history

Liu Niannian was lying on the bottom of the upside-down boat, covered by an oilcloth. She turned on the flashing flashlight and carefully pried open the file bag as if she was lying in bed reading a novel.

There were bloodstains on the edge of the file bag, and Liu Niannian's hands were covered in blood. At first she thought it was her own blood that stained them, and rubbed them uselessly on her clothes, but later she found that it was the blood on the file bag.

This file may be eighty years old, but the blood is still fresh, and even has its own life, moving on the paper, randomly covering some words and patterns.

The blood seemed to crawl on the human body and eat the living person like a leech.

The black mycelium of Liu Niannian's sun axe shrank into a dot. She called out to Zhu Ning but there was no response. She didn't know whether she couldn't hear what Zhu Ning said, or because she entered the back of the car, Zhu Ning had completely lost track of her.

Liu Niannian turned on the camera and recorded like a loyal investigator outside the wall.

There was a world map in the file bag. It had a layer of plastic film on the surface, but it was still very old. After Liu Niannian unfolded it, she was stunned. She didn't know if other people had seen a map of the old world. This was the first time for her.

The decaying world seemed to be actively destroying information about the past, and she knew nothing about the old world.

The map showed vast expanses of blue ocean and several pieces of land spliced ​​together. It was clearly just an ordinary two-dimensional map, but Liu Niannian seemed to be able to imagine the past, when the map changed from two-dimensional to three-dimensional. Wherever her eyes looked, mountains rose from the ground and the ocean was magnificent. She could hear the sound of the waves, the singing of birds in the woods, the rolling heat of the desert, and the endless grassland.

The sun would rise as usual then, and there would be no empty doors in the sky where people could break through instead of hitting the curtain.

For her, who lives in a narrow world within walls, a vast world slowly unfolds.

Vastness. Liu Niannian's greatest emotion was the vastness. Her heart was surging and her heartbeat was accelerating, but it was not because of fear, but because of shock and nostalgia. That was the land where her ancestors had lived.

She only knew that humans had abandoned eighty percent of the land, but she wasn't sure which part. She greedily touched the edge of the map, but couldn't find her current location.

Where is she now?

Liu Niannian understood the feelings of the investigators outside the wall. Why is this job so dangerous, but so many people are willing to go outside the wall on their own initiative? Once they find any information, it is first-hand and has not been whitewashed. As long as the old world reveals a corner, it can awaken the love for this land in their blood.

It doesn't matter even if the outcome is death. This is where the investigator's initial belief comes from.

At this moment, Liu Niannian seemed to have become one of the countless investigators who had committed adultery.

Liu Niannian didn't notice the bloodstains in the file bag crawling up the back of her hand. She looked at other materials almost greedily. There were also a dozen thick color photos in the file bag.

Mu Han tried to leave as much paper information as possible, and the photos were printed out. It is estimated what information these photos contain, but Liu Niannian is not an archaeologist and her knowledge is limited, so each photo looks more like a display of past folk customs.

There were no highways built in the air, no flying cars floating in mid-air, buildings reaching the sky were uncommon, and eating normal food was not a luxury.

Many of these photos are very ordinary. One photo is of a cornfield. Liu Niannian has never seen so many healthy crops, rather than pollutants that could mutate at any time.

The next picture shows someone working on the edge of a field. After noticing the camera, he looked up with a surprised expression.

An ordinary couple walking their dog on the street, a family of three having dinner, a live report of a traffic accident, a horse racing scene...

Liu Niannian became more and more fascinated as he watched. The difference between the old world and the new world was not particularly big. The technological progress in the past eighty years was limited. With the support of contaminated spores, they developed islands floating in the air and a series of nutrients and healing agents.

In terms of lifestyle, the lower class still lives an old-world life, especially inside the walls some old-world buildings are actually preserved.

Therefore, these photos give people a more retro feeling, clearly telling the viewer that only 80 years have passed since the disaster.

