After a busy afternoon that left him mentally exhausted, Li Dong hired a designated driver to take him home.
The driver dropped him off at the villa's entrance before leaving, and Li Dong drove the car into the garage himself.
By the time he returned to the suburban villa in Dongjiang City, it was already past six in the evening.
Yet, the sky remained bright, showing no signs of dimming. The relentless ten-hour heatwave still hadn't subsided, with scorching air rising from the ground.
The sun still hung high in the sky.
Sitting in the driver's seat, Li Dong rubbed his temples. He felt he wasn't cut out for investment-related business—it was too mentally and physically draining, and he simply couldn't compete with seasoned business elites.
How many years had those people spent navigating the treacherous waters of commerce?
As the saying goes, seizing power is easy, but maintaining it is hard—the same applied to family fortunes.
If future generations produced wastrels, the wealth accumulated over generations could be squandered overnight.
He was just a young man who had inherited the family business a few years ago—how could he possibly outmaneuver those veterans?
As for why he didn't delegate tasks like ordering rice, flour, oil, salt, canned goods, or petroleum to his professional and factory managers…
The answer was simple: secrecy. Though no secret could stay hidden forever, every bit of concealment helped.
Secondly, he didn't want his employees to think he'd gone mad. Stockpiling such massive quantities of supplies with large sums of money would undoubtedly draw strange looks.
Even though his actions were legitimate business decisions, what if he got "invited for tea"?
This wasn't the apocalypse yet—social order still existed.
"Yuanzhou should be back by now, right?" Li Dong muttered to himself as he stepped out of the garage.
"Aunt Liu, is Yuanzhou back?"
Entering the villa, Li Dong noticed his younger brother and future sister-in-law weren't in the living room, nor could he hear their voices. He quickly turned to Aunt Liu, who was busy cooking in the kitchen, preparing a seafood feast—steamed lobster among other dishes.
"They're back. As soon as they arrived, they went upstairs to sleep in their room."
"What time did they get back?"
"Around 4:30 in the afternoon. Young Master Chenzhou, are you hungry? Would you like a lobster? I just steamed one."
Aunt Liu spoke while bustling around the kitchen before bringing out a plate with a freshly steamed lobster.
"Sure, I'm actually quite hungry."
Instead of immediately digging into the lobster on the table, Li Dong went to wash his hands and relieve himself first.
Meanwhile, Aunt Liu set the plate down and returned to the kitchen to fetch dipping sauce—she knew exactly how Li Dong liked it.
"Aunt Liu, could you wake Yuanzhou and Weiwei for dinner? If they can't get up, don't force them." Li Dong picked up a meaty lobster tail, dipped it in sauce, and took a bite while chewing.
"Mm."
Hearing his request, Aunt Liu paused her work and hurried upstairs. She knocked on Li Tiang and Song Weiwei's door, calling out to them from outside.
Li Tiang, who had been napping, woke up quickly—he hadn't been in deep sleep, just tired.
The distance between Shanghai and Shenzhen was over 2,000 kilometers. Even by high-speed rail, traveling at several hundred kilometers per hour, the journey took seven to eight hours.
After arriving, they still had to take a car—such a long trip would exhaust anyone.
Especially since they had boarded the train at 6 a.m. that morning.
Aunt Liu, who had woken the two of them, went back downstairs to the kitchen to continue her work.
Dish after dish was brought to the dining table, mostly seafood.
"Weiwei, big brother is calling us for dinner," Li Tiang said after waking up. He checked the time on his phone and shook Song Weiwei beside him.
"Mmm~, you go ahead. Let me sleep a little longer," Song Weiwei mumbled, still half-asleep.
Li Tiang glanced at her drowsy state and decided not to press further. Rubbing his eyes, he slipped on his slippers and walked out of the room.
"Awake?"
Li Dong looked up at the young man descending the stairs from the second floor while happily eating a lobster.
The young man coming down the stairs was over six feet tall with an average build and a fairly handsome face—this was Li Dong's younger brother, Li Tiang.
"Yeah," Li Tiang nodded as he descended.
