Chapter 227 Dog Why did you give me a dog?
The phone was too close to him, and Xu Sirui's vision was out of focus for a moment before he could see the words on it.
First of all, the title: countless exclamation marks, like stiff insect corpses, arch out the four big words "landslide".
He squinted his eyes and read carefully, and saw that the main content was that a landslide occurred in a particularly poor county in Y Province due to several days of rain. A passing car was buried. The people in the car were now in danger of being dead or alive, and rescue work was being carried out urgently.
Despite some lamentations, Xu Sirui wasn't one to harbor such overwhelming compassion that he'd feel sympathy for every natural or man-made disaster. The only time a natural disaster deeply affected him was the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake. The impact of that quake was so profound, and the damage so devastating, that even though he wasn't particularly well-off at the time, he was left with palpitations and sleepless nights for several days. He even donated 500 yuan from his pocket money to the disaster area.
But apart from that, there were sporadic disasters happening in the world every day, and his mental strength was not strong enough to deeply resonate with the death of any individual.
Xu Sirui was a little confused as to why Zhou Tianlan reacted so strongly to the news. Although she was quite sentimental, she usually would just say, "How pitiful! I hope she's okay." But she was his mother after all, so he offered words of comfort, "I saw the news came out very early. If they get help in time, there's a good chance she'll be alright."
Zhou Tianlan didn't tell him that Zhu Yingning was on a business trip to a poor county in Y Province today. He wanted to explain, but his heart was beating very fast and erratically, his lips were numb, and he couldn't even utter a coherent sentence.
She simply quit WeChat, quickly swiped out Zhu Yingning's phone number from the address book and dialed it.
In any case, verification is the most important thing.
But when she called, she didn't hear the familiar voice. Instead, the female voice that rang out was cold and mechanical: "Hello, the user you dialed is currently unavailable. Sorry..."
She hung up the phone and called again without giving up.
"Hello, the user you are dialing is temporarily unavailable..."
“Sorry! The subscriber you dialed cannot be connected for the moment……”
I repeated this seven times, and each time the result was the same.
She looked up at Xu Sirui with a dull look in her eyes.
In the dull gaze, even though Xu Sirui was at a loss as to what to do, he vaguely guessed something and found it extremely ridiculous. He thought how could it be possible? What kind of bloody 8 o'clock soap opera was going on? But his fingertips were already cold, and the phone in his hand seemed to weigh a thousand pounds. He didn't remember how he lifted it or how he found her number in the address book.
Dial, hang up.
Hang up and dial.
After repeating it countless times, the only response he got was a mechanical female voice with no emotion or fluctuation.
Zhou Tianlan looked at him, tears welling up in his eyes, and he choked up and said, "Maybe the signal is not good in the mountains..."
Before she could finish, Xu Sirui hung up the last call, stood up and rushed out.
**
Although he was extremely anxious, Xu Sirui did not have the ability to teleport. It took time to get from the restaurant to the airport, time to wait for the flight to arrive, time to fly to the destination, and time to get off the plane and rush to the scene of the accident.
He wished he could fly over in a helicopter or have the magic to teleport from one place to another, but the fact was that he had to passively endure every minute and every second of the torment like any ordinary person who encountered this situation.
Only then did he fully grasp the inherent selfishness of human nature. When he believed the accident had nothing to do with him, he could nonchalantly offer his condescending comfort, like a gardener watering his plants in the morning. Only when he realized someone he cared about might be involved did this glass-thin worry, so insubstantial as to weigh heavily on his heart, transform into a huge rock.
Unless a knife cuts a person, he won't feel the pain.
A few hours passed and it was already evening.
The rain stopped briefly, but the roads were still covered with water.
In the taxi en route to the accident site, the driver, urged by him, drove as fast as he could, the wheels tumbling over the thin layer of water on the asphalt road, making a rustling sound like leaves in the wind. Unfortunately, however, they encountered several red lights along the way, forcing the driver to slow down and wait behind the traffic.
"Hey, there was a landslide at noon that day. It's very dangerous. Honestly, you should avoid mountainous areas on rainy days." People tend to talk a lot when they have free time. The driver, half trying to persuade him, half out of curiosity, chatted non-stop, "Do you have relatives living there? But I heard that the residents in the county town are fine. It's mainly the passing cars that were buried. I heard that an entire section of the mountain road was washed away. I don't know how far the rescue efforts have gone. I guess the situation is pretty dire. We have a lot of floods here, but landslides are rare. What a disaster!"
Xu Sirui didn't have the energy to tell him that the person he was looking for might be in the buried car.
From the beginning until now, he has been having a very torn feeling. Sometimes he felt that Zhu Yingning could not be in the car, and he believed in his premonition for no reason. Sometimes he seemed to have witnessed the earth-shaking and dust-filled scene when a landslide occurred and rolling rocks and mud swallowed up the car she was sitting in.
His cell phone kept vibrating in his trouser pocket. These were calls from his family and some friends he and Zhu Yingning had in common. He just glanced at them and ignored them completely.
The brightly flashing numbers decreased in leaps and bounds, like a countdown to his life. The red reflected on his retinas, dyeing his vision a flickering crimson.
The driver continued speaking, his voice tinged with sympathy and shock, but mostly with the same indifferent sigh Xu Sirui had expressed a few hours ago: "It's a good thing there were only a few cars passing through the mountains at that time. If it had been any other time, the casualties would have been even more severe."
