Chen Ci and Chen Nian rode their bicycles all the way from the ecological tank to the information processing area.
Fu Tianhe walked through the many row of information processing areas and came to the No. 24 information processor near the edge. On the west side of the No. 24 information processing area, it was next to the epidemic prevention station.
The quarantine station played a crucial role during the Ashes outbreak more than a decade ago. Later, as the vaccination rate increased, it gradually became deserted and no longer crowded.
The epidemic prevention station is now mainly responsible for studying agricultural and livestock diseases, as well as the influenza that occurs every year.
Fu Tianhe wants to go to the epidemic prevention station!
Chen Ci thought of the day when he and Fu Tianhe took a boat at the port. Alpha looked up at the mottled glass of the epidemic prevention station, and his eyes revealed that Chen Ci did not understand complex emotions.
It was not until now that Chen Ci understood that it was fear, emotion, and a kind of relief, like a dying old man checking the grave he had prepared in advance.
It is the cemetery of the infected. The incinerator that once burned blazingly in the Sanshui Underground City burned the bodies and remains of many infected people into ashes, including Fu Tianhe's mother's wish to "travel".
And now, Fu Tianhe tries to go to the place he once feared the most.
He struggled hard, trying to do something to save the situation before things got worse.
However, just when the two brothers thought that Da Congming would lead them straight to the tall gate of the epidemic prevention station, Da Congming suddenly changed direction.
It was as if there was an irresistible force that forced Fu Tianhe to change his thoughts, or to ignore his thoughts and manipulate his body——
Go further downward.
Below the epidemic prevention station is the recycling station.
"Wait a minute, he wouldn't want to pick up trash at this time!"
Chen Nian learned from the many diaries written by Chen Ci that when Fu Tianhe lived in Information Processing Area No. 13, he would go to the local garbage dump to pick up spare parts and make some electronic components to supplement his family income.
Or... Chen Nian didn't say the second half of the sentence, because that was too much of a guess.
He looked ahead. Chen Ci was riding very fast. He could only see half of his brother's face and the tips of his ears which were red from the intense exercise.
Shafley's tracking also showed that Fu Tianhe had arrived at the recycling station.
When the stench entered his nostrils, Chen Nian subconsciously held his breath.
It was a very familiar stench that often drifted in the air of the underground city. A lot of domestic garbage was piled together, fermenting in dark corners, breeding countless bacteria and attracting rats and flies.
Soon he resumed his normal breathing, because Chen Nian knew that as he continued to move forward, the sour smell would become stronger and stronger, so it would be better to start from now and slowly let his nose and brain adapt.
The Recycle Bin is the garbage disposal plant of All Beacons.
There are several small garbage stations in each area. After the garbage is initially selected, the intact and useful items are sent for recycling, and the rest are all dumped into the recycling station at the beacon base, waiting to be sorted and processed.
Food waste and other organic matter are processed into biomass fuel, valuable metals and wood are filtered out, plastics are degraded, and the rest is dumped into the sea.
Although he had been to the landfill of Information Processing Area No. 13 many times with Fu Tianhe, and had visited the local garbage station in Sanshui several times, Chen Ci still slowed down when faced with the vast amount of garbage in the recycling station.
Those red and green things, flowing with dirty juice, are spread out endlessly into the distance.
They were piled up into high hills, stretching endlessly and emitting a terrible stench. Fortunately, the entire area was strictly separated from other places and was stored in the open air, so it would not interfere with other areas of the beacon.
The surveillance also showed that Fu Tianhe's figure eventually disappeared here.
The deeper part of the recycling bin is no longer under such dense surveillance. If you want to dodge, you can just lower your body and hide completely there.
It's such a big place, where on earth are they going to find it?
Chen Nian was just about to ask Shafulai for two gas masks, otherwise he would just rush in and definitely suffocate them to death, when he saw Chen Ci park the car and run straight in.
"well!"
Chen Nian stretched out his hand, his fingertips brushed against Chen Ci's back, and he could only hurriedly say to Shafulai, "Let's go in and look for it."
Chen Nian tightly closed his mouth. He didn't dare to say much in this place. He just couldn't help vomiting when he thought about breathing in the dirty, sour air.
He parked the car and trotted to catch up with Chen Ci.
The strong smell of garbage almost completely covered up Fu Tianhe's scent. Da Congming sniffed hard, trying to identify the sweet smell of blood among the many dog-suffocating smells.
