"Don't let this bastard die! The meat won't be fresh otherwise!"
"Exactly, just keep him barely alive! We don't care, but the kids are still growing..."
The clamorous voices pierced Chu Yunshu's heart like countless blades.
"Mom, Dad, Uncle Qin, Aunt Liu—don't worry. I won’t let him die that easily!"
"Someone hold the basin steady! This is the tenderest cut on his whole body!"
Cold.
A bone-chilling cold, as if he’d been plunged into an icy abyss.
Yet the sight before him dragged him deeper into hell.
A crowd swarmed around him—his beloved wife Xu Ran, his once-respected in-laws, even distant relatives and neighbors whose names he barely knew.
All of them stared at him with ravenous hunger, like starving ghosts escaped from the underworld.
The apocalypse had come, and instead of standing by him, his own family had turned him into livestock—fattened for slaughter.
"Oh? He’s awake?"
Xu Ran glanced at Chu Yunshu, her lips curling into a cruel smirk.
"Good. Saves me the adrenaline. That stuff’s liquid gold in the apocalypse."
As the words hung in the air, Xu Ran suddenly flashed Chu Yunshu a grin—though what dark thought had crossed her mind remained a mystery. Leaning in close, her lips nearly brushing his ear, she whispered with deliberate slowness, "Darling husband... before you die, I’ll let you in on a little secret."
"See Xiaobao over there?" She gestured toward a child gnawing greedily on a chunk of cooked meat nearby. "What he’s eating right now? That’s flesh from your belly—what folks call 'five-flower pork.'"
Her voice dripped with mock sweetness as she continued, "Oh, and one more thing... Xiaobao isn’t yours. He’s Qin Yibo’s son. Bet you didn’t see that coming, did you?"
A cruel chuckle escaped her lips. "Feeling furious? Good. Stay angry. Stay alive. Because if you die..." She trailed off, then burst into laughter. "Well, rotten meat just doesn’t taste as nice, now does it? Hahaha!"
Each word struck Chu Yunshu like a live wire, searing through every nerve. Rage roared through his veins, white-hot and consuming. He wanted to scream, to curse, to unleash the storm inside him—but no sound came.
His throat had been irreparably poisoned days earlier by Xu Ran’s drugs. Now, utterly voiceless, he could only watch as these monsters devoured his flesh bite by bite, could only endure the scalpel’s relentless carving against his skin.
Helpless. Hopeless.
The world around him darkened at the edges, shadows creeping inward. A bone-deep coldness spread through his limbs, swallowing sensation, swallowing thought—until at last, there was nothing.
Only emptiness.
Only...
Darkness.
"Damn bitch!"
"I'll kill you all!"
In an office in Kyoto during the afternoon, Chu Yunshu was acting like a madman, wildly swinging a mechanical keyboard in his hands while roaring at the top of his lungs.
By the time he snapped out of it, every colleague in the office was staring at him as if he’d lost his mind.
"Uh..."
His voice cut off abruptly. Chu Yunshu blinked in confusion at the people around him.
Hadn’t he just been devoured by his wife?
Wasn’t he supposed to be trapped in a frozen apocalypse?
So why was he back in the office?
Unless…
A thought surged through his mind.
He shook his head hard, then slowly opened his eyes—still in the office.
A glance at his phone confirmed the date: March 31st.
"I've been reborn! I've been reborn! Hahaha!"
The maniacal laughter quickly drew the attention of their supervisor, Chen Fangqing, who stormed over with fury etched across her face, unleashing a torrent of curses at Chu Yunsu.
Yet Chu Yunsu barely registered her words. His gaze was fixated on the heaving curves of her chest, rising and falling violently with her anger, as if mesmerized.
He had truly been reborn.
And not just reborn—he had returned three months before the apocalypse began!
If his memory served him right, by June 30th, the entire world would be engulfed in an extreme deep freeze, transforming into an ice-locked wasteland.
At first, a sudden blizzard in the scorching summer had been dismissed as nothing more than an oddity, a fleeting topic for casual conversation.
But three days later, when the storm swept across the nation, burying cities under snowdrifts as tall as buildings, people finally grasped the severity of the situation.
What followed wasn’t the return of warmth and melting ice—instead, temperatures plummeted like a cliff dive.
Negative 70 degrees Celsius.
A temperature beyond human imagination.
Yet the freezing was only the beginning.
Monstrous creatures howled within the blizzards. Snowflakes laced with corrosive toxins melted flesh upon contact. Hailstones the size of fists pelted down like deadly projectiles.
In the chaos of this sudden catastrophe, the scarcity of food, water, and supplies laid bare the darkest facets of human nature.
At first, people scavenged and hoarded supplies, brawling over a single pack of instant noodles until blood was spilled.
Then, eventually… cannibalism became reality.
Even Chu Yunshu never imagined that one day, he would be treated like livestock ready for slaughter.
The sensation of a scalpel slicing through his skin, the horrifying sight of watching himself being devoured piece by piece, his wife's cold-blooded confession...
All of it had tormented him beyond endurance.
...
"Hah—!"
Exhaling the suffocating weight in his chest, Chu Yunshu's eyes burned with unwavering resolve as he muttered to himself, "Since fate has given me a second chance, I won't let that tragedy repeat itself!"
"For the next three months, I'll stockpile supplies like crazy and build an impregnable fortress for the apocalypse!"
Just as his thoughts raced, a sharp shout yanked him back to reality.
"Chu Yunshu! This is the office, not your damn living room!"
"Do you even want to keep this job?"
"If you don’t give me a proper explanation right now, don’t bother coming back tomorrow!"
Glancing around, Chu Yunshu finally realized he had been dragged into the director’s office by Chen Fangqing at some point.
Admittedly, Chen Fangqing was something else—barely twenty-six and already a director at this company.
Of course, her "special relationship" with Chairman Wang Jianping was an open secret. After all, she had the assets to back it up.
Staring at her voluptuous figure, Chu Yunshu couldn’t help but recall how she had made his previous life a living hell.
And what stunned him even more was that Chen Fangqing turned out to be the cousin of Qin Yibo—the very man who had turned him into a laughingstock with that humiliating affair.
"Chu Yunshu! Are you deaf?!"
"Take that disgusting look off your face—I’m your director!"
Noticing his lingering gaze, Chen Fangqing’s temper flared as she snapped at him with icy fury.