The tragic irony of Africa's fate was a grim lesson. They could have evacuated, but the tyranny of precedent blinded them. How could the world's most water-starved continent possibly drown? A week later, it did, a slow, catastrophic filling of every basin and burrow.
Other regions vanished quietly, swallowed whole with barely a digital ripple. Africa's agony, however, played out in real-time, a spectacle of suffering for a global audience with nothing left to do but scroll. Each day brought new metrics of misery: this basin submerged by X meters, that refugee camp erased.
By comparison, China's losses, after the horrific first surge, were a muted tragedy. The government never released an official tally of the missing, but high-level big-data models whispered the number: roughly two million souls vanished across the country on that single, chaotic day. In Wu City alone, including those who'd stubbornly clung to their high-rise perches, the missing numbered in the tens of thousands.
Set against China's pre-apocalypse baseline of twenty thousand deaths per day and a new birth every two seconds, even this scale of loss was, statistically, "contained." Japan's death rate hit ninety-five percent. Africa's approached sixty. Most other regions hovered around twenty. It was a macabre calculus of comparative survival.
Births, of course, had plummeted. The Banana Community housed tens of thousands, yet only a few dozen pregnant women remained, a hundredfold drop. Malnutrition, decreased libido, and the sheer terror of bringing life into this new world did the rest.
Speaking of which, Zhang Bingbing was nearing her due date. Under these conditions, who knew if the delivery would go smoothly? The government's support for expectant mothers was its most robust welfare policy. Until recently, they could still access hospitals. Now, the floods had shuttered them. Reopening would take at least a week. Everyone could only pray Zhang Bingbing's baby held on until then.
After just over a week of global inundation, most people had already transitioned from raw terror to a kind of numb acceptance. Human adaptability was a terrifying force.
Half the evening news was devoted to Africa's misery and policy failures, the other half to China airlifting home over three thousand aid volunteers stationed abroad. "When the nation faces peril, we must secure our homeland first. The state must also guarantee the safety of our volunteers. Until the cataclysm ends, China will dispatch no further personnel abroad. To friendly nations, China is willing to donate a modest quantity of food supplies." The message was clear: Chinese lives came first. The sentiment played well to a grateful, frightened populace.
The broadcast's second half showcased organized local reconstruction efforts. What surprised Jing Shu was a montage of rescue highlights from across the country, featuring all manner of bizarre, ingenious saves. Among them, a ten-second clip from Douyin: the shark submarine plowing through the Ai Jia Supermarket floodwaters. It was brief, but it was enough to send her family into paroxysms of pride.
"Incredible! Our girl made the national news!"
"She really did it!"
"Isn't that our little submarine?"
Laughter and exclamations filled the villa. Jing Shu found herself grinning too. Eating together, warm and safe under one roof, the whole family intact, it was a profound, simple joy.
Even her old classmates blew up the group chat, a cascade of @Xiao Shu notifications.
She still typed a reminder: "Keep it low-key, everyone. Or I'll be in real trouble."
Today had delivered a full basket of absurdities.
That night, Jing Shu treated herself to a private hotpot feast from her Cube Space. She'd planned to just dip into her stores, but then a craving for fresh greens hit, then for fish and shrimp, then for grilled oysters with vermicelli and scallops. Fine. A full spread. Consider it compensation for a day that had pummeled her heart.
She wasn't idle while she ate. She checked on the two snakes in her space. They seemed insistent on performing their reptilian version of "shame-shame" things nearly twenty-four hours a day. Ahem.
She also worked on modifying the bulletproof vests, helmets, and gas masks pilfered from the warehouse, sanding off official logos and stitching on generic patches. It was the best obfuscation she could manage for now. By the time she'd finished tending to the poultry, fish, and shrimp, and inspected the burgeoning fields within her Cube Space, the clock had crept past two in the morning.
"Tonight, I can finally sleep well, right?"
So she thought.
… As if.
Emmm… Jing Shu had no idea what karmic debt she was repaying. Was one uninterrupted night of sleep really too much to ask?
At 4 a.m., the door to her room creaked open. Wu You'ai hovered on the threshold, hesitation in her posture. But Jing Shu's deathly gaze was already locked onto her through the gloom.
Wu You'ai received a Death Stare ×1.
A lifetime of apocalypse-honed instincts meant Jing Shu slept like a cat, lightly, ready to spring. Enhanced by the Spirit Spring, her hearing was preternaturally sharp. She'd heard the approach, had been silently screaming don't open the door in her mind, but it was too late.
"Talk," Jing Shu croaked, the shadows under her eyes like bruises. She'd managed maybe two hours of rest.
"Zhang Bingbing's water broke. She's in labor. What do we do? There's no doctor. Also…" Wu You'ai's nose wrinkled, her crisis momentarily sidetracked by a more immediate mystery. "Why does your room smell like hotpot?"
At some point, Jing Shu had become the de facto pillar of the household, the Patriarch. Any crisis landed at her feet, and through some alchemy, she handled it. But childbirth. This was outside her expertise. She'd only just been thinking about Zhang Bingbing's impending delivery a few hours ago. She hadn't expected "impending" to mean now.
"That smell means you want hotpot. Tomorrow," Jing Shu deflected, already swinging her legs out of bed. Her mind clicked into a cold, operational mode. "We need boiling water. Sterilized scissors. Clean towels. Got it?"
"Got it! I've been reading! Inhale, exhale… like this, right? I read the cervix opens one finger at a time, and you can only push when it's at ten?" Wu You'ai mimed breathing exercises, her earlier panic morphing into a frantic, theoretical preparedness.
As Jing Shu dressed with swift efficiency, she muttered, "If labor stalls for a day or two, it's trouble. Let's assess first. If it looks bad, I'll find help. One way or another, this is going to be the Banana Community's first post-apocalypse baby. It needs to arrive alive."
Bundled against the pre-dawn chill, they headed out, a pair of sterilized scissors in Jing Shu's pocket feeling absurdly inadequate. On the way, they traded half-remembered knowledge and frantically searched their phones for information.
You never know until you read. Once you read, you're terrified. Childbirth was a gauntlet of potential horrors.
"If the baby won't come out, do we have to cut down there?" Wu You'ai hissed, her face pale in the glow of her phone. "Yikes."
"Remember in The Walking Dead?" Wu You'ai's mind, fueled by stress and pop culture, veered into darker territory. "The main guy's wife got bitten. They just cut her open and took the baby out. If the mother can't be saved, do we have to do that?"
"A cesarean section, you mean." Jing Shu's voice was flat. "Zhang Bingbing won't be that unlucky. We'd need anesthesia, then extract the baby surgically."
"Right! A cesarean! Everyone, make way, I'll do the dissection and extract the infant!" Something about the clinical terminology ignited a bizarre spark of excitement in Wu You'ai, especially the phrase "extract the infant." Her voice took on a strange, eager edge. "I heard when a newborn is registered, the mother gets 100 virtual coins, and the attending administrator gets 10. I'll take the 10-coin 'surgical fee.' How about it?"
===
We've already reached Chapter 200~! (๑˃̵ᴗ˂̵)و
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