It is really a good dog. Even though the sour stench all over the sky is hurting its nose, which is thousands of times more sensitive than that of humans, and making it extremely painful, it still tries its best to keep sniffing and distinguish the smell that belongs to Fu Tianhe.
The dirty water splashed onto Chen Ci's shoes, and the stench seeped into the fibers of his clothes, driving away the tuberose-scented pheromones.
The mental power spread in all directions, and then spread again, looking for possible traces.
At the end of the landfill is a hundred-meter-high vertical cliff. The garbage that is difficult to recycle will be pushed down by a robotic arm and eventually fall into the sea.
The direction that Dacongming led them was towards the cliff.
What exactly does Fu Tianhe want to do?
No one dared to think about it, they cleared their minds of other thoughts and used their mental power to explore as much as they could to find the injured Alpha.
A mountain of garbage blocked the way ahead, so Chen Ci climbed up using his hands and feet.
He stepped on the twisted and rusted bus stop sign, grabbed the frame of a car, and stepped on clothes, plastic bags and used cat litter to climb up. Many objects were pushed down by him, causing a small collapse.
His palms and feet had long been stained, and his clothes were no exception. It was the first time in his life that Chen Nian crawled through garbage. He suppressed the urge to vomit and followed closely behind Chen Ci.
The intense exercise forced them to breathe faster, and every mouthful of food they swallowed was filled with a nauseating, sour and stinky smell, which was even stronger than a mixture of canned herring, durian, coriander, stinky tofu and white mold cheese, and almost blocked their brains.
Chen Nian felt like he was going to pass out.
Until Chen Ci saw a large pool of blood.
Apparently, it was pus and blood accumulated in the lungs, which was suddenly ejected from the mouth with dots of purple crystals.
The bloodstains were still fresh, and Ashes was moving in a chaotic Brownian motion on the surface, like a water strider jumping around on the surface of a summer pond.
Then the blood was stepped on, and a trail of bloody footprints stretched forward.
Chen Ci and Chen Nianqi were both cheered up.
Smarty started barking and carefully avoided the blood on the ground. Ashes can infect not only humans but other creatures as well, and Smarty had never been vaccinated.
But the beagle seemed to know that the thing could kill it, so it dodged it very smartly.
Chen Ci and Chen Nian followed the bloody footprints and headed towards the borderland.
They climbed over many hills and finally saw Alpha lying on the ground at the deepest part of the recycling station, just before the edge of the cliff.
Fu Tianhe was lying face down on the garbage slope. He wanted to climb over the hill in front of him and get to the other side, but he completely lost all his strength halfway.
The blood seeped from beneath his body into the garbage and mixed with the foul, smelly water.
Chen Ci used his hands and feet to crawl to his side and struggled to turn Fu Tianhe over face up.
The clothes on Fu Tianhe's chest were already stained red with blood. His eyes were tightly closed, but the eyelid of his right eye had long been pried open, and deadly purple crystals protruded out, like a cluster of flowers blooming in his eye sockets.
The doctor had just performed surgery yesterday and removed all the large crystals from his body.
How did the situation suddenly deteriorate to this point?
"Let's take him somewhere else first." Chen Nian noticed that Fu Tianhe still had some wounds on his body. Such dirty places could easily cause infection.
He and Chen Ci worked together, lifting Fu Tianhe's shoulders and legs respectively, and moved the Alpha to a slightly cleaner space with great difficulty.
Fu Tianhe was motionless, as if dead.
Chen Ci reached out to feel his breath and found that his fingers were shaking.
The breathing was very weak, almost imperceptible.
Chen Nian immediately informed Shafulai that they had found Fu Tianhe.
He sent his location and help would arrive soon.
Chen Ci quickly checked Fu Tianhe's entire body. The Alpha's body was covered with small wounds, most of which were scratched while running madly in the garbage mountain.
Under the erosion of Ashes, Fu Tianhe's skin became extremely fragile. It would be hurt at the slightest touch, and pus and blood mixed with dust would flow out.
His worst injury was in his right arm.
Fu Tianhe relied on brute force to break through the glass wall of the isolation ward. His bones bore too much of the impact, and the scattered glass fragments cut the surrounding area.
Now the crystals are scrambling to extend from all the wounds on their bodies, no matter how big or small, like plant seeds after being frightened, riveting vigorously to push the young shoots out of the soil.
