By October, the temperature had already reached fifty-five degrees Celsius.
The government's water and electricity rationing notice had also changed from eight hours a day to four hours a day.
Water and electricity were now supplied from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. each day.
Instead of scrambling for generators and solar panels, people had begun scrambling for water tanks and buckets.
Another argument broke out in the neighborhood group chat over buying water tanks and buckets.
[Which damned bastard stole the fuel from my car?]
[The fuel in my car was stolen too!]
[Absolutely shameless. Anyone with a car should go check it. I bet all our tanks are empty!]
[It must be the thief who stole my generator! My gasoline generator needs gasoline to generate electricity!]
[Where's property management? Is anyone going to do anything about the thief in our complex?]
[Oh my god, we're actually living in the same complex as a thief. Once this weather passes, my family won't want to live here anymore!]
[Why does our floor stink so badly? Is someone not flushing their toilet?]
[Our floor stinks too. It smells like someone's meat has gone rotten.]
[I bet someone's kid has been peeing and pooping wherever they please!]
[Keep your brats under control. Don't let them out to pee and poop everywhere.]
[Stop dumping trash in the stairwell. Would taking your trash downstairs kill you?]
[I just went to the parking lot to check too. The fuel in my car was stolen as well!]
[Fucking bastard. Mine too!]
Jiang Ci scrolled through the neighborhood group's messages, thinking the fuel thieves were probably the two big, shifty-looking men she had encountered in the parking lot the day she drove out.
She remembered that there were indeed two brothers in this building who never did any honest work and spent their days idling around.
But she could no longer remember which floor they lived on.
After driving her own car back that day, she had siphoned out all the fuel herself, so she was not worried.
What caught her attention instead were the comments about the floors smelling bad.
While taking the stairs over the past two days, she had indeed smelled a terrible stench below the fifth floor.
Having seen far too many dead people in her previous life, she was particularly sensitive to them, and that smell seemed very much like the stench of a rotting corpse.
That night, she covered herself up thoroughly and went down to the fifth floor, where she began inspecting each floor.
When she reached the third floor, she found that the smell of rotting flesh was strongest there.
There were three households on each floor, but she did not know which one it came from.
"Aaaah! Someone's dead on the third floor! Someone's dead!"
Jiang Ci pinched her voice and deliberately shouted at the top of her lungs as she ran upstairs.
Only when she reached the eighth floor did she quiet down, switch to another stairwell, and head upstairs to her home.
In the dead of night, Jiang Ci's few shouts roused the entire building.
A crowd gathered at the third-floor stairwell, demanding that the residents come out and explain.
Of the three households on the third floor, only two actually opened their doors and came out.
The door to the innermost apartment remained tightly shut.
Realizing something was wrong, everyone hurried to find someone to pry the locked door open.
The moment the door was pulled open, a choking stench of decay rushed straight into their heads.
The apartment's only resident was an elderly woman who lived alone. In the extreme heat, she had died of heatstroke at some unknown point.
Yet no one had checked on her.
The old woman's body lay on the bed, long since rotten and stinking, even covered in maggots, mosquitoes, and flies.
Everyone who went inside ran back out with their hands over their mouths, vomiting.
No wonder there had always been a strange stench in the hallway. Now the truth was finally clear.
Someone quickly took out a phone and made several calls to property management, but unfortunately, they could not reach the old woman's family either.
Leaving the body there to keep rotting and stinking was no solution, but no one wanted to touch a corpse.
In the end, the other two households on the third floor had no choice but to send one man each, fully covered in protective gear, to carry out the bed with the body still on it.
They contacted the funeral home staff to come and take the old woman away.
The following evening, when Jiang Ci went downstairs and passed the third floor again, she glanced into the old woman's apartment.
She found the door wide open and the apartment ransacked. Everything valuable, along with the little food and supplies that remained, had been looted clean.
This was the apocalypse, and it was only just beginning...
In the later stages of the natural disasters, survivors became so hungry that they would even toss human corpses into a wok and stir-fry them to eat. What did looting a few supplies from the dead amount to now?
She turned and went upstairs. When she reached the seventh floor, she actually saw the young woman who lived on her floor standing outside an apartment, held in a man's arms as his hands roamed all over her.
The hallway was very dark, with only a little light spilling from that apartment, so Jiang Ci could not see very clearly.
She vaguely felt that the man's build looked familiar, as though she had seen him somewhere before.
Jiang Ci did not know what relationship the young woman had with that man. Perhaps they were dating, but it was none of her business. She glanced at them a couple of times, then went upstairs and home.
There were also three households on the eleventh floor. She lived in 1101, while a university professor lived in 1102. Property management had mentioned him in passing when she bought her apartment; he seemed to be a scientist as well.
The young woman, who was the same age as her, lived in 1103 with her family of four: her parents and her seven-year-old younger brother.
Her parents were in poor health, and her family often brewed Chinese herbal medicine. The smell was strong, which was why she remembered them so clearly.
Over the next few days, two more burglaries occurred in the building.
For a time, everyone in every household feared for their own safety, and no one dared trust their neighbors.
In the neighborhood group chat, the middle-aged woman on the ninth floor whose gasoline generator had been stolen was doing her utmost to promote her son, Zhou Junming.
She said her son was tall and handsome, could play the guitar, and had a lovely singing voice. Anyone willing to listen to him sing and play could bring two jin of rice to her home in exchange.
There was also a household on the fifteenth floor calling on the building's residents to go out together to look for supplies, saying he had special connections and knew where supplies were plentiful.
No one paid any attention to the fifteenth-floor appeal, but a woman on the thirteenth floor tagged the ninth-floor woman, saying she was willing to offer two jin of rice for her son to come to her apartment and sing her a love song.
The mother happily agreed at once and urged her son to take his guitar to the thirteenth floor to perform.
Zhou Junming himself was not very willing. He found it embarrassing, but he could not withstand his mother's pleas. More importantly, they really had no food left at home.
Reluctant as he was, he was ultimately forced to bow to the demands of life and went up to the thirteenth floor with his guitar on his back.
Only after two hours did Zhou Junming return, his face flushed red, carrying two jin of rice.
Seeing that although Zhou Junming looked somewhat evasive, he was in a fairly good mood and showed no strong protest or dissatisfaction, his mother naturally felt much more at ease.
Thinking Zhou Junming was merely embarrassed, she did not ask any more questions and simply offered him a few more words of praise: her son had grown up, become capable, and learned to provide for the family.
After all, she had raised her precious son with the utmost love and care. If their home had not been robbed and they had not truly been unable to keep going, she would never have had the heart to send her darling boy out to sing for food.
The woman on the thirteenth floor had really gotten a bargain. At least she knew a good thing when she saw it!