Chapter 3
Monday, 8 AM
Monday, morning, 8 o'clock. The streets of Pingyang City were packed with people.
Although it was just an obscure, eighteenth-tier prefecture-level city, thanks to the population influx from surrounding counties, the steadily rising number of private cars, the perpetually unchanged width of downtown streets, and its uniquely backward-era road planning, every morning rush hour in this small city felt no less intense than in any major metropolis. On the main roads, car exhaust and honking formed a uniquely human kind of mixed pollution, instantly reducing the city's livability by the square root — three times over.
Parents who had just dropped off their children, laborers riding electric scooters to work, office workers driving private cars — people of all types crowded the not-so-wide streets in the densest formations. Non-motorized vehicles had long since swarmed into the motor vehicle lanes, slipping through gaps like sand gliding over stones in a filtration jar, thoroughly clogging the roads.
And on the side of the road, in one of the office buildings, a girl lay sprawled across several sheets of cardboard, propping her face with one hand as she watched this everyday scene from above with a sense of melancholy.
Her bare little feet swung back and forth behind her. The autumn morning sun slightly eased the chill in the air, making her squint.
"It's already been nine days."
She reached out and gently brushed her fingers across the floor in front of her, slowly murmuring to herself.
— That was how long she had been in this world, a world vaguely familiar yet inherently different from what she remembered.
The last fragments of her own memories had grown so blurred that she couldn’t even be sure of her current circumstances.
In that haze, she remembered — maybe she had gotten sick... infected?
Back then, as an employee of the International Red Cross — no, at that time, he had still been a man — he was on a humanitarian aid mission in Africa.
A sudden and bizarre epidemic had struck a small underdeveloped country. Already struggling with constant friction from guerrilla forces and neighboring factions, the local government — barely able to feed its own people — had collapsed almost immediately after the outbreak began.
Surrounding nations, lacking the resources to investigate or respond to the outbreak, hastily shut their borders in an attempt to protect themselves.
But in the end, all that did was slightly delay the inevitable spread of infection.
Soon, the World Health Organization took action, and the local teams of the International Committee of the Red Cross also began small-scale humanitarian aid, coordinating with other organizations.
And he — at the time — was one of the frontline volunteers.
But now, she couldn’t recall any of the specific details. Not the nature of the epidemic, not the characteristics of the virus, not even the symptoms of the infected...
All she could remember was how strange its transmission had seemed. For instance, in a household with one infected person, the whole family might get it — except for the spouse, who remained perfectly healthy. A neighboring family might fall ill, yet those closest to them were fine, while someone on the other side of the village would be infected. The transmission paths were baffling, and the lack of detailed data on patients' personal movements made things even more difficult — it had been a nightmare.
Once infected patients passed the incubation period, their early symptoms included intermittent limb spasms and difficulty breathing. As the infection progressed, they would...
Uh… what happened again?
The girl shook her head and pressed her fingers against her temple, but no matter how hard she tried, she just couldn’t recall.
She knew she had once known. She had closely observed patients from early to late stages more than once. She had even dealt with their...
Hiss!~ A sharp headache abruptly cut off her thoughts. Alright — clearly, forcing herself to remember things she had forgotten wasn’t a good idea.
And it wasn’t just her final memories that had vanished. She had forgotten other, equally important things too.
For example… her own name.
Yes, as embarrassing as it sounded, the girl now had absolutely no idea what she used to be called.
If someone were to write out her current state of mind in third person, they might think the author simply hadn’t decided to give the main character a name yet.