Ethan's mind hung in the blinding white void, completely stunned.It took a long while before he forced himself to calm down. Slowly, carefully, he began to study this strange place.Everywhere he looked, there was only endless white. It felt like a pure, boundless little world. Nothing lived here. Nothing existed here at all.Then his expression tightened.The notebook from before was floating there, perfectly still, right in front of him."This..." Ethan stared, unable to make sense of any of it.He was only a mind here, a drifting thought with no body to speak of. Even so, he couldn't stop himself from reaching out to grab it.The moment the thought formed, the notebook vanished again.Before he could process his shock, the white world rushed backward around him, and his consciousness snapped back into reality.He looked down. The notebook was already in his hand.His fingers trembled.He forced himself to replay everything that had just happened, step by step, and tried to recreat

When Ethan realized the lending app had scammed him, he felt no regret at all. What surged through him was pure excitement.Following the same steps, he opened every loan app on his phone, registered on each one, and applied for loans one after another.Soon his phone began chiming with notifications.When his account balance climbed past $130,000, a grin spread across his face.Even though the amount he had officially borrowed was nearly $300,000, he wasn't worried in the slightest. From the moment he took the money, he had never planned to pay it back. He already knew exactly how he would deal with these shady platforms.Still, he was a little disappointed. The platforms were stingy, and none of them handed over very much.The later the app, the lower the limit and the higher the interest. One of them had lent him only $3,000, left him with just $500 in hand, and demanded $3,900 back in a single month.That wasn't lending. That was daylight robbery.Ethan decisively gave up on squee

(Author's note: The next few chapters are a bit of filler. Feel free to skip them if you don't mind.)At eight in the evening, Ethan returned to his rented room after dinner.He looked at the $770,000 in his account and couldn't help smiling.The loan had finally been approved that afternoon.The total was one million dollars, but he had received only $700,000. And he was expected to repay about $400,000 a month for three months. It was pure loan-shark robbery.But Ethan wasn't worried. From the moment he borrowed it, he had never planned to pay it back. When the repayment date came, he had plenty of ways to deal with it.Of course, the loan had come at a cost.The Mercedes G-Class he had just rented had been seized by Silverline Financial.It left him both pleased and a little sour. He had rented that car for one purpose, to impress the lenders, and now it had become a casualty of the loan.But it was only a rental, so it wasn't really his problem. All he would lose was a $30,000 dep

(Author's note: Too wordy. Can be skipped.)From Ethan's experience, hydropower, solar and wind were all useless in a frozen apocalypse. Only coal-fired and nuclear plants could provide steady power.But coal-fired plants depended too heavily on fuel like coal and oil, which would be nearly impossible to find and mine in a post-apocalyptic world. And nuclear power was strictly controlled by the state. A man like him could never touch it.So when Walter mentioned geothermal energy, it opened a brand-new road in Ethan's mind.Geothermal energy is natural heat drawn from the Earth's crust. It comes from the magma deep inside the planet and exists in the form of heat. The Earth's interior reaches temperatures of about 7,000°C. When the apocalypse struck and the sun's temperature dropped, the Earth's core would remain largely unaffected.Even at depths of 130 to 160 kilometers, temperatures can reach 650 to 1,200°C. That heat travels through groundwater and lava flows up into the crust, on

From the news reports, Ethan pieced together Professor Whitmore's temperament and personality.To his delight, he discovered that the old man was also a doomsday thinker. He urged people at every opportunity to protect the environment, and he had even taken part in building the National Doomsday Seed Vault.It was wonderful news. Ethan had actually lived through the apocalypse. Who in the world understood it better than he did?He had worried that he would have nothing in common with such a great scholar. This was like a pillow delivered to a sleepy man.His thoughts raced, and soon an idea took shape. He began typing the email.After careful consideration, an hour later, he clicked send.Now all he had to do was wait for a reply.By the time he was finished, it was noon. He ate a quick lunch and drove back to Oakridge.Oakridge had several geothermal sites, and he couldn't just sit around waiting for the professor's answer. He could scout locations in the meantime. And if the profess