Chapter 122 They all mentioned the same thing...

Midnight, City C.

When the alarm clock rang, Mo Chen quickly jumped out of bed, turned off the alarm, and connected his mobile phone, tablet, and other electronic devices to the charging cable.

There was a list on her bedside table, detailing what she needed to do within an hour of receiving a phone call.

Charging, boiling water, heating food with an induction cooker... After finishing all this, she glanced at the time, which was exactly 12:10.

She knew she couldn't connect to the internet for ten minutes after the call came in, so she had gotten into the habit of scheduling other things for that time.

The kettle whirred, and the rice cooker and induction cooker were also put to use. For the next hour, these devices would run continuously, boiling and sterilizing as much water as possible that had been stored throughout the day.

While waiting for the water to boil, Mo Chen opened his phone and refreshed the page while eating.

Mo Chen's area was unfortunately assigned to use electricity in the early morning, which was quite unlucky. If he wanted to eat something hot, he had to wait until the early morning, disrupting his sleep schedule and meals.

As a typical young person of our time, Mo Chen used to stay up late and eat late-night snacks all the time before the apocalypse, and he would feel uncomfortable if he suddenly had to go to bed early.

But now that she's suddenly being forced to get up in the early hours of the morning to eat, she's started to yearn for a healthy lifestyle.

Fortunately, the local government promised that the electricity usage times for different areas will be rotated periodically every two weeks to ensure fairness.

After persistently refreshing for six minutes, Mo Chen finally managed to connect to the internet.

After checking and replying to the timely messages from family and friends on the chat software, Mo Chen glanced at the pinned group chat and found that hundreds of messages had accumulated.

There are quite a few people in the group, but they all log on at different times, so the number of people online at the same time is limited, making it impossible to have a proper conversation. Most people just summarize the key information and leave it in the group, then leave after a brief chat.

Therefore, although there are only a few hundred entries, the amount of content inside is terrifying.

Mo Chen's expression turned serious. He forced himself to click in, already prepared to see bad news.

I wonder how many people died while she was offline this time...

Mo Chen is a recent college graduate. On the afternoon of the day the virus broke out, many classmates in their university group chat started asking for help. Unfortunately, there were too many people in the group chat, and all kinds of messages were pushed up as soon as they were sent. Many people sent the same message repeatedly, and many messages were buried. Noticing this, Mo Chen simply made a shared document to summarize the requests for help.

As it turned out, this method was very effective. The document was quickly forwarded to other group chats at the alma mater, and graduate students, teachers, and even teachers' family members sent out requests for help.

By that evening, the document had been shared in other group chats in the same city and even the same province, accumulating thousands of requests for help.

Although many people across the country do this, Mo Chen's document was created early, with a clear, concise, and easy-to-understand format, and it was disseminated widely by chance.

That very night, countless people from other places came to her asking if she could copy her format to create a help document for other provinces and cities.

Human life is at stake, so Mo Chen naturally agreed.

Because so many people were accessing the documents, formatting errors or accidental editing of others' content would frequently occur. Therefore, she organized a volunteer team specifically for maintaining the documents. She even created a Weibo account to gather documents from all provinces and cities across the country, both to promote the channel and to recruit volunteers.

The account named "@Spark Mutual Aid Documents" gained a lot of attention overnight, with countless influential bloggers helping to repost it.

Before the nationwide power rationing policy was implemented, in less than a day, hundreds of people had joined the volunteer team, and the account gained millions more followers.

After the power outage began, under Mo Chen's organization, the volunteers quickly divided the work according to their respective call times, ensuring that someone was online 24 hours a day.

To outsiders, this is already a considerable achievement.

However, Mo Chen, the organizer, was not happy.

When this work was just starting, she was very excited and secretly thought that her actions might help many people.

But over the next two days, as she watched the entries on the document increase and decrease, she began to realize that the vast majority of the entries were deleted not because the person seeking help had received assistance, but because the person seeking help had been confirmed dead, and the volunteers manually deleted the entries.

Many more people seeking help disappeared after registering, their attempts to contact them failing, but Mo Chen could already guess their fate.

Those entries that were never updated gradually sank to the bottom, like a long list of dead people.

It was only then that Mo Chen realized that access to more information also meant more pain.

The heart-wrenching pleas in Weibo private messages and comments, and the names of people dying in despair while waiting, all made Mo Chen hesitant to log into his account.

She began to be afraid to see those things.

Mo Chen persevered because of her sense of responsibility, but also fell into great pain because of her lack of empathy.

When Mo Chen logged on yesterday, she heard news that almost drove her to the brink of collapse.

A group of civilian volunteers who saw her document rushed to her rescue, but on the way they unexpectedly encountered an infected that moved incredibly fast. Of the eight people, only one managed to escape back, and that person also had a bite wound on his body. After reporting the death of his companion, he locked himself in his room and mutated two hours later.

This made Mo Chen involuntarily begin to doubt whether he had really done something wrong.

She couldn't control her thoughts: if there hadn't been the document, would those eight people have survived...?

This virus is different from previous natural disasters; civilian rescue teams are simply unable to intervene. Perhaps the right thing to do is for everyone to stay home and wait for official assistance...

She hadn't had a good rest all day, but when the new day reached twelve o'clock, Mo Chen still went online on time.

Unexpectedly, when I opened the group chat, I was greeted not with death announcements, but with a series of encouraging messages.

[Update: In City D, 47 people who sought help deleted their posts today, saying they had been safely rescued. Among them, 30 received official assistance, and 17 were rescued by unknown volunteers.]

