Chapter 20 Chapter two

Seven days, seven nights. April 1.Sunday.Night, 22:19. That night, the whole city was surrounded by violent thunderstorms. Even in the midsummer with abundant rain, it may not be so earth-shattering.Dazzling lightning pierces the darkness like a sharp sword. Everyone hiding behind the window is afraid of being hit by lightning suddenly. Ye Xiao has been working overtime for several weeks, and just caught a perverted murderer. It is rare for him to return home before midnight. He was about to go to bed, but the thunder outside the window disturbed his sleep.He walked to the window with his upper body naked.This is the twenty-eighth floor of a high-rise building, and the Future Dream Building can be clearly seen from the window.Although the 19-story Future Dream Building is a tiny speck in this super metropolis with countless skyscrapers, it has become the busiest commercial center in the southeast corner of the city in the past three years since it was erected.Tens of thousands of office workers and residents nearby, plus people who have to transfer to the subway through this place every day, all regard this place as their wardrobe, shoe cabinet, refrigerator, cafeteria, and date place... Even the few places Ye Xiao has seen this year All the movies were watched in the Future Dream Cinema on the ninth floor.

Through the rain-soaked glass windows and the thousands of meters of cold air, looking at the Future Dream Building with huge billboards flickering in the storm, Ye Xiao felt irritated. At the same time, he saw a light. That was the farthest end of the city. From the end of the branches and leaves of the steel forest, a dazzling white light lit up, covering almost the entire horizon, like lightning from the sky hitting the ground. Ye Xiao instinctively blocked his eyes, and when he put his hand down, a thought suddenly flashed through his mind - the end of the world? The earth-shattering white light has turned into a mushroom cloud like a nuclear explosion, broke through the stormy night, rose to an altitude of several thousand meters, and connected with the lightning cloud.

The air was full of deafening noises, and the floor under Ye Xiao's feet also began to vibrate, and the sound didn't just come from afar—what stunned him again was that the Future Dream Building began to descend rapidly outside his window, thousands of meters in front of him. Neither alien invasion nor nuclear radiation could stop Ye Xiao from opening the window. Right in front of my eyes, the center of the city, the nineteen-story building with flickering lights, is falling to the ground at the speed of the elevator!In just a few seconds, he could no longer see the roof of the Future Dream Building, and his sight was blocked by nearby buildings further down.

Heavy rain that shows no sign of abating. The lightning in the night sky was more violent, and the sound of thunder replaced the sound of explosions in the distant horizon.The white light in the distance has disappeared and turned into a skyrocketing fire, lighting up almost half of the urban area. Ye Xiao put on his trousers and didn't even have time to put on a T-shirt. With his muscular upper body bare, he put on his coat and went out.He didn't dare to take the elevator, but ran down the twenty-eight flights of stairs in one breath, and rushed into the rain profusely—his physical strength was as outstanding as it was ten years ago.

It was like pouring countless basins of cold water on the soles of the feet, and the whole body was soaked in an instant.Fortunately, the building where my house is located is safe and sound, and the surrounding buildings seem to be fine, and the ground is not shaking as expected. He hopped into the police car parked downstairs with cell phone, change, police ID, driver's license, car keys in his pockets...but no gun, and he never brought a gun home. Except for the flooding of the street due to the heavy rain, there is nothing unusual about it.The huge explosion and flame just now were gone.On such a rainy night, there were almost no cars to be seen. Ye Xiao turned on the police lights, ran through three red lights, and arrived at the destination in a blink of an eye.

The future dream building disappeared. Ye Xiao parked the car on the side of the road, and the place where the sidewalk used to be had become a pile of concrete ruins.The location of the 19-story building turned into a sunken square, illuminated by the street lights opposite, like a cemetery more than 60 years ago. He stepped over the half-buried subway sign and came to the middle of this empty "square".There was mud and waste under his feet, forming a swamp in the heavy rain, which quickly flooded his calf. Which magic master is performing?A few minutes ago, the Future Dream Building, which was still standing upright, disappeared into the vast rainy night and the sound of distant explosions in Ye Xiao's blink of an eye.

