The authorities were about to launch round the clock propaganda on every screen and speaker, endlessly broadcasting simplified animations and explanations of what exactly the so called "Artificial Sun" was, how it would benefit each provincial capital once built in terms of power grids and water desalination, and reassuring people with calm, measured voices that since no one knew when the Earth's Dark Days would end, the Artificial Sun could replace everything the real sun provided.
They told everyone not to panic, that unity and patience were paramount. Once the Artificial Sun was completed, all difficulties would be solved. The people only had to "tighten their belts and endure this period of hardship." Soon, many began to pin their dwindling hopes on it, repeating the phrase like a mantra in grocery lines.
Online, those frantic apocalyptic rumors about total societal collapse evaporated, deleted or buried under official bulletins. The news channels proudly displayed trays of fresh lettuce and bok choy cultivated in sterilized experimental stations, the leaves glistening under the studio lights as if full of vitality, a promise of green.
Jing Shu didn't know how to judge this matter, sitting on her sofa watching the broadcast. After all, the Artificial Sun belonged to the most cutting edge scientific achievements, realms far beyond a business graduate's understanding. She couldn't simply accuse it of being a resource black hole, of stealing all public electricity and water to fuel its reactors, thereby causing countless deaths in the short term from deprivation.
Because in truth, during the Earth's Dark Days it had once succeeded, in her previous life. It had produced grain in limited amounts in sealed, power hungry facilities, saving many high value lives. Most importantly, in that terrible year of drought and poisoned water resources that followed, it managed to power massive desalination plants that rescued countless people in coastal regions who would otherwise have died of thirst.
So Jing Shu felt she had no right to evaluate such a great, desperate endeavor undertaken in the name of human survival. Nor did she want to bother with matters so distant from her own small, determined life. Jing Shu only wished to live more comfortably in the apocalypse, to keep her family fed and safe.
But the key point now, the immediate ripple from that grand project, was: gas supply cuts.
By the middle of the third month of the apocalypse, electricity had already been restricted to 3.5 hours a day, the power coming on with a hum at irregular intervals. Water was entirely dependent on the rumble of tanker trucks arriving on a tight schedule. Now they were told through public announcements that after the Artificial Sun plan was put into action, the entire nation would lose natural gas service, the pipelines shut off to conserve fuel for industry and the project itself. For Jing Shu, who had a large stockpile of ingredients in her Cube Space, flour and rice and meats, this was rather troublesome. How would she cook it all?
The news advised people to prepare more cooked food in advance, to stew and fry and store. Once natural gas was gone, they could use coal stoves or induction cookers powered by personal generators as substitutes.
Coal merchants immediately tripled their prices overnight, expecting desperate crowds to swarm their sooty depots. To their surprise, very few buyers came, just a trickle. Only after a few days of quiet did they understand the bleak reality: most households had no vegetables left to cook. Their frozen meats were nearly gone, eaten or spoiled. A month later, people would only have plain rice or noodles to boil in electric rice cookers during the power window. Even if they had a few scraggly scraps of vegetable salvaged from a wilted stalk, they had no oil to stir fry with, so they would simply boil everything together in water.
In that case, what use was coal? Were they supposed to stir fry the air? The merchants' piles of black rock sat untouched.
It didn't take long before all privately stored coal and charcoal across the country was quietly requisitioned by teams with official papers and flatbed trucks, collected "for public utility and the project."
At first the public complained loudly on local networks, but soon they too realized the grim logic: with no water to spare for washing pans, no vegetables, no oil, and no seasoning, what good was a working gas stove? You couldn't cook stones.
"Dinner, dinner!" Grandma Jing carried the last dish, a fragrant plate of stir fried green peppers with thick slices of king oyster mushroom, to the crowded table. Jing Shu served everyone steaming bowls of winter melon meatball soup, the clear broth floating with green circles of melon. As the saying went, one sip of soup before meals helps you live to ninety nine. They clung to such old comforts.
Thanks to the villa's full facilities, its independent water tank and filtration system, they had circulating water to wash vegetables thoroughly and abundant seasonings, soy sauce, vinegar, jars of spices, to cook with. Grandma Jing, Grandpa Jing, Third Aunt Jing Lai, and Wu You'ai all came over each evening, drawn by the light and the smell, to eat together at the villa's large round table.
"Third Sister, your work is tough. You should keep the meat rations you're given and eat them yourself, build up your strength," Jing An said, pointing helplessly at the braised chicken, its skin glossy with sauce, on the table.
"If I leave it sitting in my hot apartment without refrigeration it will spoil in a day. Stop fussing and eat, you need the protein more for your driving," Jing Lai urged, pushing the plate toward him.
Recently, Jing Lai had been working in the west of the city, in a vast, steamy communal kitchen processing cooked food for the government, chopping, boiling, packing. Each week she received small rations of cooked chicken, pork knuckles, and similar meats as partial payment, all of which she brought back in her lunch pail to store in the villa's refrigerator. Though she always said they were for everyone to eat whenever they wanted, she had never once taken a choice piece for herself, always opting for vegetables.
