Chapter 97: It's Time to Meet the Elderly Brought by the Butterfly Effect

Jing Shu thought a major reason might be acclimatization issues. A temperature of 60°C is already uninhabitable for humans, which is why the country decided to evacuate people from Hainan first using cargo ships, trains, and other transportation methods. As a result, a large number of people died en route, and even more died upon arrival.

After all, Hainan is tropical and doesn’t get cold at night, but the Northeast experiences temperatures dropping below minus ten degrees Celsius at night and soaring above 40°C during the day. Such extreme temperature fluctuations easily cause various illnesses.

Without a point of comparison, there’s no perceived harm. If Africa’s situation hadn’t been broadcast earlier, there might not have been much skepticism. But the problem is that Africa, also enduring 60°C temperatures, used China's machinery to dig underground tunnels. They lived inside without casualties, while over half of China’s evacuees perished during the migration.

Many people protested the migration and demanded to emulate Africa by digging underground homes. Jing Shu remembered how fiercely this issue was contested; half of the people there refused to leave, but this time the country was resolute—it was mandatory to evacuate!

If you didn’t evacuate, you wouldn’t receive rations! Those who evacuated could receive various subsidies and other benefits.

This tactic, touted as highly effective, successfully evacuated all residents of Hainan under the country’s combined use of incentives and coercion, and then initiated the second wave of large-scale migrations, though many still died.

At the time, the government's reason was very simple: “High temperatures will inevitably cause sea levels to rise, resulting in floods. Hainan is likely to be submerged. Not to mention, Hainan is an island, but a third of the global inland areas might also be flooded. This is a matter of time; it will happen sooner or later. Rather than face countless casualties later, it’s better to evacuate early.”

Jing Shu couldn’t help but marvel, exclaiming loudly, “Our China is awesome! This move was brilliantly strategized!”

It turned out that the science channels had been predicting floods every day. After a whole year of warnings, in the second year of the apocalypse, floods finally hit. Hainan was indeed submerged, and all survivors were deeply grateful. The country, despite facing pressure, insisted on the evacuation, and it was the right decision! However, the high mortality rate during migration still caused fear and resistance among many people; many were unwilling to leave their hometowns.

By the way, Africa’s grassland-like terrains, rarely experiencing water shortages, were half-submerged.

The underground tunnels dug earlier were a nightmare. Fortunately, those in higher elevations remained unwaterlogged, but those in poorer locations were directly sealed in tunnels tens of meters underground, unable to escape when the floods came.

If Africa’s struggling underground houses were merely clinging to life, then a few island nations worldwide were destined to vanish from Earth’s map entirely.

Jing Shu practiced solving the mechanical Rubik’s Cube in her hand, lost in thought, when she heard her father say:

“Now that the trains are suspended, your older brother called saying the elderly person staying at SuMei Mei’s house can’t leave anymore. Weren’t you planning to check on them when they left? I’m afraid it won’t be possible.”

Jing’s mother irritably replied, “Then find another time to go see. My older brother said SuMei Mei treats the elderly like her own father. When our parents were alive, I never saw her so attentive, sigh.”

If her father hadn’t mentioned it, Jing Shu would have forgotten about the elderly person influenced by the butterfly effect. Now, with such a scarcity of food, would SuMei Mei, given her nature of not wanting to suffer losses, treat them well? This was definitely worth investigating.

That evening, Jing Shu followed her usual routine: she had an extra meal, finishing the last few dozen roasted quails, drank a pot of mushroom chicken soup, and then began her practice with the Golden-Harmony Divine Rubik’s Cube. This state lasted another half month, but Jing Shu was still stuck at a plateau. From initially striving to break through to now feeling irritable and restless, she felt like she was about to lose her temper and hit someone at any moment.

The kind of breakthrough seen in novels, where overcoming a bottleneck leads to instant advancement, never happened. Jing Shu began to doubt whether she was fit to be the master of the Rubik’s Cube space. After all, she had been working on the cube for seven or eight months without any promotion?

Several times she smashed the cube out of frustration, almost wanting to stomp on it, but she calmed down and obediently picked it back up, treating it like a sacred ancestor. Continuing to solve and practice, stocking more food and supplies was Jing Shu’s current motivation.

However, recently, Jing Shu had been in a bad mood. It was best not to anger her.

Before bed that night, Jing Shu added a new task: checking the traps around the villa, inspecting the poultry, the fish in the pond, and noticing that the second batch of frogs was doing well—just in time before the corrosive insects’ outbreak. She felt that this batch of frogs was more valuable than the previous one.

In the days that followed, despite the daily temperatures continuing to rise, the number of people staying at home noticeably decreased. Everyone went out searching for various supplies, especially knives and metal rods. During this period, the aunts exercised their formidable gossip and combat skills, knowing which families had lost members and were on the verge of collapse. They promptly targeted these homes, waiting for deaths to occur to find corpses and search for household supplies.

Most robbers were ordinary people targeting those who had stockpiles, overlooking aunts who were ugly, old, and had no food. To put it crudely, if you had nothing worth stealing, you weren’t worth robbing.

Of course, there were also family-style robbers—entire families of all ages going together to steal others’ food and exchange knives for meat. However, more people were attracted by the rewards for reporting crimes.

Now, if a robbery or murder occurred in any residential area of Wucheng, it was usually reported within minutes, all for the sake of the rewards.

Wang Qiqi organized a group: some specialized in finding knives, others in identifying robbery cases, some in tracking and determining robbers’ identities, and others responsible for making corpse removal calls.

Wang Dazhao sent a message confirming that this time, the She Tian group’s target was the petroleum base next to Aijia Supermarket. It turned out they intended to throw bombs at the petroleum base to destroy the extracted crude oil.

Jing Shu always thought She Tian was after her, but it seemed she was overthinking it. Unfortunately, in her past life, she was busy exchanging knives for meat and didn’t have time to pay attention to She Tian. There were no reports of the petroleum base being bombed.

“The petroleum base in the residential area of the petroleum district supported the entire operation of Aijia Supermarket before the apocalypse. All the people working there were from petroleum units, and there were armed police stationed nearby. There shouldn’t be any problems, right?” Upon receiving the news, Jing Shu once again advised Wang Dazhao to be cautious and avoid being tracked by information systems.

Several days later, after Jing’s mother finished her tasks, the family, enduring a super high temperature of 52°C, took ten braised eggs and half a jar of pickled vegetables to visit their older uncle’s house in Xishan. They then walked another seven to eight kilometers straight to SuMei Mei’s house.

Along the way, Jing Shu drank three bottles of mineral water.

“Jing Shu, how can you waste water like that? It’s just a sip to moisten your mouth. I only let Sulong have a small sip,” her aunt couldn’t bear to watch any longer. “Lanzhi, at least manage Jing Shu a bit, save some water.”

Jing Shu retorted, “I’ve stocked up on two months’ worth of supplies before the apocalypse, just to live better in these times. Now you’re telling me to save even a little?”

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Author's Note:

Thank you to *Tian Qiuqiu* for the generous rewards! 🥰