Time flew. At the peak of the heat, Jing Shu insisted on staying at home with the air conditioner on, its low hum a constant backdrop, drinking cold drinks from the fridge, feasting well on stored provisions, practicing with the cube in her mind's quiet space, sun-drying vegetables on the rooftop in the relentless glare, and skimming the petty dramas in several chat groups on her phone. She lurked silently in those digital spaces and refused to go out unless it was a matter of life or death, the world beyond her walls a hostile furnace.
People kept dying in droves. In her community, three more people died from prolonged dehydration, their names marked off on the community board. When Wu You'ai called to have the bodies hauled away by the municipal cart, she said they were mummified already, skin stretched tight over bone. At the crematorium they were thrown onto the breeding piles to feed maggots, but even the maggots, adapted to decay, refused to lay eggs in the desiccated remains.
The government's water allotment kept shrinking, cut by another 100 ml per person. Even the mountain spring water reserved for senior officials was almost gone, the guarded taps running dry. The rich no longer dared to bathe casually, their luxury a curtailed thing. Jing Shu's family also stopped bathing and doing laundry, adopting a gritty practicality. Clothes piled up in a corner until they filled half a room, a mountain of worn fabric.
Their last one ton of water, stored in drums in the basement, was nearly used up. They had started dipping water from the fish pond to irrigate the fields, and the pond's level had visibly dropped, the water growing murky. Grandma Jing was anxious, pacing the shaded courtyard. Only Jing Shu sat steady as Mount Tai at the kitchen table, eating and drinking as usual, her calm a bulwark against the creeping dread.
Wu City's major reservoirs were down to muddy pits, the cracked earth at their bottoms exposed. Part of the current drinking water supply was "black snow water" hauled from the distant, cooler mountains and roughly filtered through basic cloth. It was bitter and fishy enough to make people retch after the first sip. Jing Shu knew that the black grit suspended in it was carrion scavenger feces, a fact she wished she didn't know.
Don't ask how Jing Shu knew, ugh. The memory was unpleasant.
Every day, people in the chat groups asked why the water tasted so foul, so gritty. Even after boiling, there were still many tiny black flecks swirling in the cup. People wondered if it was some new virus or pollutant. Much later, when complaints reached a peak, the government finally said, oh, those are carrion scavenger poop, a blunt admission. The news didn't make the water any easier to drink.
Her family no longer went to pick up the public water ration. First, the amount was too little to be worth the trip. Second, water like that was useless for irrigation; it would kill the plants. As for the livestock, even when Jing Shu diluted the stench with filtered water from their own stores, the animals turned their heads away, refusing to drink it.
Outside the villa was a living hell of heat, dust, thirst, and death. Inside the villa was a carefully maintained paradise of green plants, full water containers, and full stomachs. In this life's apocalypse, Jing Shu, through preparation and secret advantage, truly lived the way she wanted, a stark island of normalcy.
Just when most people were on the verge of physical and mental collapse from dehydration, governments across China finally released earth-shaking news on every public channel. The artificial sun project was complete and would be activated.
The Wu City government announced in a special broadcast that it would officially switch on the artificial sun on October 1, National Day, a symbolic date. The message was clear: hold on for a few more days and everything would pass, the long night would end.
At the same time, to keep the massive energy demand of the artificial sun running, Wu City issued orders requisitioning all usable energy sources from private holders: petroleum, natural gas, coal, and more. Compliance was mandatory.
Operating the artificial sun was, in essence, a nuclear fusion process. The government didn't disclose to the public that a critical technical issue regarding containment and energy recapture remained unsolved and they had gone ahead with activation anyway, a gamble.
The consequence was that it burned money, or rather, burned precious fuel reserves, every second. It wasn't true self-sustaining fusion and still needed massive external energy input to maintain the reaction, a hidden flaw.
Regardless, the artificial sun gave the desperate masses something tangible to believe in, a light at the end of the tunnel.
Once the announcement came out, Jing Shu's high school classmates' group exploded with activity. The twenty-some students who had attended the last swap meet invited even more classmates who hadn't shown up, pressing them to buy distillers, then began frantically promoting the scheme, relatives dragging in relatives, friends dragging in friends, the digital chain expanding.
Zhang Lingling ran herself dizzy every day coordinating it all, her messages a constant stream in the group. In the previous life, Jing Shu had left the group early and never knew how the scheme finally ended. In this life, Jing Shu learned from the chat history that Zhang Lingling had gone all in and opened twenty separate "accounts" under different family members' names.
