Doomsday Wonderland

If a person has the luxury to fall ill in peace, they can consider themselves lucky.

In that dim hotel room, as Xie Feng lay feverish and bedridden, she quietly shed tears more than once.

Her entire body ached under the high fever, as if her skin and bones were on the verge of bursting. Every time she turned over, it felt like torture. Yet, she had the comfort of a dry bed, free from wandering the streets under endless rain, with three meals a day and fever medicine she could afford. Most importantly, she wasn't alone—someone was by her side.

Though by any stretch of the imagination, Dong Luorong was not someone you'd call nurturing.

The food came via room service, and the medicine was bought by a driver. There were no scenes like in TV dramas where someone cools a fever with a damp cloth. Instead, a large pack of fever patches was tossed onto the nightstand with a thud, and Dong Luorong's idea of care was simply saying, "Stick one on yourself."

When Xie Feng quietly asked if she could boil some hot water, Dong Luorong's expression was one of genuine confusion.

"Why would you need hot water?" she asked, as if she truly lacked all basic common sense in life. "Hot water, cold water—it all turns into body temperature once it's inside you, right?"

Technically, that made sense. But a sip of warm tea would've been nice for the throat.

"Didn't I already buy you throat lozenges?"

At that moment, Dong Luorong looked like a child who had begged for a pet only to realize it involved cleaning up after it—annoyed and unwilling but unable to shirk responsibility. "Fine, fine, I get it. Hot water, right?"

She stood by the electric kettle, rocking impatiently on her toes, as if willing it to boil faster with sheer mental force.

Even though Dong Luorong was such a person—and an imperial citizen on top of it—her presence was still a great comfort to Xie Feng.

Xie Feng often felt as if she were hanging by a single thread, one gust of wind away from plunging into an unknown abyss. The sense of security that had once tethered her to the world, like a screw firmly fastened, only seemed to exist when she was compliant and obedient. The moment she expressed discontent or resistance, the world revealed a very different face.

She had an older brother who worked at City Hall. On the day of the city's surrender, she even saw him on the TV news in the station lobby, standing with his colleagues at the entrance to City Hall, all beaming with pride.

If there had ever been a choice between the two siblings, Xie Feng knew she was the one left behind.

"The Empire guarantees Tear City's future safety. You'll still be able to study, work, marry, and have children. How has the Empire wronged you?" her brother had lectured her at the dinner table, just before she decided to leave home. "Girls shouldn't carry so much anger and resentment all the time, looking so bitter and twisted—it makes people want to keep their distance."

Women's protests turned out to be an offense, a principle that Xie Feng understood at the age of eighteen.

The Empire is protecting you, but the price paid is me.

Xie Feng was in a trance, staring at the scrambled eggs on the table, wondering when she would next taste her mother's cooking. Tear City wasn't far from the Empire, and in this age of instant information, it was easy to see what life under imperial rule would look like—especially for ordinary women at the bottom of society. The only difference was whether you chose to open your eyes and or not.

Before she left home, Xie Feng hadn't been at the bottom. But after leaving, she fell to the very bottom, only one step away from sinking into the mud of the streets.

From that perspective, finding shelter with Dong Luorong might have been the luckiest thing to happen to her in the past two years. But for Xie Feng, this "luck" wasn't about material comfort—it was about Dong Luorong herself.

Even though Dong Luorong never talked about her own life, she seemed like someone barely hanging by a thread too.

Despite not knowing how to take someone's temperature, Dong Luorong had her own way of being attentive. Xie Feng was given a room in another part of the hotel. Whenever Dong Luorong visited, she always brought along a book or a handheld game console.

Tear City's rainy season was relentless. On rainy days, Dong Luorong would sit in the armchair by the bed, propping her feet up on Xie Feng's mattress, flipping through pages of a book or tapping away on her game console. Every time Xie Feng stirred and opened her eyes, however slightly, she would see the glow of the bedside lamp illuminating the edge of Dong Luorong's face.

