The night was bitterly cold, the damp chill of the cave seeping into bones. The heavy storm outside had stopped being a merely wet, warm spring rain and turned into an icy downpour mixed with red nematodes, the temperature plummeting.
While people in the other, less-prepared caves shivered in their damp clothes, huddling together for meager warmth, the carefully gathered firewood in Zone Z's No. 5 cave had finally burned down to embers. When the thick, eye-stinging white smoke cleared, the heated stones lining the fire trenches still held a comfortable, radiating warmth, and sleeping with your back against those warm stones at night was about as good as it got in this stone refuge.
Jing's family earthen kiln, built against their wall, was stoked with precious charcoal for a longer, cleaner burn, and the family all sat around the warm kiln talking in low voices, its heat creating a small pocket of defiance against the cave's cold.
After dinner, to pass the time and keep spirits up, Grandpa Jing had carved a simple mahjong set out of spare wood chips for the family. The whole project started because Grandma Jing's lifelong mahjong habit flared up, the familiar itch for the clack of tiles. By the time Jing Shu and Li Yuetian finished their discreet handoff of the snakes and steel panels and came back, they found the family had already gathered at the little wooden folding table, playing mahjong by lantern light.
Occasional quiet calls of "one tile" and "pung" drifted out from their awning-covered corner, and surrounded by the organized camp of their cave-mates, it really felt, bizarrely, like being on some rustic, survivalist holiday.
Jing Shu watched them play the casual challenger's game they had invented, with the loser stepping down and the next person in line taking the seat, while she kept practicing her mental manipulation of the Rubik's Cube Space. This lifetime, with its strange gift, had finally given her something complex and infinite to aim for again, a puzzle that grew with her.
"This is the thirty-third time." Jing Shu said to herself, staring at the mental projection of the Cube that had literally just been twisted into perfect color order only to instantly, silently revert to its previous scrambled state, counting silently the frequency of its spontaneous reversion.
Yes, the Rubik's Cube Space really did change colors, shift patterns on its own, which made mastering the Cube mentally much harder. At first she thought it was an illusion, a trick of her tired mind, but she had kept a few specific color sequences in mind and discovered it really did sneakily swap them when her focus lapsed for a millisecond.
Because of that relentless, automatic difficulty, she had become painfully sensitive to sudden color changes in her visual field, and when she caught a color shift in the real world, her perception seemed to sharpen, everything moving in perceptible slow motion for a split second.
She could even track the seemingly blurry flight path of a fly as it zipped past her face in the cave, seeing it as a series of positions rather than a streak.
She didn't know whether this new, hyper-acute perceptual skill came from the extra hundreds of hours she spent practicing the shifting Rubik's Cube or from drinking too much of the enhanced Spirit Spring, which might have subtly altered her neural pathways. For now it didn't seem to help much in daily life, just a curious side effect.
She could only hope that when her Rubik's Cube Space finally upgraded to the next level, it would gain extra, useful functions, just like the color-changing trick had unexpectedly trained her vision. It was predictable that the future upgrades of the Rubik's Cube Space would be harder and harder.
They arranged sleeping arrangements for the night by squeezing her parents a little in their tent to make room for Su Long in his own small one. There were two inflated boats set aside for Uncle and Auntie to sleep in later, placed close to the earthen kiln where there was residual warmth.
It was colder to sleep in the vehicle, with nowhere to stretch your legs, and everyone was still caked in dried mud and the occasional crushed red nematode. They didn't mind the boats, which were off the ground, and inflatable boats were easier to wipe clean.
As for Wang Fang, she had felt bad about letting Su Long sleep in what she perceived as the dirty tent, so before dinner she had gone and meticulously cleaned a tent especially for him. In the end, someone in the community, seeing her effort, lent her a relatively dry towel to wipe the worst of the red nematode residue off. Most of the loose red nematodes in their area had already been hunted down and eaten clean by Xiao Dou's diligent pecking.
At 11 p.m., Wu You'ai finished taking roll call for the people in the No. 5 and No. 6 caves, confirming all were present, and everyone retired to their spots, the cave settling into a murmur of whispers and then silence. Her official checking work for the day was over.
A little after two in the morning, her phone, set to vibrate against her wrist, started beeping with a specific, urgent pattern from the villa's security system. She snapped awake in the darkness of her tent, instantly alert.
…
The community below the mountain was terrifyingly quiet at night, the floodwaters a black mirror reflecting nothing. Only the top floor of Building No. 25, where a few families still huddled, showed a faint, flickering glow from a candle or small fire. Shangguan Jun stood at a broken window on that floor, his shoulder blades bare and streaked with fresh, dark blood, carefully pressing a smoldering piece of wood from the fire to his wounded shoulder. The meat sizzled faintly when it touched the hot ember. He clenched his teeth, sweat beading on his forehead, and he growled through the pain, "This feels great!" a twisted grin on his pale face.
At that moment someone below, in the flooded streets, made a sloshing noise, and Shangguan Jun quickly smothered the glowing wood against his palm, plunging himself back into shadow. He watched, unseen, as a group of a dozen dark figures moved through the thigh-deep water toward the villa district. He tilted his head with mild, predatory interest.