"She's just like that, strong willed. Don't mind her. She feels embarrassed, eating at your place every day without contributing enough," Grandma Jing whispered quietly to Jing Shu as they cleared side plates.
After dinner, Jing An stacked the dishes into the dishwasher, the machine a luxury that hummed to life. The family gathered in the shrunken living room, the space made smaller by stored boxes along the walls, for slices of pear and held a small family meeting.
Grandpa Jing began, his voice low and serious, "The situation now is even worse than the famine years of our time. Back then at least we could dig for roots, could plant seeds in the earth and wait for rain. Now we can't grow anything in this heat and dark. As for this Artificial Sun the news keeps talking about, I don't think it sounds reliable. It feels like a story to keep children quiet."
"I go to the attached slaughterhouse in the west of the city every day. The poultry are almost completely processed already, the pens emptying out. It's too miserable. At this rate, in a few years you won't even see a single chicken or duck in Wu City. Once the frozen meat in cold storage and this batch of cooked meat are gone, people will realize that for a very long time there will be no meat at all." Third Aunt Jing Lai shuddered every time she thought of years without the taste of meat, her face pale.
Su Lanzhi countered, trying to be practical, "If we have no vegetables, we can plant under lights. If we have no electricity, we can generate our own with the solar panels and the generator. If there's no natural gas, we'll just use the coal stove outside. The backyard has a few tons of coal in sacks, though I think it's not enough. They say long term high temperatures will cause polar melt and sea levels to rise. What if in the future, after the heat, it's endless snow instead? Climate gone mad. Better to buy a few more tons of coal now and stack them outside the villa tomorrow, before prices jump again or they're all taken."
"Alright, I'll source it and build a small, discreet shed outside to keep it dry. Once the Earth's Dark Days end, we can dismantle it," Jing An agreed, pulling out his phone to check contacts.
"Dad, you and Grandpa should also reinforce the chicken coop out back, add another layer of wire mesh. There's really not enough space anymore, and they're getting nervous," Jing Shu quickly added, thinking of the birds' restless clucking.
Wu You'ai adjusted her glasses, the frames slipping down her nose, and showed everyone a picture on her phone, a graph from an academic site. "Not only that. In the past two months, urban crime rates for robbery and assault have soared, like this curve. But the arrest and prosecution rates have plateaued, like this flat line."
"Letting the tiger back to the mountain!" Grandma Jing exclaimed, frightened, her hand going to her chest. "These days we must not go out after dark. Such sins, to let bad people roam."
Wu You'ai's lenses glinted coldly under the room light. "Grandmother is right in her analogy. It is indeed deliberately letting the tiger back to the mountain."
Jing Shu raised her brows. In her previous life she had muddled through, scavenging and hiding, without understanding the larger mechanisms at play, only learning the ugly truth much later from fragments of conversation among soldiers. This time, nothing of that scale had yet happened. Could it be that Wu You'ai, through her professor's analysis, actually knew something about the cold calculus of survival?
"Why do you say that?" Jing Shu asked with real interest, leaning forward.
"Relaxed management to bait the criminals out into the open. Let them stir up chaos, let them reveal themselves and congregate, then finally there's a clear, public justified reason to wipe them all out in one go. It saves on long term food supplies, on prison resources. At present, society can't sustain a complete ecological cycle, can't feed both the productive and the destructive. But if you abandon one group, let another group die off or be eliminated, you can save the remainder, extend the timeline. Naturally, they will sacrifice the criminals, the uncooperative, the burdensome.
This is only a wild analysis by my mentor over tea, but judging from the circumstances, the eased patrols, the focus on property crimes over violent ones initially, the stockpiling of non perishable foods in guarded depots, Wu City will definitely not be peaceful for much longer. We should think about what happens if we are targeted for our generator noise, or chased by a mob with knives who see our chimney smoke. After all, this villa of yours is luxurious and obviously stocked with food." Wu You'ai bit off half an apple in one loud, decisive crunch, the sound sharp in the quiet room.
"Damn, damn, damn!" Jing Shu's mind raced. "Even if it's just wild analysis, it's eerily accurate! This is a god tier prophecy! In my past life I never thought of this, never connected the dots. I never understood why the chaos lasted for half a year before it was brutally, efficiently crushed. At first the police measures were so gentle, almost perfunctory, afterward so swift and bloody. They didn't leave a single survivor from the raider gangs. Even those who escaped early on, when they later came out of hiding for relief grain, were directly executed at the distribution points. It was like two entirely different styles of rule."
She clenched her fist under the table, the knuckles cracking softly. It seemed that even with a second chance at life, there were still many cold, strategic truths she had been kept in the dark about.
"What on earth does your professor study? Spouting such frightening nonsense all day," Third Aunt Jing Lai grumbled, dissatisfied with her daughter's chilling words, and reached over to pinch her arm.
"Grandpa, Dad," Jing Shu said, her voice calm but firm, cutting through the discomfort. "We should set some traps around the perimeter, discreet ones, just in case."