He was so tired that he couldn't even feel angry at the driver's words. It was strange. He clearly didn't do anything physically demanding, but he felt his whole body from the inside out - even his bones were weak, his muscles were sore, and he had difficulty breathing. Every time he inhaled, he had to use a lot of effort to barely inhale the thin oxygen into his chest.
My fingers were numb, stiff and hard, and it felt as if there was a taut thread connecting my fingertips to my heart. Every time my fingers curled and flexed, my heart would beat faster or slower.
After passing the red light and entering the mountain pass, the driver drove a few hundred meters in and then stopped the car: "The road ahead is closed, and the car can't drive in. Let's stop here. Scan the code or..."
Before he could finish his words, someone threw an object at him. The driver looked down and saw a Hetian jade pendant made of Xinjiang seed material. It was a lustrous white jade, clearly meant to be used as a talisman. The chain had broken in two, freshly ripped from his body. He froze for a moment, then said, "Hey, man, what are you doing?! Just scan the QR code and pay me. It's only a few dozen yuan for the ride. I can't accept something so valuable. My QR code is here..."
He frantically took out the QR code tag from the cabinet in front of the passenger seat and was about to hand it to the back seat, but when he looked up, Xu Sirui had already gotten out of the car and walked to the front.
"Hey! Brother! Handsome guy——"
He leaned out of the car window and shouted loudly towards the front, but his voice soon weakened due to the distance and was swallowed up by the evening breeze.
A yellow cordon was drawn along the road ahead. Firefighters and armed police were scattered in groups of three or five on either side of the ruins. Large excavators and bulldozers hummed to life. Farther away, news media were broadcasting live from their equipment.
It was completely dark, and all the xenon lights on the fire trucks were turned on, illuminating the entire accident scene as bright as day.
Xu Sirui had only seen similar disaster scenes on TV. Only when he saw them up close did he realize how small humans are in front of the mountains.
On the left side of the mountain road was a moderately high, not-too-steep cliff, leading directly to the river below. To the right was a mountain. A landslide on the right side of the mountain slope stretched for over a hundred meters, completely flooding the entire path. Even the guardrails and the road surface had been washed away, leaving the guardrails hanging loosely from the cliff like a tattered rag. Piles of mud, branches, and rocks choked the path, partially sinking to the riverbed. Looking down further, two or three huge rocks pressed against the center of the river, splitting the turbulent water in half.
The scene was filled with noise, with people holding loudspeakers and walkie-talkies giving directives loudly.
Xu Sirui heard some of the media onlookers shout, "I see the wheels! I see the wheels!"
Confused, he followed the crowd's gaze and saw, beneath the tangled mass of earth and wood, a deformed car, its wheels facing upwards. An excavator had cleared away most of the overburden. Not only were the aluminum doors warped, but even the steel frame was dented.
The person in charge of the survey carefully inspected the internal structure of the car body with a high-intensity flashlight and waved to his companions to come and help.
The scene was bustling yet orderly. Someone quickly inserted a lifting air cushion under the relatively intact rear seat frame and inflated it with an air pump. The gradually filling air cushion propped up the deformed roof, creating a relatively stable space. However, there was still a lot of dirt and branches above and around the vehicle that the large excavator could not clear. Other rescue workers rushed forward with shovels, hoes, and other tools to clear these small, fragmented pieces of dirt and rocks. Others held optical life detectors and carefully searched for any living creatures inside the vehicle.
Just as the rescue workers were busy doing their jobs, a pair of hands without any protective measures and not even gloves reached out to help them clear the gravel and dirt on the car.
The rescuer looked over in surprise and shouted urgently, "What are you doing! No one, get out of here! Can't you see it's dangerous here?! Get out of the way!"
The man was unmoved. He wanted to chase him again, but then he saw the other person's handsome face covered with tears.
"Please let me help, it's me inside..."
Xu Sirui was so choked up that he couldn't finish his sentence. He continued to dig at the dirt with his hands frantically halfway through.
At the beginning, he was not very skilled and his movements were clumsy. After repeating it several times, he became faster and faster. His white fingers were soon covered with sticky and wet mud. He grabbed the soil and rocks as well as the branches of trees and threw them out indiscriminately. He was not even aware of the red marks left on the back of his hands by the tips of the branches.
The rescuer was slightly moved, but still sternly stopped him: "I know you're anxious, but you're totally doing more harm than good! We are professionals, just wait on the side, and we'll notify you as soon as we rescue him!"
Xu Sirui ignored them and continued to dig at the soil. The rescuer he was talking to had to intervene and was about to take him out when he heard his companions shout, "He's out! He's alive!"
At that moment, Xu Sirui felt the frozen blood in his body begin to surge and flow again, like a thawing iceberg, melting into snowy water that washed over his veins. His ears buzzed, his eyes felt dizzy, and his five senses, which had been blocked, opened up again, overwhelmed by the external world. He swayed a bit, barely holding onto the people around him to steady himself. Before he could say anything, something warm was stuffed into his hand.
The rescuer said to him, "Alright, alright, see? It's still alive! Take it to a safe place."
Xu Sirui calmed himself down, looked down, and saw a shivering black puppy in his arms.
Xu Sirui: “?”
He was stunned for a long time and blurted out: "Why did you give me a dog?"
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The author has something to say: There will be another chapter at ten o'clock.
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