The scene from many years ago invaded Chen Ci's mind again. Under the transparent pipe, many wailers were dissolving. The extreme itching made them scratch their bodies constantly. Their already fragile skin was rotting, and thick blood and flesh flowed out. The Bauhinia in their bodies finally found a way out and rushed out one after another.
With trembling hands, he touched Fu Tianhe's chest and wanted to unbutton his hospital gown to see the condition of his chest.
The bright red blood stained Chen Ci's fingers, but he suddenly felt something bulging in Fu Tianhe's left chest pocket.
Chen Ci reached into his pocket. He thought Fu Tianhe had brought something from the hospital ward, but it felt exceptionally soft.
He pulled the thing out a little and found it was a tuberose.
The pure white flower had been dyed red by the blood spat out by Fu Tianhe. While escaping, Alpha carefully protected the flower on his chest, but in the end he fell into the garbage pile and accidentally crushed it under his body.
The petals were crushed flat, and translucent juice oozed out, mixing with the blood.
Chen Ci was stunned.
He gently held the flower in his palm. In the stinking garbage dump, he could not smell its fresh fragrance, and the originally white petals had long since turned completely scarlet.
The other side of the garbage mountain is the edge of the recycling station. If you take a step out, you will fall from a height of 100 meters, fall into the sea below, and disappear in the rolling white foam.
The wind blew.
The Alpha's face, which was destroyed by Bauhinia and blood, looked familiar yet strange.
When we first met, his eyes were full of ill intentions, clearly the lowest level of lust, but in the subsequent interactions, he acted so innocent.
He lay beside the machine tool, teaching the functions of each part step by step, while being careful to keep a distance so as not to cause possible disgust.
He sat in front of an abandoned suburban tent, clearing away the pots and pans after dinner, the fading sunset casting a dazzling orange-red glow over his broad shoulders.
He lay on the kayak, holding me tightly in his arms, confessing his love to me with the determination to die, and kissing me on the back of my neck in the heavy rain on the exploration platform.
Countless scenes appeared before Chen Ci's eyes, and finally converged into a mottled bloodstain.
Fu Tianhe knelt in front of Donald, his arms chained with iron chains. He inserted his fingers into his right eye and dug out the golden prosthetic eye along with the flesh and blood.
They tried their best to pursue their goals and find ways to survive, but in the end they could only lie helplessly in the garbage dump, waiting for their bodies to rot.
It hurts. It hurts so much.
Those strange feelings that cannot be accurately described are so strange, filling my empty heart and gnawing at it madly.
No, I'm clearly not injured, so why is it so painful that it's hard to breathe?
Suddenly Chen Ci felt that Chen Nian seemed to be supporting him, and his brother's anxious shouting could not be clearly analyzed by his brain.
All he could see before his eyes was the bright red, and the flower that was carefully protected on the Alpha's chest but was ultimately destroyed.
The membrane that had been covering his body was torn apart by invisible hands. Too much energy was pent up in his chest, rushing through every blood vessel like a flood.
He is like a closed container, which is obviously filled to the maximum extent it can contain, but is still being filled with things in an endless stream. Those illusory existences are squeezing each other to the point where they are almost substantial.
It only brought extreme pain.
He was about to explode and break into pieces.
…What should I do?
Fu Tianhe.
Fu Tian...He...
A drop of crystal clear liquid fell on Fu Tianhe's face with a slight "plop" sound. It created small splashes and washed away some of the blood on Alpha.
Before Chen Ci could react to what it was, another drop of water fell and hit Fu Tianhe's lips.
The continuous dripping of liquid washed away the blood on Alpha. Chen Ci thought it was raining. He looked up at the sky. It was dark and dry. The wind was carrying a foul smell, and there was not even a drop of rain to be seen.
The water flowed down his cheeks, gathered warmly at his chin, and finally dripped down under the heavy burden.
Click.
Only then did Chen Ci realize that those were his tears.
For the first time in his nearly nineteen years of life, he shed tears for no reason.
It's not from cutting an onion, tasting something very sour, irritating the eyes from strong light, or the physiological tears caused by pain.
A gap was opened in that layer of membrane, and it could no longer contain the surging emotions that filled the whole body.
Those strange and unfamiliar emotions to Chen Ci surged out and flooded his entire world like a dam bursting.
Even the body trembled. Chen Ci had seen many people crying, wailing in pain, sobbing in sorrow, or shedding silent tears.
