Wang Kun was freezing to death.
He really was about to freeze to death. Even after ransacking a clothing store, putting on its two most expensive, thickest down jackets, and huddling around a burning fire, his face was still pale with cold, his eyelashes coated in a thin layer of frost.
He sat cross-legged on the ground facing the fire, buried beneath layer upon layer of clothes and blankets until he resembled a small hill. After who knew how long, white frost had sealed his eyelids together.
In the middle of the empty, chilly street, there was only this one campfire, yet it could not thaw his frozen, swollen red hands or the phone cradled between them.
"Beep, beep!"
That notification from his phone seemed like a spark of life breaking the deadlock. At last, it roused Wang Kun, who was on the verge of freezing to death, and his sealed eyelids trembled faintly.
"Crack..."
Somewhere, there seemed to be the sound of ice breaking. Only then did Wang Kun, who had waited until he lost all sense of himself, seem to be remembered.
His gaze went from rigid to lively, from barren to colorful. His phone screen lit up automatically, displaying a pop-up: "Battery below 5%. Please charge your phone."
It took Wang Kun a full five minutes to recover his senses, and he began to feel genuine despair.
From the morning of January 5 to the bright moonlight of January 6, he had waited here for two full days and a night, yet everyone seemed to have forgotten him.
Apart from the fake Xiao Qian Duyue at the beginning, and a fake text message from Ji Li... no further word had come.
He did not know whether things inside the Rose Hotel were equally stagnant, but he would