37
Su Yun opened his eyes again.
The curtains were opened a little, and dim light flowed into the room from the gap. Small white round lights were embedded in the snow-white ceiling, glowing faintly in the thin morning light.
Everything was the same as Su Yun remembered, even the glasses on the bedside table seemed so familiar yet strange. How long had it been since he last wore glasses? So long that he almost forgot that he was once nearsighted.
Su Yun climbed out of the quilt. He was wearing familiar pajamas. The monotonous solid-colored fabric had no patterns. The clock on the wall showed a familiar time. This was his room, the small apartment where he used to live.
Later, he participated in an archaeological expedition abroad, and then encountered an accident and went to Haishi to recuperate. It has been a long time since he returned.
I came back here directly...
Su Yun stepped barefoot on the floor. The first thing he did was to lower his head to look for his shadow, but unexpectedly, his shadow disappeared.
Su Yun squatted down in some surprise, and touched the floor clumsily, as if he could find his shadow in this way. However, Su Yun could clearly feel the gaze everywhere, but he could not find his little shadow.
Did you run out to play?
Su Yun stood up and drew open the curtains. The cold sunlight suddenly leaked into his room. He dusted off the dust on his hands and turned to walk out of the bedroom door.
The living room, kitchen, dining room... all the rooms were covered with a thin layer of dust, just like the bedroom. The vase on the table had long dried up, leaving only withered branches. The fallen petals had long dried into dry red crumbs. There was a pair of scissors next to the crystal vase.
Scissors……
Su Yun suddenly remembered that a long time ago, his half-sister had said that she would help him trim the branches of the flowers so that they could stay fresh for a long time.
What time is it now?
Cell phone—he had to find his cell phone.
Su Yun easily found his cell phone on the table in the living room, but as expected, his phone was turned off due to a power outage. Su Yun looked for an outlet to charge it, but was surprised to find that all the sockets in the house had no power. Not only that, all electrical appliances were unusable.
This is very unusual.
It would be fine if there was no power, his phone would never stop working. After all, the game was still in the phone, unless... they changed the window.
Su Yun looked up at his reflection in the living room glass door. His long black hair and silver
Eyes.
Su Yun lowered his eyes and indulged his hearing.
Within a radius of 100 meters, there was no sound of human heartbeat or breathing.
36
Su Yun changed into casual clothes, opened the door and walked down the stairs. He saw the houses of other residents in the same building: wide-open doors, dirty floors, glass everywhere, hurried footprints, and not uncommon bloodstains... Everything seemed to indicate a disaster.
Losing his shadow made Su Yun feel particularly confident. He just walked downstairs. The flower bed outside the apartment was already overgrown with weeds, which showed that the property management was a thing of the past hundred or eighty years.
There was a pool of black blood at the entrance of the apartment. Su Yun stared at the blood in a trance, and the tragic scene at that time naturally came to his mind - a frail woman fell from the roof in a mad state, and then her head hit the edge of the stairs, killing her on the spot.
Su Yun was stunned. He looked up at the deserted community road in front of him. Scenes flashed before his eyes quickly. They were people with their families. They should have been the social elites who were either rich or noble, but each of them looked panic-stricken and frightened. They fled with all their belongings, screaming and crying.
This is...what happened...
The garage had long been empty, with only a few cars left. Even the remaining cars had all been smashed. Su Yun walked out of the gate of the community. The streets outside the community were not much better than those inside. Occasionally, a few wild cats and dogs would run across the weed-covered green belts. The ground was littered with discarded things, feces and urine, and even half-rotten corpses.
Su Yun walked towards his school and saw similar scenes along the way, except - there was no one.
Not a single person.
The city lost all its inhabitants, so it lost its water and electricity, it stopped functioning... it died.
Su Yun passed by the once most prosperous commercial street. The tragedy in the square was even worse than that in the community. Almost all the windows of the large shopping malls were smashed. Everywhere he looked, there were traces of violence. There was no intact merchandise anywhere within reach.
Su Yun stopped in front of the home appliance city. He looked up at the huge screen hanging high on the ceiling. He stared at the screen in a trance, and the scene from a few months ago flashed on the screen.
[… Huai City, Yin City, Zhuang City, all the first-tier cities above have received official nuclear strike threats. Citizens are requested to migrate in an orderly manner according to the dispatch. We mourn for Hai City. We will never admit defeat. Our country has…]
A man in black was reading the document aloud. His voice was deep and powerful, but the sentences he read out were so desperate.
Su Yun was stunned.
What is he talking about?
...nuclear strike?
35
Su Yun walked in this city of death for a long time and got enough information.
