Chapter 733: Epilogue (4)
Survivors
[Part 2]
Inside a certain group chat named “Survivors”.
AAA Honest Management Various Businesses Welcome Inquiries: @AllMembers
–”Tarot Master” has been pulled into the group chat.
–”Promote Civilization, Foster New Ethos, Build a New Era University Campus” has been pulled into the group chat.
AAA Honest Management Various Businesses Welcome Inquiries: surprise!
*[Smug dancing yellow bean emoji.jpg]*
After a brief five-second blank.
Cute Little Cake: ??!!
Heartless Fiend Proud Blood Emperor (Reborn from the Ashes Edition): Holy shit!
Cute Little Cake: Bro, seriously?? Am I seeing this right?!
Chen Mo (Please contact for post-war reconstruction matters, offline during non-working hours): ?! [Shocked taking off glasses.jpg]
Promote Civilization, Foster New Ethos, Build a New Era University Campus: Yo.
Tarot Master: Hello everyone.
Tarot Master: Wait, the IDs in this group are actually in this style?
–Member “Tarot Master” has changed ID to “Pirate King”
Cute Little Cake: …
Chen Mo (Please contact for post-war reconstruction matters, offline during non-working hours): …
Dark Fire – Qi Qian: Wait a second, how did you guys connect the signal to that area? @AAA Honest Management Various Businesses Welcome Inquiries This is no ordinary major technological breakthrough.
AAA Honest Management Various Businesses Welcome Inquiries: Explaining the principle is very complicated, and technically it’s very difficult to achieve.
[Shy and bashful.jpg]
Dark Fire – Qi Qian: …
Dark Fire – Qi Qian: What do you want?
AAA Honest Management Various Businesses Welcome Inquiries: Fair prices for all, DM me for details.
[Cute bunny holding face.jpg]
Promote Civilization, Foster New Ethos, Build a New Era University Campus: This is moving. I can finally get online. You have no idea how much I missed this thing.
Pirate King: Oh right, wait a sec, I’ll pull someone else in.
–”No. 8″ joined the group chat.
Pirate King: @No. 8 change ID
–Member “No. 8” has changed ID to “Pirate King – No. 8”
Heartless Fiend Proud Blood Emperor (Reborn from the Ashes Edition): Hahahahahaha Pirate King-Ba! (T/N: In Chinese, “Wang-Ba” sounds like bastard/turtle).
–Member “Pirate King – No. 8” has changed ID to “Pirate King – First Mate”
Cute Little Cake: ………………I’m begging you guys.
Hugo: Actually, the IDs in this group don’t have to be so
Heartless Fiend Proud Blood Emperor (Reborn from the Ashes Edition): So what?
A few seconds later.
Hugo: Never mind.
Bai: Welcome.
[Politely holding flowers.jpg]
Chen Mo (Please contact for post-war reconstruction matters, offline during non-working hours): Welcome, welcome.
Heartless Fiend Proud Blood Emperor (Reborn from the Ashes Edition): Since you two are both in the group chat now, can that underworld thing you used to communicate with before finally be scrapped?
Cute Little Cake: !! Ohhhhh! Finally!!
Promote Civilization, Foster New Ethos, Build a New Era University Campus: Sorry, not yet. Getting online is still a luxury after all, only once a week.
Cute Little Cake: Honestly, I tolerated how it looks, but why does it have to appear in the middle of the night every time?? Do you know it’s easy to give someone a heart attack?
Promote Civilization, Foster New Ethos, Build a New Era University Campus: Try to understand, they are things that can’t see the light of day, it’s hard for them to move around during daytime.
Bai: Yeah, it’s a bit scary.
Bai: My family’s butler said he was very scared when he saw it.
Cute Little Cake: ………Sorry, I hate the rich. Logging off for now.
The ID that had disappeared for a few minutes popped up again.
Dark Fire – Qi Qian: @Dark Fire – An Xin leave the group.
Dark Fire – An Xin: ???
