Chapter 3 : The heat

⋟────────────────────╮

What? My "Information Club" is Actually an All-Knowing Secret Society?

Genre : Apocalypse, Fantasy, Superpower, Action

Tag : Misunderstanding, Secret Organization, Wolrd-Freezing, Super power

Chapter 3 : The heat

╰───────────────────⋞╯

[Time remaining until the Great Freeze: 27 Days]

The world wasn't freezing. Not yet. In fact, it was burning.

Arlen wiped a stream of sweat from his forehead with the back of his soapy hand. The midday sun in the city was unforgiving. It beat down on the asphalt of 'Splash & Shine Car Wash' until the air shimmered like a mirage.

"Hey! You missed a spot on the rim!" a customer yelled from inside his air-conditioned SUV.

"Sorry, sir. On it," Arlen muttered, dipping his sponge back into the bucket.

This was his reality. Arlen wasn't a famous author yet. He was a 24-year-old guy scrubbing mud off rich people's tires for minimum wage.

The novel, The Frozen Era, was currently just a file on his laptop titled Draft_Final_v3.docx.

"Twenty-seven days," Arlen whispered to himself, spraying water on the car. "Just hold on for twenty-seven more days."

If it worked, he could quit this job. If it failed... well, more car rims.

He looked up at the sky. It wasn't blue. It was a hazy, oppressive white. The electronic billboard across the street flashed the temperature: 39°C.

Arlen chuckled bitterly.

"I'm writing a book about an Ice Age while living in a toaster. Talk about escapism."

[The City Streets - 5:00 PM]

His shift ended. Arlen walked home, his clothes damp with sweat and soap water.

The streets were chaotic. Motorcycles weaved through traffic, honking incessantly. The humidity was so thick you could chew it.

He passed a local park. Usually, the trees were full of noisy tropical birds.

Today, it was silent.

Arlen paused. He looked at the power lines. Empty.

Suddenly he remembers something, it's a word from his book, to be precise, it's from Chapter 2: "The birds knew first. They fled to the north twenty days before the ice fell, a black river of feathers against a bruising violet sky."

"Meh, coincidence isn't causation. Birds migrate early if the wind changes. Markets fluctuate. It's happened all the time." Arlen reasoned, wiping his neck. "But still, man. Global warming is getting scary."

Then, he saw a stray dog panting heavily under a shade tree. No, it's not just panting. It's more like whimpering, while digging a hole in the dirt, trying to bury itself. Hiding.

Arlen frowned. "You feel it too, huh buddy? Too hot."

He continued walking to the convenience store, a glowing generic minimart on the corner. He needed dinner. Specifically, instant noodles. And he needed salt because he was too broke to buy the flavored brand.

***

[The Convenience Store]

The blast of AC as he walked in was heavenly.

Arlen went straight to the spice aisle. But when he see it, He froze.

The shelf was empty.

Not just the salt. The pepper, the MSG, the dried chili... specifically the high-sodium products were gone.

He checked the beverage secltion. The energy drinks containing ginseng? Gone.

The vegetable crate in the fresh section? Not even one.

"Excuse me," Arlen asked the cashier, a teenager looking bored out of his mind. "Restocking soon?"

The cashier laughed. "Good luck, bro. Some weirdos came in a truck this morning. Bought every bag of salt we had. Then about an hour later, some guys in suits came and bought the rest of the spices."

"Who buys salt in a heatwave?" Arlen asked, baffled. "Are they preserving meat?"

"I don't know," the cashier shrugged. "But I heard rumors. It's happening all over the city. People say it's some rich doomsday cult that always said the end is coming. They’re paying in cash with high amount of money."

Arlen's eyes narrowed.

"Hoarders," he muttered. "Probably trying to corner the market on because of the heat. Greedy bastards."

He bought a bland packet of noodles and a bottle of water.

***

[Arlen’s Apartment - Night]

His apartment feels like a sauna. The fan was just blowing hot air around.

Arlen sat in his boxers, eating his tasteless noodles, sweating profusely.

He opened the Information Club chat on his laptop to check the engagement metrics.

The chat was active, but mostly dominated by the "Old Guard" (The Pillars and Elites). The new members were quiet.

> [User: Viper]: Report from Sector 4. [IronClad] has finished reinforcing the perimeter wall. We are installing the thermal insulation tonight. <

> [User: Vector]: Transport fleet fueled and ready. We managed to secure 500 gallons of diesel before the price hike this afternoon. <

> [User: Seraph]: The blankets have been distributed to the inner circle. The lambs are safe. <

Then, a message from one of the new users.

> [User: Apothecary]: Question regarding 'Page 4: Vitality Stew'. I've been running some tests on the chemical composition in my lab. The reaction between the heated sodium and the ginseng alkaloids is... unusual. It's creating an exothermic reaction I can't quite explain yet. Still verifying data..<

Arlen raised an eyebrow.

"Wow, [Apothecary] is really getting into the roleplay," Arlen mumbled, impressed.

