"I've finished reading it."
Rubbing his eyes that were too sleepy to open, Chu Guang put down the diary and the notes that he had extracted key information from, and threw away the pen in his hand.
Although he didn't find the answer he wanted, the story in it still provided him with a lot of interesting clues.
At first, he thought that this diary was about a group of survivors who lost their humanity and eventually transformed into predators.
Later, it was concluded that it was actually a simple modern version of the farmer and the snake.
There are three main characters in the diary.
The owner of the diary is named Li Xiu, an ordinary sports news reporter, let's call him Xiao Li.
The other is a woman named Sun Lai, let's call her Xiao Sun.
The third person is Xiao Sun's husband who works as a guard in the shelter.
Since the diary does not mention the name of the guard, let's call him "the victim".
After reading the whole diary, Chu Guang had a feeling that the brother who lived in the yellow-haired diary was really miserable.
The beginning of the diary was very plain. Xiao Li, who survived the catastrophe, simply described what he saw and heard when the nuclear war broke out with the touch of memory.
At that time, a regional basketball game was being played in the gymnasium in the northern suburbs of Qingquan City. The game was in the second half, and it was the tense and fierce decisive stage.
And at this moment, the radio suddenly sounded the alarm of a nuclear strike.
[… Almost everyone didn't react, even my assistant thought that this sound effect was a special effect arranged by the organizer to liven up the atmosphere. However, I still panicked, almost instinctively ran, instinctively rushed into the basement, and found the hibernation capsule there. When I stepped in with both feet, I hesitated for a moment. ]
[What if all this is just a bad joke? It only takes a month for my audience to forget me completely, and I will have nothing... But I finally closed the door and turned on the safety of the start button. ]
[The surroundings began to get colder, and my consciousness faded away little by little. When I opened my eyes again and pushed open the hatch, the mechanical watch on the door told me that the nuclear war had indeed happened. I had been asleep for more than three years, and now everything outside was different. I made the right bet, but I didn't feel lucky at all... I would rather be wrong, and everything was just a bad joke, at least I could get a lot of compensation from the organizer. Or let everything end three years ago. It's not a bad thing to die in a utopia, but it's a torture to live. ]
In the following paragraph, Xiao Li described the scene he saw on the street from his perspective.
The fragmented streets, the broken concrete buildings, and the dead bodies abandoned on the street for crows to eat were like hell.
It was so desperate that it was suffocating!
It was obviously August, but the sky had already started to snow. The gray sky could not see the sun, and there was no warmth.
Wandering aimlessly in the street.
Before he was about to collapse, he finally found a group of poor people who had also survived in a nearby scrap tire factory.
In that era when humanity was far from extinct, the survivors of the tire factory rescued him, and he also met a woman named Sun Lai there.
The woman was a nurse with a child under 7 years old. She was separated from her husband when the nuclear bomb exploded and had been looking for her husband all these years.
Li Xiu sympathized with her experience and expressed his willingness to help her.
When writing this, there was a yellowed photo pasted in the diary, which was a photo of the two of them. Although the woman's face was full of traces of frost, she looked beautiful.
Chu Guang didn't care about the development of their relationship, nor did he care about the complex ethical entanglements, so he quickly skipped at least 30 pages of psychological activities and detailed descriptions until he finally saw the clues that really interested him.
Xiao Li and Xiao Sun assembled a primitive but reliable radio with the parts they found, and successfully listened to a broadcast from the shelter.
The person on the radio was Sun Lai's husband, the victim who served as a guard in the shelter.
For three years, the broadcast had not been interrupted for a single day. It started on time at noon every day and continued until three o'clock in the afternoon.
The content of the broadcast was also the search for his lost wife and children for three years.
When she realized that her husband had never given up looking for her, Xiao Sun, who had been a little shaken, cried in Xiao Li's arms.
Chu Guang could feel that the owner of this diary did not seem very happy. She did not even mention her husband's name in the diary, but just used that man as a pseudonym to pass over the whole thing.
However, the following things gradually became interesting.
As a guard in the shelter, the victim was locked up in the shelter before the nuclear war broke out.
When he learned that his wife and children were still alive, he immediately found a way to contact his friend who used to work in the police station, and guided his friend to bring supplies to rescue those poor people living in the tire factory.
These supplies came in handy.
Not only that, the victim relied on the almost unlimited knowledge reserves in the shelter to look up useful information from the electronic library and actively helped the survivors of the tire factory to collect useful items and build their own shelters to fight against the severe cold weather and hunger.
It was like remote control.
Xiao Li and Xiao Sun cooperated very well, but they concealed one thing, that is, they did not tell the survivors about the shelter.
People are selfish.
If these survivors knew that there was a shelter hidden near them that they could contact, it would be hard to say whether they could still live bravely, united and help each other as they do now. They might even have bad ideas and force those who helped them to tell the location of the shelter, or even do something more outrageous.
The credit and prestige were temporarily attributed to Xiao Li, and the existence of the shelter was concealed. He seemed like an omnipotent genius and won the support of everyone.
This is not a bad thing.
But leading a group of survivors is not an easy thing after all.
Especially since the collected materials will eventually run out, and there is no hope of ending this endless winter.
The owner of the diary had a clear mindset from the beginning. He knew that only by entering the shelter could he get eternal peace.
So he began to try to persuade Xiao Sun, instilling some ideas in her, telling her that the shelter was the only way out.
This was not only for her sake, but also for her children.
No matter what the idea was, Xiao Sun was obviously convinced. Compared with the shelter with a good environment, no one wanted to stay in hell and suffer.
Besides, her husband was in the shelter, so it was not impossible to get in.
However, the two did not know that once the door of the shelter was closed, it would not be so easy to open it. The so-called being able to get in was just wishful thinking.