"Sleep well?" Li Dong asked again.
"Not bad."
"Why isn't Weiwei coming down? This is a seafood feast—I remember she loves seafood the most."
"I called her, but she said she wanted to sleep a little longer."
Li Tiang sat down and stared at the lavish spread on the table, his mouth watering. For a moment, he couldn't believe he could still enjoy such pristine seafood.
This was pure bliss.
In his memories of the apocalypse, eating these delicacies had been nearly impossible—something he could only fantasize about in dreams, to the point where he could barely recall the taste of seafood.
"Let's eat first. You must be starving, right?" Li Dong picked up a king crab leg, dipped it in sauce, and took a bite.
"Wow, it smells amazing! A seafood feast? Why didn't you wake me up sooner?"
Song Weiwei, who had just woken up, looked at the two enjoying the meal with a hint of complaint.
"I did call you—you were the one who didn't want to get up," Li Tiang replied, turning to her with a smile.
"Aunt Liu, come join us."
"Oh no, I can't. I'm allergic to seafood."
"Ah, I forgot. But besides seafood, didn't you also make steak, beef with potatoes, and stir-fried lamb with scallions? Have dinner with us before you leave," Li Dong insisted.
In the end, after much persuasion, Aunt Liu stayed for dinner, washed the dishes, and tidied up before heading home.
After Aunt Liu left the villa,
Li Dong turned to his younger brother with a serious expression. "Now, can you explain?"
He was referring to the matter about the apocalypse.
Li Dong hoped that what Li Tiang had said was just a farce—not the truth.
Song Weiwei was present too.
Faced with Li Dong's stern demeanor, she felt a little afraid. She worried that if he got too angry, he might hang Li Tiang up for a beating—and might even give her a thrashing in the process.
"Brother, believe me, everything I said is true. The real apocalypse will come in a year, when dozens of meteorites of varying sizes will strike Blue Star. Among them is one massive meteorite nearly ten kilometers in diameter, along with several others several kilometers wide."
"This information has already been suppressed by the government. Almost all astronomers have been gagged, and the same goes for other countries. Any mention of meteorites hitting Blue Star online has been completely erased—there's not a single trace left on the internet now."
"The news about meteorites hitting Blue Star would never be made known to the general public by any country, primarily to prevent mass panic."
Li Tiang shared some information from his future memories with Li Dong.
This news was indeed true.
Two years ago, observations of a meteorite swarm by various astronomical observatories had caused quite a stir, but the information was immediately suppressed.
The trajectory of the meteorite swarm had been continuously monitored and analyzed. Although its path occasionally deviated toward Blue Star, many nations had already used algorithms to predict—and confirmed this year—that the swarm would indeed collide with the planet.
Currently, all countries were working hard to suppress this information.
In his memories, Li Tiang had only learned about the meteorite swarm's impending impact through declassified documents.
It turned out that the upper echelons of Blue Star's nations had long known about the meteorite collision and had been making preparations.
But no one had anticipated that a sudden solar storm would destroy all the contingency plans and backup measures of the three superpowers.
It nearly obliterated all satellites, including communication satellites, and even caused an international space station to crash for unknown reasons.
The sudden solar storm caught Blue Star's nations completely off guard, resulting in only a pitifully small number of meteorites being intercepted.
"Meteorites?"
"Yes, they were observed two years ago, but the news was suppressed. If you don't believe me, just wait until May next year. As the meteorites get closer to Blue Star, amateur astronomers will start noticing them, and the information will become impossible to contain. That's when countries will finally stop suppressing the news."
"Big brother, we need to prepare early. Once the news about the meteorite impact spreads, the prices of all supplies will skyrocket, and purchases might even be restricted," Li Tiang urged.
"What preparations should we make? And where should we build the Shelter? Where should we store the stockpiled supplies?"
The news of the meteorite impact had indeed shaken Li Dong.
This was something beyond human resistance—dozens of meteorites. If they couldn't be intercepted, the subsequent chain of catastrophic consequences was something Li Dong could well imagine.
Returning to an ice age would be the least of their problems.