AAA Honest Management Various Businesses Welcome Inquiries: Oh my, don’t be like that, let’s talk nicely.
Dark Fire – Qi Qian: You kid are treating me like a sucker!
AAA Honest Management Various Businesses Welcome Inquiries: Harmony brings wealth, harmony brings wealth. I ask an exorbitant price, you can haggle.
Dark Fire – Qi Qian: …
AAA Honest Management Various Businesses Welcome Inquiries: Don’t be angry, come on, for the sake of our old acquaintance, I’ll give you a discount, how about it?
[Flying kiss.jpg]
The two IDs disappeared again. Probably pulled into a private chat by Wen Jianyan.
Pirate King: He’s going to get ripped off.
Pirate King – First Mate: Guaranteed.
Promote Civilization, Foster New Ethos, Build a New Era University Campus: Indeed, without a doubt.
Cute Little Cake: Speaking of which, how long has Orange Candy been out of contact?
Chen Mo (Please contact for post-war reconstruction matters, offline during non-working hours): Almost three days.
Cute Little Cake: Hiss, isn’t that a bit too long?
Chen Mo (Please contact for post-war reconstruction matters, offline during non-working hours): Yeah. And it seems there’s no news from Wei Cheng, Zhao Ran, and the others either.
Heartless Fiend Proud Blood Emperor (Reborn from the Ashes Edition): Alright, alright, can you two stop acting like mother hens? No matter how young she looks, she’s not a little kid. Anyway you look at it, she was in the top ten of the Nightmare, could she possibly get lost in the real world?
Meanwhile.
Hundreds of kilometers away, inside a police station in a certain city.
A little girl sat on a bench, intently eating the ice cream in her hand.
“What’s the situation with the kid over there?” Not far away, a police officer at a desk asked his younger colleague.
The other replied quite concisely:
“Got lost.”
*
In the police station, the conversation continued.
“And then?” the older officer pressed, “Have you contacted the parents?”
The younger officer shook his head: “No.”
“What?” The asking officer seemed accustomed to this, “Another case of a kid not remembering their adults’ information?”
“No…”
Hearing the unexpected answer, he paused and looked up: “Hm?”
“The kid remembers her parents’ names and home address very clearly,” the young officer frowned, looking entirely at his wits’ end. “But we couldn’t find any relevant information in the system.”
Hearing this, the asking officer was also surprised: “How could that be?”
“I’m not sure either, but I just had a free colleague go do a field visit. It’s not far from here, they should be back soon.”
As he spoke, he pulled open a drawer and carefully rummaged inside.
A few seconds later, the young officer pulled out a lollipop and turned around with a beaming smile.
But, as soon as he turned around, he froze.
The bench was completely empty.
The little girl who had been sitting there just a moment ago was nowhere to be seen. In the blink of an eye, she had vanished without a trace.
On the street.
The little girl skipped and hopped through the streets, still holding the half-eaten ice cream in her hand.
She navigated alone through the city. The surrounding crowds were bustling, but seemed far removed from her.
Some kind-hearted people saw a young child walking alone and, feeling pity, wanted to step forward to ask if she needed help. But as soon as they approached, they immediately met a pair of chilling eyes that did not match her age, carrying a bloodlust entirely incompatible with the surrounding world. They were startled and abruptly stopped in their tracks.
By the time they recovered, that small figure had already disappeared into the crowd, never to be found again.
Should I turn left here?
Orange Candy thought absentmindedly.
No, no, it should be a right turn.
Memories from different time periods merged and reorganized in her mind, making everything bizarre and disjointed.
The streets before her were both unfamiliar and familiar, like fresh skin attached to an old skeleton. Even though everything wasn’t exactly the same as in her memory, a corner of a certain street seemed to vaguely reveal its past appearance.
Just like this, wandering absentmindedly for an unknown amount of time…
She finally stopped in her tracks.
Orange Candy tilted her head up, staring at the door in front of her with a half-indifferent, half-detached gaze for a long time. Then she bent down, groped under the dirty doormat for a while, and soon pulled out a rusty key.