Two months ago, the world was experiencing a financial collapse, with public opinion wavering between control and loss of control; a year ago, large-scale conflicts began, with the fourth one quietly approaching; five months ago, nuclear weapons were used, and the situation began to spiral out of control.
The sea city was razed to the ground four months ago, and the city under Su Yun's feet was deserted because of the threat.
The social order in this vast country is in jeopardy, and the collapse of regimes abroad is everywhere.
Su Yun looked up at the strange, clean sky, and suddenly he didn't understand why the world had become like this.
Was it because he destroyed Paradise Island and the Ark? The hysterical voices of Lili Marlene and Tang Chao seemed to ring in his ears again. They said something about the coming... Oh, they said that destroying the Ark would bring about the next war.
It’s actually true.
34
Su Yun stopped in front of the school gate. He saw a moment of silence and painful protests. Anger and despair filled the young faces. These shadows of the past passed by him quickly. They roared loudly and cried wildly.
Su Yun saw his half-brother Li Haochu in the crowd. Li Haochu walked up to him and stood still, a look of mixed shock and anger.
This is Li Haochu’s old shadow, his real self had long left this city.
"Brother, come with me." Li Haochu whispered, his voice was extremely hoarse, as if he had two pieces of iron in his mouth, "Let's go back to the north, there... there are fortifications."
Su Yun turned his head to look at Li Haochu's appearance. Countless shadows of people coming and going were superimposed on him. When the shadows of countless times were superimposed on one point in time, it created a colorful world like a kaleidoscope.
Very strange.
“Don’t be willful!” Li Haochu suddenly shouted loudly, and then he coughed uncomfortably. After catching his breath, he lowered his voice to a level that was barely audible. “Do you know how difficult it is to get a ticket?! Ordinary people can’t do it at all. If you don’t want many people to go, the world will be in chaos.”
There was a period of silence afterwards, and Li Haochu's expression seemed to be on the verge of collapse. This was the first time he had lost his composure in front of Su Yun since he became an adult.
"…What's wrong with your illness? You're missing a hand.
Or a broken leg! "Li Haochu suddenly exploded, he stretched out his hand, veins exposed, "Mom can't let you go, and so can those people in the Su family. We are a family, aren't we? Even if it's to repay my parents for giving birth to me!"
Unfortunately, Li Haochu's hand did not fall on Su Yun.
"Doctor Wang has passed away, and your grandfather's grave is not here. What are you doing here? Are you going to die with the whole city?!" Li Haochu's eyes were red. "I beg you not to be stubborn at this time! You must come with me! I can't let you stay here and die!"
Looking at Li Haochu like this, Su Yun wanted to agree, but this was a replay of the scene, and soon Li Haochu disappeared in front of him. He must have returned empty-handed, right?
The sad monologue disappeared, and when Su Yun looked again, he could only see the desolate school gate.
There were still a few human heartbeats in the school, but Su Yun didn't want to go and take a look.
Is Dr. Wang dead? Perhaps because of the previous and subsequent blows and the rioting crowd, she was already an elderly woman and her health was not good.
Su Yun turned around and walked towards home.
33
The further Su Yun walked, the more complicated the scene became. The chaos of the past two years seemed to have accumulated in front of him at this moment. Countless emotions were suppressed layer by layer, like mud in a swamp.
Humans have so many emotions.
But Su Yun has seen all this too many times.
He had witnessed countless similar wars and killings, similar persecutions and expulsions, similar looting and atrocities, and similar separations of life and death.
History is an unchanging cycle, everything repeats itself in the same way, and no one learns any lessons.
Su Yun walked towards the residential area in a daze. There was no white snake on his wrist, no shadow pattern on his body, and even more nothing under his feet. The little shadow that stuck to him never came back to him. Su Yun could feel its company, but... where did it go?
For a moment, Su Yun almost thought that the other world was just his delusion before he died. After all, few people left in this city had a normal spiritual world.
Su Yun finally returned to the community. He stepped over the pool of blood in front of the door and walked up the stairs step by step. Finally, Su Yun arrived at the door of his house and stopped here.
Su Yun saw the shadow of the past again.
Sitting outside his house was a helpless woman. She was no longer dressed as elegantly as usual. She wore the simplest casual clothes, with no makeup on her face, and her wrinkles could not be hidden.
She raised her head, looked in the direction of Su Yun, and tears fell.
"Xiaoyun, come with mom, okay?"
The author has something to say: Let Lao Su take a close-range nuclear bomb before going back
Su Yun: How many floors does it take to carry a bag of rice?
———
Muah!
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