However, he doesn't believe everything in sci-fi movies, let alone that this building was instantly transferred to another parallel time and space. Ye Xiao squatted halfway in the heavy rain, letting himself be like a drowning ghost, stretching his hands into the dirty puddles, sinking his fingers into the dirt full of garbage, as if touching the fingers of a drowning person—this was the future The atrium of the Dream Mall. A few minutes ago, I saw this building for the last time, and it fell rapidly until it disappeared. Will it just sink into the ground like this? Fingers still stuck in the dirt, imagining that he is one with the earth and one with the deeper hell.

There are more and more police officers, and people in various uniforms are standing by the side of the road, but none of them dare to walk to the center of the building where it was originally like Ye Xiao did—they are afraid that the soil is too soft, and that the entire building has been swallowed up. It's too easy to swallow another person. Two minutes later, three police officers walked in cautiously and dragged Officer Ye Xiao out who was kneeling in the muddy water. He was sent back to the police car to rest, and a large number of rescuers with equipment were on the way.The city leaders, who are busy with everything, have rushed to the petrochemical plant in the outer suburbs to deal with the chemical explosion accident that just happened... a sleepless night.

Like many people in this city, Ye Xiao was still staring with bloodshot eyes in the early morning of April 2nd. It's daylight. The heavy rain turned into heavy rain, and then the light rain turned into a drizzle. A drizzle of experts and professors, as well as a national-level rescue team, flew in urgently from the capital in the early morning, bringing various high-tech instruments to conduct an in-depth inspection of the "relics" of the Future Dream Building.Through geological engineering exploration equipment, electromagnetic waves penetrated more than 100 meters underground, and found traces of human buildings, it was confirmed that the Future Dream Building was not robbed by aliens, but fell into the ground as a whole.The top of the building seems to have been severely damaged, and it is about 110 meters above the ground. It is impossible to judge whether there are still people alive.The consensus of most experts is that the building was buried so deep in the ground, that severe damage had been done in the process, and the vast majority of people had died, not to mention the lack of life-sustaining oxygen in the ground, and the possibility of survivors was extremely slim .

Although several nearby roads were blocked by the police, hundreds of citizens still flocked.They are not here to watch the excitement, but suspect that their relatives have been buried underground with the Future Dream Building. Everyone is nervous or anxious or fearful or sad, and wants to know the whereabouts of their relatives, whether they are alive or dead, disabled or injured.There are also some people who are not sure whether their family members are underground, but stayed nearby that night and did not return home. Although this number of people is decreasing every day, there are still dozens after seven days.

