Chapter 269: Cold

Aurora City.Courtyard.

Chu Muyun glanced at the time on his pocket watch, then gently closed the metal cover with a crisp 'ding'.

"It's been almost six hours... still no movement," Chu Muyun murmured to himself. "It seems the operation isn't going as smoothly as expected."

"An operation? What operation?"

A lazy voice drifted down from the rooftop. Chu Muyun raised an eyebrow and looked up.

He sighed helplessly. "Do you always have to make your entrance from the rooftop?"

"The view is better from the rooftop. If enemies approach, I'll know immediately," Bai Ye shrugged, his pair of silver serpent-shaped earrings gently swaying. "This is a basic tenet of our God of Thieves path, something you wouldn't understand."

"Are you done with the Incendiary affairs?"

"Done," Bai Ye replied, lying sprawled on the rooftop, sounding a bit tired. "Running back and forth between two domains... perhaps this is the price of having a dual identity."

"Then why don't you just leave the Incendiary?"

"I was planning to, but Red King said my presence within the Incendiary allows me to gather crucial intelligence, and that this identity is very valuable... He won't let me leave." Bai Ye seemed to recall something, muttering, "It's time Red King gave me a raise. Being a spy is too exhausting."

Chu Muyun: ...

"By the way, what was this mission you mentioned earlier?"

"While you were gone, a new person joined, and they've gone to the Aurora Base with Heart 6."

"The Aurora Base?" Bai Ye asked, surprised. "Even I can't get into that place. Are those two newcomers going to be okay?"

"How should I put this... those two are practically born to infiltrate the Aurora Base. They're the only ones in the entire Twilight Society who could possibly get in."

"I can understand Heart 6; he's very skilled at infiltration and stealth... But that newcomer, are they also from the God of Play path?"

"...No, you'll see when you meet them."

Seeing this, Bai Ye didn't bother to ask further. Instead, he lay quietly on the rooftop, lazily yawning, seemingly preparing for a short nap.

His eyes, just about to close, suddenly snapped open as if he'd sensed something!

He stared at the ceaselessly flowing aurora above him, his brows furrowing deeper and deeper...

"Was I mistaken?"

"What?"

"Just now, the aurora seemed to waver..."

Chu Muyun froze, then immediately looked up. The aurora still flowed quietly across the sky, like a vibrant fabric dancing in the wind, shrouding the entire Aurora City.

"It looks much fainter than before?" Chu Muyun also noticed something amiss. For the past few days, he had been monitoring the changes in the aurora because, to some extent, it reflected the Aurora Monarch's condition... But Chu Muyun had only stopped observing for a little over an hour, and its color and density were clearly much thinner than before.

"Those two newcomers... they haven't done anything extraordinary inside the Aurora Base, have they?"

Bai Ye looked at Chu Muyun suspiciously.

Chu Muyun's mind conjured images of Chen Ling and Jian Changsheng, and his mouth twitched slightly. "Hard to say."

"When I returned to the Aurora Domain, I specifically took a detour outside. The Forbidden Sea's water has almost reached outside the city walls. Except for the domain train tracks, almost everywhere else is frozen solid by the cold. Aurora City truly doesn't have much time left."

"This year, Aurora City is indeed unusually cold," Chu Muyun said, gently rubbing his hands. "Summer just ended, but the temperature already feels like winter..."

"You're so rich, why don't you turn on the heating?"

"I did."

Bai Ye glanced at him, then casually tossed a pebble to the ground. The pebble landed on the frost-covered earth and instantly slid several meters away.

"You call this 'on'?"

Chu Muyun froze. He stared at the frost that had covered the ground at some unknown point, muttering to himself:

"That's impossible... Aurora City has a centralized heating system; generally, the heating wouldn't just cut out like this..."

As if remembering something, Chu Muyun suddenly stood up and walked towards the door.

As soon as he opened the main door, he saw many residents bundled in thick clothes, huddling their necks and complaining outside:

"What's going on? Where's the heating?"

"Exactly... in this freezing weather, no heating is life-threatening, isn't it?"

"That's not right, I saw the boiler plant's smoke burning strong. How come we have no warmth at all?"

"Are the pipes broken?"

"I just came back from the west side of the city; they don't have heating there either. Even if one or two pipes were broken, it shouldn't affect the entire Aurora City, should it?"

"Oh dear... they need to restore the heating quickly. No heating in this weather is really deadly."

"I'm going to buy some coal to burn myself; my child is freezing indoors..."

"Hey, wait for me, I'll go buy some too..."

Chu Muyun's face darkened at this scene.

He retreated back inside, closing the main door behind him, an unprecedented gravity settling on his brows.

"What's wrong?" Bai Ye asked, puzzled.

"This is bad..."

Chu Muyun looked up at the sky. "Why now, of all times??"

"Chen Xin, have you found anything unusual?"

"Nothing on my end yet."

"Don't drop your guard. Be careful, someone might be hiding in the blind spots."

"Understood."

Dressed in an enforcer's trench coat, Chen Ling meticulously searched the third floor. He went through room after room, and after his peripheral vision caught sight of the room across the hall, he casually pushed its door open.

Inside the room was a row of neatly arranged beds, but most of them were empty. Only one figure squatted blankly at the head of a bed, hands pressed against the top of their head, like a strange mushroom.

When Chen Ling entered, Jian Changsheng's eyes lit up, and he asked in a low voice:

"How did it go? Did you succeed?"

"We did."

Jian Changsheng finally relaxed upon hearing those two words. "So, how do we get out?"

"The security is too tight right now; we can't find a suitable opportunity," Chen Ling replied, shaking his head.

"But if we keep dragging this out, we'll be exposed sooner or later," Jian Changsheng said, pointing to the restraints by the bed. "My straps are already broken. If a white coat tries to take me for an experiment again, I won't be able to explain myself..."

"Aren't you a mushroom? Do mushrooms need to explain themselves?"

As the two spoke, several white coats slowly emerged from Laboratory 1, pushing a hospital bed.

"What are you doing?" an enforcer, currently conducting a search, asked warily.

"We're going to dispose of the failed experiment subject from earlier," a white coat replied. "The amount of agent in his body is too high, and if he decomposes, it will cause pathogen diffusion. He needs to be incinerated on the surface as quickly as possible."

The enforcer's expression subtly changed. He lifted the white sheet on the hospital bed, took a quick glance, and nearly vomited on the spot. He immediately waved his hand at them:

"Go on, go on..."

As the figures of the white coats gradually receded, Chen Ling's eyes, from behind the door, gleamed faintly.

He turned to Jian Changsheng. "I have an idea..."