Liu Niannian didn't understand the meaning of the photo and thought it was an IQ test that required a certain arrangement to understand.

After reading it, she subconsciously turned to the back and found a line of small words on the back of each photo: Don't forget history.

Mu Han is not a god. She doesn't know what information is key, or out of selfishness, these dozen photos are meant to show the lives of all beings in a peaceful world.

There was a notebook in the file bag. Liu Niannian was prepared to read the diary or investigate the notes, but Mu Han, as if out of the professional ethics of a journalist, only presented the information and made almost no personal judgment. He would only write something down when he could not help himself.

The notebook is a collection of clippings. The notebook itself is not thick, but it is bulging because of the clippings.

She forgot Pei Shu's warning that investigators outside the wall should read the information carefully after finding it. The more intuitive the information, the more severe the damage to people's spirit. Many investigators went crazy after watching the videotape.

The collection of clippings unfolded, and the printed news headlines were like a knife, with the sharp edges of the fonts very impactful. Liu Niannian's heart contracted, and he began to mutter in his mind, and his eyes became more painful.

With a "click", the tears of blood accumulated in her eyes fell, hit the yellowed newspaper, and quickly made her dizzy.

She seemed to be pulled into the torrent of history in the past. White plastic bags were floating on the blue ocean. TV programs reported vicious injury incidents. War broke out, mushroom clouds rose, and hatred spread. She saw corpses, death, and pollution.

Hatred was like a whirlpool that swept everyone in. Liu Niannian fell deeper and deeper into it, his heart aching. Eighty years ago, they called people with special abilities mutants, and ordinary people knew of their existence.

The X-area mutants' vicious assault incident resulted in the deaths of 800 people.

Passing the Mutant Control Act to divide mutant living areas

The public petitions to eliminate all mutants and return the living space to real humans

Experts Study the Impact of Garbage Pollution and Social Pressure on the Creation of Mutants

The world is dying, the end will come sooner or later, calling for the search for a new home

The past scenes merged with the news headlines. When the headlines faded out, the next scene emerged. Liu Niannian received too much information. His brain almost exploded, his skull shattered, and his brain matter was about to splatter all over the floor.

Among these pictures, there is a close-up of a woman's face. She has short hair that reaches her ears, a stiff expression, and she stares coldly at the screen.

Liu Niannian seemed to be floating in the sea, and suddenly she grabbed a piece of driftwood, because she had seen this person before. When Zhu Ning first ventured out of the wall, he would send her what he saw and heard outside the wall, most of the time it was some photos.

One of the photos was taken under the flying fish line. Zhu Ning's team outside the wall took a warm group photo at sunrise. There was a huge flying fish floating in the sky. When they took the photo, they looked like a group of kittens perched on the roof of a car.

Because Pei Shu and Zhu Ning were in this photo, Liu Niannian kept it and took it out to look at it from time to time. She envied Zhu Ning so much at that time and thought that was freedom.

There were also two identical faces in the photo. When Liu Niannian saw it, she thought Zhu Ning's teammates were twins because she looked exactly like the person in the clipping.

The same short hair, the same stiff body language, she raised her eyes and stared at the screen indifferently, with a divinity that transcended the world.

This person has lived from eighty years ago to the present day and has not changed at all. There are at least three identical versions of her.

Her name was in the newspaper, Bai Cheng.

…

"I've lived longer than you think."

In the underground garbage dump, Bai Cheng said calmly, "I was born when plastic was invented."

"Initially, it took molecular form. Due to its chaotic state, it lacked any individual consciousness. You can imagine me as a human embryo. The researchers were unaware of my existence during development. In fact, from my perspective, humans knew nothing about the world."

Bai Cheng originally only existed in laboratories. With the advancement of technology, plastic assembly lines were created, and people mass-produced plastics and also mass-produced Bai Cheng.

