Forty-nine rules of the end times

Chapter 48 The First Signs of Snow Disaster
"laugh--"

Guan Tong unzipped her sleeping bag, sat up, and stretched.

He slept very soundly through the night, but the sleeping bag kept him warm enough, and he certainly got the rest he needed.

He squinted at the snow accumulation outside. Overnight, the snow in the area outside his "little camp" had risen by about ten centimeters.

"If it's like this on Mingdao Mountain, the snow accumulation in the city will probably be fifty or sixty centimeters by the end of the night..."

Guan Tong didn't linger. She immediately got up, put on her warm clothes, and rummaged through the food in her backpack.

Besides several large bags of compressed biscuits, there were also several cans of food, several bags of instant noodles, several bags of freeze-dried food, etc.

If you eat sparingly, you can barely survive for a month on a half-starved diet. Moreover, the previous rule, "fasting therapy," has honed many people's ability to endure hunger, so going hungry for two or three days when there's really nothing to eat isn't a big deal.

He opened the bag of freeze-dried food and ate breakfast with some biscuits. Then he took out the "Wordless Book" and began writing "Sublimation Coin" on the second page.

He currently has 70 coins, but he's still 30 short of buying the Multi-Terrain Marching Boots. He can only make up the difference by using the Wordless Book and consuming mental energy to craft them.

The first time he did this, his mental power limit was low, and it took him almost half a month to create 10 bound coins. But now, his mental power limit has increased significantly, so the efficiency can be improved considerably.

A rough estimate suggests that it will take him about twenty days to produce 30 bound coins. Considering that he can increase his maximum mental power by 1 point every seven or eight days under his current extreme conditions, the overall coin production time might be shortened by one or two days.

It would take quite a while, but Guan Tong could afford to wait. This rule lasted for a whole month, so even if he could only buy the boots in ten days, he would still have ten days to use them, which would be enough for him.

After quickly finishing today's writing, Guan Tong put away his book, picked up a shovel, and went to clear the snow outside the camp. Although the huge rocks high up on the mountain blocked the snow from entering the camp, he still needed to clear a path for himself to pass through.

Otherwise, he would just stay in the small camp and let the snow pile up outside. After ten days or half a month, when the snow, which was more than half a person high, froze solid, he wouldn't be able to leave the camp.

Guan Tong didn't choose to clean a large area; he only had a folding shovel, and he couldn't clean a large area anyway. What he did was simply clear a path about forty or fifty centimeters wide, extending outwards from the camp.

He piled the shoveled snow on both sides of the road, knowing that sooner or later the snow would pile up high on both sides. As for the direction the road led, it was naturally the direction of the highway.

Even after the rules expire, the frozen snow that has lasted for thirty consecutive days will not melt immediately. If the authorities are to clear the snow, they will definitely prioritize clearing the roads. This way, Guan Tong can wait for the snow on the highways to melt and then leave the camp along the newly cleared paths.

For the next three days, Guan Tong used up her mental energy to write each day, and then used her physical strength to clear the snow from the path she had cleared.

During this time, he also looked around to see if there was anything he could use. To his disappointment, apart from a patch of wild woods, the area around Mingdao Mountain was all wasteland with nothing to offer.

The wild forest was still somewhat useful. Guan Tong cut down a lot of branches from it and brought them back. They could be used to line things, make a fire, or stick them on both sides of the "snow path" he had cleared to make a wooden fence.

Over the next three days, the snow on both sides of the path grew thicker and thicker. It was now over forty centimeters high, taller than the case of Guan Tong's desktop computer.

Furthermore, due to the low temperatures caused by continuous snowfall, a frozen layer had formed in the middle of these snow piles. Guan Tong tried to knock them with a shovel, but they only produced dull thuds and were very difficult to knock.

This made him feel fortunate that he had been consistently cleaning the path every day since day one; otherwise, if he had delayed for a few days, he wouldn't have been able to clean it at all!
"call……"

Guan Tong worked until evening again today. He took a deep breath, shouldered his shovel, and went back. He lit a campfire, sat on a wooden stool made of branches wrapped with tape, and warmed his hands by the fire to relieve the numbness from working in the cold.

"The temperature is dropping every day, so I have to be very careful not to get frostbite," Guan Tong thought, looking at the flickering firelight. "Once the temperature drops even further in a few days, I'll try to make the most of the 6 hours my [Thermostatic Technology Underwear] is active each day. Outside of those 6 hours, I'll try to stay by the campfire in the camp."

He turned his head and glanced into the distance, where he could vaguely see the city lights through the snow curtain.

"The rules have been in effect for four days now. I wonder how things are going in Yunhua city..."

Even in Mingdao Mountain, where snowfall has already decreased significantly, the snow accumulation is still deep. After four consecutive days of torrential snow in the city, the situation will only worsen. Even if the city has various professional equipment, a large number of snowplows, and de-icing agents, can these truly contend with the power of nature? Guan Tong is not very optimistic.

Of course, if he had remained optimistic from the start, he wouldn't have made the resolute decision to leave the city and come to this remote place to survive alone...

"Beep-beep-"

Suddenly, Guan Tong, who was warming himself by the fire and deep in thought, was startled. He vaguely heard an unnatural sound coming from a distance.

"What was that sound? Was it a car horn?"

Guan Tong immediately stood up and looked toward the road where the sound was coming from.

His gaze pierced through the dim snow, where he could vaguely see two thick, round beams of light shooting out in the distance, like the headlights of a vehicle.

"How did we get here?" Guan Tong clearly remembered that about ten kilometers down the highway, the road was blocked by multiple cars involved in a chain-reaction accident.

Did the driver ram into those broken-down cars? With such powerful performance and the ability to drive on such thick snow, it must be a large vehicle…

As Guan Tong watched the approaching headlights, a sense of vigilance rose within her.

……

Yunhua City is more than 300 kilometers away from Guan Tong.

The city has become a snow city.

Apart from a few main roads where snowplows are busy clearing snow 24 hours a day, all other auxiliary roads, side roads, and various sidewalks are piled with thick snow.

The snow accumulation is generally close to two meters high, exceeding the height of most people, and looks like snow walls standing in the city, giving people a cold and suffocating feeling.

A driver wearing heavy winter clothes, driving a snowplow on a main road, looked at the high snow walls on both sides and inexplicably felt a tightness in his chest and difficulty breathing.

"This snow is killing me..."

He muttered to himself, worried. It had only been four days, and there were at least six more "four-day periods" to come. If these snow walls kept piling up, wouldn't they eventually completely block out and bury the shops on the street?

No, it's probably already...

"Boom!"

A thud, as if the snow wall was about to collapse, came from behind it. The driver was slightly startled, but quickly regained his composure.

He knew that it must have been another poorly constructed shop that had collapsed under the weight of the snow.

He had heard this sound two or three times since yesterday. Not only him, but other snowplow drivers also said that they heard the sound of snow collapsing shops and other buildings while driving on the road.

Some collapse instantly, while others emit an unpleasant, teeth-grinding "crunching" sound until they exceed a certain critical point before collapsing with a crash.

"Let these little shops collapse if they want, there's no one there anyway. Just don't let the living quarters collapse," the driver muttered. "If those living quarters collapse, the people inside... ugh... what a tragedy."

(End of this chapter)