When the water reached their chests, they finally crawled into the subway ventilation shaft. Xiao Yi used a lighter to ignite the propaganda poster, and the flames revealed dense graffiti. These seemingly chaotic lines reorganized into a three-dimensional structure in his eyes—a retired engineer had spent ten years marking escape routes throughout the city's underground space.

"Follow the red arrows." Xiao Yi supported the pregnant woman through the maze-like tunnel when he suddenly kicked a cement slab half-buried in the mud. "1968 War Preparation Project" was engraved in traditional Chinese characters on the slab. A dark green liquid oozed from the cracks, emitting the fluorescent glow of some radioactive substance.

The pregnant woman suddenly stumbled to her knees, her amniotic fluid mixed with blood spreading around the edges of her boots. Xiao Yi felt the unusual hardness of her abdomen and instantly realized it was placental abruption. He pulled out the communication cable from the tunnel and tied it tightly around her abdomen. This action would cause the monitoring system to misidentify a malfunction in the subsequent chapters.

A cacophony of voices rose from the front, the glow of emergency lights piercing the darkness. Thirty meters away, the subway platform had become a raging river. Retired engineer Lao Zhou was directing survivors to build a floating bridge using escalator parts. When the old man turned, Xiao Yi noticed he was wearing a military-grade monocular night vision goggle on his left eye—something a civilian wouldn't likely wear.

"Catch it!" The lifeline thrown by Lao Zhou was wrapped in some kind of silicone exoskeleton. Xiao Yi froze the moment he grabbed the knot. The rope core was woven with carbon nanotubes, the latest scientific research from the National Laboratory.

At this moment, the floodwaters burst through the last sluice gate, and the platform columns crackled with the sound of steel and concrete peeling off. Old Zhou suddenly laughed: "Kid, do you know why the drainage system collapsed?" He pulled open his shirt to reveal the surgical scar on his chest. "Twenty years ago, when I performed a 'bypass surgery' on the sewer pipes, they said I was destroying the city's aesthetics..."

Before Xiao Yi could ask further questions, the pregnant woman in his arms suddenly screamed as if she was about to die. Blood mixed with vernix caseosa slid down her inner thigh, and a fleeting lotus flower bloomed in the flood.

As Xiao Yi jammed the fire axe into the crack of the elevator door, the metal rails groaned in a way that made his teeth ache. The indicator light on the 28th floor flickered in the leaking ceiling, reflecting the turbulent dark green water below—this skyscraper was becoming a concrete Noah's Ark.

"Each solid wood desk provides 120 kilograms of buoyancy." Lao Zhou used a utility knife to cut open the leather seat, revealing the honeycomb aluminum alloy frame inside. "But we have to complete the splicing within an hour, otherwise the Bernoulli effect caused by the rising water level will sweep everything into the drainage well."

A pregnant woman's moans suddenly erupted in the stairwell. Xiao Yi turned around and saw financial elite Zhang Zhihao stacking cases of mineral water into a roadblock. This Wharton School graduate, an M&A expert, was currently tying three water dispenser filters with Prada belts.

"Get out of the way!" The moment Xiao Yi knocked aside the roadblock, he caught a glimpse of a box of anti-anxiety pills sticking out of the other person's shirt pocket. The pale pink pills scattered all over the ground, quickly dissolving into some kind of fluorescent substance in the stagnant water—a key foreshadowing of the subsequent "weather war" conspiracy.

The woman's amniotic fluid had turned a strange blue-green. Old Zhou suddenly ripped open her overalls and pressed his age-spotted fingers against her swollen belly. "The fetus is in a transverse position, and the iliac arteries are compressed. Have you had a myomectomy before?"

"How come you..." The pregnant woman's pupils dilated due to the pain, and the subway employee card on her wrist suddenly made a beeping sound. Xiao Yi noticed that the card number started with "S18", and the Shanghai Metro was currently only open to Line 17.

Old Zhou pulled out a titanium folding knife from his pocket and burned it over an alcohol lamp: "During the 1948 Siege of Changchun, I delivered 67 babies." Amid the sound of the blade slicing through the leather sofa, he suddenly turned and stared at Xiao Yi: "Do you know why flood water is alkaline?"

Xiao Yi froze, then remembered the fluorescent liquid in the tunnel. He licked the water stain on the floor, feeling a stinging sensation on the tip of his tongue—the pH must have reached at least 11.3. Outside the French window, the soaked concrete exterior wall was precipitating white crystals—sodium carbonate formed by the reaction of sodium hydroxide and carbon dioxide.

"The whole city is melting." The moment Old Zhou lifted the baby upside down, the entire building suddenly shook violently. Xiao Yi rushed to the French window and saw that the helipad on top of the IFC Center, 500 meters away, was tilting. Countless sealed lead cans were floating in the huge waves caused by the peeling glass curtain wall.

The pregnant woman suddenly let out an inhuman howl. Her bloody fingertips dug deep into the leather of the sofa, leaving five hideous gashes on the backrest. Xiao Yi was about to step forward when Lao Zhou pressed a pair of surgical forceps against her throat: "Look at the cross-section of the placenta and umbilical cord!"

Under the medical headlight, the blood flowing in the baby's umbilical cord was not blood, but a silver-gray colloid. Xiao Yi thought of the mass spectrometer in the basement of the Meteorological Bureau that had been borrowed by the military. Three months ago, it had detected abnormal metal particles in the stratosphere.

"They've begun..." Old Zhou paused in his gauze wrapping the baby. A corner of the skin behind his ear lifted, revealing a bionic layer beneath, gleaming with circuitry. Lightning flashed just in time outside the window, illuminating the QR code pattern gradually emerging on the gauze.

Zhang Zhihao's screams shattered the silence. This financial elite was cradling the severed head of a female executive. The headless corpse's satellite phone was still playing a recording: "...Typhoon Fenghuang has turned... I repeat, Typhoon Fenghuang is forming..."

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