No matter how dark, cold, and stormy the world outside became, this corner of the room always had a lamp—and someone in it. freewebnσvel.cøm

With her eyes shut, pretending to sleep, Xie Feng slowly slid her foot out from under the blanket. Her toes found Dong Luorong's bare, cold foot, making Dong Luorong shiver. Even that tiny, cool touch—a fleeting connection that wasn't even warm—felt enough to soothe everything Xie Feng had been through over the past two years.

"It's so hot," Dong Luorong muttered after a moment, pulling her foot away. "Are you trying to use me to cool down?"

So, she had noticed she was awake after all.

"But..." Xie Feng mumbled in her fevered haze, her words slipping out unfiltered. "It's been so long since I've touched someone's skin. When I was sick, my mom would always hold me."

"Hold you? You people in Tear City are really that emotionally open?"

'That was back in grade school,' Xie Feng thought, though she didn't say it aloud.

When Dong Luorong climbed into the 39-degree fevered bed, she had a hopeless look on her face. There was no way she'd hold Xie Feng, but she could at least tolerate lying beside her, letting Xie Feng rest her head on her arm.

"Alright, stop crying," Dong Luorong said, her voice unexpectedly gentle—so gentle it only made things worse. "There's nothing in this world worth crying over."

Although Xie Feng's fever lingered and came and went, she got a little better each day.

Dong Luorong didn't seem to find anything unreasonable about taking in someone with no clear background and looking after them. In fact, she stopped by Xie Feng's room every day—checking if she had eaten, dropping broccoli she didn't like into Xie Feng's bowl, learning the local dialect of Tear City, and applying face masks with her, proudly declaring, "This is the best fever patch!" only to complain moments later, "Are you a furnace? You've baked the mask dry."

However, she never once mentioned anything about herself. Who Dong Luorong was, what she did, or why she was in Tear City—Xie Feng didn't know any of it. And to be honest, Xie Feng wasn't sure if that information even mattered to her anymore.

No matter who Dong Luorong was, this was just the kind of person she was.

On the fourth night, Xie Feng finally felt refreshed and light, as though she had completely shaken off the fever.

After days of tossing and turning in bed, her body ached all over. Now that the fever was gone, she naturally wanted to get up and move around. It wasn't too late, and Dong Luorong was probably still awake. But if Xie Feng wanted to chat with her, she knew she'd need to bundle up—she wouldn't dare knock on the door of that icebox without wearing extra layers.

She slipped on the hotel's thick bathrobe, pulling the collar up to cover her neck, and grabbed a pillow before heading out. Anyone who saw her would think a snowman had come to life. Dong Luorong's room was at the end of another hallway, past the elevator lobby. Shuffling slowly like an old lady, Xie Feng reached the elevator lobby just in time to see one of the elevators close its doors.

She didn't think much of it.

Even when she noticed a man walking ahead of her, she still didn't think much of it.

The man walked steadily in front of her without stopping at any of the doors along the hallway. It was only when he stopped at the door of a room at the end and turned around to ring the doorbell that Xie Feng finally froze—it was the very room she was going to as well.

Moreover, she knew that man.

Almost everyone in Tear City would recognize him—his face had become all too familiar over the past year. Chief Qiu, the security chief responsible for maintaining order in Tear City and leading the hunt for suspected posthumans, was a regular feature on the news and in newspapers.

He never personally dealt with low-level troublemakers like protesting students, but officers from his department had once chased Xie Feng for two streets, tearing her backpack off her shoulders in the process.

Standing there in the empty hallway, Xie Feng felt completely trapped—unable to move forward or retreat.

In person, Chief Qiu looked even sterner than on TV, his tall frame upright and devoid of any excess weight. As he waited for the door to open, his side profile showed no emotion, as if he were there strictly on official business.

Sensing someone behind him, he glanced back, his gaze sweeping over Xie Feng's bathrobe without a hint of suspicion, and then turned away.

Xie Feng clutched her pillow tightly, pretending she was about to knock on the door of another room. Her hand trembled slightly as she lowered her fist.

The door opened.

As always, Dong Luorong's expression was cold and indifferent. She said something in a low voice to the man at the door, but it was inaudible from a distance.

Then, as if sensing something, she leaned out slightly, the two's eyes met in midair.

After Chief Qiu entered the room, Dong Luorong, still expressionless, closed the door behind him.