Ye Shu paid no heed to any of it. After a while, the voices of doubt and accusation were swallowed up by a fresh wave of terror.
This time, all survivors had only eighteen hours before they ran out of oxygen.
Eighteen hours!
What did that mean? If an average person consumed a liter of oxygen per hour, they would need 18 liters—and after days trapped like this, who among them still had oxygen tanks left? Thanks to the sinkhole, nearly all of the supplies and oxygen generators had been buried forever beneath the earth.
By 8 a.m., when the sky should have been glowing with the rising sun, only thick darkness pressed down. No stars, no light.
Despair suffused the air-raid shelter.
Some survivors, overcome by hopelessness, chose to end their lives. Others clung grimly to their posts, praying they could endure to the last possible second.
"Mama... *hic*... Are we going to die?"
"Sweetheart, don't be afraid—don't cry, you'll only use up oxygen faster if you do. Mama is here, always. Take the oxygen tank, hold it tight."
A mother and her son clung together in the corner, curled up against the cold wall.
"Damn it all, I've never suffered such humiliation!"
"The oxygen's been snatched away by those bastards hiding behind the air wall! If one mushroom bomb doesn't work, we'll just deploy more! Maybe quantity will win out! Who knows—maybe that'll do the trick!"
"I can't take it! My tank’s running out—there won't be any oxygen left soon... I don't think I’ll see tomorrow."
"Are we... is humanity really... just going to go extinct like this? What a cosmic joke—dead by suffocation..."
The survivors in the shelter edged closer to the brink of hysteria.
Only at the end of life does one truly sense its value.
Within ten or so meters of Ye Shu, many people gazed listlessly at their nearly empty oxygen bags.
Some, not willing to yield, squeezed their deflated bags to confirm the oxygen was almost gone. But why, then, could they still breathe?
Could it be... the oxygen crisis was over?
One man detached his oxygen tube, bracing for suffocation. None came.
Joy filled his face.
When had it happened, exactly? When had this absurd, humanity-threatening crisis ended?
Lin Cheng laughed—he wanted to shout to everyone that the oxygen was back, that they could leave their tanks behind. But as he walked forward a few steps, the familiar asphyxiation struck him once more.
"Wha...? What's going on?"
"I just... I was literally breathing fine! Was it all in my head, some hallucination from lack of oxygen?"
The light in Lin Cheng's bright eyes dimmed in an instant. It had all been an illusion.
His trembling body stumbled backward—by accident, he crossed into the invisible range supplied by Xiao Lv's oxygen.
Suddenly, he could breathe freely again.
Lin Cheng stood rooted to the spot, his face frozen with disbelief, gulping down lungfuls of air.
He could breathe again? No asphyxiation? This was real. Not an illusion.
Nothing could compare to this whiplash from despair to ecstasy.
Lin Cheng laughed and wept at once, a mad expression passing over his face. But to the others, his actions hardly even registered—they'd seen too many people break beneath the strain of oxygen deprivation. Lin Cheng was simply one more.
No one paid him any mind.
There were too many like him—people cracking under pressure, incidents happening every day. What was there left to be surprised at?
Faced with eighteen hours of suffocation, hope was extinguished. No one noticed that, despite their empty tanks, they could still breathe freely.
"This..."
Lin Cheng was absolutely sure: he could breathe now. His oxygen bag had long since run dry—there was no way it could be supplying even a wisp of air.
That meant that somewhere near here, there was something—some special substance—that made oxygen.
How else could he have survived?
He had to find it. If he did, maybe... humanity could be saved.
The shelter was dim—the lights barely lit the way. Lin Cheng shuffled step by step inward. The deeper he went, the easier it was to breathe. The nearer he ventured toward the entrance, the more suffocating it became.
He paced the area back and forth.
At last, he found it: the oxygenated zone was a small patch, ten meters across at most. Beyond it, nothing—just the airless void.
Fu Shiyi's gaze lingered, dark and shadowed, on the sneaky figure moving about.
So—the survivor had discovered the secret.
If it got out that Ye Xiaoshu was a bottomless well of fresh air, she’d probably be locked up and used as a human oxygen tank. Even if she was tough and resourceful, Fu Shiyi was still uneasy.
"Elder sister, do you want me to get rid of him?"
Fu Shiyi’s stare bored holes into Lin Cheng’s back.
Suddenly, several meters away, Lin Cheng shuddered violently. Goosebumps erupted; he seemed to sense danger in the air and retreated a few steps, glancing warily about.
"No need," Ye Shu replied softly. "I want to make a deal with the people from Planet E."
The spores of her plant-based oxygen might have been useless anywhere else, but here in this scenario, they could shine.
Fu Jingchuan was surprised.
After so many run-ins, he fancied himself to have some handle on Ye Xiaoshu’s temperament. She wasn't one for meddling in others’ business. For her to offer charity now—now that was unusual.
Even Pang Pangzi, thick as he was, had noticed the extraordinary change in the air. All the more so for the rest.
Ye Shu, as the source, naturally noticed Lin Cheng’s odd behavior.
She also saw that he’d discovered and was sizing up the boundary of the oxygenated zone, but didn’t intend to do anything about it.
Back and forth Lin Cheng went, unable to find anything suspicious in the ten-meter radius. The shelter was a crush of bodies—nothing but people, packed tight.
Wait.
People.
If it wasn’t some thing, could it be that a person was producing oxygen?
The world's collapse into global hypoxia had happened—was it so strange if a few humans with special power to generate oxygen appeared?
Lin Cheng had served in the military.
With his scout’s instincts, it didn’t take him long to report the anomaly.
Thanks to his background, he was received by the top brass of the shelter. Lin Cheng stated his case plainly.
The commander’s skepticism was obvious: "You’re saying, in the S-sector, room 12-10, there’s a person who can generate oxygen?"
Impossible. How could a human...?
If not for Lin Cheng’s service record, they’d have thrown him out for spewing nonsense by now.
"It’s true!" Lin Cheng insisted. "I swear to it. I’m not seeing things—send a team to S-12-10, you’ll find a fifteen-meter-wide oxygen bubble."
The higher-ups wavered at his conviction.
After a while, regret crept in—what a waste of resources, chasing after this nonsense. Why had he let Lin Cheng sway him at all?
Shelter S-sector, room 12-10.
Ye Shu and the other survivors sat quietly, just like always.
The soldiers sent to investigate dismissed Lin Cheng’s claim at first—until they entered Sector 12-10 and, warily, removed their oxygen masks.
Finally, Lin Cheng was proven right. In this patch, you could breathe freely.
The soldiers stared at each other, pinched off their air feeds, and searched the crowd with flashing eyes.
Still, their movements were covert—they dared not draw attention from the desperate masses.
Others, clustered near Ye Shu, soon noticed something off.
With so little oxygen, how could they be breathing so easily? With no discomfort at all? It was as if they'd returned to the days before the crisis.
Was it an illusion?
Seeing those furtive figures on the edge of her vision, Ye Shu stepped forward. She'd been hesitating how best to sell her plant spores to the shelter’s higher-ups, and now the buyers had walked straight to her door—the pillow delivered right when she needed to nap.