Bai Cheng is everywhere. She feels the world vaguely, and Bai Cheng from all over the world convey information to her.

The first time she really started to act like a human was an accident. There was a patient with pica who was obsessed with eating plastic bags. She only ate plastic instead of rice. When her family tried to stop her, she ate it secretly and vomited it out after eating.

The white plastic bag passes through the esophagus and falls into the stomach, filling the stomach to form the shape of the stomach. Then after a spasm, bile and gastric juice flush out the plastic.

This process may seem disgusting to humans, but for Bai Cheng, the girl with pica is like a 3D printer, accurately depicting the organs of the mouth, esophagus and stomach for her.

The first organ Bai Cheng possessed was a stomach. The plastic bag that fell to the ground shrank and twisted itself into the shape of a stomach relying on its memory.

It was also as a stomach that she began to think about her relationship with the world.

The girl was afraid of being discovered by her family, so she wanted to clean up her vomit, but she found that the plastic bag stained with gastric juice was shrinking and curling up.

In the girl's eyes, Bai Cheng looked like a fetus.

She raised Bai Cheng and put her in a round fish tank. The white plastic bag would spread out like a swimming jellyfish, but most of the time she liked to curl up into a ball, insisting that she was a stomach.

The girl was no longer so radical. She tore the plastic bag into pieces before eating so that she would not vomit after eating.

Bai Cheng didn't understand why she had to overcome her instinct and force herself to eat plastic when the human body was not suitable for eating plastic.

Most of the time, the girl ate the plastic like she was chewing a biscuit, and then looked at Bai Cheng through the fish tank. The girl didn't say anything, but occasionally stretched out her fingers and touched the edge of the fish tank. The plastic bag would touch her through the glass, and then the girl would give a simple smile.

That was also the first time Bai Cheng knew that he could make people laugh, it was that simple.

They just quietly accompany each other and share their loneliness.

Later, she was discovered by her parents and sent to the hospital for compulsory treatment. Her family saw the plastic bag in the fish tank and threw it away in disgust on the same day she was admitted to the hospital. Bai Cheng was buried as garbage.

Buried underground, Bai Cheng encountered more plastic. Plastic was everywhere, underground, in the ocean, and in the sewers. She easily controlled other plastic waste and wandered underground, and finally she found the girl's grave.

The girl with pica died a year later. After treatment, she still refused to change her bad habit of eating plastic bags and died of starvation.

Her parents had another child and she was completely forgotten.

"I used her appearance and name," said Bai Cheng.

In the darkness of the night, a humanoid creature in a plastic bag was half-kneeling in front of a tombstone with Bai Cheng's name written on it. She put her hand on the tombstone, wanting to play the fish tank touching finger game with her, but got no response.

The plastic bags around made a rustling sound.

It was a very horrifying scene. The ground cracked into spider-web-like patterns, and the plastic bag penetrated the girl's body. The layers of skin and flesh wrapped around the bones, entered the rotten mouth, and tried to move downwards. When it reached the stomach, there was even a strange sense of security, as if she had returned home.

That was the first time Bai Cheng crawled out of the grave.

The plastic underground is like a new assembly line. They drill into the grave and solidify into countless white shells, making her immortal forever.

The immortal Bai Cheng was born.

"I have a complete consciousness and thinking mode. Through learning, I have become very similar to humans. Others may think I am a little strange at most."

Bai Cheng started her life in the world. Her favorite thing to do was to lie on the grass in the park and watch the plastic bags floating in the sky. The flying plastic bags looked like swimming jellyfish, reminding her of her days in the fish tank.

"But the good times didn't last long. One day, humans discovered our existence. I guess someone had discovered us before, but it wasn't reported publicly."

Bai Cheng knew that she was abnormal. She mingled with people, but she was just a plastic bag inside. There were many abnormal people, and at that time, the mutants' way of concealing their identities was still very immature.

