Chapter 281: A Way Out

“But even if we raise it to fifty thousand, the enforcement system definitely won’t agree, right?” One of the chairmen was still relatively clear-headed. “Aurora City has market regulation. If our listed price is too outrageous, they will definitely send people over……”

“For those low-level enforcers, whoever comes, send them fifty kilograms of coal each. Whether they use it themselves or resell it at a higher price is up to them. For every rank an Enforcer has, send an extra hundred kilograms. They don’t need to do anything, just delay things for a while.”

Yan Shang took the train ticket out of his pocket and spoke unhurriedly. “Our train departs in three hours… In this situation, three hours is enough for us to clear out all our inventory.”

“But, but what if they don’t accept it?”

“Don’t accept it?”

Yan Shang smiled slightly.

BOOM—!!

The next moment, the lounge door suddenly exploded, startling the two chairmen!

Amidst the flying dust, a black-haired woman stood quietly outside the door. Behind her was a tall man who looked like he was made of stone. Through the door frame, one could barely see his chest; his overall height must have exceeded three meters.

With their appearance, terrifying pressure was released one after another from the squinting man, the black-haired woman, and the stone man, scaring the two chairmen until their faces turned deathly pale!

“My Star Chamber of Commerce has already suffered a heavy blow… I thought I would have to tuck my tail and leave in disgrace, but now Heaven has finally given me a chance to turn things around……” Yan Shang picked up his teacup and said lightly,

“Whoever blocks my business dies.”

……

Wisteria Coffee Shop.

Aurora-kun coughed for a long time before finally calming down a bit. He picked up a frozen rag from the table and wiped the bloodstains off his hands, his expression extremely weary.

“Are you okay?” Chen Ling couldn’t help but ask.

Aurora-kun didn’t answer. He just silently threw the rag into the trash can and refocused his attention on the coffee he was brewing, as if that were the only thing he cared about right now.

Occasionally, noisy sounds of fighting came from outside the window, like someone crying or wailing. Chen Ling turned to look, but through the frost-covered glass, he couldn’t see what was happening outside, only knowing that they seemed to be fighting over something.

Inside the coffee shop, it remained quiet, with only the sound of Aurora-kun brewing coffee and the wailing of the cold wind flowing through the door cracks.

“Do you like more milk or less?”

“……Less, I suppose.”

Before long, Aurora-kun brought over two cups of coffee and sat down by the window.

Chen Ling sat opposite him and took the latte Aurora-kun pushed toward him. The rich aroma of coffee entered his nostrils. At this moment, he felt as if he had dreamed back to before the Great Catastrophe, sitting in a coffee shop between high-rise buildings, watching the pedestrians and vehicles passing by, a moment of peace and tranquility rising in his heart.

Aurora-kun took a sip of the coffee in his cup, and that pale face finally regained a hint of vitality. The corners of his mouth turned up slightly, and like Chen Ling, he seemed to be reminiscing about something.

“Although it feels like not much time has passed… drinking this coffee really does give a long-lost feeling of transcending time and space.”

“Three hundred years of slumber, is that not long?”

“To people outside, it is indeed long. To me, it was just a nap.” Aurora-kun picked up the coffee, about to take a second sip, but found that the coffee in the cup had already frozen into a block of ice, sticking firmly to the cup.

Bitterness appeared in Aurora-kun’s eyes. He put the coffee cup down with helpless reluctance, looked at the frost-covered glass, and said softly,

“Who knew that after waking up, the world would have become like this… and I, too, am about to die of old age.”

Chen Ling looked at Aurora-kun’s dazed face, still frozen at the age of less than thirty. As a doctor, he was definitely young and handsome, but it was such a person who had silently missed the second half of his life in his sleep.

Waking up, the world had turned upside down, and his own life had reached its end.

“Are… are you married?”

“No.” Aurora-kun paused for a moment. “But I had a fiancée, a colleague at our unit. We were already preparing for the wedding, but then……”

Aurora-kun didn’t continue, and Chen Ling had already roughly guessed what had happened, so he didn’t press further.

“So, even if you have ascended to the Ninth Rank, you can’t extend your own life?”

“Extend my life?” Aurora-kun shook his head. “A human is a human. Human lifespan is limited. Even hibernation didn’t extend our lifespan; it just slowed down the speed of my aging… But I will still have the day I die of old age.”

“But the people at the Aurora Base spent over three hundred years trying to extend your life.”

“……Perhaps.” Aurora-kun’s expression was complex. “In fact, the mission of the Aurora Base went far beyond that… Extending my life was just one of the attempts they made for the continuation of humanity. Besides that, they had many other attempts,

such as the artificial Aurora Domain; or… creating another Aurora-kun. They would extract my genes to perform artificial insemination, trying to clone an Aurora-kun in this form… or injecting some of my cellular tissue into organs found elsewhere, trying to replicate a portion of my power, etc… In short, they tried every method they could think of.”

“Did they have your consent to do all this?”

Aurora-kun looked at Chen Ling deeply. “These plans were proposed by me together with them before I went to sleep……”

“……But they still failed.”

“That’s right.” Aurora-kun sighed. “Perhaps you can’t say they failed completely; they had some gains in the process, but it didn’t help the big picture… They couldn’t analyze why I possessed this power, nor could they perfectly replicate another Aurora-kun capable of opening a domain to protect the entire Aurora Realm… Likewise, they couldn’t extend my life.

But you can’t blame them. Before I went to sleep, people had already tried these things… Even with the level of technology before the Great Catastrophe, it was impossible to achieve all this. The Hibernation Project was a helpless choice we made when we were at our wit’s end.

We could only pray that time would bring us a miracle, but as time passed, the level of scientific research continued to regress, and the difficulty of the experiments only increased. In the end… we still gained nothing.”

Aurora-kun slowly put down the coffee. The frozen coffee cup landed on the table with a dull thud, and the air suddenly fell into silence.

He looked at the hazy glass window and suddenly gave a bitter smile.

“So, where… exactly is the way out for humanity?”