Wu You'ai's single sentence plunged the group into silence, a fear that seeped into the bones, chilling despite the heat. People themselves could barely eat now, let alone prisoners. What would happen to prisoners? The unspoken answer hung, dark and final.
Most likely, only a dead end. The conclusion was inescapable.
Zhu Fan shivered, the tremor running through his feverish body, accidentally brushing a weeping wound on his arm. Pain twisted his face, a grimace of agony. He stretched out a shriveled, prematurely aged hand that trembled uncontrollably, the skin papery and loose. "Why… why did it become like this?" The whisper was for no one, a raw confusion.
His wounds kept oozing pus, a slow, constant seep, then turning into sores, craters of rotten flesh. In such heat there was strangely no typical inflammation, no red heat, but they never seemed to heal, a stagnation of decay. He asked the other two men and their conditions were the same. It was as if the water had been sucked out of their bodies all at once, leaving them visibly older by several years, their cheeks hollow, eyes sunken.
Jing Shu was thinking about the same problem, the mystery of the stings.
That day, Su Meimei's cheap father had been stung by bees that Jing Shu released on the road, a parting gift. Anxious to learn the outcome, she made discreet inquiries through Niu Mou's network the next day and learned that Su Meimei's cheap father had hitched a ride and left Wu City overnight, fleeing like a rat.
That spoiled her follow up plans. "Fine, he ran fast," she thought, a flicker of disappointment. There would be other times.
Without her father's protection, Su Meimei was discharged from the hospital and returned home, a shell of her former self, with Zhang Hanhan taking care of her, the duty clearly grudging.
On the day of discharge, Jing Shu watched from afar, hidden behind a cracked wall. Su Meimei was a tragic sight. Her eyes were wrapped in gauze, a blindfold of bandages. She stumbled along behind Zhang Hanhan, one hand groping the air.
Her whole body seeped pus, stains blooming on her clothes. Where it dried, crusts formed, yellow and flaking. Her skin was wrinkled and withered like a sixty year old woman's, her cheeks sunken, lips cracked.
Zhang Hanhan supported her with a look of disgust, her nose wrinkled. Zhang Zhongyong, who came to pick them up, kept his brows knitted, snapping at them to hurry, his impatience clear.
Jing Shu sneered, a cold sound in her throat. Some debts were self made. Only now did payback begin. Su Meimei would suffer for a long time yet. Let her first taste what it meant to be abandoned by everyone, to be a burden. That was its own punishment.
She continued observing the others who had been stung, checking the group chat for whispers. A thought rose in her mind, incredible at first, then impossible to stop, a hypothesis taking shape. She felt she was circling a guess, closing in on the mechanism.
"What effect would nux vomica plus Spirit Spring plus a bee stinger have?" Jing Shu grew excited, a scientist's thrill, waiting only for a suitable subject to try again, to confirm the synergy.
She realized she had fallen into a trap of her own making, assuming that using Spirit Spring must always produce positive outcomes, healing and enhancement. What if it worked the other way? If ingesting Spirit Spring increased life force, then when a bee nourished by Spirit Spring stung someone, it might cause life force to drain away rapidly, reversed through the venom. "Yes, that must be it. I'm a genius." The insight felt electric.
The Cube Space truly was a miraculous realm, as if endless abilities lay in wait for her to unlock, layers of an onion. Jing Shu couldn't wait to drill her cube practice again, her fingers itching for the puzzle. She hoped to level up soon and glimpse even more powers, the next tier of its mystery.
In the blink of an eye, it was July. Wu City began sweeping across districts with a heavy hand, cleaning out anyone with a criminal record, going door to door to verify identities and disseminate the new laws, the state reasserting its monopoly on violence.
Apocalypse theories had been circulating online for a long time. The authorities had gone from initial denial to a half acceptance, a strategic shift. Jing Shu knew that on National Day in October, there would be an official recognition of doomsday theory, and January 1, the day the sunlight vanished, would be designated as Day One of the apocalypse, a new calendar of darkness.
Jing Shu remembered that day's speech clearly, from her past life: "Seventy plus years ago today was the well known beginning of a new era.
Seventy plus years later, we indeed face some small difficulties.
But this isn't frightening. What is frightening is if we can't unite and overcome them together…" The words had been meant to rally, to unify.
Precisely because of the current chaos and the voices claiming the darkness would last forever, many people had come to despise rules, exposing the darkness in human nature, the beast unleashed.
In reality, the power above should never be underestimated. What you see is always the tip of the iceberg. When a vast machine truly begins to operate, that is when it becomes terrifying, a juggernaut.
Of course, the movie or novel kind of protagonist who steamrolls everything had appeared in other places. Real cases existed and were outrageous. But here, that was impossible. Forever impossible. The system was designed to prevent exactly that.
Those above had already predicted your predictions and came prepared. They were always three steps ahead.
While some dreamed of doing whatever they pleased in the apocalypse, the truth was this:
Two months before the apocalypse, the leadership had already executed corrupt elements, a purge. One month before, they butchered the fat sheep, confiscating hoards. When the apocalypse came, they seized control of food and canning plants. In the second month, they centralized all grain and supplies, nationalizing survival.
In the third month, they arranged housing and security for all armed personnel's families, securing loyalty. In the fourth month, they decisively poured half the nation's resources into the artificial sun, burning bridges behind them, a gamble on the future.
The fifth month did bring a pinch on supplies, but that was anticipated. They had backup plans, layers of contingency.
For example, replacing cash with virtual currency. First they secured loyalty among insiders by rewarding vegetables and virtual coins, making that cohort determined to safeguard their own interests, tying them to the system.
In the sixth month, they deployed online and offline big data together, the net closing. In the seventh month, they immediately executed those who had committed crimes, skipping all intermediate steps, summary justice.
If you asked how formidable the authorities were…
Jing Shu felt they were simply grasping the levers of human hearts and interests and combining them into one force. All relationships between people reduced to the word "interest." Understand that fully, and nothing is hard. It was a brutal, elegant calculus.
That was the true meaning of the will of the people and the tide of the times. You either rode the wave or were crushed by it.
Aside from those who failed to flee at the start, many others ran. They figured that without sunlight, no one could recognize their faces, there were no cameras, and no one could catch them. Many others were seized right at home and never knew how they were discovered. If you asked Jing Shu, the authorities' brilliance lay in never telling the public about big data, letting the tool work in the shadows.
As for the fugitives, they couldn't make trouble anymore. Most knives had already been traded for meat, and most importantly, no households had food. What was there to rob? Don't envy the era when people slept with doors unlocked. In that era, there was nothing to steal. The irony was bitter.
The knife reclamation had run for two months. Almost all knives and dangerous weapons had been collected, melted down or stored, disarming the populace.
[Wu You'ai]:"@Everyone, Team Two will sweep our sector today. For everyone's safety, please stay at home and don't go out. At noon, gather in the underground garage. We will ask about each household's situation."