When Bai Cheng walked on the road, he could tell which were human and which were not, a spider, a mosquito, this was a cat, that was a crocodile.

The world is rotting and creatures are mutating.

Bai Cheng carefully hides herself. She has no hostility towards anyone. Non-natural humans can't help but eat people, but Bai Cheng has no appetite at all. On the contrary, as human society develops, Bai Cheng's power becomes stronger.

As garbage increases, microplastics enter the human body after recycling, and she can even manipulate corpses.

But Bai Cheng has her own drawbacks. Her memory is very short, and she loses part of it every time she wakes up after death. At that time, the conflict between humans and mutants has become increasingly serious. Always losing memory means always being killed.

"To store memories, I created my own main brain."

She knew she needed a terminal so she could truly become immortal.

"What you see is my main brain." Bai Cheng said.

Bai Cheng sacrificed herself. She stood at the edge of a landfill filled with plastic models. She knew this was her own grave, so she buried herself with her own hands.

Bai Cheng jumped into the landfill and closed her eyes. All the living Bai Chengs would report to her.

"I learned about human knowledge and objectified myself. It's strange that among all living things, only humans objectify others."

She was a tool herself, and after knowing freedom, it would be painful for her to become a tool again.

"There's one good thing about this. I'm recording my own history, and I'm also inadvertently recording your history."

"What you are going through now has happened countless times in the past, and we keep repeating the same mistakes."

After Bai Cheng set up the main brain, the conflict between mutants and humans expanded to an irreconcilable point. The mutants believed that they were more powerful and why should they be controlled. The first vicious incident occurred in a famous business district. The indiscriminate attacks of the mutants made the moderates unwilling to admit that mutants were part of the human race.

After the violent suppression, strict regulations were introduced. The mutants were expelled to a centralized management area, and humans allocated a portion of land for them to survive.

"This is the prototype of the high wall." Bai Cheng said.

Zhu Ning had always been curious about how people built high walls in the first place. Even the most efficient execution would not have created such a complex wall structure in such a short time.

It turns out that it was not built from scratch, but renovated on the original basis.

The high wall that protects humans was originally a prison used to imprison mutants.

"The initial measures seemed to be very effective. Mutants entered an independent living space, everyone was clearly divided, and the idea of ​​eliminating all mutants was growing louder and louder, but this was simply impossible."

"Because we come from you," Bai Cheng said, "We are you. Just as microplastics have entered everyone's body, everyone is already carrying pollution factors. All it takes is a fuse to detonate."

"You are still us, there is no difference at all, we are the same kind."

After the mutants were isolated, the mutations did not disappear, but became more and more numerous due to high social pressure, unhealthy lifestyles, and increasingly serious environmental pollution.

People are just trying their best to control their sanity and pretend to be normal.

"Where are the nodes?" Zhu Ning asked.

Pollution has existed for many years, but it only broke out in a concentrated manner eighty years ago. There must be something special about it.

Bai Cheng: "People have discovered the true purpose of the contamination spores."

In the ancient past, there were very few mutants. People knew that there was a special group of people, but they would not be alarmed because the probability of encountering them was too low.

At that time, a small number of dead people would release contaminated spores. They didn't know what they were, and different countries had different explanations. Most of them believed it was a miracle, or that it was the soul of a dead god. Some tribes even worshipped the contaminated spores.

As social civilization developed rapidly, everyone became a part of the exploited population. The number of mutants increased, and the possibility of releasing contaminated spores after death became greater and greater. They had enough samples to analyze and study.

"Some mutants and ordinary humans have therefore formed a united front. They hope to obtain more contaminated spores and monopolize production, so they have set their sights on the mutant living areas."

"Back then, there wasn't so much high technology inside the wall. Some mutants actually wanted to live inside the wall. It was more comfortable for them. They didn't realize they were becoming meat in a factory."

"I've already said that what you're experiencing now has happened countless times in history. The same concept has been escalated countless times. The founders of the Federation definitely considered this history."

