C1

My name is Hu Tianyi, and I'm 25 years old. I was born in a place called Hu Village in the northwest.

Like all children, my childhood was a carefree one, but I never imagined that at the age of eight my life would be transformed by a disaster.

It was a terrible plague.

No one knew where the plague had come from. It was as if, overnight, the people of the village had suddenly contracted a strange disease.

People said it was a disaster that fell from the sky.

I also remember that the sick villagers were as sick as rabies, fearful of the sun, bloodshot eyes, enlarged pupils, purplish black fingernails, black saliva running from the corners of their mouths, as if they had been possessed by a demon.

And all patients, without exception, have symptoms of restlessness, madness, and sometimes uncontrollable insanity.

Not just humans, but livestock as well.

The unease and fear seemed to envelop the hearts of every villager in the Hu Family Village.

The villagers all held their fingers as they lived, hoping that one day, someone would be able to save them.

During that time, those who were rich and capable all went to the city to hide. However, the majority of the remaining people could only leave it up to fate.

In the abandoned farmlands, rotten animals were everywhere. People hid at home all day, closed the door, panicked, and waited for death in fear. They were like zombies.

Of course, not everyone was infected with the terrible plague, because there was also a doctor in the village who had been trying to control the plague, and that person was my father.

After he received his master's degree, he gave up on his high salary, and returned to the village to open a clinic. He said, "Hu Jia Village is remote, and lacks medical treatment, and my grandparents died early because they had a small illness and could not be cured in time. It was the elders in the village who raised him into a talented individual, and he wanted to use his own abilities to repay everyone."

Although the village was remote and lacked medical attention, very few people were sick. The villagers worked all day long without the pollution from the city. It was rare for the villagers to have any serious illnesses throughout the year, so our days at that time were rather leisurely.

But during the summer of the plague, my father spent nearly twenty-four hours a day at the clinic. At first, there were only three or four patients a day. "But a few days later, more and more patients came in, and the symptoms became worse and worse. My father was busy every day, and as I watched him wear himself out day by day, my brow furrowed and my temper became more and more irritable.

Unfortunately, despite his father's best efforts, there were patients who died every day after their treatment had failed.

There was a mage in the village, and most of the dead villagers were handed over to him.

In that moment, the streets and alleys of the village were filled with panic. Almost every day, the tolling of the bell could be heard as the mages carried the coffin.

The deaths of the villagers also made his father, who was a master of medicine, feel troubled. At first, he thought it was just an ordinary outbreak, but the situation became more and more serious.

In the absence of any success from his treatment, he wrote dozens of letters overnight asking for help to his friends in the medical field.

However, the replies they received said that they had never seen this strange disease before.

His father refused to give up and spent the night flipping through countless medical records both at home and abroad, only to find that this strange disease was not recorded in any of them.

Finally, after a variety of treatments and methods failed, my father began to suspect that this strange disease was caused by a virus he had never seen before. Thus, he directly reported to the city's leaders, hoping to isolate the treatment.

After a period of time, the situation in the Hu family village finally attracted the attention of the higher ups. After some investigation, it turned out as his father had said, the city, after all, was afraid of the spread of the virus, so they quickly agreed to his father's request and quarantined all the patients. They also sent two doctors to study this rare and strange disease together with his father.

However, even so, new patients still appeared every day. Every day, new patients would die, and every day, corpses would be sent out from the clinic's courtyard.

At that time, there were at most a dozen people being buried at the same time, and they were all people I knew, familiar faces. Every time this happened, his father would look exceptionally exhausted. His face would turn pale, and he would become much older.

More than half of the villagers had died. The Soul Summoning Bell had never rang so frequently in the Hu Family Village.

The hill behind the mountain where the dead were buried was also the busiest place in the village besides his father's clinic.

Everyone was panic-stricken. The fear of death had shattered their courage. The members of the "medical team" were unable to find out anything, so they had to report it as an unknown virus infection. When they returned to the city, they never returned.

Everyone was afraid of death, and doctors were no exception.

The village was shrouded in a deathly curse. Even in broad daylight, no one was to be seen. Occasionally, a few people would walk through the streets, but they were just like walking corpses.

