Apocalyptic Hoarding Diary

Chapter 528 Disaster Victims

Xu Xiaoyan's pupils shrank suddenly, and she was completely stunned.

"We were lucky this time," Blue Moon said. "Before it was our turn, the troops arrived, and all the guards ran away, without even taking the cage keys with them."

When I came out of the cage, my legs were so weak that I could barely stand. I crawled several steps on the ground before someone helped me up.

Lan Yue looked at Xu Xiaoyan, and tears welled up in her eyes again. "Xiaoyan, even if it had been half a day later, some of us might have already had our organs harvested."

In the days following Lan Yue's return, Xu Xiaoyan would open her shop in the mornings and spend the afternoons with her, waiting for her to recover.

During this period, Xu Xiaoyan noticed that several groups of people had entered Qing City. These newcomers all had one thing in common: they were dressed in rags.

Their clothes were wrinkled, their trouser legs were covered in mud, and their shoes were worn out of shape; some were tied with rope, while others were simply barefoot.

The luggage they carried was similar: snakeskin bags, woven bags, plastic buckets, and bundles wrapped in bed sheets.

Xu Xiaoyan stood at the shop entrance, watching these people walk by, a feeling she couldn't quite describe welling up inside her.

"It took us forty whole days," a bearded man said to someone sitting on the roadside steps.

"I crossed three rivers and climbed two mountains. There was a section of road that was completely flooded. The water was up to my chest, so I held my luggage above my head and swam across."

The person next to him was a young man, tanned dark, who rolled up his trouser leg to reveal a long scar on his calf:

"I slipped and fell while crossing a ditch, and got a long gash from a rock at the bottom of the water."

There was no way to bandage it at the time, so I tore a strip of cloth from my clothes and wrapped it around myself. It wasn't until three days later that I had time to find some dry grass and bandage it up simply.

Xu Xiaoyan's gaze swept across their faces, and her heart skipped a beat. Floods were no small matter.

She recalled the flood discharge she had seen downstream that day, with muddy yellow water pouring down from the dam, flooding the riverbanks, swallowing the ditches, and overflowing the earthen embankments.

It was just the discharge of water from a river, and she almost couldn't escape.

What would it mean if an entire region were flooded, countless rivers overflowed at the same time, and countless villages were submerged simultaneously?

Xu Xiaoyan's fingers unconsciously tightened around the door frame.

She stood at the door and listened for a while longer, her heart growing colder with each passing moment.

"Where did you get the food?" asked a woman sitting on her bundle.

"The land is completely flooded. Everything we planted in the sinkhole is submerged. Everyone is running out. Those who can run have run, and those who can't..."

"What?" someone asked.

The older sister didn't answer. She lowered her head, took a bite of dry food, and chewed for a long time before swallowing.

A middle-aged man squatted by the roadside, drawing incomprehensible lines on the ground with a twig in his hand. He didn't look at anyone.

"I have something to tell you, but don't spread it around."

Several people gathered around.

"In our area, people have started...cannibalism again."

The middle-aged man's voice wasn't loud, but everyone present heard it, and no one spoke.

"It started with eating dead people," the middle-aged man said, drawing a circle on the ground with a branch, then drawing an X inside the circle.

"When the flood first started, some people drowned, and their bodies floated on the water and no one collected them."

Some people were so hungry that they brought up the corpses... and later there weren't enough dead people to eat."

The tree branch drew several smaller circles outside the main circle. "Then they started killing people. When you weren't looking, they'd knock you unconscious with a stick, drag you away, and then..."

"Enough! Stop talking!" someone shouted, their voice high-pitched and shrill.

The middle-aged man shut up, threw the branch on the ground, stood up, dusted off his pants, and walked away without looking back.

The remaining people stood there, looking at each other, none of them knowing what to say.

Xu Xiaoyan leaned against the door frame, her hands clenched tightly. Compared to cannibalism, she was more worried about something else: floods were often associated with plagues.

After the flood, the water source was polluted, and feces, garbage, and the carcasses of drowned animals were all mixed in with the floodwaters. Bacteria and viruses multiplied wildly in the warm and humid environment.

These people came from the disaster area, crossed flood-soaked land, and waded through polluted water sources. Did none of them get sick?

Are there people who are already sick, but insist on saying they are healthy in order to enter Qing City?

Xu Xiaoyan's gaze swept over the newcomers. The man with a full beard was coughing quite frequently, and the older woman's complexion was abnormally sallow.

On the young man's exposed arm, there were several red and swollen marks left by something that had bitten him.

The more she looked, the more uneasy she felt, and the more she felt that everyone carried an unseen danger.

She wasn't a doctor and couldn't distinguish between a common cold and a deadly plague; she only knew she couldn't take the risk.

Xu Xiaoyan retreated back into the shop almost against the wall, quickly walked to the door, gently closed the glass door, and then locked it from the inside.

Then she walked to the roller shutter door, grasped the doorknob, and slowly pulled the shutter door down. The metal door made a slight rattling sound, which sounded particularly jarring in the quiet afternoon.

Xu Xiaoyan sat behind the stove, holding her mobile phone. The screen showed her account balance of 2300 yuan.

The day after tomorrow is the rent due date, and given the current situation, she doesn't plan to stay in C-12 any longer.

Although this location is good, close to the trading center, with high foot traffic, it's easy to do business here.

But now, the phrase "good location" has gone from an advantage to a disadvantage.

High foot traffic means high risk; being close to the trading center means being close to newcomers and potential sources of infection.

As more and more people arrived, temporary tents were set up in the square of the trading center.

People of all kinds were sitting, lying, or curled up everywhere, on benches, steps, and even on the grass next to green belts.

She opened the trading platform and began placing a large number of orders.

Rice, flour, cooking oil, convenience foods, fresh vegetables, eggs, toilet paper, toothpaste, soap, disinfectant, medical masks, sanitary napkins, etc.

She added items to her shopping cart one by one, and after adding each item, she would think about what she might have forgotten.

The online shopping platform had a wide variety of items, but there was one downside: there were purchase limits on everything. Soon, the amount in her shopping cart jumped to 798 yuan.

She glanced at it, placed the order, made the payment, and confirmed the delivery address as store C-12.

A notification pops up: "Your order has been confirmed. The estimated delivery time is 4:50 a.m. the following day. Please keep your phone accessible."