"But they made a mistake," Bai Cheng said. "There's a reason why there were so few contamination spores in the past. At that time, the giants were still alive, and humans were living in the body of a mature giant. If they used resources in an orderly manner, they could have survived for hundreds or thousands of years. But humans were intensively exploiting the contamination spores. The contamination spores must kill the source, so they had to be artificially polluted. When the contamination spores erupted in large numbers, it meant the giants were beginning to die, and we are now living in the aftermath of their demise."

But greedy people are still demanding, whether they are mutants or ordinary people, what they ultimately exploit is the land under their feet.

Mutants declared war on human society, war broke out, hatred spread, and wars were everywhere.

At that time, the most produced thing on the assembly line was weapons. Hatred brought greater pressure, and pressure brought greater hatred, which snowballed and made the world unbearable.

Then a large-scale pollution broke out completely and spread at an extremely fast speed, like a venting of the female giant before her death.

Those who were busy fighting for resources and those who were busy venting their hatred faced the world for the first time. They finally let each other go, but it was too late to save themselves.

Blood-red contaminated spores floated under the black mushroom cloud. A photographer captured this astonishing scene. The contaminated spores swept across the world like catkins, and the infection speed was too fast.

Mutants are able to maintain their sanity after being infected. That large-scale pollution mutated into powerful creatures that extended their tentacles to kill everyone indiscriminately. Even mutants could not survive in such an extreme environment.

They created monster after monster, and in front of higher-level creatures, there was no difference between strong ants and weak ants.

Mutants and natural humans acknowledged each other as human, but what was the point at the time?

"When humans are destroying the world, the world is also destroying us." Zhu Ning repeated Bai Cheng's original words. Only now did she understand the true meaning of this sentence.

Zhu Ning has always wondered whether Yongsheng Pharmaceutical was hiding some secrets, and what the company had done before the great pollution came. Now it seems that it was just involved in it. Many large companies must have done so back then, but Yongsheng Pharmaceutical has survived to this day.

It was not a single company or individual that destroyed the world, but the apocalypse created by everyone together.

Bai Cheng nodded and continued recounting the history of that year: "They had no choice but to head higher, as the contaminated spores had a floating height. A race called mutants opened the wall. While natural humans possessed superior technological prowess, mutants possessed even greater abilities. The mutants welcomed all outsiders to seek refuge. Finally, everyone united in a desperate attempt to find a way to survive."

The High Wall Project came later. The mother of the new world represented by Liu Niannian almost merged the two types of people. They wanted to seek a path to symbiosis.

No wonder Huo Jinsheng supports this path. In her opinion, the former enemies are cooperating, and the irreconcilable contradictions must have a window for reconciliation. This is the result of their labor.

Zhu Ning was silent for a moment. Now half robot, she didn't need to spend time to digest Bai Cheng's words. She asked, "I remember that eighty years ago, when humans built the survivor base, the pollution disappeared briefly."

Zhu Ning looked up at Bai Cheng and asked, "Did you do this?"

Zhu Ning only had a vague impression of past history, and it was difficult to distinguish the truth from the falsehood in what was passed down orally. One thing in particular was that they said that after the major pollution outbreak, the pollution disappeared for a period of time, which left a buffer period for humans to build a survivor base. Otherwise, people would not even have had a chance to escape.

Now that I think about it, the only person who could do this is Bai Cheng. Only someone whose every molecule has infiltrated the entire world can possess such terrifying power.

Bai Cheng: "I did it."

Bai Cheng sensed the female giant at the same time she died. Such a vast land had a specific outline in her perception, as if Bai Cheng witnessed the death of every cell.

The female giant belongs to all mankind when she is alive, but belongs only to Bai Cheng after her death.

…

Liu Niannian's nerves trembled in the cave, and her eyes stayed on a line of words for a long time.

Pollution breaks out, the undead Bai Cheng buys time