Chapter 1

On Day 100 of the global heat collapse, surface temperature climbed to a hopeless 70°C.

To keep my girlfriend from being roasted alive, I drove my ice ability past the limit and became her personal human air conditioner.

But when my ability core was on the verge of shattering and I collapsed coughing blood, she stole the last two bottles of water from my pack and climbed into someone else’s temperature-controlled car without looking back.

Before she left, she tossed the life-saving lump of ice I’d condensed with half my life onto the blistering asphalt like garbage.

“Jack, I’m sick of your cooling cutting out any second. I’m not staying here to die with you.”

She didn’t know—

The moment that ice turned into white vapor, the broken ability core in my chest—the one ruined because of her—evolved in the abyss.

--

The reinforced steel security door above my head was giving off a teeth-grinding groan.

That was the scream of metal warping and expanding under a constant 70°C bake.

This was the third month since global temperatures had gone fully out of control.

The surface of the earth had become a giant frying pan, holding steady at around seventy degrees. In this world, day and night no longer mattered. There was only hot and hotter. Any organic matter exposed to direct sunlight without protection would be fully cooked in three minutes.

The entire city had long lost the smell of the living. All that remained were melted asphalt roads and the charred stench of ruined buildings.

My name was Jack.

An ice-type ability user.

In this boiling apocalypse, I was one of the very few people who could survive by himself.

But even I was almost done.

I was curled up in the corner of an abandoned supermarket’s underground cold-storage room, both hands pressed hard against the burning concrete floor. My knuckles were white from strain. Thin frost spread weakly from my palms, trying to drive away the suffocating heat in the air.

But that pitiful coolness didn’t even make it half a meter before the heat around us devoured it whole.

This was the last place my girlfriend Irene and I had left. Barely ten square meters.

And it was draining my life dry.

Riiip—

The sleeping bag zipper was yanked open violently, the sharp sound ripping apart the dead silence of the cold room.

Irene sat up. Damp hair clung to her cheeks. She didn’t even glance at me. The first thing she did was stare at the thermometer on the wall.

The moment she saw the red column stop at a certain mark, her face darkened instantly.

“Twenty-seven degrees?” She hurled the towel in her hand at me, her voice shrill in the cramped room. “Jack, what the hell are you doing? Last night the air was like a steam chamber. I didn’t sleep at all. Can’t you drop it a little more?”

The towel scraped my cheek—dry, rough.

I lifted my heavy eyelids. My vision was already double.

I hadn’t slept for even one second in three full days.

My ability wasn’t infinite. The total cold I could generate each day simply wasn’t enough to keep this room cool for long against the relentless heat pressing in from outside. Every forced attempt at cooling was me overdrawing my own life.

I could feel it—

My face had to look grayer than a corpse’s. My lips were split into deep bloody cracks. Every breath I took tasted thick with iron.

But I still looked at her and nodded with difficulty.

“Sorry… I’ll… cool it more.” I forced the words out, my throat feeling like I’d swallowed broken glass.

The moment I gave in, the anger on Irene’s face vanished like a trick.

She leaned over like a lazy cat and kissed my cheek lightly. The sweet fragrance on her skin briefly overpowered the moldy air.

“I knew you were the best.”

She said it with perfect ease, then slipped right back into the sleeping bag and turned on the old tablet she’d scavenged from the ruins.

There was no internet, so she could only replay the old downloaded shows saved on it.

The weak light from the screen lit her face. Fake canned laughter crackled from the speaker.

And I, hunched in the dark corner, bit through my tongue to force myself awake with pain. Frost gathered again in my palms. The steel door outside glowed red from the sun. Heat struck the walls like a tidal wave.

I had to keep outputting, nonstop, just to preserve this tiny patch of cool.

Time stretched infinitely under extreme heat and extreme exhaustion.

By evening, the line finally broke.

A dull blast rang inside my skull. The whole world went dark. The frost on my palms turned to steam in an instant. My body gave out completely, and I hit the ground like a dead branch.

Blackness swallowed me.

I thought that might be it. I even thought maybe it would be a relief.

But pain dragged me back.

Bang!

Something slammed hard into my ribs. No restraint. I coughed up acid and forced my eyes open.

Irene stood over me, soaked in sweat. She had no intention of helping me. Instead, she kicked me again like she’d gone mad, her voice cracking with panic and tears.

“Stop pretending to be dead! Get up! Get up!” She pointed at the thermometer, her fingers shaking. “It’s thirty-five already! Ten minutes and it’s at thirty-five! You can’t sleep—you’ll kill me!”

I clutched my ribs and looked up at her tear-streaked face.

For one brief crossed glance, a massive sense of absurdity drowned me.

I suddenly couldn’t tell whether she was crying because she was afraid I’d die—

or just afraid there’d be no one left in the world to act as her cooling machine.

My chest churned, but I still clenched my jaw and swallowed the blood-flecked spit in my mouth. With bleeding fingers digging into the concrete, I forced myself up inch by inch.

I looked at her and said nothing.

Faint frost formed in my palms again.

Late that night, true despair arrived.

The cold room barely held at thirty degrees, but I woke with a violent convulsion of agony. My body spasmed out of control as if ten thousand ice spikes were being driven through my bones. Cold sweat drenched me instantly.

Shaking, I pressed a hand to my chest.

The instant my fingers touched skin, my heart dropped.

Beneath the flesh, the core that powered my ability had cracked.

A clear split.

That was the absolute sign of total depletion—of backlash turning inward. Every breath made the crack throb, warning me:

Use the ability one more time by force, and the core would shatter completely.

Then I’d become less than an ordinary man.

In a world of seventy degrees, I wouldn’t survive ten minutes.

The cold room was dead silent now. Even the tablet had stopped playing.

I lay on the ground, trembling, gasping. I waited for a hand to reach out in the dark—waited for even one casual, “What’s wrong with you?”

Nothing came.

Instead, from the far corner came the faintest sound—

a weak but unmistakable pulse of shortwave static.

I held my breath, enduring the spasms, and tilted my head.

Irene had her back to me in the deepest shadow. Clutched in her hand was a shortwave radio.

Our last survival device. She’d kept it in her bag this whole time under the excuse of “safekeeping.”

A man’s voice came through the radio.

Arrogant. Elevated. In that dead room, it sounded like a rusted blade sawing into my eardrums.

“This is Kane, manager of the shelter. Your insulated pickup vehicle will be at the street corner in half an hour.”

The man paused, and when he spoke again, his voice dripped with naked contempt.

“Bring your own things. As for that ice-trash who’s almost been drained dry—leave him. Let him die on his own.”

My blood froze solid in that instant.

The crack in my ability core felt like it had split my heart open.

In the corner, the woman who’d kissed my cheek that morning didn’t hesitate for even one second.

She lowered her voice.

And in a tone sweeter and more eager than anything I’d heard from her in months, she said:

“Got it. I’ll come out right away.”