July 1, Yunhua City.
The city was filled with an icy, frozen silence. Ice walls more than ten meters tall stood everywhere, connected in sprawling stretches, as if they had turned the place into a kingdom of ice and snow.
Only a few main roads remained passable thanks to round-the-clock snow clearing. Yet everyone traveling along those roads felt an intense sense of oppression and suffocation when they saw the towering ice walls on either side.
Over the past few days, several drivers had been unable to endure the psychological pressure and abandoned their snow-clearing work, leaving others to take over.
These interconnected ice walls had practically sealed off the entrances and exits of most gathering places. Schools, malls, hospitals, libraries... all of them were the same.
The Life Support Department and the Emergency Management Bureau had no choice but to frequently deploy drilling vehicles to bore holes through the ice walls blocking those entrances and exits, allowing emergency supplies to be delivered.
Even so, during the final phase of the rules, riots still broke out due to inadequate supplies, prolonged water shortages, and low temperatures.
Serious conflicts erupted at many gathering points. Even with armed squads stationed there, some people who had suffered mental breakdowns could no longer be deterred by force. Faced with their indiscriminate attacks, the armed squads could only shoot them dead.
Some gathering points also collapsed under accumulated snow. Although the authorities had repeatedly sent helicopters to spray snow-melting agents onto the rooftops, there were simply too many gathering points, and some were inevitably overlooked.
The people in those collapsed gathering points faced moments of indescribable despair.
With every building exit sealed by ice walls, they could not escape even if they wanted to. They could only watch helplessly as collapsing roofs crushed them beneath