“Xiao Ai, turn off the air conditioner.”
No response.
The cold air around him continued to mercilessly leach the warmth from his body.
Isac first frowned, then his consciousness gradually returned, and his eyes opened along with it.
What met his gaze was not the familiar ceiling — or rather, there was no ceiling at all, only a deathly, sepulchral white.
Sparse snowflakes drifted down from the pale grey sky, a few wisps of sunlight struggled through the thick cloud cover, and the entire world was utterly still.
Where am I?
This was Isac’s first thought, but it was quickly displaced by the pain spreading through his body.
“Hiss…
cough, cough…”
He sucked in a sharp breath of cold air, then was choked into coughing twice by that bone-chilling chill, exhaling two thin puffs of white mist.
Isac first wiggled his fingers, then carefully raised his arm.
After confirming that the pain was still within his tolerance, he began to try to sit up.
Yet even a simple act of sitting up still made Isac grit his teeth in pain — especially in the lower right rib area, where the stabbing sensation was particularly sharp.
His heart sank, and he hurriedly reached out to check.
Mercifully, it was only a contusion and not a fracture.
He then checked the rest of his body and discovered that most injuries were just bruises and abrasions, with no area serious enough to impair his movement.
Whew, his luck wasn’t bad.
Giving his somewhat dizzy head a shake, only now did Isac have the spare capacity to begin pondering the earlier question — where am I?
Turbulence, weightlessness, tumbling, darkness…
So…
did I crash?
Isac could hardly believe it.
He wasn’t questioning the fact of the crash itself, but rather the location where the helicopter had gone down.
After all, there were no snow-capped mountains where he had boarded the helicopter!
Surely the entire globe hadn’t plunged headlong into an Ice Age during the stretch of time he’d been unconscious from the crash, had it?
But now wasn’t the time to dwell on that.
The pressing priority was to assess his surroundings as quickly as possible, then seek rescue.
Isac surveyed his surroundings: shrubs blanketed in glistening white snow, dense dark coniferous forest, and a sprawling field of aircraft wreckage composed of wings, cabin sections, seats, and shattered debris.
Wait — wings?
Since when did a helicopter have wings?
Shouldn’t they be rotor blades?
Isac blinked, confirmed that he hadn’t misread, and immediately a wave of absurdity surged up in his chest.
‘I…
I couldn’t have transmigrated again, could I?’
Otherwise, there was simply no way to explain how he had gone from a helicopter crash to a fixed-wing aircraft crash.
Of course, both were crashes — judging purely by the outcome, there was no real difference.
After a brief moment of mental blankness, Isac gritted his teeth and slowly pushed himself up from the icy snow.
In the process, a powerful wave of vertigo assailed his brain, making his figure look as though it might topple at any moment.
It took a good while before the dizziness finally and barely passed.
“Anyone there?”
Isac called out without much hope.
The only response was the biting wind — and colder than the wind was his own heart.
He noticed something even more bizarre: around the aircraft wreckage there were no traces of any people whatsoever, not even remains, not even body fragments.
Had they been rescued?
Then why hadn’t they taken him too?
He had bought commercial insurance!
The payout for a dead person versus a living one was on a completely different scale.
Even for the sake of the money alone, there was no reason for a search-and-rescue team to overlook a perfectly alive person like him, was there?
The truth was already inevitably sliding toward the direction he least wanted to see.
— If only he hadn’t listened to Lao Da’s little tunes before boarding.
Isac pulled his thoughts back.
Survival instinct drove him toward the wreckage zone.
The clothes he was wearing were the windbreaker he had boarded in, but with several tears torn through it, its wind-blocking performance was essentially zero.
The inner lining wasn’t particularly thick either, and his pants were also autumn-winter wear — by themselves insufficient against sub-zero conditions, let alone in this worn state.
He had to try to gather supplies.
Medicine, food, warm clothing — these were all things he currently lacked.
While he was at it, he also needed to confirm whether there were any other survivors nearby.
Solo survival and group survival were entirely different concepts.
“First make sure I stay alive, then worry about everything else.”
“This damned weather — I reckon it’s around minus ten degrees?
The wind is strong too, and there’s a light snowfall.
If this keeps up, I’ll probably be at risk of hypothermia.
I need to get moving, fast.”
Muttering to himself, Isac made his way toward the aircraft cabin where supplies would be relatively concentrated, taking the opportunity to shelter from the wind and let his body heat recover.
The massive cabin had snapped into two pieces.
The section in front of Isac should be the rear half — he could still make out the plane’s tail and paintwork.
As for the front half of the cabin, who knew where it had flown off to.
He hoped the people inside were alright.
Isac bent over, carefully avoiding the twisted steel framework and seats, scouring for supplies he might be able to use.
He quickly spotted a half-burned briefcase containing a small amount of paper printed with English and Japanese.
It looked like a contract of some kind?
Worthless.
Isac realized he shouldn’t be paying attention to these trivial things right now — the efficiency was simply too low.
Rather than picking through the cracks for scattered odds and ends, he should be focusing on the suitcases up in the overhead bins.
Those were the real supply nodes.
Having reached this conclusion, Isac quickly found a damaged suitcase and rummaged out two reasonably thick-looking sweaters, along with a leather jacket.
Jackpot.
Without hesitation, Isac stripped off the outer shell of his windbreaker, layered all three garments over the inner lining, then pulled the windbreaker shell back on over the top.
Although this made him look somewhat bloated, looking good couldn’t save his life out here — but hypothermia really could end it.
Continuing to dig through the suitcase, Isac also turned up a stick of hard candy, a bag of energy bars, and a work laptop.
Isac tried to power it on, without success.
He couldn’t tell whether it had been broken in the fall, or whether the temperature was too low for the battery to function.
The sight of an electronic device reminded him to pat himself down.
He quickly fished out from his inner pocket a phone with a crack in the upper-left corner of its screen.
This was his own phone — and also the culprit responsible for the contusion on his lower right ribs being more severe than the rest of his body.
The crack, however, had been there from before; it wasn’t from this crash.
Considering that he himself hadn’t been smashed apart in the fall, it was unlikely the phone had been either.
So in all likelihood, the temperature was simply too low for the phone to power on.
Isac located a backpack with one of its shoulder straps snapped and tucked the laptop and phone safely inside.
If he later failed to find anything to start a fire with, they would serve as his backup hidden energy source.
Besides that, Isac still nursed a sliver of hope, thinking that once he got a fire going and the temperature rose, he might be able to power them on and call for help.
After that, Isac’s luck seemed to run dry.
The suitcases were either jammed in the overhead bins and impossible to pull out, or the contents inside were utterly useless to him in his current situation.
His body temperature had also more or less recovered, so Isac decided to head outside and try his luck.
After all, there were quite a few suitcases scattered out there.
The reason he hadn’t gone earlier was that his body temperature had been dropping too quickly and the suitcases were too widely dispersed.
Now that his temperature had recovered somewhat and his clothing had been supplemented, he could support a brief exploration.
Stepping out of the cabin, the familiar cold wind returned, but it was far more bearable than before.
Isac tightened his collar and immediately got to work.
He had to seize this precious daytime window to search for supplies as quickly as possible.
He began searching in the direction opposite to the one he’d come from, and quickly found an unopened box of airline meal.
Although it had been frozen rock-hard, like a brick, it still lifted Isac’s spirits.
If there was one box of airline meal, that meant there were more nearby!
Sure enough, Isac spotted another one not far away — and looking up, there was yet another farther off!
He picked up four boxes of airline meal in a row, until he raised his head to search once more — and saw what appeared to be a young girl lying beneath the wing wreckage not far away?