The time had reached half-past eight in the evening. On the empty streets, Chen Yuan was a solitary figure, his gaze sweeping aimlessly across the desolate landscape.
This can't go on...
He watched his own breath mist and fog the screen of his phone. With a decisive turn, he ran for home.
At 9:10 PM, he was back in his apartment. He cranked the water heater to fifty degrees Celsius and stood under the scalding spray for a full twenty minutes before the deep-seated chill in his bones finally began to recede.
From the deepest corner of his wardrobe, he unearthed a set of aged long johns, quickly pulling them on before layering his windbreaker over top. He went to the living room and switched on the television.
"Attention all citizens, the cold wave is expected to arrive around midnight tonight. All non-essential travel is strongly discouraged..."
"The power grid and water supply will operate as normal. We urge the public not to panic..."
...
He flicked through channel after channel. They were all repeating the same thing.
Chen Yuan rummaged through the kitchen cupboards, taking stock of his supplies.
Five packs of instant noodles, five kilograms of flour, three slices of toast, two tomatoes, a bunch of bananas, two cartons of milk.
As someone who never cooked, he rarely bought groceries. At most, he'd have some instant noodles to stave off late-night hunger. But now, his situation seemed distressingly bleak.
One carton of milk and three slices of toast. That was dinner for tonight.
He stowed the remaining items in a cabinet.
Standing by the window, he gnawed on the bread, his gaze drifting outside. Solitary streetlamps stood guard over the empty streets, casting a dim, jaundiced glow. Gusts of fierce wind swept through, tearing the leaves from the trees.
Chen Yuan watched the scene quietly, beginning to wonder if this sudden freeze would truly last for only ten days. In other words, if the temperature didn't rise in ten days, what would he do then?
It wasn't until eleven o'clock that the ticking clock on the living room wall finally pulled him from his thoughts.
He noticed the edges of the window panes were beginning to turn white. The stark temperature difference between the inside and outside was causing a layer of condensation to form on the glass.
Chen Yuan reached out and pushed open a corner of the window.
Hiss...
A bone-piercingly cold wind poured in, as if he had just opened the freezer door of a refrigerator.
Smack.
He quickly slammed the window shut, his body shivering involuntarily.
Looking at the thermometer on the wall, he saw the temperature had already dropped from twenty-six degrees in the afternoon to eighteen. A plunge of nearly ten degrees in just four hours. The needle was still creeping downwards. At this rate, the outside temperature would be below ten degrees in just a few hours.
He immediately turned on the living room air conditioner, setting it to heat mode.
He pulled out his phone and started scrolling through a short-video app called dYin. With a flick of his thumb, his screen filled with an endless stream of anti-cold strategies from other users. He watched videos of people lighting wood-burning stoves, gathering around them to eat hot pot, and a pang of envy struck him.
He glanced back at the locked door to the other room, his resolve wavering. "I wonder if there's anything useful for warmth in that warehouse?"
He decided to call the landlord. The call connected almost immediately.
"Hello? What is it?" a coarse voice grunted through the receiver.
Chen Yuan frowned slightly. As he'd suspected, even the landlord was different. His original landlord had been a woman not much older than himself.
"I wanted to ask, what's stored in the warehouse room in my apartment?" Chen Yuan asked, bracing himself.
"Just some useless materials. Not worth much, but you'd better not break anything."
"Well, could I possibly—"
Beep... beep... beep...
Hearing the disconnected tone, Chen Yuan swallowed the rest of his sentence.
"Useless materials, huh."
He murmured to himself, abandoning the idea of forcing the door open. After all, he didn't want to be on the hook for repairs after the cold wave passed.
As time slowly ticked by, the wind outside began to howl. Cold air seeped through the cracks in the window frames, carrying with it wisps of white frost. Chen Yuan suddenly realized how utterly lacking in experience he was for dealing with this kind of extreme cold.
"No, at this rate, even the air conditioner won't be enough."
Muttering to himself, he hurried to his room and rummaged through a drawer, pulling out a roll of clear tape. He returned to the window and began to seal it. But the tape, chilled by the cold, had lost more than half its adhesiveness. It had barely been on for a moment before it froze solid and fell off.
Chen Yuan stared at the unsealable gaps, his face sinking. He glanced at the thermometer. The red needle had already reached the yellow zone: twelve degrees.
He sighed deeply, feeling that he had truly transmigrated at the worst possible time. He hadn't gained a single thing and was now left to scramble against a cataclysmic cold snap.
Twelve degrees inside. The "feels like" temperature outside was probably already in the single digits.
Gritting his teeth, Chen Yuan grabbed a bucket from the kitchen and pulled open the front door.
WHOOSH—
The biting wind poured into the apartment. In an instant, his eyebrows were dusted with frost. He tightened his collar and rushed downstairs. If tape couldn't seal the windows, he would have to find another way.
He burst out of the building to find the ground already carpeted with fallen leaves. The fierce wind whipped up a cloud of dust. Without hesitation, he ran to a large tree and began digging at the soil near its trunk with his nine-tenths-new cooking spatula.
Scrape, scrape, scrape...
With each scoop, he dug up clumps of dark, dry earth and tossed them into the bucket. After just three to five minutes, his entire body was stiff with cold.
He hurried back inside, slamming the door shut. He had no time to rest. The thermometer's needle was now pointing into the red zone: nine degrees. The speed of the temperature drop was far beyond his expectations.
He ran to the kitchen, boiled half a pot of water, and poured it into the bucket. He stirred the powdered earth over and over with the spatula, breaking up the clumps until it finally became a thick paste.
Standing before the drafty window, Chen Yuan grabbed a handful of the mud paste and began to fill the gaps. His movements were clumsy, and mud splattered all over the floor, but he couldn't be bothered with that now. What little physics he knew told him that if he wanted to live, this window had to be sealed. Otherwise, the heat in the room would continuously bleed out, and he didn't even have an electric heater.
After a flurry of work, he was completely exhausted. He looked at the thermometer again, and his heart sank.
Six degrees...
Chen Yuan's brow furrowed. The rate of cooling was far beyond anything he could have anticipated. The warm air blowing from the air conditioner vent no longer felt warm at all.
He rushed back to his room, wrapped the thin blanket he used in the summer around himself, and fell into a state of anxiety.
No down jacket, no space heater. In other words, he had nothing.
"What am I supposed to do..."
After muttering to himself, he picked up his phone and tried calling the local administrative office.
Beep... beep... beep...
The phone rang for a long time, but no one answered.
He tried the landlord again. Same result.
He ran across the hall and knocked on his neighbor's door. No response.
Refusing to give up, he went from the first floor to the fifth, knocking on every door. Only the sound of his own pounding echoed in the empty stairwell.
In that moment, he felt as if he had been abandoned by the entire world.