Under the strong demands of the families of the missing persons, and under the attention of the media all over the world, the rescue operation was finally officially launched on the evening of April 2 after a whole day's delay.Oil drilling engineers were called in, and only they could drill a deep well into the ground.Many foreign scholars and rescuers have also come to China, some of them are from Chile. In 2010, a copper mine collapsed in the desert of northern Chile. Thirty-three miners were trapped at a depth of 700 meters underground. He was miraculously rescued nine days later.Therefore, Chilean experts resolutely opposed giving up, thinking that a depth of more than 100 meters is nothing, as long as there is a possible survivor, they must go all out to rescue. National public opinion tends to be on the rescue side, and hundreds of millions of netizens even scolded the experts who first agreed that there were no signs of life. At about the same time, the expert group released preliminary findings on why the Future Dream Building fell into the ground—ground subsidence. This metropolis on the eastern seaboard began to sink many years ago.The foundation of the Future Dream Building happens to be the core area with the most serious ground subsidence (some netizens even mentioned the deserted cemetery back then. It is said that the feng shui here is not good, and many ancient tombs were dug out when the Future Dream Building was first built).According to the investigation and judgment of experts, a huge cavity had formed underground here several months before the disaster, and no one expected that this building was actually a castle in the air. The heavy rain on the night of April 1 put enormous pressure on the city’s drainage system. Several nearby drainage pipes burst and a large amount of rainwater seeped into the ground, seriously shaking the foundation of the Future Dream Building. The loose soil could not bear the weight of the building, eventually forming an underground collapse. The entire nineteen-storey building was ruthlessly swallowed up to a hundred meters below the ground.The huge void formed by the subsidence of the building was also filled by the nearby stratum and soil.Therefore, it is not as simple as imagined to travel through these complex geological environments and send rescuers to the ground below 100 meters. As for the white light that Ye Xiao saw from his window at the same time that the Future Dream Building sank into the ground on the night of April 1, and the violent explosion that followed, it was not the earthquake light imagined at the time, but came from the outer suburbs of the city. A large petrochemical complex on the seashore.According to a government release, a mistake by an unlicensed temporary welder led to an explosion in a chemical warehouse and a series of explosions throughout the factory.Due to the large amount of petroleum and chemical products in the petrochemical plant, the energy generated by the explosion almost exceeded the Hiroshima atomic bomb-this is why the original white light was so strong.Naturally, this accident caused huge casualties, all of them were staff members, including the temporary workers who caused the accident. Many people will have doubts, why did these two huge disasters happen almost at the same time?It is officially determined to be purely coincidental and has no connection with each other.However, some netizens also analyzed on Weibo: when the petrochemical project was first constructed, it was suspected of violating laws and regulations, and lacked environmental assessment, which destroyed the local ecological balance and even affected the geological structure of the entire area—such as land subsidence, although it is not related to the city center. It is related to high-rise buildings, but after the petrochemical plant was put into operation, the nearby groundwater was over-extracted (the exact amount of extraction is always a mystery, and the answer to the mystery was taken to the grave after the explosion), and the speed of land subsidence in the city accelerated by more than ten times.Especially in the past two years, unfathomable cracks have often appeared on the asphalt roads, and parks have inexplicably collapsed into large pits—all of which are harbingers of the approaching end of the world. During the seven-day and seven-night rescue process, the police tried their best to collect information on the missing persons, except that the staff at the time of the disaster could be basically identified (God knows which one will leave work one minute earlier or sixty seconds later to change the fate, the rest of the list can only be approximate, Ye Xiao deduced that at least half of them were wrong, and the total number of missing persons fluctuated between one hundred and two hundred. The roads near the "remains" of the Future Dream Building have always been closed. Many foreign media have rented residential buildings or offices in the surrounding high-rise buildings, and filmed the live broadcast of the rescue scene globally.On the fourth day, a major breakthrough was made in the rescue. The drilling well entered the ground at a depth of more than 100 meters and opened up the top floor of the building. The high-rise part of the hotel has been reduced to ruins according to the results of the instrument detection.Rescuers who reached the ground through the deep well cabin found human remains that had been smashed to pieces in the rubble. However, electronic detection instruments showed that there were still signs of life below the ninth floor. This news was exciting again, and it was spread all over the world through major media.Experts have carefully studied the architectural drawings of the building, and believe that the dome structure between the cinema on the ninth floor and the office building on the tenth floor is extremely strong, and it is likely to support the huge pressure on the upper part. The rescue team quickly cleared the upper ruins, and at the same time drilled a deep well with a diameter of only 7.5 cm-this is also the method used in the mine disaster in Chile: it is extremely difficult to create a space that can accommodate a person through, and it will take a long time. It took many days to get through the tunnel, only to find that the people underneath were all starving and thirsty.Therefore, there must be a pipeline deep into the ground to transport basic survival materials as soon as possible, even if it is just a few bottles of water and a few pills, it can continue the life below. The deep well was opened within 24 hours and went 150 meters underground.The rescue team sent food, water, medicine, communication equipment, batteries... through the deep well, but there was no response. The rescue