Chapter 95: Diary, Clue, and Origin
"Finally." Rubbing his sleepy eyes, Chu Guang put down the diary and notes extracting key information along with the pen in his hand.
Although he did not find the answer he wanted, the story still provided him with many interesting clues.
At first, he thought that this diary was about a group of survivors who lost their humanity and finally transformed into a group of marauders.
But later, he learned that it was actually a pure modern version of ‘The Farmer and the Snake’.
There were three main characters in the diary.
The name of the diary’s owner was Li Xiu, an ordinary sports news reporter. For simplicity, let's call him Xiao Li.
The other was a woman named Sun Lai, but let's call her Xiao Sun.
The third person was Xiao Sun's husband, the guard of a shelter.
Since the name of the guard was not mentioned in the diary, let's call him the "sufferer" for the time being.
This is because after reading the entire diary, Chu Guang felt that this old brother who lived in the diary had a really miserable life.
The narration at the beginning of the diary was very plain. Xiao Li, who had survived the catastrophe, briefly described what he saw and heard when the nuclear war broke out.
At that time, the stadium in the northern suburbs of Qingquan City was holding a regional basketball game. In the second half of the game when the game was at its most intense moment, the radio suddenly sounded the alarm that indicated a nuclear strike.
[... Almost no one reacted—even my assistant thought that this sound effect was a special effect to hype up the atmosphere arranged by the organizer. However, I still panicked and ran almost instinctively. I rushed into the basement and found the dormant cabin placed there. When I was about to use it, I hesitated for a moment. ]
[‘What if all this is just a bad joke? It will only take a month and my audience will forget me completely, and I will have nothing,’ I thought to myself… but eventually, I still closed the hatch and pressed the activation button. ]
[The surroundings started to get cold, and my consciousness went away a little by little. But when I opened my eyes again and pushed open the hatch, the mechanical watch on the door told me that a nuclear war had indeed occurred. I had been asleep for more than three years, and now everything outside has changed. I was right, but I didn’t feel lucky at all... I would rather be wrong, and I much preferred it to be a bad joke; at least I would be able to get a lot of compensation from the organizer that way. Or maybe I should've died three years ago. Dying in a utopia is not a bad thing. After all, being alive is torture. ]
In the following paragraph, Xiao Li described the scenes he saw on the street from his perspective.
Fragmented streets, riddled concrete buildings, and dead bodies abandoned in the streets to be eaten by crows. It felt like hell on earth.
The atmosphere was so desperate that it would make people suffocate!
It was obviously still August, but it was already snowing. In the grey sky, one couldn't see the sun, or feel any warmth.
Wandering aimlessly, he found a group of poor people who had also survived in a nearby waste tire factory before he collapsed.
In that era when humanity was far from being annihilated, the survivors of the tire factory rescued him, and he also met a woman named Sun Lai there.
The woman was a nurse, and she had a child younger than 7 years old. She was separated from her husband when the nuclear war broke out, and had been looking for her husband for all these years.
Li Xiu sympathized with her and expressed willingness to help her.
There was a yellowed photo in the diary which contained the two of them. Although the woman's face was covered with traces of experiencing hardship, it couldn't conceal her good looks.
Chu Guang didn't care about their relationship’s development or the complicated ethical entanglements, so he quickly skipped at least 30 pages of psychological activities and detailed descriptions until he finally saw the clues that really interested him.
Both Xiao Li and Xiao Sun used scrapped parts to assemble a primitive but reliable radio, and successfully received a broadcast from a shelter.
The person on the radio was Sun Lai's husband—that was, the sufferer who served as a guard in the shelter.
In the past three years, the broadcast has not been interrupted for a single day. It sounded punctually at noon every day and continued to broadcast until three o'clock in the afternoon.
The content of the broadcast was information used to look for his wife and child who had been separated from him for three years.
When Xiao Sun realized that her husband had never given up looking for her, she, who was already a little shaken, cried out in Xiao Li's arms.
Chu Guang could feel that the owner of this diary didn't seem to be very happy. He didn't even mention her husband's name in the diary. He just used ‘that man’ to refer to him and described the whole thing in just a few sentences.
But what happened next gradually became interesting.
As the guard of the shelter, the sufferer was kept in the shelter before the outbreak of the nuclear war.
Knowing that his wife and child were still alive, he immediately found a way to contact his friend who had worked in the police station, guided his friends to bring supplies, and rescue the poor people living in the tire factory.
These supplies came in great use.
Moreover, the sufferer relied on the almost unlimited knowledge reserve in the shelter to actively help the survivors of the tire factory, instructing them on what they needed to collect, how to build their own shelters, and how to survive the severe cold weather and hunger.
It was like a remote control.
Xiao Li and Xiao Sun were very cooperative, but they concealed one thing—the shelter.
If these survivors knew that there was a shelter that could be contacted by them nearby, it was difficult to say whether they could still live as brave, united, and mutually supportive as they were now. They may even harbor malicious ideas and force them to disclose the location of the shelter, or do something even more outrageous.
The credit all went to Xiao Li temporarily, and the existence of the shelter were concealed. He was like an omnipotent genius and won everyone's support.
This was not a bad thing.
But leading a group of survivors was not an easy task after all.
Especially since the collected materials would run out one day, and there was no hope for the end of this endless winter.
The owner of the diary had a clear idea from the beginning. He knew very well that only by entering the shelter could he get absolute safety.
So he tried to persuade Xiao Sun, telling her that shelter was the only way out.
This was not only for her sake, but also for her child.
No matter what the reason was, Xiao Sun was obviously persuaded. When compared with a shelter with a good environment, no one wanted to stay in hell and suffer.
Besides, her husband was inside the shelter, and it was not impossible to get in.
However, the two of them didn't know that once the door of the shelter was closed, it was not so easy to open it. The so-called being able to get in was just wishful thinking.
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