The blizzard howled through the night. By morning, the precipitation had finally ceased.

Su Jin woke and pulled himself upright.

The sheer, unrestrained venting of his emotions the night before had granted him an unprecedentedly sound sleep. His mental exhaustion was practically wiped clean.

He shot a complicated look toward the frosted windowpanes.

The government had publicly dissolved. The Hanqiong missiles had plunged the city into an artificial winter. The military was completely MIA.

The situation had deteriorated past the point of rock bottom.

There was no room left for naive illusions. No cavalry was coming; survival was entirely a solo project now.

The temperature outside hovered near a deadly negative sixty degrees Fahrenheit. Without central heating, the indoor climate wasn't much better.

He exhaled a long breath, watching it immediately crystallize into a thick white plume.

Kicking off his quilt, Su Jin rolled out of bed, already bundled in a heavy down parka.

He crouched by the foot of the bed to inspect the makeshift mouse cage, which was swaddled in layers of scrap clothing and padded with foam insulation.

The heating candle had sputtered out, but rustling sounds still echoed from within. Seeing the test subjects alive, he let out a sigh of relief.

The infection source was still a complete enigma. If this batch of experimental mice froze to death, it would be an agonizing waste of resources.

Fortunately, they had managed to scrape through the night.

Even buried under layers of winter clothing and hoarding all his warm Supplies, he woke up with stiff, ice-cold joints.

He only owned one thick quilt and had a pathetic stockpile of winter wear.

If he hadn't rigged a few alcohol stoves surrounded by bricks to trap the heat, he likely would have lost some toes to frostbite last night.

When Fu Qingdai visited last night, he had tossed her a few of those stoves as well.

The Fu family's setup was different from his bachelor pad. They definitely had a surplus of bedding, so surviving the cold snap wouldn't be an issue.

The other tenants in the building shouldn't have much trouble either. Every apartment had propane tanks and plenty of furniture to burn.

Su Jin did a quick sweep of his apartment.

Aside from the water bucket freezing solid, everything was optimal. He choked down a few raw spoonfuls of lard for calories and headed straight for the door.

He rapped his knuckles against the Fu family's door. It swung open almost instantly.

Fu Qingdai's pale, frost-nipped face peeked out, followed closely by Fu Hu's haggard, utterly defeated visage.

Seeing Su Jin standing there, the older man flinched in shock.

"Director?"

"Inside." Su Jin cut him off with a raised hand, smoothly brushing past him into the apartment.

The interior was a disaster zone. A pile of ash from a makeshift bonfire sat dead in the center of the living room.

Judging by the gutted remains nearby, they had chopped up their own sofa for kindling.

The family had clearly huddled out here all night.

Taking it all in, Su Jin turned to Fu Hu and dropped the bomb: "I was the one who barricaded your door."

"What! You?"

"Hold your questions," Su Jin said, his tone turning deadpan and rigidly authoritative. "Let me formally reintroduce myself. My name is Li Haocheng, Director of the National Key Risk Intervention and Execution Bureau."

"I... I know that," Fu Hu stammered.

Su Jin shook his head. "You know my title, but you don't actually know the National Bureau's operational mandate. It isn't what I claimed earlier. Our division is classified; we exclusively research paranormal anomalies. We are critically underfunded and essentially treated as a black sheep by the mainstream alphabet agencies."

"Thirty years ago, black-ops excavation teams unearthed two-thousand-year-old artifacts in the northwest. Our top brass designated it the Maya civilization. Whether they were extraterrestrials or early metahumans is above my pay grade, but by deciphering their monolithic records, we found predictions mapping out the trajectory of human history. That includes this exact apocalyptic scenario."

"The Bureau was founded entirely to reverse-engineer Mayan foresight."

Both Fu Qingdai and Fu Hu stared at him, completely paralyzed.

Su Jin didn't skip a beat. "Initially, the state poured billions into the project. But after three decades of zero actionable intelligence, our department was practically shelved. Even internally, we splintered into factions. Most of the suits just treated it as a retirement home to collect easy paychecks. I was the only one pushing the agenda."

"What the hell are you talking about? None of this makes sense!" Fu Hu blurted out, aghast. "Are you out of your mind?"

"My faculties are perfectly intact," Su Jin replied with clinical precision. "According to the Mayan algorithms, a 'Savior' would manifest to predict this exact cataclysm. I tracked the anomaly and found your daughter. I'll admit I lied to you previously; I had already established contact with Qingdai long before I moved next door."

"To put it in layman's terms... your daughter is the prophetic Savior. I have a one-hundred-percent confidence rating on this. Given the total societal collapse happening outside your window, I assume you're smart enough to draw your own conclusions."

"Wait, just wait a damn minute!" Fu Hu clutched his temples, wincing as if in physical pain.

Zombie outbreaks. The government collapsing overnight. And now some guy in a parka was casually dropping the bomb that his teenage daughter was the messiah.

It was a cognitive overload. His brain simply refused to compile the data.

"Are you telling me you knew this was coming the whole time?! And instead of warning the country, you came here to hide behind my kid?!" Fu Hu's voice trembled with rising fury.

Su Jin remained coldly pragmatic. "The higher-ups have known for decades. Do you really think me filing another memo would have changed anything?"

"Why else would I have told you to stockpile arrows and batteries? You think I wanted to squat in this rundown complex instead of relying on state military assets? The Bureau wouldn't even approve my fucking expense reports!"

The sheer corporate frustration in Su Jin's roar left Fu Hu utterly stunned.

He had a point... if they were cutting budgets, things must have been dire.

"Do you... do you have any intel on the government's current status?" Fu Hu asked, his voice shaking with a pathetic, desperate shred of hope.

"The government is a dead asset. We're on our own."

The light died in Fu Hu's eyes. He cast a miserable glance back at his daughter, his heart twisting in agony.

Su Jin pressed his advantage. "Old Fu, you're a veteran. You know military hardware. You saw the payload those Hanqiong missiles delivered. What's your tactical assessment on the weather? How long until the freeze lifts?"

"I don't know... I can't be sure. Maybe a week. It's supposedly summer, so maybe even less..." Fu Hu waved his hand weakly, his spirit broken.

A week, huh... Su Jin analyzed the variable.

The Hanqiong bombardment had bought him a solid seven-day buffer.

The catastrophic freeze was severely debuffing the Zombies, freezing their motor functions whether they were on the streets or in the stairwells.

At a conservative estimate, he had a three-day window to purge the infected from the apartment block and consolidate his Supplies and manpower.

"Director Li, I need you to leave. I don't know what your agenda is, but I refuse to be part of it," Fu Hu said, sounding drained. "My wife is still in a coma. I saw the texts and heard the broadcast, but I refuse to believe the system just evaporated. I'm waiting for evacuation."

"Old Fu!" Su Jin barked, shattering the man's delusions. "Wake up! The state is offline! If they had the bandwidth to save us, we'd have seen military transports by now! If they were still operational, why the hell would they nuke their own civilian centers with weather weapons?!"

"Fine, let's play devil's advocate. Let's say the military is still out there. Look at the logistics! You're a retired grunt. Why would you be priority extraction? Waiting for rescue? How long does your KPI on survival last here? We got lucky the Hanqiong didn't detonate directly on our roof. What happens if they call in another strike to scrub the sector? You think your living room fort will save you then?"