Diary, Clues, and Origins

"Done reading." Rubbing his eyes, which were heavy with exhaustion, Chu Guang set down the diary along with the notes containing key information he had extracted, tossing aside the pen in his hand. Although he hadn't found the answers he was looking for, the story within had still provided plenty of intriguing clues. At first, he had assumed the diary would chronicle how a group of survivors lost their humanity and degenerated into marauders. As it turned out, in the end, it was simply a modern wasteland version of *The Farmer and the Viper*. Three main figures appeared throughout the diary. The author was Li Xiu, an ordinary sports journalist—for convenience, let's call him Xiao Li. Another was a woman named Sun Lai, or Xiao Sun. The third was Xiao Sun's husband, who served as a guard in a shelter. Since the diary never mentioned the guard's name, he might as well be called the "wronged husband." After reading the entire diary, Chu Guang had only one overarching thought: the poor bastard living inside this homewrecker's diary had it far too rough. The diary began mundanely enough. Recalling the catastrophe from memory, Xiao Li briefly recounted what he had seen and heard when the nuclear war broke out. At the time, a regional basketball game was underway at an arena in the northern suburbs of Qingquan City. The match was in its final quarter, deep in an intense, deciding stretch. Just then, the sirens blared over the public address system, announcing a nuclear strike. [...Almost no one reacted in time. Even my assistant thought the sound effects were just audio flair arranged by the organizers to hype up the atmosphere. But I panicked. Running on pure instinct, I rushed into the basement and found the hibernation pod stored there. When I stepped inside with both feet, I hesitated for a split second.] [What if this was all just a sick joke? In just a month, my audience would forget me completely, and I'd be left with nothing... But in the end, I closed the hatch and flipped the safety on the activation switch.] [The surroundings began to turn cold, and my consciousness drifted away little by little. When I opened my eyes again and pushed open the hatch, the mechanical clock on the door confronted me with reality: the nuclear war had truly happened. I had slept for more than three years, and the world outside was completely unrecognizable. I had bet right, but I didn't feel the least bit lucky... I'd rather have been wrong, that everything had been an awful prank; at least then I could have gotten a hefty settlement from the organizers. Or perhaps it would have been better if everything had simply ended three years ago. Dying in a utopia isn't a bad way to go; surviving, on the other hand, is sheer torture.] In the next passage, Xiao Li described the scenes he witnessed on the street from his perspective. Shattered streets, concrete towers riddled with holes, and corpses dumped haphazardly across the pavement to be pecked apart by crows—everything was like hell on earth. Suffocatingly bleak! Even though it was August, snow was already drifting down from the sky. Beneath the dreary gray clouds, there was not a trace of sunlight, nor the slightest warmth. He wandered the streets aimlessly. Finally, right before collapsing, he found a group of similarly miserable survivors in a nearby abandoned tire factory. Back then, humanity had not yet fully eroded. The survivors at the tire factory took him in, and it was there that he met a woman named Sun Lai. She was a nurse with a child not yet seven years old. Separated from her husband when the bombs fell, she had been searching for him all these years. Li Xiu sympathized with her plight and offered to help. At this point in the journal, a yellowed photograph was pasted to the page—a photo of the two of them together. Though the woman's face bore deep marks of hardship and weathered grief, it was clear she was quite attractive. Chu Guang didn't care about how their feelings blossomed or the tangled ethical web between them, so he skimmed past at least thirty pages of inner monologues and descriptive details—until he finally spotted a clue that genuinely caught his interest. Xiao Li and Xiao Sun had assembled a crude but reliable radio from scavenged parts and successfully picked up a broadcast transmitted from a shelter. And the speaker in that broadcast was none other than Sun Lai's husband—the wronged husband serving as a shelter guard. For three years, the broadcast had never lapsed for a single day. It sounded promptly at noon every day and ran until three in the afternoon. And every day without fail, the message was the same: a man searching for the wife and child he had lost. Realizing that her husband had never given up searching for her, Xiao Sun, whose resolve had already