"Dasheng, if you are caught stealing now they will put you in labor reform for sure. Didn't you see what happened to Lao Wang the other day? He stole someone's wet jacket and got arrested. Now with the flood they have got him moving sandbags ever since, non-stop." one of the figures whispered nervously.
Zhou Dasheng held Zhou Dafu's confiscated phone, its screen dimmed, and his small eyes darted around in the near-total darkness. "You fools. Our personal phones are hidden back in the caves. With no big-data location pinging from our own devices, who will know we came out? Besides," his voice hardened, "we're helping Dafu fulfill his last wish and get revenge. Even if you take it a step further, that woman stole Dafu's pistol. If we go to her place and take some stuff, isn't that fair? An eye for an eye?"
"Right, I'm just worried there won't be anything worth taking in an empty house," another man muttered, shivering.
"You don't get it." Zhou Dasheng's voice was greedy. "They can afford a custom energy vehicle and they raise chickens right in their car. There was so much food visible in their vehicle at the cave. You don't think their actual house will be short of good stuff? Come on, according to the big-data property registration I pulled with Dafu's access, this is the house." He pointed toward Jing Shu's villa, a dark shape against the slightly less dark sky.
Zhou Dasheng compared the data on the big-data app, and Zhou Dafu's secondary access permission had been given by his cousin Zhou Daheng before everything went wrong. Just search for her name and you could find where she lived and even some of her family's public work registrations.
"We have hit a fat target," Zhou Dasheng thought, a thrill of anticipation running through him, but a sudden, sharp scream from one of his men cut through the silent night.
"Ouch! Something bit me! It hurts like fire!"
"I got stung too! It's bees. Damn it, why are there bees here at night?"
"There are so many bees! They're coming from the bushes!"
Zhou Dasheng rubbed the sudden, swelling lump on the back of his own neck and swore viciously. "They're just bees! We're wearing thick clothes. Curl up, cover your heads, and head for the door! Once we get inside, we'll be fine. Move!"
High above, Shangguan Jun squinted, his enhanced night vision goggles picking up the chaotic thermal signatures below. He murmured to the empty room, "So there are defensive bugs planted around here after all? Interesting."
"Oh… there's a fenced trap too?" He watched as one man stumbled into a nearly invisible wire, triggering a soft snap and a cry as he fell into a shallow, water-filled pit. "That place must have pulled a lot of stupid people into those traps back during the blackout riots."
"There are several traps outside," he observed clinically, "and inside there might be just as many, probably more sophisticated." Shangguan Jun adjusted his special goggles. Although the military-grade goggles could track lifeform heat signatures at night, they weren't perfect, and the view through the rain and mist was blurry.
A dull, metallic rumbling came from below as the men tried to break the villa's reinforced door. But after a few heavy hits, they started dropping one by one, collapsing silently into the water or onto the porch.
"They're useless. They can't even get past the first line of mechanical defense. Still, it doesn't matter." Shangguan Jun sounded a little disappointed and slowly closed his eyes, conserving his strength.
Less than half an hour later, a figure emerged from the villa's side door, moving with silent efficiency. It was Jing Shu, alerted by her sensors. She inspected the bodies with a flashlight, confirmed they were unconscious from tranquilizer darts or traps, then unceremoniously dragged and tossed them into another, larger concealed trap pit further from the villa. Then she went back inside. About half an hour later she left again, this time moving swiftly through the water in her amphibious shark submarine, heading back toward the mountain and the caves.
"See, I wasn't wrong. There is active surveillance and automated defense. Good thing I didn't go down there rashly…" Shangguan Jun started coughing violently, a wet, tearing sound. He leaned against the wall. "That woman is her? Her strength is terrifying for her size."
He leaned against the cold concrete wall and slid down to a sitting position, the pain in his shoulder flaring. A crazed, determined look came into his fever-bright eyes. "I hope you all come back to the city soon. This body of mine can't hold on much longer. Wu You'ai," he whispered the name like a curse and a promise, "I want to go to hell with you, and we'll study all kinds of eternal punishments together. As for the rest of you… you ruined my great plan, so you'll just be buried with it," He coughed again, blood spotting his lips.
"Looks like I'll be busy for the next few days. How can I make sure you all die without a trace, without a grave? The whole family must go together, don't miss anyone, or Wu You'ai will regret it," Shangguan Jun said, coughing into his hand. The obsession was the only thing keeping him going.
Even if his body held on a few more days, the people hunting him, the ones he had betrayed, would probably push on to Wu City soon, following the same flood-driven migration patterns. He had to act before they arrived, or before he bled out.
…
"Twelve bodies in all. I dumped them in the old drainage cistern trap. They will wake up with headaches and hypothermia, but they will live." Jing Shu reported quietly to Wu You'ai the next morning in a relatively private moment. "Go to the No. 6 cave roster and verify them as missing, then report it. One of them is Zhou Dasheng who was with Zhou Dafu yesterday. I found Dafu's phone at the scene. It has our family info on it. They probably came to the villa to steal, thinking it was empty."
Wu You'ai listened, her face grim. She nodded once, she knew exactly what procedure to follow and how to frame the report to ensure no further trouble came back to Jing Shu's family. It was another loose end to tie up in this increasingly tangled shelter.