Stéphanie woke up in a gloomy mood that morning, feeling the cold air despite the layers of clothing she was wearing and the thick blanket she had wrapped herself in. A brief shiver ran through her as she slightly lifted her quilt to scratch the tip of her nose.

Despite the insulation of the walls and the warmth emitted by the whole community sharing the room, she felt like she had spent the night outside.

She tightened the quilt around her and let out a deep yawn that woke Marie, who was lying next to her, separated only by her large backpack.

A pale light passed through the small square windows in the roof of the town hall, a sign that the day had technically already begun. Looking around discreetly, she noticed that a few mattresses were empty.

Despite the temptation to stay warm under the quilt for an additional hour or two, Stéphanie got up, definitively waking her older sister.

"Good morning."

"Morning," Marie murmured in a big bear-like yawn. "Sleep well?

"It was okay. I think I've finally gotten used to this shitty mattress."

Marie made a sound that could be considered a small laugh, but she agreed with her sister. They were indeed shitty mattresses. They were thin and too soft, making it feel like you were sleeping directly on the floor.

"Happy birthday, Stéph."

"Thanks."

It had been exactly nine months since the world changed.

At the end of January, Stéphanie should have been celebrating her seventeenth birthday with her parents in their family home, like every other year. Even without the photo album she kept carefully in her backpack, she remembered that day perfectly, or rather the meal they had.

The previous year, Xavier and Christine Lemoine had bought a superb ice cream cake with vanilla and raspberry cream, meringue, and red fruits that they had devoured out of sheer greed despite being quite full. Then they had given her a large figurine representing a video game character she liked a lot at the time.

Despite the circumstances that had forced her to drastically sort through her belongings twice, she had kept it. It was carefully stored in her backpack along with the album, some clothes, and other personal items that reminded her of the world before.

Stéphanie used to play video games a bit before the blackout and had phases where she could play for hours without stopping. A year earlier, she was in one of those phases and only left her room to go to class and protest.

Thinking back to that time, a golden period compared to the current one, a tune played in her head and made her want to hum.

The young girl, almost an adult, put away her quilt and pillow before going downstairs in the small building, which even in its internal organization resembled a house. She was quiet because the mayor had not yet arrived. It became a bit livelier when her friends and comrades came down, followed shortly by another family that hadn't found a vacant home in Précy-sur-Marne.

It was a family of four, two adults and two children. It was the Cochon family. A hard name to bear, she had thought when she met them almost twenty days earlier.

Once outside the building, she paused for a breath.

The sun was hidden behind a thick veil of clouds that didn't reveal even a bit of blue sky. A light cool breeze caressed her face, which had retained its childlike features.

In front of the entrance of the Précy-sur-Marne town hall, Mathieu, Olivier, Amin, and Jérôme were sitting on small chairs near a small campfire. Dry wood was burning peacefully, warming a pot of wheat porridge in a large blackened pot suspended about twenty centimeters above the flames. A small white smoke rose in front of the small group of men discussing what they would do that day.

This strange scene, which seemed out of a movie, a novel, or a video game, had become usual.

Come on, a new day begins.

Despite the cold, the village of Précy-sur-Marne was neither asleep nor frozen in time. While the children went to school for basic education, the small village was very slowly growing. Indeed, new houses were being built on the outskirts following the roads and streets. However, these were not modern concrete houses but more like shacks and hovels similar to slums on the other side of the world made from all sorts of materials.

Mathieu, Olivier, Jérôme, and Amin got up before everyone else to prepare breakfast for the community while discussing the construction of their house. They were somewhat the architects and site managers.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

Their future house, which at the moment did not look like much, would be at the northern end of their fields currently resting. It was much too early to start sowing since the nights were very cold.

Only the bases had been laid, and everything remained to be done. They were taking their time to do things right, advised by the village carpenter.

Unfortunately, he couldn't spend a lot of time on this site or the others since he had to focus on the water mill being built along the wide river flowing peacefully south of the village.

From their fields, they could see it grow day by day and take shape. The building currently looked like an ordinary house, mostly made of wood since it wasn't wise to make concrete in this weather. The water used to trigger a chemical reaction with the cement might freeze during the hardening period, significantly weakening the structure.

A deep trench had been dug between the mill under construction and the river, deep enough to bury an adult standing up. According to what had been explained to Stéphanie during her village tour two weeks earlier, the wooden wheel the Jousselin family was building on-site would be positioned there, and the trench would be connected, once reinforced with planks and stones, to the river to let the running water pass.

The Marne's water would flow into the trench, encounter the obstacle in the large wooden wheel equipped with small vanes, exert pressure on them, making it turn, and engage a mechanism that would turn large stones in the mill to grind raw wheat grains into flour.

