Eight Years Into the Catastrophe, I Build an Impregnable Fortress

“Crack!”

The sound of ice splitting exploded through the silent underground shelter as Lin Che struggled to claw his way out of endless darkness. Touch was the first sense to return. The bitter cold of minus sixty degrees seeped through the walls of the alloy coffin, making every muscle in his body spasm. Even his blood seemed ready to freeze into shards of ice. But more piercing than the cold were the images that wouldn’t leave his mind.

Eight years ago, in the third year of the cataclysm, a pack of mutant beasts known as Icebone Hounds ambushed their temporary shelter just after a blizzard had passed. He watched his father stuff the last compressed biscuit into his hand, then charge the beasts with a rusty steel pipe. The Icebone Hounds’ claws tore open his chest. His mother hid in a wardrobe with his little sister, but the pack was drawn to them by their howls. He heard his sister’s heart-rending cries. When he turned around, he saw only his mother lying in a pool of blood, one hand still reaching toward him as if trying to grasp the last thread of hope.

That was the day his overwhelming hatred unleashed the potential within him, awakening his source energy, a powerful ability that let him control the flow of energy in all things. With nothing but the force of his will, he shattered the bones of more than a dozen Icebone Hounds. But his body couldn’t withstand such a violent power. By the time a research team from Ark City found him, he was already half unconscious. To preserve this “last seed of humanity’s fighting strength,” they sealed him in a specially made alloy ice coffin and buried him in this underground shelter, far from the fighting, agreeing to awaken him five years later.