March 7, 2056
The 18th Day of Extreme Cold
Inside an abandoned stairwell.
The icy wind was like countless whips, wrapped with swirling snowflakes, lashing madly against the body again and again.
Lin Wan curled herself tightly in the corner of the stairwell. The thin down jacket she wore—so thin it was like torn cotton padding—had long been soaked through by melted snow. It clung heavily to her flesh, draining away the last pitiful trace of warmth.
Every breath she took felt as if she were swallowing a handful of sharp blades.
The intense pain cut down from her throat straight into her lungs and organs, making her entire insides convulse.
Instinctively, she wanted to cough, yet from her throat there came only a hoarse, leaking wheeze like a broken bellows—“heh… heh…”
She desperately tried to open her eyes wider, but her vision felt as though it were tightly covered by a thick sheet of frosted glass that kept freezing over.
All that remained was endless, suffocating whiteness.
“Little Yang…”
A faint breathy sound, blurred and mixed with the rasp of blood foam, struggled out from deep within her throat.
Using every last bit of strength left in her body, she tried to move her frozen limbs, attempting to crawl toward that direction.
Just a few steps in front of her, her younger brother Lin Yang’s small body lay quietly curled up.
The brand-new blue down jacket he wore—one that Lin Wan had saved up for three whole months after starting work, scrimping and saving to buy for him—was now stiff around him. It had long lost all softness and warmth, turning into a cold shell of ice.
Snowflakes settled on his long eyelashes, but they no longer melted.
His lips had turned a lifeless bluish-purple.
Those eyes would never again curve into crescents when they saw her.
He would never again call her “Big Sister” in that slightly proud little tone.
A despair thousands of times colder than the freezing wind suddenly seized Lin Wan’s heart and squeezed it fiercely.
The pain was so great she could barely breathe.
“Wanwan…”
A weak, threadlike voice drifted from the shadows by the wall.
Lin Wan’s body slowly turned toward the direction of the sound.
Her mother, Li Shulan, leaned against the icy wall corner, her face ashen. Her bloodless lips moved with great difficulty, extremely slowly. From her throat came only a faint flow of air, almost impossible to hear.
Lin Wan’s pupils suddenly shrank.
She understood the silent, desperate shape of her mother’s lips:
“Wanwan… run… quickly…”
The final word “run” had not even fully formed when her mother’s head could no longer hold itself upright. It dropped weakly against the hard wall behind her with a dull thud.
There was no more movement.
“Mom—!”
A silent scream exploded inside Lin Wan’s lifeless chest. The overwhelming grief made her vision darken in waves.
She turned her head and looked toward the stairwell window.
Her father, Lin Jianguo—once tall and strong—was frozen there in a posture that looked almost tragic.
Like a mammoth sealed in ice, his back was slightly hunched. His large, calloused hands remained exactly as they had been in life, ten fingers deeply jammed into the hard ice outside the window frame.
The joints of his fingers had long been scraped raw. Dark red-black blood had frozen together with the ice, forming a horrifying patch of purplish black.
Immense regret seized Lin Wan’s heart like a freezing iron hand and crushed it brutally, grinding her soul in agony.
If…
If she had not believed those so-called experts who confidently claimed that the coming “Little Ice Age” was nothing but alarmist nonsense… if she had not brushed off that summer’s abnormal heat—hot enough to roast people alive—as merely occasional “climate mood swings”…
If…
If she had not been blinded by greed and thrown the family’s meager life-saving savings into that damned bottomless stock market, dreaming that “a bold gamble could turn a bicycle into a motorcycle,” instead of honestly exchanging it for real rice, flour, grain, and oil…
If…
When the disaster had first revealed its fangs and the family still had a few bags of life-saving rice left, she had not softened like a fool and given half of their supplies to Zhou Qing—the neighbor who had grown up with her since childhood, always smiling sweetly, speaking words sweeter than honey, her coworker and “best friend”…
That viper who had smiled while handing her a bottle of water laced with industrial poison and then calmly watched her collapse in agony.
Countless “ifs” hissed like a swarm of starving venomous snakes with crimson tongues, madly gnawing at her already frozen nerves and the heart that was about to stop beating.
Cold tears had barely flowed from her eyes before they froze instantly into tiny beads of ice on her eyelashes.
“Heavens… if I could start over… once more…”
With the last trace of strength she had left, and with bone-deep hatred, she whispered,
“I… will make them… all… die miserably…”
Darkness—boundless, bone-chilling darkness—completely swallowed her.
Drip… drip…
The steady, clear sound of dripping water seemed to call from a distant horizon, yet also sounded as if it were tapping right against her eardrum.
Strangely, the sound pierced through the thick ice encasing her and violently dragged her out of the endless abyss of deathly silence.
Lin Wan’s whole body trembled violently, as if struck by high-voltage electricity. Her eyes snapped open!
Blinding light shot into her sore eyes like countless golden needles.
The sharp pain made her clamp her eyelids shut again instantly, and physiological tears streamed out uncontrollably.
She subconsciously raised her hand to block the overly bright light, but the movement was stiff, like a rusted machine part.
There was no knife-like freezing wind.
No ice shards filling her lungs.
No cold, rigid touch of her family’s frozen bodies.
Only… warm air, almost hot, gently wrapping around her bare skin.
And… the heart in her chest pounding wildly.
Thump! Thump! Thump!
Each heavy, rapid beat sounded like an out-of-control hammer crashing against her eardrums, making her temples throb violently and the blood vessels beneath her skin pulse urgently.
She was still alive?
She hadn’t died?
Had that hell… ended?
Lin Wan suddenly sat up from the bed. The movement was so abrupt that the soft mattress springs beneath her let out a strained creaking sound.
Cold sweat had already soaked through the thin silk nightgown on her back, clinging wetly and stickily to her skin.
A breeze carrying the warmth of early summer slipped through the window gap and brushed lightly across her body, raising tiny goosebumps and bringing with it a strangely chilling tremor of survival after disaster.
She gasped for breath, her chest heaving violently like a child who had just awakened from the worst nightmare and lost her soul in terror, greedily gulping down the warm air that even carried the faint scent of grass and sunlight from outside.
Nervous fear gripped her. Her trembling hands anxiously and frantically looked around, her gaze sweeping over every familiar corner.
The beige walls were clean and tidy. On the wall hung a certificate framed in glass, its characters seemingly dancing in the sunlight:
“Comrade Lin Wan — Awarded Outstanding Employee of the Municipal Botanical Garden, Year 2054.”
Beside the certificate hung the work badge she wore every day to work. In the blue-background photo, she was smiling shyly, her eyes still carrying the restraint of someone newly entering the workplace and a faint trace of hope.
Her gaze moved to the bedside table.
A light green cartoon photo frame stood quietly there. Inside it was the familiar crooked handwriting of her younger brother Lin Yang, the letters crawling like little caterpillars:
“Happy Birthday, Big Sister! The number one most beautiful girl in the universe! — From your most handsome younger brother, Little Yang.”