His heart was as cold as a stone, always indifferent, his eyes were dry and not even a drop of water could come out.
So this is what crying feels like.
All the emotions have been released, what are those things that are washed away and flow out?
Fear, grief, pain, and pity.
Is this it?
Or are you confused, helpless, panicked and numb?
Or maybe all of them.
Completely unfamiliar things mixed together and fell on Fu Tianhe's face as tears fell.
The spreading purple crystals seemed to make a crackling sound as they were dissolved by the biological factors contained in Chen Ci's tears. They reluctantly retreated and lingered in the pierced eye sockets.
At first Chen Ci just shed tears silently, but later he sobbed softly and held Fu Tianhe's scarred hand tightly.
The fingertips of that hand were all worn out, and the hard object was trying to poke out.
——His emotionally deprived brother actually cried? !
Chen Nian knelt beside him, immersed in shock, but suddenly discovered that Chen Ci's left shoulder was glowing faintly.
The light was not that bright, and in the evening when the sun was about to set, it was difficult to be detected through two layers of clothes.
Chen Nian was stunned.
He instantly remembered the night when he had annoyed Shafley and ran to the villa to seek forgiveness from Alpha.
At that time, he was probably still in a low fever, and accepted the mark that Shafley called "punishment". He did not notice it, but Shafley mentioned it casually afterwards -
For a few brief seconds, he seemed to see the birthmark on his shoulder glow.
The dark clouds hanging over their heads were completely dispelled, and Chen Nian understood that the birthmarks on their shoulders were not just birthmarks, but a form of seal!
That night, he understood what true love was.
And at this moment, Chen Ci finally felt his own emotions.
From the moment they were born, the two brothers were incomplete.
The supreme being used emotion as the key to allow the two brothers to be born into the world with defects.
One is abundant, the other is missing.
If it were a normal time, Chen Nian might have complained that this setting appeared in some melodramatic eight o'clock fantasy TV drama.
But at this moment, facing Chen Ci, who was crying like rain and biting his lips to stop sobbing, and Fu Tianhe, who was as broken as garbage and covered in blood, Chen Nian was unable to utter a word.
The warm liquid moistened the eye sockets and blurred the vision. When it could no longer be held back, it quickly flowed down the cheeks.
It turned out that he also shed tears.
Chen Nian raised his hand and quickly wiped it with his sleeve. He sniffed and stared at Fu Tianhe closely.
However, the scene in the TV series where a lover cries and a seriously ill patient slowly wakes up did not appear.
There was no sign of Alpha's chest rising or falling with breathing, and for a moment, Chen Nian even suspected that he was dead.
Da Congming sadly used his head to support Fu Tianhe's head, hoping that his master would open his eyes and give orders with a smile again.
Does it also understand what is happening?
The sound of chaotic footsteps could be heard faintly from behind. The members of the execution team followed the coordinates sent by Shafulai and quickly rushed here.
They carefully placed identification tags next to the bloodstains to facilitate subsequent disinfection and cleaning.
The two fastest-moving officers came up to Chen Ci and Chen Nian, their faces obscured by their heavy protective suits. “Young Masters, leave it to us.”
Chen Nian stood up dizzy, and medical staff came trotting over with a stretcher and immediately checked Fu Tianhe's condition.
Chen Ci knelt beside Fu Tianhe like a statue. No matter how he was persuaded, he refused to move and held Alpha's cold hand tightly.
It was not until Fu Tianhe was lifted onto the stretcher by everyone that Chen Ci was supported and stood up. The tuberose stained with blood fell to the ground and was contaminated by the dirty water from the garbage.
Chen Nian bent down, picked it up and handed it to his brother.
"It'll be fine," he heard himself say hoarsely.
Chen Ci said nothing. His eyes passed over Chen Nian's shoulder and stared at Fu Tianhe who was being carried away. Tears continued to fall, and his dark eyelashes were wet. He was like a butterfly struggling in a rainstorm and could no longer fly.
Chen Nian opened her arms and hugged Chen Ci. She felt her brother stagger and lean weakly in her arms.
He had never seen Chen Ci like this before.
To be precise, no one has ever seen Chen Ci like this.
Chen Nian patted Chen Ci's back gently, pursed her lips, and tried her best to give her brother some comfort.
"We've found him." Chen Nian said hoarsely, "Everything will be fine from now on."