The man gripped his knife tightly, his face flushed red and his veins bulging as he roared, "Give me formula! My son needs formula! Otherwise, I’ll kill her right now!"
The surrounding crowd surged forward, murmuring anxiously among themselves.
"The building manager didn’t do anything wrong! Why are you hurting her?"
The man screamed at the top of his lungs, "I don’t want to kill anyone! I just want my son to survive!"
"But she doesn’t have any formula either! Taking her hostage is useless!"
"Hurry and let her go. We’ll all figure something out together!"
Panic-stricken, Wang Liping spotted Chen Momo in the crowd and anxiously mouthed the words, "Save me."
Chen Momo signaled for Wang Liping not to panic. She did have baby formula in her spatial dimension, but she couldn’t give it to this man. It was a time of severe material shortages; if taking a hostage resulted in getting supplies, such vicious incidents would only multiply.
Chen Momo unlocked her phone and was about to dial the police when she heard people whispering nearby, "Has anyone called the police?"
"Several calls have been made. It’s useless."
Hearing this, Chen Momo finally gave up on the idea of calling the cops. She scrolled through her contacts and saw Gu Rongjin’s number saved right there. Her eyes immediately lit up.
She thought, "Right, I’ll call Gu Rongjin!"
He used to be a special forces soldier before his discharge, so subduing one person wouldn’t be a problem for him at all. She immediately dialed his number, and the call was quickly connected. A confused but pleasant "Hello" came from the other end. However, Chen Momo didn’t reply; she simply kept the line open, letting Gu Rongjin listen to the commotion.
The man shouted hysterically, "Don’t tell me the entire Dongfang Garden doesn’t even have a single bag of formula? Just give me one bag, and I’ll let her go immediately! Otherwise, I’ll kill her!"
Over the phone, Gu Rongjin heard the entire exchange loud and clear. Soon after, he appeared amidst the crowd.
Seizing a moment when the man was distracted, Gu Rongjin lunged forward, pinning the emotionally unhinged man to the ground. Before anyone could even process what had happened, the man was completely subdued, spread-eagled on the floor and unable to move. Pulling a pre-prepared rope from his pocket, Gu Rongjin bound the man’s hands and feet.
"Lock him up for now," he said coldly.
The man kept sputtering phrases like, "My son needs formula," and, "I just want to give my son formula."
Having been rescued, Wang Liping thanked Gu Rongjin profusely.
It was freezing downstairs. As the crowd dispersed, Chen Momo took the opportunity to return to her own home. Later, she learned that the formula issue had been resolved. The Dongfang Garden management had somehow procured two bags of baby formula and delivered them to the man’s family.
However, the poor infant hadn’t just been starving for formula; he had been sick. With the blizzard blocking the roads and the baby’s extremely weak constitution, he succumbed to his illness and died that very night.
Following the baby’s death, the man went insane. He ran out of his home in a delirious state in the middle of the night and never returned. According to those in the know, when the man left his apartment that night, he was wearing nothing but a thin set of thermal underwear. As for his wife, she also left the residential district, trudging through waist-deep snow after her husband’s departure.
Neither of them ever came back. From then on, Room 512 became a completely abandoned ghost apartment, and a gloomy, oppressive atmosphere shrouded the entire building.
Wang Liping had been taken hostage while going door-to-door to survey everyone’s living conditions. The moment she knocked on Room 512, the resident had seized her. After this incident, neither the property management nor the building managers dared to conduct door-to-door visits anymore.
To make matters worse, the water supply was cut off later that day.
Rumor had it that the pipes had frozen over. Previously, dedicated maintenance workers had kept them clear, ensuring everyone had access to drinking water. But now, the maintenance crew refused to work for wages, demanding to be paid directly with supplies because money could no longer buy anything. A small bundle of leafy greens that used to sell for two yuan at the supermarket had skyrocketed to two thousand yuan. Meat prices had surged from fifteen or sixteen yuan a pound to over ten thousand. Even with prices inflated thousands of times over, the supermarket shelves were already swept completely bare whenever anyone tried to buy something.
After their demands for supplies were rejected, the maintenance workers went on strike. With no one to tend to the pipes and the reservoir, the water supply ceased completely.
It wasn’t just the water maintenance crew; the cleaning staff in charge of clearing snow in the Dongfang Garden District also went on strike. Their reasoning was the same: they didn’t want money, they wanted supplies. Even an allowance of three cups of instant noodles a day would suffice, as the supermarket price for a single cup had reached eight thousand yuan. A daily wage of five hundred yuan wouldn’t solve anything.
Naturally, the cleaning staff’s proposal was also rejected. Consequently, they initiated their strike that very day, abandoning their snow-clearing duties in the district.
As a result, the snow piled up past chest-level that night. By the next day, it completely swallowed the first floor of the buildings. The blizzard sealed the building entrances, trapping every household inside.
Chen Momo, however, didn’t care about any of this. She didn’t need to go out, and her son was very well-behaved, never fussing about wanting to leave the house. The mother and son simply went about their daily routines at home. She racked her brains researching how to make various delicious meals, while her son was busy inventing his own gadgets.
Once the tap water stopped running, Chen Momo began utilizing the bottled water she had long stockpiled in her dimension. To maintain the indoor temperature, she also brought out a stove from her dimension, lit some coal briquettes, and placed them inside. The house was instantly filled with warmth. Now, her home was being heated simultaneously by the air conditioning, an electric space heater, and the coal stove.
The indoor temperature hovered comfortably around twenty degrees Celsius. It was incredibly cozy inside, and if she absolutely had to step out, she just needed to layer two down jackets. But Chen Momo figured the air conditioning wouldn’t last much longer. Based on her experience, the power was about to go out.
Sure enough, by the afternoon of the nineteenth day, the electricity was cut. Cell phones lost their signal, the internet disconnected, and the hallways plunged into pitch darkness.
The once vibrant district now truly felt like a ghost town. Looking out from Chen Momo’s window, all she could see was a terrifying grid of pitch-black boxes.
Chen Momo wasn’t panicked. She brought out her fully charged solar panels and hooked them up to the lamps, allowing her home to remain properly illuminated. However, these were sensitive times. To avoid drawing suspicion with the light spilling from her apartment, she tightly drew the curtains whenever she needed to turn them on. Before the apocalypse descended, she had purposely replaced all her curtains with thick, dark, blackout drapes. Even with the lights blazing inside, nothing could be seen from the outside.
The aroma of cooking, however, was harder to completely mask. Although Chen Momo was extremely careful, wisps of fragrance still managed to slip through the cracks of her doors and windows, drifting into the hallway whenever she cooked.
In this season of hunger and cold, the scent of food was undoubtedly a massive stimulant to anyone’s nose. Cooking every day, no matter how cautious she was, made her an easy target.