Many times he asked my mother to take me out of the village, but my mother refused, and no matter what my father said, it was useless. She insisted on disinfection at home every day, and I was not allowed to go out at will, but one day, a month later, my mother had a fever.

His father's heart was burning with anxiety. He tried every possible method, but no matter what, he couldn't make his mother's fever subside.

In fact, he knew very well that it was all in vain, because he had long since exhausted all the methods that he could think of.

His mother had endured until that day, when the terrible virus completely broke out.

I remember very clearly that my mother, who had a fever that day, was lying in bed, spitting out black blood. She used to be young and beautiful, but after just a few days, her face had turned as haggard as dried up bark. It was as if all the blood had been drained from her.

That day, I gripped the hem of my mother's dress tightly and refused to let go.

His father sat on the edge of the bed, his mother in his arms, a serene expression on his withered face, all the way until he closed his eyes.

I didn't cry that day, and when I looked at my mother, I couldn't shake the feeling that she hadn't left.

The next day at noon, the mages began to move from house to house to collect the corpses.

When his mother's body was taken away, his father was sitting on the front steps of his house, looking dazed, as if he had lost his soul.

There were still people dying every day in the village, and my mother was only one of them. I used to think, who would be next?

A few days later, I was asleep when I heard my father whispering in my ear.

"I want to save everyone... But I can't save anyone … Tianyi, I've already … I don't want to lose it anymore. I want to find the answer! "

The next day, my father disappeared.

Anxious, my relatives and I searched the entire village but couldn't find him. My father seemed to have vanished from the face of the earth.

Now that I think about it, the last thing my father said to me still echoed in my ears. No one would have thought that the answer to all of this would cost us so much.

After his father went missing, the mages in the village also disappeared without a trace, no longer hearing the Soul Summoning Bell ringing. The village was completely shrouded in the shadow of death.

In the end, the matter of the Hu Family Village was finally brought to the attention of the central government.

Following that, a large number of experts and soldiers came to the village and began to control the spread of the disease.

For a time, the entire mountain area was sealed off by uniformed soldiers. A group of doctors wearing white biochemistry suits, who were tightly wrapped up, entered the mountain area.

The villagers who had a severe fever all entered the temporarily built isolation area in the middle of the village. As for what happened afterwards, no one knew.

It was just that every night, they could hear the hysterical screams of the seriously ill villagers in the quarantine area.

As for me and the other uncles and aunts who were lucky enough not to be infected, they were under guard twenty-four hours a day in a tent behind the mountain.

But during that time, some of us still had fever. They were then taken away by armed men, some said, who had been turned into experiments and dissected alive.

There were more than a thousand people in the village, and only two hundred were still healthy.

However, it was like a small white mouse. It was being watched every day without any freedom.

I lived in that tent for more than a month. It was only by a coincidence that I got to know Uncle Lin.

Uncle Lin was a close friend of his father at university. He had been assigned by the government to come here and control the spread of his illness. He knew everything about his father.

When he learned that I was my father's only son, he gave me a lot of convenience. Often take me out of the camp, out to relax, to breathe the fresh air.

A few weeks after Uncle Lin and the others arrived, the people in the tent began to have fever. Groups after groups of people were taken away.

Uncle Lin returned to his tent less and less every day. The next few times he came back, he was frowning and preoccupied.

It was only when he saw me that he gave me a tired smile.

I know, Uncle Lin and the others seem to have reached a bottleneck in their research of illness. The treatment was deadlocked.

The number of villagers in the Hu Family Village also decreased.

Faced with such a large area of death, the medical staff also became completely hysterical.

They blew up the cemetery in the back of the mountain. He dug up all the corpses that were buried in the ground.

He kept dissecting, studying, and repeating himself in an attempt to find out the answers from the dead.

However, the corpses that had long since rotted away and turned black were filled with poison. Their hideous faces made it seem as if the demons were mocking them for overestimating their capabilities.

Finally, a month after their arrival, the treatment was announced as a failure. All those who were quarantined had to leave the quarantine for an indefinite period of time!

That is, we have been abandoned.

Of course, I learned about it later.

Because, when the news came out, I had a fever.