Although the victim was also very anxious to see his wife and children, only the manager had the authority to open the door of the shelter.
As a guard, I didn't even have the qualifications to see the manager, let alone open the door.
Not only that.
In principle, after the door of the shelter is closed, it will immediately enter radio silence. No one is allowed to send messages to the outside world in any form. If discovered, they will be severely punished.
The reason why he can send signals to the outside world and receive information from the outside world is largely because the shelter he is in is a little special.
There is a low-power signal tower hidden on the surface of this shelter, and monitoring the signals in the nearby area is what he has to do every day.
Yes, he took advantage of his position.
No matter what the reason is, this is not a glorious thing.
He has not figured out how to confess, let alone how to beg the administrator to show leniency and let him go.
The worst result is that after he truthfully confessed everything, he was sentenced to life imprisonment by the administrator for treason, and was frozen in a hibernation capsule forever, and was tried by law after order was restored.
By then, he will lose contact with his wife and children forever.
The above are all Chu Guang's speculations based on the content of the diary.
After all, the diary did not record the psychological activities of the victim, but only briefly stated the clues about "radio silence" and "unable to open the door".
Later, out of guilt for his wife and children, the victim guided them through the radio and found some hidden supply points that would not be marked on the regular refuge map.
The supplies there were very rich, not only food, medicine, clean drinking water, but also police weapons for explosion-proof purposes.
These supplies allowed the survivors of the tire factory to spend a prosperous time, and even rescued a group of survivors who wandered from the neighboring city.
And the owner of this diary, of course, became the savior in the eyes of these people, and even became a hero in the eyes of other people's wives and children.
However, this prosperous period did not last long.
From the second half of the diary, it can be seen that as the supplies were exhausted, the conflicts and frictions between people began to intensify.
At the beginning, regardless of gender, age or status, everyone could enjoy two boxes of canned meat and unlimited self-heating rice every day, and even iced and delicious beer to drink.
Later, the survivor community began to ban alcohol, and meat could only be left for young and middle-aged men who went out to explore, hunt, and scavenge, as well as pregnant women. The porridge became thinner and thinner, and even had to be mixed with some tree bark.
Finally, all the stockpiled supplies were exhausted, and the weather was getting colder and colder.
Everything was getting worse, and there was no sign of improvement. Even the most optimistic people could not see any hope.
Some people said that the winter would last for a long time.
Others said that it was a rumor and there was no nuclear winter at all.
Then there was a voice to refute, maybe not just nuclear weapons? After all, the news once said that they had already mastered the existence that was more deterrent than nuclear weapons.
But if it really exists, is everything in front of them false?
They have never seen even the most primitive nuclear bombs, and the source of their knowledge is what others have chewed, and they can't even distinguish which ones are true and which ones are just a possibility of speculation and conjecture.
Suspicion and complaints spread among the survivors, some people chose to leave, and those who stayed gradually turned against each other.
Maybe...
They shouldn't have taken in those wandering survivors from the beginning.
But who is not a wanderer?
Or, which person should be taken in first?
When the contradictions accumulated to the point of being irreconcilable, they eventually turned into a fierce conflict. The cause might have been just a piece of moldy bread or even a bone, but it didn't matter.
The fight finally subsided with Xiao Li's gunshot, but from that moment on, his dream of being a savior was completely shattered.
Sun Lai's child died in the fight, and she went completely crazy. One night, she disappeared in the snow and never appeared again.
Xiao Li himself was immersed in regret and pain, and the content of his diary gradually went to another extreme. The words were no longer sharp and elegant, but were sloppy and perfunctory.
Sometimes he wrote a few days later, and sometimes he even forgot to update for a month.
The date on the last page was fixed in the fourth year of the Wasteland Era.
[…I am still looking for that refuge, which is the only hope. Although I know the hope is slim, this world is hopeless.]
This is the last line he wrote.
Until the end of his life, he was looking for the utopia that he never found.
"This diary can be put in a museum for exhibition... If one day museums and history reappear on this planet, someone must know what happened here."
"Forget it, I'll spend some time to update the entry of 'Blood Hand Clan' in the official website setting collection another day."
"The server in another world is always more reliable than the museum in the wasteland."
Although the diary explains the origin of the Blood Hand Clan, it does not mention the ending of Xiao Li himself.
But this is not important.
In a sense, the blood handprint printed on the cover has explained everything. It is not surprising that it was left by him.
Chu Guang once heard from Haien that two years ago, the leader of the Blood Hand Clan was not called "Bear", but a man called "Eagle", and his body was hung on a street lamp not far from the entrance of the tire factory.
Before "Eagle", there was "Snake" whose eyes were gouged out.
I don't know what happened before that, maybe it was called something else.
Legend has it that none of the leaders of the Blood Hand Clan had a good end, and almost all of them died from the murder of their successors or the cruel law of Darwin.
This diary with bloody handprints seemed to be cursed with some kind of vicious curse, and was regarded as a spiritual totem by those plunderers. Together with the bloody and violent culture, it has been passed down from generation to generation to the present.
Now that it has been passed down to the generation of "Bear", the iron hammer of justice has finally smashed this cycle of sin.
With a sigh, Chu Guang closed the diary in his hand.
"Xiao Qi, I'm going to sleep, turn off the lights for me, and remember to wake Xia Yan up."
"As for me, 1pm... forget it, I'll just sleep until I wake up naturally."
"I'll divide the spoils after I wake up. If any player asks you, just say... the equipment hasn't been identified yet."
As we all know, unidentified equipment cannot be equipped. This is common sense in M-mo RPGs and is very reasonable.
And Xiao Qi's voice is always so caring.
"Okay, master."
"Go to sleep."
The light in the room gradually softened and finally returned to darkness.
It would be a good dream.