Chapter 1

In my last life, the heatwave collapse began with me turning an abandoned warehouse into a safe zone. I stocked it, fortified it, and brought my girlfriend inside. That same night, she slid the bolts open from within and let an armed crew storm the place. They threw me out to die.

I survived the heat, only to learn too late that it was just the warning. The real purge came next, when brutal cold hit overnight and froze me to death in the snow.

Then I opened my eyes and found myself back one month before disaster.

While everyone else rushed to buy water and fans, I was the only one who knew the heat was just the beginning. The deep freeze was what would really wipe people out.

This time, I explained nothing. I poured everything I had into diesel, insulation, winter stoves, generators, and turned that warehouse into a fortress built for the cold.

She came again, just like before. This time, I never let her through the door. So she ran straight to the armed gang and had them surround my warehouse for three full days.

She thought trapping me inside meant she’d already won.

What she didn’t know was that in just a few more days, the freeze would arrive.

And the people outside had no fuel, no winter gear, no way to stay warm.

They weren’t waiting for me to break.

They were waiting for their own deaths.

————

I was freezing to death.

The blizzard pressed so hard I could barely lift my head. Snow buried my legs past the calves, and every step felt like wrenching them out of icy water by force. My face had gone numb long ago. My hands no longer obeyed me. Even my breath, the white vapor leaving my mouth, was shredded apart by the wind the instant it appeared.

Not far ahead was the warehouse.

My name was Ethan. I ran a small trucking company—freight routes, a few trucks, steady cash flow, good supply contacts. That abandoned logistics warehouse had originally just been a temporary storage site for my fleet.

Then the heat disaster hit. The city started losing power, losing water, and sinking deeper into looting and violence. I moved every useful supply my trucks could carry into that warehouse and turned it into a safe zone: reinforced doors, generators moved inside, supplies sorted by category, night watches on rotation. Back then, the line I said most often was this—

As long as the door holds, we still have choices.

The door was still there.

I just couldn’t get back inside it.

Outside the warehouse gate, seven or eight bodies lay scattered in the snow. The ones closest to the crack beneath the door all wore the same heavy outer jackets, their vests bulging where magazines and holsters were stuffed underneath. Their guns were frozen beside their hands, their bodies twisted as if they had been trying to push toward the entrance with their last strength. Farther ahead was another body—a woman. One side of her face was exposed above the snow, frost crusted over her lashes, and there were marks around her wrist where plastic zip ties had once bitten in.

I recognized her at a glance.

Amy.

She was my girlfriend.

The snow fell harder and harder. I had to brace myself against an ice-coated railing just to keep from dropping to my knees. The cold in my body wasn’t pain anymore. It was numbness, climbing from my toes to my knees.

But my mind was clearer than it had any right to be, as if someone had forced every old debt back in front of me.

When the disaster began, it hadn’t started with cold.

It started with heat.

The city had felt like it had been shoved inside a furnace. The power grid kept failing. Stores imposed limits. People fought in the street over cases of bottled water.

I realized earlier than most that staying in the city and waiting for order to return was the worst possible bet. So I started hauling everything I could buy and everything I could move into the warehouse.

I wasn’t a hero back then.

I was just a man doing business.

The guys from my trucking crew contacted their families and friends. More and more people came to the warehouse. We built a system, assigned work, set rules. There was friction sometimes, but everyone did their part, and we managed to hold things together.

Until Amy showed up.

Amy was my girlfriend. Not long after the world started falling apart, I contacted her and told her to leave the city and come to the warehouse. I told her there was water there, supplies there, safety there.

What I didn’t know then was that while I was always out on the road with the trucking business, she had already been cheating on me for a long time. What I knew even less was that the moment she got my message, she forwarded it to her lover. The man had once been an outsourced security contractor in the city, the kind who ran a crew of enforcers for dirty jobs. When law and order collapsed, they shifted fast—from debt collection and guarding venues to armed raiders who specialized in stealing supplies and taking over strongholds.

The day she arrived, I had actually felt relieved.

I remembered thinking: At least I saved her.

That very night, she opened the warehouse gate from the inside.

By the time I reached the entrance, headlights were already pouring in. The footsteps were steady. The gun barrels were steady too.

Those armed men stormed into the warehouse like they owned the place. First they subdued people, then they took the guns, then they cut the power. Amy stood by the door. There was no panic on her face. Only a strange calm, like something long planned had finally begun.

In that instant, I understood everything.

The others were executed for resisting. I was knocked unconscious. When I woke up, I was already outside, wearing nothing but a thin jacket and carrying an empty water bottle.

The warehouse door shut in the distance.

The lights inside stayed on, like nothing had happened at all.

I survived the heat by running for days—scavenging, trading, hiding.

Then, more than ten days later, the temperature started to drop. I thought the worst was over.

That was when the real end of the world finally showed itself.

The cold front came without warning. In a single night, rain turned to snow, and the wind glazed the streets into sheets of ice. Most people had never stockpiled fuel. Most had never prepared insulation. Some didn’t even have one set of clothes warm enough to survive a night outdoors. That was when I understood: the heat had only cracked society open first. The deep freeze that followed was the blade meant to cull people by the thousands.

Now, staring at the bodies outside the warehouse door, I almost wanted to laugh.

I finally understood why they had all died here together.

Not long after the cold hit, there must have been infighting inside the warehouse.

When the disaster first began, most of what I stockpiled had been meant for heat—cooling supplies, not true winter survival. After they stole the warehouse, food and water probably kept them going for a while. But food always runs out. And once fuel and warmth became the most precious things left, the first people to get pushed out were always the troublemakers and the expendable ones.

And now Amy was lying outside.

Along with several discarded members of that armed crew.

My knees gave out, and I finally collapsed into the snow. My palm hit the ground, and what touched my fingertips wasn’t soft snow but a layer of frozen ice crust. My vision began to blacken. The sound of the wind stretched into something like electrical static screaming into my ears.

As consciousness started to come apart, only one thought remained clear in my head:

If I ever got another chance, I would never hand control of that door over to emotion again.

And I would never gamble on human nature with trust.

The door would open only for my own people.

And who counted as my own people—

I would decide that.

The next second, my eyes snapped open.

No wind.

No snow.

Above me was a familiar ceiling. Outside the window came the normal sound of traffic. Sunlight slipped through the gap in the curtains and fell across the back of the chair beside the bed. My fingers could move. My skin was warm. I sat up, grabbed the phone from the nightstand, and lit the screen.

The date was right there, clear as day.

The disaster hadn’t happened yet.

I stared at the numbers and tightened my grip on the phone.

I was back.