"Pretending to run lab tests? That's dedication. And [Tank] is on, he's probably just lurking, wondering what the hell is going on."

He decided to keep the immersion going. Then, he joins the discussion.

> [The Architect]: The heat is a lie. It is the fever of a dying world. The earth burns before it breaks. Do not be fooled by the sun. Prepare for the white dark. <

He hit send.

Ping! Ping! Ping!

The chat flooded with responses from the Elites.

> [User: IronClad]: Understood. We will double the insulation thickness. <

> [User: NightOwl]: Fever before the frost... Roger that. I know what I must do <

> [User: Apothecary]: ...A fever? Interesting hypothesis. If the planetary core is destabilizing, it would explain the surface temperature spike before the atmospheric collapse. I need to run more simulations. <

Arlen shook his head, closing the laptop.

"They are so creative," Arlen grinned. "Connecting real-world heatwaves to my lore. God, I love this community."

He lay down on his mattress, staring at the ceiling fan spinning lazily.

Arlen just closed his eyes, wishing for a cool breeze.

"Man," he whispered. "I'd kill for some ice right now."

***

[Location: Advanced Biochemistry Laboratory, National University - Jakarta]

The air conditioning hummed aggressively, battling the tropical heat that tried to seep through the double-paned windows. Outside, the city was asleep, sweating under a 30°C moonless night. Inside, it was a sterile 18°C.

Dr. Elena Vance rubbed her tired eyes behind her safety goggles. The ID badge on her white coat read: Senior Researcher - Biochemistry Division.

"Sample 14-B. Attempting synthesis of organic compound: 'Vitality Stew'," she whispered into her voice recorder, her tone dripping with skepticism.

She looked at the paper on her desk: Page 4.

It was ridiculous. A recipe involving aged radishes, excessive sodium, and ginseng roots. It looked like something a grandmother would cook for a cold, desperate survival serum.

"If this is a prank, I’m going to find whoever made this QR code and strangle them," she muttered.

She had found the code three days ago, taped behind a vending machine in the faculty canteen. Curiosity and boredom with her current grant proposal, had led her to join the group.

Now, she stood before a magnetic stirrer. Inside the beaker, a thick, amber-colored liquid was spinning rapidly.

She had isolated the alkaloids from the ginseng and concentrated the sodium ions, following the Architect's instructions to the letter, treating "simmer for 20 minutes" as "maintain 100°C thermal constant."

"Subject is... stable," she noted.

She picked up a pipette and dropped a single bead of the liquid onto a thermal imaging sensor.

The monitor on her computer spiked instantly. Red. Then White.

Elena blinked. She tapped the screen, assuming a glitch.

"That’s impossible."

The drop of liquid wasn't just hot. She doesn't know how, but it was generating heat.

Maybe, the reaction between the specific enzymes in the radish and the sodium structure was creating a hyper-efficient exothermic loop.

It was a biological heater that, theoretically, could raise a human's core temperature by 2 to 10 degrees (Depends on the dos) and sustain it for six hours.

"It’s not soup," Elena whispered, stepping back, her heart racing faster than it should. "It’s... it’s liquid antifreeze for the human body."

She looked at the printout of Page 4 again. The messy handwriting, the crude drawings of vegetables.

"Who are you?" she asked the paper. "This ... This was a Nobel Prize-level biochemistry disguised as a dinner recipe. How did something like this appear out of nowhere and I found it?"

She grabbed her phone. Her thumb hovered over the Information Club app.

She saw the messages from Viper and Seraph. When she seraph, she always sounded like religious fanatics. "Lambs," "Purity," "Perimeter." Elena hated that unscientific nonsense.

But the data... the data didn't lie.

She hit send.

Almost immediately, a reply came. Not from the fanatics, but from The Architect.

> [The Architect]: The heat is a lie. It is the fever of a dying world. The earth burns before it breaks. Do not be fooled by the sun. Prepare for the white dark. <

Elena stared at the screen.

"Fever of a dying world..." she murmured.

"Planetary core destabilization," she reasoned, her mind racing. "If the magnetic field is collapsing, the initial release of energy would cause a massive spike in surface temperature, or he called it a fever. Before the atmosphere loses retention and plunges us into zero."

She walked to the window. The city lights of Jakarta flickered in the heat haze.

For the first time, her eyes spark something different. It was, devotion. She feels the heat of the nights, but she knows that it was a symptom. Symptoms of how sick this earth is.

"He knows," Elena realized, a chill running down her spine that had nothing to do with the AC. "The Architect ... Who are you? Are you a scientist who has run the simulation further than anyone else? I admire you."

She turned back to her lab bench.

She didn't need money. She had the university's keys. She had the equipment.

"I need to scale up," she decided, her eyes hardening with resolve. "If the frost is coming, 500 milliliters won't be enough."

She grabbed a heavy-duty s

ack of industrial salt from the storage shelf, stolen from the maintenance closet.

"Screw the ethics committee," she said, pouring the salt into a massive centrifuge. "Tonight, we do real science!"

›› To Be Continue ‹‹

—KS