A shrill alarm suddenly blared, but it wasn't from the Meteorological Bureau. Xiao Yi watched the city surveillance footage show the bronze sculptures on Nanjing Road Pedestrian Street swaying in the torrent, the water already reaching above an adult's waist. Farther away, on a cross-river bridge, an out-of-control truck crashed through the guardrail, leaving a pale trail of fall in the torrential rain.
Lin Xiaoxia stumbled back, her lip bleeding from her own bite. "The director said the early warning system requires joint signatures from seven departments, and it's two in the morning, and there's no way we can find anyone..."
Xiao Yi grabbed his coat and rushed into the elevator, the number keys burning his palms. The water in the underground garage had already reached his calves, and his car drifted like a stranded fish in the murky water. The car radio suddenly erupted with an electrical hum, and the female anchor's trembling voice cut through the rain: "Breaking news... The Meteorological Bureau has confirmed... This rainstorm is a once-in-a-millennium event..."
The windshield wipers whirred frantically, unable to wipe away the curtain of water pouring down. When Xiao Yi finally emerged from the underground tunnel, a terrifying scene flashed in his rearview mirror: the entire green belt had collapsed like melted butter, revealing the hollowed-out subway tunnel beneath. In the murky vortex, an orange carriage was squeezed and deformed like toothpaste.
His phone vibrated at that moment. It was a group message from the Municipal Emergency Office: "Please remain calm and stay home." Xiao Yi sneered and threw the phone towards the passenger seat. The traffic lights at the intersection ahead flickered in the water, like the luminescent tentacles of some deep-sea creature.
Suddenly, a sharp whine of twisted metal echoed from the left. Xiao Yi swerved, watching as the glass curtain wall of an office building peeled away in pieces, reflecting strange, prismatic light in the torrential rain. The hexagonal fragments spun in the air, carving spiderweb-like cracks across the hood of his car.
The time on the dashboard jumped to 03:47, just 23 minutes after he left the weather bureau. The red crosses on the navigation map, indicating road closures, now covered the entire city.
The water temperature warning light on the dashboard suddenly lit up, and Xiao Yi slammed on the brakes, causing the wheels to create fan-shaped ripples in the water that flooded the road. Through the front windshield, which was pounded into a spider web by hail, he saw the asphalt road five meters ahead bulging.
It was a twitching movement that defied common sense, like a giant beast tumbling underground. Hydraulic forces squeezed concrete slabs against each other, sending three-meter-high jets of black water gushing from the cracks. Xiao Yi instinctively shifted into reverse, only to hear the whine of metal fatigue from the gearbox.
"Get out!" He unbuckled his seatbelt and slammed the door open as the car sank. Mud instantly filled the cab. The floating phone screen still displayed the Municipal Engineering Institute app—at this moment, the pressure in the city's underground pipeline network had exceeded twice the red alert level.
Xiao Yi grasped a ginkgo branch by the roadside and suddenly realized why these century-old trees could stand firm in the hurricane. Their roots had long since grown alongside the city, entwined underground with drainage pipes, cable trenches, and even subway tunnels, forming a vast symbiotic organism. At this moment, these roots were transforming into thousands of flood channels in the flood.
A flash of lightning split the sky, illuminating the outer wall of the office building in front of him with a purple-white electric light. Xiao Yi's pupils shrank suddenly. He saw that fine water droplets were oozing from the seams of the glass curtain wall on the surface of the building. This was a sign of inert gas leakage inside the double-layer insulating glass.
"It's going to collapse!" he yelled at the elderly woman staggering in the middle of the road, but his voice was crushed by the thunder. In the basket of vegetables in the elderly woman's arms, bright red tomatoes bobbed in the water like some strange buoy.
Xiao Yi had just taken two steps when a high-frequency vibration suddenly struck him from beneath his feet. He was all too familiar with this frequency—the resonance waves of the subway tunnel. Sure enough, the ground twenty meters away suddenly collapsed, and a burst water pipe sent a white car careening ten meters into the air. As the car rolled, Xiao Yi caught a glimpse of the fluorescent sticker on the child safety seat in the back seat.
He leaped into a roadside convenience store, and the bottles of water on the shelves sprayed at him like machine gun bullets. The fish tank behind the cash register exploded with a bang, and a blood-red dragonfish drew a mournful arc in mid-air, its scales reflecting the last bit of green light from the automatic door before it powered down.
"Help..." A faint cry for help came from behind the refrigerator. Xiao Yi groped his way forward in the darkness, his fingertips touching sticky blood. The pregnant woman was half-leaning on an overturned shelf, her amniotic fluid mixed with blood snaking across the ground, forming an eerie, pale pink stream.
"Take a deep breath and follow my rhythm." Xiao Yi took off his shirt and tied it around her thigh artery. Suddenly, he noticed the name tag on the pregnant woman's neck - technician in the Shanghai Metro Operations Department. This identity would have a crucial impact in the following chapters.
A teeth-grinding sound of twisting metal echoed from the convenience store's exterior. Xiao Yi looked up and saw water seeping through the ventilation ducts. He immediately tore off all the plastic bags and inflated them into a makeshift lifebuoy. This technique, originating from submarine rescue, was something he learned while serving at the Naval Weather Observatory.
The moment they rushed out of the store, the entire glass curtain wall collapsed like a waterfall. Xiao Yi pushed the pregnant woman into the municipal inspection shaft, but was cut open on the back by the flying glass shards. He smelled the strange smell of salty blood mixed with underground methane, a smell that would save his life three days later.
Deep in the tunnel, the water surged at a rate of two meters per second. Xiao Yi touched the raised plaque on the shaft wall, his fingertips tracing the inscribed text: "Constructed by the Second Municipal Bureau in 1987." Suddenly, a memory struck him like lightning—the engineering blueprints he had seen in the archives last week indicated that this tunnel had been filled in three years ago.
The pregnant woman suddenly grabbed his wrist and said, "Listen!" Amid the roar of the turbulent water, a rhythmic metallic knocking could be heard. Xiao Yi pressed his ear against the pipe wall, his face suddenly changing. This was the Morse code rhythm unique to underground air-raid shelters, but all of Shanghai's civil defense facilities had been digitized as early as 2001.
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