At this moment, the neighbors in Building 25 were curled up in their homes, holding the food Zhang Yi had given them, eating their dinner.
They hadn't bathed in almost a month, and their bodies itched terribly. Some of them had even developed skin diseases.
But there was nothing they could do. They couldn't get enough hot water, and even if they could use a kettle to boil water, they had to save it for drinking. Who dared to use it for a bath?
Taking a bath meant getting sick, and now, if you got sick, you were just waiting to die.
Jiang Lei and Li Chengbin were roommates. They had been best friends in college, and after graduation, they worked in the same company. Their bond was unbreakable.
That night, they were in a good mood because Zhang Yi had given each of them a box of braised pork rice.
These two boxes of braised pork rice were taken from the supermarket shelves and had been frozen solid for a while.
But that didn't stop them. They stuffed the rice into their down jackets, heated it for several minutes, and after a while, they could chew it.
In the pitch-black room, the two of them were wrapped in thick blankets and quilts, only their heads exposed.
Jiang Lei struggled to scoop a piece of braised pork with his spoon, chewed for a long time, and finally tasted the flavor of the meat.
A look of happiness appeared on his face. At this moment, being able to eat this was like eating a gourmet meal!
"Good thing we followed Zhang Yi back then! Now we can even eat braised pork!" Jiang Lei said happily.
But beside him, Li Chengbin remained silent, chewing on the rice in his hand.
That's right, it wasn't eating, it was gnawing.
After all, the rice and meat had frozen together, and he didn't want to bother with the spoon, so he pressed his face to the food and ate it directly.
Seeing that Li Chengbin wasn't saying anything, Jiang Lei thought he hadn't heard, so he nudged him with his elbow.
"Hey, don't you think I'm right? We'll stick with Zhang Yi from now on."
"Did you see Zhou Ke'er? That person, still looking so glamorous, wearing branded clothes—Canada Goose!"
"The most terrifying thing is, she seems to be able to take a bath!"
Jiang Lei's eyes were full of envy. His current method of cleaning himself was rubbing dust off his body with his hands, and every time he rubbed, it left a long streak.
But later, he was too reluctant to rub it off because it helped keep him warm.
Li Chengbin glanced at him and said in a low voice, "What good does it do to envy her? You don't have the conditions for that."
Jiang Lei sighed, "You're right. She has the resources we don't have! Otherwise, I'd go try it too."
He looked at his buddy, gave a wicked grin, and said, "But before that, I'll let you enjoy a bit."
Li Chengbin replied impatiently, "Go away, I wouldn't want it even if you gave it to me for free!"
Jiang Lei argued, "Don't complain about it being dirty, I'll use my mouth if I have to."
"Shut up, shut up, the more you say, the more disgusting it gets!"
The atmosphere between the two of them became a bit awkward.
After a moment of silence, Li Chengbin spoke quietly, "Jiang Lei, don't you think Zhang Yi giving us food is actually just using us as cannon fodder? He never really intended for us to survive."
Jiang Lei's eyes widened, "What do you mean by that?"
Li Chengbin recounted what the neighbors had said earlier that day.
Jiang Lei fell silent.
"Talking about those useless things, what can we do?"
"We didn't think about killing him and stealing his house and food back then. But we couldn't beat him and almost got killed ourselves."
"In this world now, the one with the strongest fist is the boss. If he gives us a meal, we have to obey."
Li Chengbin said nothing.
At that moment, their phones rang.
Li Chengbin took his phone out of his pocket, glanced at the message, and his expression immediately became serious.
In that seriousness, there was a hint of tension and excitement that was hard to interpret.
…
The next day, Zhang Yi, as usual, left the community on his motorcycle.
After being ambushed the day before, he took a longer route this time, going out in a different direction.
Today, he didn't call Uncle You because he was heading to the military camp to dig up the buried weapons and equipment.
He was also planning to find some trees to chop down for future use.
The night before, Li Jian and Chen Lingyu contacted him again.
They were simply asking how Zhang Yi was considering things.
Zhang Yi just gave them a perfunctory response and said he needed more time to think.
But he could clearly sense that some people were starting to get impatient.
Zhang Yi wasn't concerned about their attitude. He was just waiting to see when they would take action.
After all, getting the people from Building 29 to unite would take some time for negotiation.
During this period, he had enough time to make thorough preparations.
After two and a half hours, Zhang Yi arrived at the place he had been the day before, following his memory.
Under his feet was a vast expanse of snow, with only a few landmarks in the distance, and everything around was empty.
Zhang Yi took the excavator out of the alternate space and began digging down as he did last time.
With experience now, Zhang Yi's skill in operating the excavator had become much smoother.
After another round of busy work, he eventually dug up a building.
Zhang Yi wasn't sure if this was the weapon storage, but digging into a building was much easier than digging through snow, even if it meant breaking through walls.
So he jumped down and began searching carefully. Eventually, he discovered that it wasn't a weapons storage but a soldiers' dormitory.
Although he had come to the wrong place, finding a building meant the weapon storage was probably not far.
However, as Zhang Yi entered the dormitory, he noticed something strange.
According to logic, with the heavy snow falling, almost all transportation on land would be useless.
These soldiers, if left there, would be unable to leave once the snow thickened.
So there should be many corpses inside the military camp.
But when he entered the dormitory, he found that the blankets were neatly folded, and the bed sheets were smooth. Not a single frozen soldier was in sight.
"How strange, where is everyone?"
Zhang Yi couldn't figure it out. Where had these soldiers gone?
He went to a few more dorms nearby, and the scene was the same.
"Could it be that they all left here?"
A thought formed in Zhang Yi's mind, and he felt it was the most likely explanation.
After the snowstorm hit, the higher-ups must have received accurate information and realized the coming apocalypse was unavoidable.
So they needed to go to shelters, and these soldiers were probably transferred to protect their safety and transport supplies.
With this thought, Zhang Yi's mind cleared.
Recalling the empty warehouses he had seen earlier in the storage area.
The truth was, a few high-level officials must have completed their transfer the night the snowstorm arrived.
But ordinary people hadn't received any word of it.
They were now hiding somewhere, waiting for the disaster to pass before coming out to continue ruling the world.
A sense of vigilance rose in Zhang Yi's heart.
He knew that the disaster wouldn't be over anytime soon, and after a long period of hardship, everyone's inner state would change.
By then, armed factions might emerge as a major threat.
However, that moment wouldn't come too soon, because for now, there was still at least some semblance of order.