[458 people deleted entries in City S today... What the heck?? A whole bunch of entries suddenly disappeared. I thought someone accidentally deleted them.]

[In City A today, 53 people seeking help were rescued, 31 of whom were rescued by civilian volunteers. Have these civilian volunteers become incredibly skilled?]

[The city of S mentioned above is a bit scary.]

Why are there suddenly so many more people rescued today? I compared the official rescue numbers, and there wasn't a significant increase, so the problem lies with civilian volunteers. But after asking around, all the familiar rescue teams in the city said it wasn't them.

[Great news! Do you remember the person I mentioned before who asked for help? The one with the incredibly agile infected outside the door? That girl is so kind; she didn't hide anything and told the truth, which meant no one dared to go and check on her. To be honest, I was almost in despair... But she was actually rescued today, and by a group of students! I almost cried when I heard the news.]

[Congratulations! That's great! But seriously, these students are incredibly brave!]

[He's like a warrior fallen from the sky!]

Go check the square; someone posted something.

The group chat had been dulled by the constant stream of death messages, but today it was more lively, and the volunteers were chatting in a relaxed atmosphere.

Of course, the number of people rescued as listed above is only the number recorded in the Spark Mutual Aid document; there are many more people who have never registered with them.

Those who leave requests for help in shared documents are mostly skilled at using the internet, and they certainly won't only ask for help in this one place.

Their requests for help were left in documents, chat groups, social media platforms...

This also resulted in the fact that although the students from Fangzhou brought the information from elsewhere, some of the final results were reflected in the documents.

Mo Chen found it increasingly unbelievable. On this day, the number of people rescued in all provinces and cities across the country suddenly surged! Moreover, with the number of rescued far exceeding that of the previous two days and the number of infected people on the road also increasing significantly, not a single volunteer who went to the rescue was injured or killed.

What exactly happened?

Upon seeing the last sentence in the group chat, she hurriedly opened Weibo.

There were actually very few new topics appearing on the homepage. Even if people had time to go online, most of them would no longer waste their time browsing and forwarding Weibo posts. But on this day, many of the bloggers she followed forwarded several posts here and there.

The content of these posts is very similar, mostly feedback brought back by people who had previously asked for help on the platform.

First, they thanked everyone for their concern and help in sharing the message, stating that they/their family members were safe. Then, they provided information about the rescuers. Mo Chen, with his keen eye, noticed that nearly half of the people mentioned the same keyword—

Fangzhou.

Whether it was out of tacit agreement or not, before Sun Wei and others created their accounts, the students had already left this name when faced with people who were eager to thank them for their help.

Those who mentioned Fangzhou used words like "extremely young," "student," "strong," and "well-equipped" when describing the rescuers.

Some people went alone, while others went in groups of three or five. Judging from the location of the IP address of the people seeking help and the time of posting, they could not possibly be the same group of people, but their characteristics were surprisingly similar.

Mo Chen was a little confused.

Where did this mysterious organization that suddenly appeared come from?

Ultimately, a post from City S answered her question.

The other party was a mother who had previously posted a plea for help searching for her daughter. In her post, she mentioned in detail that the rescuers were students from a local university in S City called Fangzhou. It is said that the entire student body of their university spontaneously formed a large volunteer organization, with some people compiling information on requests for help and others forming groups to go out and provide assistance.

They not only rescued the blogger's daughter and in-laws, but also more than a dozen other people who were trapped.

After reading it, Mo Chen felt both admiration and confusion.

She was amazed by the kindness and courage of the Fangzhou students, and also surprised by their abilities.

So, those rescue cases outside of S City, were they rescued by students on their way back to school?

That's impossible.

Mo Chen let his mind wander, then chuckled, quickly dismissing the idea, unaware that he had already guessed the truth.

Regardless, the name Fang Zhou was deeply etched in her heart.

Nearly twenty minutes had passed, and she dared not waste any more time. Just as she was about to finish her work, her phone vibrated; it was a call coming in.

The caller ID shows that the caller is from City S.

Mo Chen's heart stirred, and a strange intuition suddenly arose within him.

She pressed the answer button: "Hello?"

A clear female voice came from the other end: "Hello, are you Ms. Mo, the holder of the 'Spark Mutual Aid Document' account?"

"I am."

"Here's the thing, I'm the contact person for the volunteer organization 'Fangzhou,' my surname is Tian. The situation is urgent, and we were worried that you might not see my private message, so we contacted the platform to get your phone number. We're really sorry."

The young lady apologized and then gave a brief introduction to Fangzhou.

Upon hearing those two words, Mo Chen's eyes widened. When she heard that Fangzhou had nearly two thousand volunteers, each of whom possessed the ability to independently combat infected individuals, Mo Chen's breathing became rapid.

She fully understood what such a force meant.

“…We are currently compiling requests for help from all over the country, and after we finish compiling them, we will distribute them to the volunteer teams we have on hand…I would like to ask you to cooperate with us in compiling the information we have on hand…” Little Freckles Tian Tian continued speaking.

Mo Chen realized what was happening and interrupted her excitedly, "No problem!"

Mo Chen is very smart. The fact that Fang Zhou was able to contact the platform directly and get her contact information means that it must have connections with the authorities, or at least be trustworthy.

As for the information in the documents they wanted, it was all publicly available; the most Mo Chen needed to contribute was some manpower.

What's there to hesitate about?

What they have no shortage of is manpower.

"You can make us do whatever you want."

Thinking of the thousands of people across the country who were saved by Fang Zhou today, Mo Chen almost cried.

For the first time in days, she saw hope.