Gunshots echoed in the corridor. "Open the door!" Chen Zhenghao barked. "I'm Chen Zhenghao—swap houses with me. Open up or I'll shoot!"
The young couple inside trembled. "What do we do? They'll take our place and our last food!" the wife whispered. The husband—an office clerk in thin glasses—mumbled, "Give them the house. Hide what we can." They shoved the few remaining rations into their coats and opened the door, hands raised in surrender.
They hadn't taken two steps before one of Chen's men laughed and struck the husband with a steel pipe. The man crumpled, eyes wide with disbelief. The wife screamed as another blow landed. Zhou Ke'er clamped a hand over her mouth to keep from shrieking—this was her first time seeing a killing so close. Chen Zhenghao sneered at the scene. "It's freezing. They'd have died anyway. Get used to it, Dr. Zhou." His cruelty was armor against his own fear, and he kept Zhou Ke'er close because he needed a doctor more than he trusted her.
Over the next days, Zhang Yi watched the next door unit become a base of operations. Chen Zhenghao's men took shifts, probing for weaknesses in every seam and frame of Zhang Yi's apartment. They expected him to step out for water or garbage. He never did. Zhang Yi had no need to forage—his spatial storage and prep kept him inside, his time filled with games and downloaded shows.
The owner group filled with pleas and curses. "You're inhuman! Why hoard when we could live longer?" they wrote. Zhang Yi answered in the most brutal way he knew: he invited them to watch.
He started a live stream. "Hi everyone—I'm making braised pork today," he announced, lifting a one-kilogram slab of pork like a trophy. On camera the kitchen looked decadent: steam rising, a table crowded with dishes—prawns, sea cucumber, whole fish. Warm light made even scraps look like gold.
Comments exploded: "Don't waste it—give it to me!" "Please, I haven't had oil in a week." Zhang Yi took a bite, paused, then spat theatrically. "Too much soy sauce—ruined." Then he dumped the pot into the trash.
The chat went feral. "My mouth is a trash can—let me eat that!" someone typed. Mothers begged for a fish tail; young men offered their strength as barter. Privacy and dignity bled away in public messages. Many women, desperate, offered themselves in exchange for a bowl of soup.
Zhang Yi watched them plead, ate, sipped, and smiled. The stream became a cruelty broadcast: food as lure, humiliation as performance. Outside, some lingered in the snow and watched the lighted window as if it were a dying hearth. Inside, the food was warm, the fire bright, and the man on the other side of the glass felt, for the first time in a long while, that the world had bent to his joke.