Chapter 4: The Price of Preparation

The fluorescent lights of the underground parking garage flickered once, twice, then died.

Lin Mei stood in perfect darkness, her hand still pressed against the cold metal of the storage unit door. She counted her heartbeats. One. Two. Three. The emergency generator would kick in within thirty seconds. She'd read the building specs in her past life, memorized every contingency plan of Jiangling Tower after she'd been forced to perform surgery by candlelight during the third qi storm.

Fourteen seconds. The lights buzzed, hummed, and snapped back to life.

She didn't move.

The door in front of her was unremarkable. Gray steel, number 47 stenciled in fading white paint, a standard combination lock that had probably cost her past self three hundred yuan. She knew what sat behind it. Twenty kilos of dried ginseng roots she'd purchased through a black market contact in Yunnan. Fifteen liters of medical-grade ethanol. A stockpile of sterile bandages and surgical instruments that would make any field hospital weep with envy.

And four bricks of pure silver.

Not for currency. Silver was useless in the apocalypse. Dehydrated food was currency. Antibiotics were gold. Clean water was worth more than a person's life.

The silver was for the formation arrays.

Lin Mei's fingers found the combination lock, spun it left, right, left. The mechanism clicked. The door swung open with a groan that seemed too loud in the empty garage.

She pulled out a single headlamp from her messenger bag, strapped it on, and stepped inside.

The storage unit was exactly as she remembered it. Stacked cardboard boxes labeled "Books — Do Not Discard." A false front. Behind the boxes, the real inventory waited in vacuum-sealed bags and military-grade medical coolers.

She'd been smart in her past life. Too smart. She'd prepared for the apocalypse with the precision of the surgeon she was. But she'd made one critical error.

She'd trusted people.

Lin Mei pulled open a cooler, checked the temperature gauge. Still cold. The vaccines inside would remain viable for another six hours. She closed it, moved to the next.

Her hand stopped.

A piece of paper sat on top of the third cooler, held in place by a roll of surgical tape. No one should have been in this unit. She'd paid cash for the rental, used a false ID, paid six months in advance.

The paper was folded once. She picked it up, turned it over.

In elegant calligraphy, four characters:

*I remember you.*

The hair on her arms stood up. She turned the paper over again. Nothing else. No name, no context, no indication of who had left it or how they'd known.

She read the characters again. *Wo ji de ni.*

I remember you.

Impossible.

She'd been reborn. No one else had come back. In her twenty years in the wasteland, she'd never met another person who remembered the old world, who spoke of the time before with the specific ache of someone who had lost everything twice.

This wasn't a message from the past. This was a message from the future.

Lin Mei shoved the paper into her pocket, her mind racing through possibilities. Fellow time traveler. Someone who had died and returned like she had. A survivor from the final days of the old world who had somehow carried their memories through the qi storms.

Or a trap.

She'd learned one lesson in the wasteland that had saved her life more times than any surgical skill: trust nothing. Trust no one. The apocalypse didn't create monsters. It revealed them.

She finished loading her messenger bag with essentials — scalpels, sutures, a small vial of the concentrated ginseng extract she'd prepared in her past life and hidden in a false compartment of her apartment wall. She'd need to replicate the formula. Fast.

The qi storms would hit in eighteen hours.

She had eighteen hours to secure a base, stockpile water, and prepare the simplest formation arrays that would keep the initial wave of qin beasts away from her location. The first wave was always the weakest. The first wave was also the most deadly because no one believed it was coming.

She locked the storage unit, reset the combination, and walked back toward the elevator.

Her phone buzzed. A message from her younger brother, Lin Tao.

*Sis, why did you send me that weird address? And why did you transfer me 500,000 yuan? Did you win the lottery?*

She typed back: *Do exactly what I said. Go to that address. Pick up the package. Don't open it. Don't tell anyone. I'll explain tonight.*

Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.

*You're scaring me.*

*Good. Be scared. Stay alive.*

She pocketed the phone and stepped into the elevator. The doors closed, and she caught her reflection in the polished steel — a woman of thirty-two with steady hands and dead eyes. She barely recognized herself. In her past life, she'd been fifty-two when she died. The face that looked back at her belonged to a stranger.

The elevator hummed upward.

She needed to find three people before the storms hit. The old apothecary who knew the mountain herbs better than anyone alive. The disgraced martial arts master who would teach her the breathing techniques that could filter qi from the air. And the child prodigy who would grow up to be the wasteland's greatest formation master — a boy who was currently eleven years old and living in an orphanage on the east side of the city.

She'd found them all in her past life, one by one, over the course of a decade. She'd watched them die, one by one, at the hands of the warlord she'd saved.

This time, she would find them before the apocalypse. This time, they would be ready.

The elevator doors opened.

Her phone buzzed again. She glanced at the screen.

Unknown number.

*You have changed the timeline. The storms will come six hours early. Prepare accordingly.*

She stared at the message, her blood cold.

Six hours. That gave her twelve hours, not eighteen.

And someone was watching her.

She stepped out of the elevator, walked across the lobby, and pushed through the glass doors into the grimy afternoon light of the city. Cars honked. Street vendors shouted. People laughed and argued and lived their last normal day without knowing it.

Lin Mei hailed a taxi.

"East district," she said. "The Phoenix Rise Orphanage. Fast as you can."

The driver looked at her in the rearview mirror. "That's a rough neighborhood, miss. You sure?"

"I'm sure."

He shrugged and pulled into traffic. Lin Mei leaned back in the cracked vinyl seat and closed her eyes. She calculated. The orphanage was forty minutes away, assuming no traffic. She'd retrieve the boy, take him to the apothecary, then find the martial arts master. Three people. Twelve hours. A city about to collapse into chaos.

Her hand brushed against the paper in her pocket.

*I remember you.*

Whoever had left that message knew her. Knew her patterns, her hiding places, her past. In the wasteland, that would have made them either a valuable ally or a death sentence.

But this wasn't the wasteland. This was Day Zero. And she had no intention of dying again.

The taxi turned a corner, and Lin Mei caught a glimpse of movement in the side mirror. A black sedan, three cars back, matching every turn they made.

She didn't react. She didn't look again. She simply reached into her bag, fingers finding the handle of a scalpel, and waited.

The boy would wait. The apothecary would wait.

First, she needed to survive the next twelve minutes.

The taxi pulled up to a red light. The black sedan stopped two cars behind.

Lin Mei smiled without warmth.

Let them follow.

She had a message to deliver — and she was very, very good at delivering messages that left no witnesses.