This titanic project mobilized a large part of the inhabitants because everyone wanted flour by the end of the next summer. What Stéphanie and her companions were doing seemed like a mere child's playhouse in comparison.

"Hi, Stéphanie. How are you?"

"Yeah. What's the goal for today?"

"We continue what we started yesterday. While you work on the walls, we'll handle the frame. The problem is that we won't have enough beams. Almost everything is used for the mill, and we have to share the rest with the other houses under construction."

"And can't we, I don't know, cut down trees to make some?"

"I think we'll have no choice, but it will take us a monstrous amount of time. I don't even know how to go about it and what tools to use."

"We'll manage, Mat'," Jérôme intervened. "We don't know how to build a house, and yet, look what we've already managed to do!"

Mathieu smiled. Jérôme wasn't wrong. What they had already achieved, for those with no experience in the matter, was remarkable. It wasn't perfect, but they had put their hearts into it, and it showed.

Their morning meal was brief, partly because there wasn't much to eat for everyone, as food was rationed. Indeed, despite the previous harvest, the reserves were low. As had been the case on Mathieu's farm, many fields had been neglected due to a lack of hands to work them. On top of that, the grain had been exposed to moisture, promoting mold growth, and rodents had come to feed.

The plots Mathieu had bought would have lain fallow for years if he hadn't found someone to take care of them. By giving up these lands, not only had he lost nothing, he had gained a lot since they brought him many items from the capital on a silver platter, but also food.

But even for him, life wasn't easy. Nearly half of his lands would rest this summer, depriving him of a gigantic amount of grain at harvest time. The whole village would pay the price if the next harvest was bad.

"Alright," Mathieu declared, "let's get to work!"

Stéphanie got up with her friends and left the green square in front of the town hall. They found their site exactly as they had left it the previous evening at sunset.

The ground had been cleared and leveled manually, and solid poles had been planted at regular intervals to support the frame under construction. The walls were being built, but materials were lacking. They had started placing wooden panels but quickly concluded it was better to save them for the roof. It was imperative that it be well-sealed so they could spend all their nights dry.

They had therefore lost three days undoing what they had struggled to build.

The walls they were building were made of clay soil from the banks of the Marne. Stéphanie, Marie, Emma, Léa, Baptiste, Kévin, Justine, and Sylvie, who weren't involved in the frame construction, formed balls that they spread over a sort of barrier made of woven branches. They tried to make a smooth and clean surface when the thickness was deemed sufficient.

Lucas, Léa's youngest son, and Zoé, Emma's daughter, were at school with the other children. This would probably be the last year Lucas would have the chance to go to school since it was decided to educate only children under fifteen and involve the older ones in work.

Because there was no middle school in Précy-sur-Marne, they had to improvise a class in the town hall. Mr. Michel Cochon had agreed to teach them, even though he wasn't really a teacher but a supervisor. He still had a degree in modern literature.

SPLASH!

Stéphanie smashed her brown clay ball on the wall under construction and spread it with large circular motions of her right palm.

The Stéphanie before the blackout would have simply refused to literally get her hands dirty, but today's Stéphanie didn't care about these little details. Her hands had long resembled those of a forty-year-old.

The clay was cold and wet, making her hands as brown as if she had dipped them in a pot of Nutella. All this was accompanied by a powerful smell that she struggled to ignore. It was as if she had plunged her hands into a septic tank.

Marie and the others didn't display a pleasant expression either.

Ugh! Can't wait for this to be over! My God, it stinks! It's Hell! I feel like I have it in my nose!

Meanwhile, Mathieu and the others were sweating profusely to place a very heavy light wood beam. It had to be placed horizontally and run the length of the house, opposite where Stéphanie was working.

Suddenly, a loud cry of pain echoed on the site.

"AAAH! LIFT! LIFT!"

"Damn it!

"Mathieu! Are you okay?!"

Fortunately, the boys reacted quickly. Not quickly enough, however, to avoid the accident. Mathieu was holding his hand with a pained expression on his face.

"Ah," he groaned, tears in his eyes. "It hurts. Damn it!"

"What happened?" Marie gulped nervously, seeing Mathieu painfully descend from his perch, still holding his hand, his fingers curled.

"I-I didn't pay attention and my fingers got crushed. I-I'll be fine. I'll hurt for a while, but it'll pass. I've known worse."

"Your nails turned black!" Amin exclaimed in horror.

"Uh, yeah. I didn't miss. Ah, what an dumbass! What an dumbass, dumbass, dumbass!" the man swore, massaging his left hand while trying to move his aching fingers.

"Well, on the bright side, it doesn't look broken," Léa, Jérôme's wife, said with a deep sigh.

Everyone nodded gently.