Then, she pushed the door and entered.
The room smelled of dust, having been unoccupied for a long time. The fruit placed on a small table nearby had rotted, with mosquitoes and flies buzzing around, emitting a foul smell.
Orange Candy turned a blind eye to this and walked straight forward.
Unlike the streets, the layout of the room before her was exactly the same as in her memory.
Whether it was the placement of the furniture or the orientation of the tables and chairs, everything perfectly matched the pictures in her mind, without a single discrepancy.
The coat neglected to be put back in the closet seemed like it would trigger a scolding the next second; the scarf forgotten on the back of the chair seemed like it would be picked up again shortly; the large and small slippers at the entrance were neatly arranged on the shoe rack, seemingly waiting for their owners to return from work.
Only the withered plants on the windowsill, unwatered for a long time, seemed to show the passage of time.
The police station was in chaos. Everyone was mobilized, searching everywhere for the little girl who had inexplicably disappeared inside the station.
“How could you not keep an eye on her?” the older officer scolded anxiously. “What if the kid runs around and gets into an accident?”
The young officer was sweating profusely from anxiety: “Sorry, I wasn’t paying attention for a second…”
“What about the security cameras? Did you check them?” an officer looked up and asked loudly.
“Yes, yes!”
The officer in front of the computer suddenly straightened up, “Ah, found it!”
A group of people immediately gathered around.
On the surveillance screen, the little girl sat obediently on the bench, swinging her two legs, completely focused on licking the ice cream in her hand.
But suddenly, her movements stopped.
It wasn’t just a pause in her movement, but rather as if the time on her body had suddenly frozen.
Time was still passing second by second; clearly, it wasn’t the video being paused.
This stillness lasted for three seconds… maybe five seconds.
The little girl started moving again.
She raised her eyes and looked directly and accurately at the position of the surveillance camera.
“…!”
The moment they met those eyes across the screen, everyone’s heartbeat involuntarily skipped a beat.
Did she know where the camera was?
Or was it just a coincidence?
Before they could figure it out, the little girl smiled at the camera, waved absentmindedly as if saying goodbye, and then hopped off the chair with an indescribably light posture, walking towards the outside of the police station.
The footage ended, but the crowd was still immersed in surprise.
But, before anyone could speak further, an officer rushed in.
He had a solemn expression and was panting heavily:
“Just now, the colleague we sent out just came back!”
“Did you find the child?” an officer pressed.
“N-No.” The officer’s face looked a bit strange. “But the information the child gave us matched up.”
“Did you contact the parents?”
“No…” But as soon as these words came out, the officer’s face became even stranger.
He shook his head, walked in, and placed an old, local newspaper on the desk: “This… this was given to me by an elderly person in their neighborhood.”
“There’s a reason we couldn’t find her parents’ information in our system.”
On the old, yellowed newspaper was a news report occupying an entire page.
“A Human Tragedy: Out-of-Control Truck Rushes Towards Family of Three in Rainstorm. Parents Both Perish Protecting Beloved Daughter.”
In the blurry picture was a messy street, with a large pool of blood under the overturned truck.
Lifeless arms drooped underneath, still maintaining a protective posture.
A six or seven-year-old girl was being carried away by a police officer, her thin arms stretching desperately towards the direction of the tragedy, crying heartbrokenly in the frozen frame.
“They died over twenty years ago.”
In the room.
Orange Candy lowered her head, looking at her palm.
The ice cream that had been tightly gripped in her hand had melted at some point. The cold, sticky syrup dripped down the hand holding the popsicle stick, gooey and emitting a sickeningly sweet smell that was nauseating.
Fruits will rot.
Plants will die.
Ice cream will melt.
Not far away, buzzing flies surrounded the rotten fruit. Behind it were two black-and-white portraits that would never change.
They smiled, gazing at the surging, forward-rolling torrent of time.
And the small child who futilely wanted to return to the time before everything started.