One person paid twenty work points and could build unlimited downlines from that single point. Zhang Lingling opened more than twenty accounts and dumped over four hundred collective work points in at once. That meant she needed two hundred recruits just to break even on the initial outlay. For every ten people she pulled in, she opened another account, using the bonus points from one account to feed the purchase for another, a complex pyramid of points.
Even just the high school group, a captive audience, brought her considerable returns as the first layer.
After classmates took the distillers home, they excitedly followed the printed instructions, dug a deep pit in their yards or designated community plots, and buried the device. The next day, there was a thin film of water in the collection box, a miracle.
After that initial success, people hauled in relatives and friends, scraping together points, even selling their last valuables, a wedding ring, a tool, to buy the gadget. Soon, expanding the chain, building the downline, mattered more than the distiller itself or its meager output.
A few days later, as the initial excitement wore off, doubts started to appear in the group chat.
"My distiller's been in for two days and only collected one mouthful of water. This thing is practically useless." The complaint was tentative.
[Zhang Lingling]:"Mine has collected plenty. Your placement must be wrong. Did you bury it deep enough? Is the collection tube clear?"
[Nima Sang]:"Exactly. We set up three at home. Just buy more, right? More units, more water."
Whenever anyone questioned the device's performance, the group, now financially and socially invested, spoke with one voice and smothered the dissent. If you were going to sell something, you had to say it was good, no matter what the truth was, to protect your own investment.
Even if the distiller underperformed, everyone who had bought in tacitly avoided mentioning its flaws in the main chat, confining their worries to private messages.
But now the artificial sun would be used, a promise of limitless energy and, by extension, water. In the future, water wouldn't be scarce. For people, a distiller that collected droplets from arid air would become tasteless and pointless. No one would need it.
So the group, sensing the approaching end of their scheme's viability, began to panic.
"I only recouped ten points so far."
"I earned a dozen, but my relatives haven't made theirs back yet. They are asking me." The anxiety was palpable.
[Zhang Lingling]:"@everyone, internal news. Don't be misled by the headlines. The artificial sun starts on October 1, but it will need ten days or so of calibration before water production even begins, and who knows how long after that until it reaches the public. We still have plenty of time to operate. Hurry and reel in your lines. Stop opening new accounts and focus on recruiting under your existing ones."
[Wang Chao]:"Received."
The artificial sun announcement shook all of China, dominating every conversation. The follow-up notice about further shortening the daily electricity hours to conserve power for the project felt like a light drizzle by comparison, an accepted sacrifice.
[Wu You'ai]:"@everyone, to supply the artificial sun, Wu City's power-on window will be adjusted to 18:30 to 19:30 daily, effective immediately. Once the artificial sun stabilizes, returning to pre-Earth's Dark Days levels isn't impossible. Anyway, people aren't cooking much or heating water for baths now."
Power supply dropped from two precious hours to one. People started counting the days on their calendars to the artificial sun's launch, marking off each sunset.
[Wang Qiqi]:"By the way, on September 29, Mid-Autumn Festival, Wu City will host a one-day community buffet in each district. Only 0.1 work points. All-you-can-eat maggots prepared in every flavor."
[Fei Niu]:"Great, I can eat salt-and-pepper maggots again. Awesome."
[Zhang Bingbing's Husband]:"I'm taking my wife for a proper meal there. The baby in her belly needs nutrition."
On September 29, 2023, Mid-Autumn Festival, Jing An picked up her eldest uncle's family of three in the car and brought them to the villa for a reunion meal, the trunk carrying a small gift of dried vegetables.
By custom, they should have gone to her eldest uncle's home, the elder's residence.
Although her eldest uncle and aunt had become outreach staff for the government, a stable job, the natural gas lines to their apartment had been shut off for the project, they couldn't cook, and their vegetable supplies from the ration system had been suspended. There was nothing decent to serve guests, their cupboard bare.
Recently, due to the severe water shortages, the Agricultural Management Department where Su Lanzhi worked had stopped providing vegetable rations to ordinary civil servants, supplying only a few hundred people in the very upper ranks of the city's administration.
The government switched the vegetable rations for most to extra portions of white rice. Each civil servant could now collect two meals worth of plain rice and one small piece of cured meat per day.
Countless people outside the system were crazed with jealousy. Everyone sharpened their heads trying to land a government job, any government job. The government clearly wanted to spur the public, to create visible hierarchies. Only when the benefits of position were obvious would people feel motivated to climb, to work, to maintain order.
Mid-Autumn is for moon-viewing. Traditionally, people dine at night under the moon, and this time was no different. Daytime temperatures were still terrifying, a lethal blanket, so the family meal was naturally set for the evening, when the world cooled to a merely oppressive heat.