continued for another three days. A larger rescue channel passed through the ruins and soil, and finally reached the dome between the ninth and tenth floors of the Future Dream Building on the evening of April 8. This all-steel structure dome is extremely strong. Apart from cracks in the concrete, there is no major problem with the steel itself-a state-owned steel group that produces these steels will inevitably publicize it as major news. The rescue team made a careful excavation plan, because the dome is related to the safety of the bottom nine floors (not including the four underground floors). Once the dome is damaged, all the floors below may collapse.Therefore, everyone adopted the method of manual excavation to find the escape passage between the ninth floor and the tenth floor, so as to avoid the steel structure dome. Just an hour ago, due to a little negligence of the rescue team, an accident occurred while cutting steel, and the dome structure partially collapsed.A cloud of smoke billowed in front of his eyes, Ye Xiao quickly lay down on the ground and fastened his safety helmet. Throughout the excavation process tonight, he has been following the rescue team. As the only representative of the local police, he is responsible for dealing with emergencies between people—to put it bluntly, it is to suppress possible underground crimes. A minute later, the strong electric light passed through the heavy concrete dust, illuminating a large opening in the ground, which could be vaguely identified as the ticket window of a movie theater. Get through! Ye Xiao didn't forget to put on a mask, followed the rescue team in red, and entered Future Dream Studios through the gap. Hope it's not hell.He prayed silently, and opened his eyes amidst the still lingering smoke and dust. Yes, it really survived!Under the sun-like searchlights set up by the rescue team, a strange picture is shown, just like the scenes in the science fiction novels I read when I was a child-the dungeon, the huge atrium and patio, the artificial sky above the head, and the high-speed elevator. People go up and down, and there are shops, restaurants, and houses on each floor... Countless people live underground, just like we live on the ground. It's just that they can't see the sunset at dusk, the stars at midnight, or the moonlight in the second half of the night. Ye Xiao felt dizzy for a while, and almost fell to his knees by the railing of the atrium on the ninth floor.He didn't dare to take off his mask, the air was cloudy and dirty, filled with a rotten smell.Looking up, I saw that most of the dome is still strong, and the collapsed part is limited to the vicinity of the theater. A loaded pistol was pinned to his armpit to guard against various accidents that might occur underground.Colleagues joked that there might be prehistoric monsters hidden underground, so Ye Xiao was required to play the role of Ultraman.People in red rescue suits were coming and going in front of him, but he felt something calling him.This is the sixth sense formed in the police career for many years, or the sense of hearing, sight and smell that cannot be explained by science. Returns without warning after years of disappearance. He entered the passage outside the movie screening hall. The rescue team had already gone to the eighth floor to search for survivors, and the ground responders did not dare to come down rashly.Ye Xiao walked alone in the labyrinthine road, more than half of the walls had collapsed, a pile of rubble and ruins.When passing through an inconspicuous small door, there was a strange sound—it turned out to be a dog barking! Finding a living dog would be a miracle, if not a living person.Ye Xiao opened the door, entered a narrow room, and found that it was a movie projection machine room. Most of the roof had collapsed, crushing a Labrador dog, which was making the bark. Ye Xiao was about to rename it "Dog Qiangqiang", but when he lowered his head, he found a person. A man with half of his body exposed, his lower body was crushed under the heavy rubble. he died. His throat was cut open with a sharp weapon. Eyes are still open. The deceased appeared to be between thirty-five and forty-five years old, with dust and smudges on his face, a long beard, and some scars on his forehead and cheeks.But from the eyebrows, the bridge of the nose, and the outline of the face, it can be seen that his appearance is quite good, and he must have been a handsome guy when he was young. The time of death should not be long, the smell of blood still lingers in the air, and the blood on his neck has not dried completely.There are many sharp pieces of broken glass on the ground, from the shattered picture frames on the wall.The murder weapon was one of the glass stained with blood. murder! No one would have imagined that such a cruel murder would happen amidst such a huge disaster!It is conceivable that this person has experienced all kinds of pain and despair in the dark underground, and spent seven days and seven nights like years. Finally, the rescue team has arrived, and the moment he is about to see hope, his life is ruthlessly taken away by someone. It seems that Ye Xiao risked his life to follow the rescue team to the front line, not for show or anything else, but because he really needed a police officer! At this moment, he has exited the half-collapsed film projection room, and the wailing of the Labrador dog is still ringing in his ears.He knew the rescue team would be on their way soon and do their best to get this poor and lucky dog ​​out. Continue to walk to the passage of the projection hall, there is no clear road, you have to climb over the ruins.He holds a powerful flashlight in his left hand, and puts his right hand carefully under his armpit, ready to draw the pistol at any time.In the murder just now, right after the movie theater collapsed, the victim was pinned down and unable to move, and he easily cut his throat with broken glass—before the rescuers found out! The murderer won't run very far, and is likely to be trapped in the ruins as well. Ye Xiao couldn't breathe, the rope of the safety helmet tied around his neck almost strangled him to death.He simply took off his safety helmet and mask, and only relied on the gun under his arm to protect himself. After climbing another ten meters, he heard a cry, which seemed to be from a child. God!He no longer considered whether to shoot the murderer, and immediately began digging up the rubble in front of him.He had no tools, but with ten fingers, until his hands were ripped apart and bleeding—he touched a hand. Although his palm was rough and bleeding, he could feel that it was a woman's hand. Thankfully, not dead!Five fingers that were still warm firmly clenched Ye Xiao's hand! He saw her face.