The off-road vehicle made a sound of malfunction. The door was pushed open, and a man covered head to toe in mud jumped down from the vehicle, shaking the bits of dirt from his hair.
Feng Quan raised his collar and exhaled a breath of white mist.
“Something’s wrong. I actually feel cold.”
“Isn’t that obvious? Why else would we have come here!”
A child who looked only in his teens hunched his neck, clutching a game console in both hands, shivering in this world of ice and snow.
“Relax, with Papa Xiong here... achoo!!”
Beside them, a strange woman with three faces was lowering her head, looking at the satellite phone in her hand.
“Very strange. Within the signal coverage area, there’s actually no sign of any living person. This is the city center, and this temperature still isn’t enough to freeze people to death.”
At the very front of the team was a steady figure, dressed in a trench coat, stepping across the accumulated snow as he led the group slowly forward.
There was almost no emotion in his voice.
“Feng Quan, keep an eye on Xiong Wenwen.”
“Tong Qian, stay alert to our surroundings. Huang Ziya, watch the rear. Xiong Wenwen, stop playing.”
Faintly, one could still see strands of dark, eerie tattoos bulging slightly at the back of the man’s neck, as if something were trying to break out from beneath his skin.
The five-person squad walked along the city road. The entire city had only one color left.
Dead white. An abnormal white.
An eerie white, without the slightest impurity, swallowing everything.
Even the outlines of the buildings had been eroded by ice. Streets, shops, billboards—everything was shrouded in a deathly pale silence, without a trace of any other color.
Cold. Pure low temperature. It was not merely cold in terms of temperature, but more like a bone-deep deathly stillness, mixed with wisps of cold, corpse-like stench, permeating this city covered in white snow.
But what was even stranger was that behind everyone, the white snowflakes formed a vivid boundary line.
Outside the boundary was the normal world. The winter sun hung high in the sky, pouring its light lavishly onto the streets.
Inside the boundary, however, all things were sealed in ice. A cold, corpse-like stench spread through the air, and a suffocating atmosphere filled the freezing wind.
Two forms of weather with such abnormal contrast coexisted under the same sky, so abrupt it was as if the world had been forcibly torn apart and then crudely stitched back together.
Looking down from high above, there were only five tiny human figures slowly moving toward a certain place, dragging a long trail behind them, especially conspicuous in this惨 white world.
“An S-rank... and yet they’re asking us to provide support...”
Zhang Han looked at the boundless expanse of snow, intense unease showing in his eyes.
“Headquarters can barely look after itself now. As far as I know, three cities have already fallen... The captains are dealing with incidents of even higher level.”
“Zhang Han! What are you thinking about? Hurry up.”
Feng Quan and the others stopped, all turning to look at Zhang Han.
“Coming.”
Putting away his thoughts, Zhang Han strode after them.
Time rewound to half an hour earlier.
“I refuse.”
Zhang Han glanced at the report in his hand and tossed it back to the person across from him.
“This is no different from sending me to my death.”
Sitting across from him was a man wearing glasses, his face full of exhaustion. Looking at Zhang Han, his tone was filled with anxiety.
“You know the current situation very well. Regional supernatural incidents are becoming more and more frequent, one after another. If it weren’t extremely urgent, I wouldn’t have come to you. Besides, it’s only to find someone. There’s no need to imprison that ghost.”
“Aren’t there still several captains?”
“Operations at the captain level aren’t something I’m qualified to know about.”
The bespectacled man gave a bitter smile.
“But I can tell you that one person in charge often has to handle three, or even more, supernatural incidents. Headquarters is almost out of people it can use...”
“I need to speak with my captain.”
Before Yang Jian left Dachang City, he had told Zhang Han that the mission abroad this time was no small matter. For ordinary issues, Zhang Han was to handle them on his own, but if he truly encountered a problem he could not resolve, he could contact him.
And the situation Zhang Han was facing now was precisely one he could not decide on.
“Impossible. He’s on the moon.”
The man in glasses pointed at the ceiling above his head.
“The moon?!” When Xiong Wenwen heard this, he shot straight up from the sofa, his eyes wide and round.
“He went to the moon without taking Papa Xiong with him?! What if he dies?”
Zhang Han immediately snapped back, “Shut up! The captain can’t possibly die.”
“Exactly. With Brother Leg’s abilities, even if there are aliens up there, Brother Leg can come and go as he pleases.”
Feng Quan chimed in from the side. Ever since Yang Jian had altered his memories, his personality seemed to have changed quite a bit as well, no longer as rigid and gloomy as before.
“I think we can make a trip. At the very least, we can contribute some strength and save some innocent ordinary people.”
Tong Qian stood up and was about to take the document.
Zhang Han’s gaze abruptly turned cold.
He wanted to kill Tong Qian. This thought surfaced in his mind almost instinctively. Ever since the incident at the tattoo parlor, his personality had long since undergone changes that were difficult to detect.
As the malevolent ghost continued to erode him, many of his human emotions were gradually growing numb. Seeing Tong Qian act like this at this moment, killing intent surged in his heart.
A hideous tattoo wriggled faintly beneath his skin, as if something might tear through the skin and rush out at any moment.
But in that instant, Yang Jian’s figure flashed through his mind. “I shouldn’t be this impulsive. If it were the captain, what would he do...”
Zhang Han closed his eyes and took a deep breath. After several seconds of silence, he slowly opened them.
“I’ll agree, but I have three conditions.”
He snatched the materials from Tong Qian’s hand, raised his stiff palm, and held up three fingers.
The man in glasses was stunned for a moment, then laughed.
“Should I say... as expected of a soldier trained by Yang Jian?”
“Fine. I agree. Three conditions.”
Now.
“Cao Yang’s footprints.”
Zhang Han held a stack of paper reports in his hand and crouched in the snow, looking at that clear series of exposed barefoot prints.
In this world swallowed by white snow, a string of sinister footprints wound outward, their end nowhere in sight.
What was strange was that these footprints seemed to have been stamped onto the surface of the snow. No matter how the heavy snow fell from the sky, it could never cover them.
“Cao Yang... and Liu San. Everyone, keep up. We’ll rendezvous with them as soon as possible.”
Zhang Han put away the report, stood up, and walked in the direction of the footprints.
The group arrived in front of an old apartment building. The footprints abruptly disappeared at this place.
Feng Quan looked at the snow. The footprints had vanished here.
“It should be here.”
Suddenly.
“Crack!”
In the silent world of ice and snow, the sound of shattering glass exploded.
“There’s someone there!”
Tong Qian caught the movement at once, pointing toward a certain window on the fourth floor.
Following Tong Qian’s finger, they looked up.
A blurry, deathly stiff figure was hiding crookedly behind the window, revealing half of a sinister, pallid face, as if it were watching them.