begun wavering, broke down in tears against Xiao Li's chest. Chu Guang could tell the diary's owner hadn't been particularly pleased about this; he hadn't even bothered mentioning the husband's name, simply referring to him as "that man" and glossing over the matter. However, what followed gradually turned interesting. As a shelter guard, the wronged husband had been locked inside the shelter before the nuclear war began. Learning that his wife and child were still alive, he immediately found a way to contact a former colleague from the police force, guiding his friend to deliver supplies and aid to the wretched souls living at the tire factory. Those supplies proved invaluable. Not only that, relying on the shelter's near-limitless repository of knowledge, the husband looked up helpful technical data from the digital library, actively assisting the survivors at the tire factory in scavenging useful materials, constructing a sanctuary, and weathering the bitter cold and starvation. It was like remote coordination. Xiao Li and Xiao Sun cooperated, but they kept one thing secret: they never told the survivors about the shelter. Human nature was inherently selfish. If those survivors found out there was a shelter in contact with them nearby, it was hard to say whether they could continue living with courage, solidarity, and mutual aid as they did now. They might even harbor malicious thoughts, forcing the people helping them to reveal the shelter's location or doing even worse. Credit and prestige were temporarily credited to Xiao Li, while the shelter's existence remained concealed. He appeared like an omnipotent genius, winning everyone's devotion. That wasn't necessarily a bad thing. Yet leading a group of survivors was never an easy task. Especially when scavenged supplies would inevitably run dry one day, and this endless winter offered no glimmer of hope for an end. The diary's author had maintained clear foresight from the start: he knew full well that entering a shelter was the only path to everlasting peace. So he began trying to persuade Xiao Sun, planting ideas in her head, telling her the shelter was their only way out. Not just for her sake, but for her child's. Whatever her thoughts, Xiao Sun was evidently convinced. Compared to the comfortable, well-provided shelter, no one wanted to suffer in hell. Besides, her husband was right inside; getting in wasn't completely out of the question. However, neither of them realized that once the heavy shelter doors shut, opening them was far from easy. The idea that they could simply walk in was pure wishful thinking. Though the wronged husband was desperate to see his wife and child, only the Administrator possessed the authorization to open the vault door. As a mere guard, let alone opening the door, he didn't even have the clearance to meet the Administrator. What was more: In principle, once the shelter door sealed shut, radio silence immediately took effect. No one was permitted to transmit any message outside by any means; anyone caught faced severe punishment. The reason he had been able to transmit and receive signals at all was largely because the shelter he was in was somewhat special. A low-power transmitter tower was concealed on the surface above this shelter, and monitoring signals across the nearby sector was part of his daily duty. Yes, he had abused his position. Whatever the motivation, it was not an honorable deed. He hadn't figured out how to confess, much less how to beg the esteemed Administrator for leniency. The worst-case scenario was that after telling the truth, the Administrator would sentence him to life imprisonment on charges of treason, freezing him forever in a hibernation pod to face legal judgment once order was restored. If that happened, he would lose contact with his wife and child forever. All of this was Chu Guang's deduction based on the diary's contents. After all, the diary didn't record the wronged husband's thoughts, only briefly summarizing the clues concerning "radio silence" and "inability to open the door." Later on, out of guilt toward his wife and child, the husband guided them via radio to several hidden supply caches that were unmarked on standard civil defense maps. Those caches held abundant supplies: not only food, medicine, and clean drinking water, but even riot-control police weapons. These resources allowed the survivors at the tire factory to enjoy a period of prosperity, and they even rescued a group of wandering survivors from a neighboring city. The author of the diary naturally became the savior in the eyes of these people—and the hero in the eyes of another man's wife and child. Yet those days of abundance did not last long. As seen in the latter half of the diary, as supplies depleted, friction and conflicts between people grew