Chương 69: Chapter 70: Moving Day

Ethan woke with a sharp, ragged gasp, his real-world eyes flying open under the harsh green glare of the room's single utility light. His chest rose and fell in a heavy, controlled sequence as his physical central nervous system re-calibrated to the dense, humid air of Room 12-04. The low-frequency thrum of the Chinatown Sump's primary regional power cap vibrated straight up through the floorboards—a dull, relentless industrial hum that had served as the background noise to his entire childhood.

Outside the narrow, dirt-crusted window frame, a deep, mechanical roar shook the thin concrete walls of the HDB rental flat. The rented automated cargo transit drone had hovered into position directly outside the open gantry corridor, its four heavy multi-rotor blades throwing down a massive, churning downdraft of hot, sulfur-tinted sump air into the narrow block courtyard below.

There were no grand security checkpoints or perimeter gates out here—just rows of weathered, public concrete corridors stained with decades of tropical dampness and corporate soot. The movers were here now, and he had exactly a two-hour drone-docking window to clear the property. It was time to clear out. Ethan went to work with the cold, mechanical efficiency of an industrial worker. Moving in a frantic, silent grind, he began throwing their entire life into the drone's rusted steel cargo harness.

He manually hauled their tattered plastic storage bins, their meager clothing bundles, and his own scratched, low-tier VR gaming capsule out onto the narrow concrete gantry. Every muscle in his forearms burned with a deep, physical lactic ache—the exact same physical tension he had just cleared using his daily towel-wringing sets—but his grip remained iron-clad and steady. The final asset was the most critical.

Ethan walked over to the therapeutic medical pod, checking the emergency pressure metrics before disconnecting the raw utility lines. He hooked the pod up to a heavy, brick-sized portable lithium power pack to keep it running during the transfer. The compact auxiliary unit hummed to life instantly, keeping the life-support filters running at full capacity.

With slow, deliberate care, Ethan rolled the heavy capsule containing his grandmother out of the damp concrete room, guiding the wheels across the gantry ledge straight into the drone's secured chassis. He left the unit completely bare—nothing remaining but the flaking, dry scales of cheap white paint peeling off the raw industrial concrete walls. The flat was dead, and they were leaving the Chinatown Sump for good. The transition to the Jurong East Sky Pylon was a sharp, monumental shock to their senses.

The new public unit was tight, minimal, and structurally bare, but the difference was immediate: the concrete was clean, dry, and run by a dedicated, un-throttled municipal power grid line with zero smart-grid wattage caps. Ethan spent the entire afternoon positioning their old, tattered equipment against the clean white walls, running the high-voltage supply links straight into his grandmother's medical pod.

The capsule's internal air-scrubbers let out a deep, powerful, un-interrupted hum, the automated pressure valves instantly stabilising her breathing cycles without a single power sputter or voltage drop. Ethan walked over to the high glass window, leaning his heavy forearms against the clean, un-smeared sill. Beside him, his grandmother had slid open the clear plastic shield of her capsule, her weathered eyes slowly widening as she stared out into the cooling evening.

The visual contrast was a staggering testament to the city's stratified, dystopian physics. Down in the Chinatown Sump, the air was a permanent, choking sludge. The heavy organic aerosols and sulfurous tar droplets from the smoldering Sumatran peatland fires were physically dense; when they drifted across the straits, they absorbed the moisture of the humid coastal currents, growing waterlogged and heavy.

Trapped beneath the downward blanket of super-heated air radiating from the elite high-altitude corporate canopy gardens, the atmosphere underwent a permanent Thermal Inversion. The heavy peat smoke was locked down like a cold, toxic liquid, pooling flat against the floorboards from Floor 1 to Floor 35. But here, on the 44th floor of the Jurong East pylon, they had broken completely through that atmospheric lid.

The air rushing through the upper-sector vents was thin, crisp, and moving—swept hyper-clean by the brisk, un-trapped slipstreams of the open sea lanes. Far across the distant, neon-lit grid lines, the glimmering, razor-sharp towers of Queenstown pierced straight through the upper violet horizon, glowing in a pristine, un-filtered brilliance that mirrored the clean world of her childhood.

"You can see the high towers from here, Ethan," she whispered, her voice carrying a fragile, genuine lightness that he hadn't heard in decades.

"The sky... it really is clear."

"It's clear, Grandma," Ethan said softly, his eyes dropping briefly to the stark black stencil painted onto the outer metal doorframe: Unit 44-02. She followed his gaze, a soft, weathered laugh escaping her lips—a sound completely free of the wet, heavy rattle that had trapped her chest down in the sumps.

"Forty-four," she murmured, shaking her head gently.

"The corporate developers must have been desperate to get this lease off their ledgers. Two fours. People in this city are so terrified of a silly sound on a display screen that they'd rather choke downstairs than sign for a number that spells out death." She reached out a frail, paper-thin hand, her fingers resting gently over Ethan's calloused forearm.

"Let them have their superstitions, Ethan. Who cares about a number? I'm just thankful it left the door open for us to get out."

"Yeah," Ethan said, forcing a warm, relaxed smile to mask the ruthless calculations running through his head.

"Who cares about the number. We're out." Thinking back to the Chinatown sump, he had initially thought about commuting back down to the lower sump markets every week to haggle for cheap synthetic groceries to keep their budget stable, but as he computed the opportunity cost, he instantly discarded the idea. Spending two hours on a transit rail just to save a few dollars on discount rations was an absolute amateur error. At his current Level 43 advancement, time was his highest-leverage resource currency.

Every hour spent traveling in the real world was an hour lost from the making more money in the game. The heavy, twenty-five hundred dollar monthly mortgage installments would begin automatically in thirty days. To pay down that debt, he couldn't waste a single millisecond haggling in the chinatown markets. He would buy their high-nutrient food bars and medical refilled via automated local delivery drones, keeping his body optimally fuelled.

He hadn't won the game; he had simply bought his way onto a faster, deadlier wheel. He stepped away from the window, climbed back inside his scratched, low-tier gaming capsule, and adjusted his neural head-piece.