increasingly fierce. At the beginning, regardless of age or gender, everyone could enjoy two cans of meat a day, an unlimited supply of self-heating rice, and even ice-cold, refreshing beer. Later on, the survivor community prohibited alcohol. Meat was reserved exclusively for able-bodied men who went out exploring, hunting, and scavenging, as well as pregnant women. The porridge grew thinner and thinner, eventually having to be mixed with tree bark. Finally, all hoarded supplies were exhausted, yet the weather only grew colder. Everything deteriorated without the slightest sign of improvement. Even the most optimistic among them saw no glimmer of hope. Some said the winter would last a very long time. Others claimed that was just a rumor, that there was no such thing as a nuclear winter. Then voices countered: perhaps it wasn't merely nuclear weapons? Old news reports had stated long ago that humanity had developed weapons of deterrence far beyond nuclear arms. Yet if that was true, was what lay before their eyes an illusion? They hadn't even seen the most primitive nuclear bomb; their knowledge came entirely secondhand, chewed over and regurgitated by others. They couldn't even distinguish what was real from what was mere speculation and conjectured possibilities. Suspicion and grievance festered among the survivors. Some chose to leave, while those who stayed gradually turned against one another. Perhaps... From the very beginning, they should never have taken in those wandering survivors. Yet who among them wasn't a wanderer? Or rather, from which accepted wanderer onward should the line have been drawn? When contradictions accumulated to the point of being irreconcilable, they erupted into violent conflict. The spark might have been a piece of moldy bread or even a scrap of bone—none of that mattered anymore. The armed brawl was eventually quelled by gunshots fired by Xiao Li, but from that moment on, his dream of being a savior was shattered beyond repair. Sun Lai's child died in that brawl, and she lost her mind completely, vanishing into the heavy snow one night, never to be seen again. Xiao Li himself sank into guilt and agony. The diary's tone also shifted to another extreme; gone was the neat, stylish penmanship from before, replaced by hurried, careless scrawls. Sometimes days passed between entries, and sometimes he neglected to write for an entire month. The date on the very last page was frozen in the fourth year of the Wasteland Era. [...I am still searching for that shelter. It's the only hope left. Though I know the chances are slim, this world is beyond saving.] That was his final line. Until the end of his days, he had been searching for that utopia he never found. "This diary could be put on display in a museum... If museums and history ever return to this planet one day, someone should know what happened here." "Never mind. When I get a chance, I'll take the time to post it under the Bloodhand Clan lore entry on the official website's compendium." "A server in another world is far more reliable than a museum on the wasteland." Although the diary explained the origins of the Bloodhand Clan, it didn't mention Xiao Li's personal end. Not that it mattered. The bloody handprint on the cover, in a sense, already said it all; in all likelihood, it had been left by him. Chu Guang remembered Hein mentioning that two years ago, the leader of the Bloodhand Clan wasn't called "Bear," but a man named "Eagle," whose corpse had hung from a streetlight near the tire factory entrance. And before "Eagle," there was "Snake," whose eyes had been gouged out. Before that, who knew? Maybe someone with another name. Legend had it that not a single leader of the Bloodhand Clan died a natural death. Nearly all were murdered by their successors—or rather, succumbed to the brutal law of Darwinism. This diary with the bloody handprint seemed cursed with some sinister malice, treated by those marauders as a spiritual totem and passed down through generations alongside their violent, bloodthirsty culture. Now that it had reached Bear's generation, this vicious cycle had finally been smashed by the iron hammer of justice. Letting out a soft sigh, Chu Guang closed the diary. "Xiao Qi, I'm heading to sleep. Turn off the lights for me, and remember to wake Xia Yan." "As for me... 1:00 p.m... Never mind, let me just sleep until I wake up naturally." "The loot can be distributed after I wake up. If players ask you, just say... the equipment hasn't been appraised yet." As everyone knew, unidentified gear couldn't be equipped. That was common sense in MMORPGs—completely reasonable. And Xiao Qi's voice was as attentive as ever. "Alrighty, Master!" "Sleep well!" The lights in the room softened gradually before fading into pitch darkness. It would be a good dream.