CH 101

Chapter 101: Burdened to Continue Ahead

When the earthquake started, Song Yu was operating a drone in the surveyor control vehicle, inhaling oxygen.

The earthquake vibrations were very violent — the car had shock absorbers, but it still kept rocking back and forth. In order to protect the special machine designed specifically for high-precision surveying in alpine areas, Song Yu remained at the control panel until a heavy instrument crashed down from its fixed position on his right.

The instrument injured his hand, and it also smashed the cellphone that was currently broadcasting and transmitting images on the console. 

When the instrument was moved away, his arm instantly throbbed with sharp pain. Half of his body’s energy seemed to be sucked away. The car’s emergency alarm was already ringing, his fellow research group members were screaming, and he could hear the communicator device being abruptly cut off. 

It was very chaotic.

Song Yu could still be considered calm, immediately saving the drone’s data before getting off the control vehicle with the help of a senior. He realised he’d left his phone in the car as he was getting off, and he wanted to get back inside to grab it — only to be restrained by another senior, forcefully pulling him to an open area to wait for rescue.

Every single person in the emergency surveying team had already gone through emergency training when they’d first entered the team. Everyone safely found shelter, and in the entire team, only Song Yu had been injured. Except two seniors were working separately away from the team on surface surveying, and the team was worried about them.

They were on a plateau in a relatively remote location, their backs against the snow mountains. A few cell towers had been damaged by the vibrations, and so they essentially had no cellphone reception.

“I can’t call, there’s no signal.”

“Same with me.” 

There were ten people in the entire team, including Professor He. With two members away, only five of the remaining people had cellphones with them, and only one of them had a battery pack. No one was able to successfully send out a call. They didn’t have enough oxygen, and right now, they couldn’t even find medical assistance for Song Yu’s injury.

Professor He had been working with the director of the local seismological bureau, and after the earthquake, he immediately requested assistance from Professor He’s team.

It would take time for the provincial surveying team to arrive, and right now, what the local search and rescue workers needed most was time, as well as people to monitor the disaster conditions. Professor He’s team was their best choice. 

Even though they were in such a desperate and critical situation, Professor He didn’t decisively agree. He said to the young people he’d brought over, “If you guys want to go back, you need to head back now. No one will be able to predict what will happen later.” 

“Especially you.” Professor He glanced at the injured Song Yu, inwardly sighing. He felt Song Yu was someone who would succeed especially well in this field, and he didn’t want him to be frightened of emergency surveying because of this. 

“I can get them to drive you guys out. Get yourselves ready.”

No one wanted to leave.

“I’m not going back.” The first person to speak was a senior sister. “We’re studying emergency rescue. What are we doing here if we leave now?” Pulling out a paper and a pen from her bag, she wrote down a notice of agreement and signed her name at the bottom before handing it to Professor He. 

“Professor, I’m not leaving if you’re not,” she may have said, but her hands were trembling.

This disaster was utterly outside anyone’s expectations — and now, they were suddenly tasked with a mission, something they shouldn’t be doing to begin with.

No one would be truly unafraid. 

Before Professor He could take the piece of paper, it was snatched away by other students. In a swaying, temporary shelter, the students signed the paper one by one. Song Yu, who’d only just entered the team, was the last person to sign.

He didn’t say a single thing. He scribbled down his name with his left hand, enduring the pain. It was the most sloppy, illegible time he’d ever written his name.

They didn’t even have the time to encourage themselves, hurriedly pulling on shockproof rescue uniforms and then rushing off to the battlefield. They followed the director to the temporary gathering place organised by the command centre, and only there did the emergency surveying team finally find a medical personnel who could check and bind Song Yu’s arm.

“You’ve fractured your forearm. I’m going to put it in a splint, you have to be extremely careful.”

Song Yu was faintly frowning the entire time, not speaking. He only repetitively asked, “Is there reception yet?”

“No, not yet. Xiaoyue’s phone has already turned off by itself, everyone’s saying there’s going to be heavy snow this afternoon.” Song Yu’s fellow team member was extremely worried. He said, “We need to collect enough images of the disaster area before the snow hits, or else we won’t be able to capture anything.” 

Another senior sister was on her laptop, processing the images from earlier into a 3D model. Without lifting her head, she said, “We can use satellite phones. They should be giving us one.”

“Satellite phones are in short supply right now, the command centre and medical teams don’t have enough. They said they’ll help get us one before tomorrow afternoon.” 

“I really want to call my mom…”

“They’ll send over some walkie talkies later.”

“Those walkie talkies are an internal radio to communicate with the command centre. Its operating frequency won’t support external communication, and plus they don’t have external radio connectors.”

The senior sister processing the data suddenly noticed a program error. “There’s an issue with this. Who knows how to program?”

“I do. I wrote that remote sensing program.” Song Yu’s arm had just been placed in a sling, and he was thrown into an emergency task. He used only his left hand to debug the program, re-controlling the special feeder machine in the midst of turmoil. 

Song Yu had also rewritten the base code for that particular feeder machine. Without him there, no one would be able to quickly resolve any problems that popped up.

It was a group of students undertaking their masters and PhD programs, and the group of less than ten people shouldered the frontline emergency surveying responsibilities as soon as the disaster occurred. The remote sensing drone circled up in the sky over the turbulent land, and it gave the most precise guidance to the rescue workers in the command centre — they were able to successfully rescue so many people trapped in the earthquake. 

“Xiao Luo and Chenchen are back!”

That was the first piece of good news they’d received all day, even though the two of them had received some slight injuries. But the two of them brought back very valuable surface data, and after they’d supplied it, the two senior sisters in charge of processing data started to create a map model of the disaster zone. 

Once the vibrations subsided, they returned back to the mobile surveyor control vehicle and quickly set up an emergency mobile monitoring platform. Every single one of them was carrying out incredibly important tasks, and they were spread too thinly. From the initial earthquake to the afternoon, Song Yu spent six hours in front of two laptops and the drone’s control console, controlling it with one hand. He didn’t have time to take even a sip of water.

But whenever he had an opportunity to take a breath, he would once again ask, “Is there reception?”

Snow started to fall, the temperature abruptly dropping, and a lot of people’s phones shut off from the cold. Song Yu’s phone screen had been shattered, and he hadn’t had the time to check if the phone had actually been broken or had only turned itself off. Later, volunteers came by to give them water, and Song Yu heard them talking, still focused on monitoring the drone. It sounded like they could call out using an old phone. He rapidly stood up and went to ask if he could borrow it, his arm in its sling.

“Give it a try, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.”

He’d been overly calm over the entire day, and it hadn’t mattered if it was about his broken arm or the extreme amount of duties he needed to multitask. He appeared highly trained — he didn’t look like a normal university student, but more like a true emergency mapping worker.

But when he received the old cellphone that could possibly contact the outside world, Song Yu’s fingers suddenly started to tremble as he typed in a string of numbers he could recite backwards and forwards. With his eyebrows tightly knit together, he held that phone closely to his ear.

He still couldn’t send out a call.

“Trying sending out a text. Everyone else sent out texts, but they won’t always go through. But if you’re lucky, sometimes the text’ll send.” The volunteer was also unsure. “That’s what I’ve heard, at least…”

Song Yu told him thank you, and to save time, he very quickly wrote a message for Yue Zhishi.

[This is Song Yu. I’m very safe, I temporarily can’t contact you with my phone. Don’t worry about me, stay at home and wait for me.]

He watched the spinning icon, as well as that message. Song Yu couldn’t help it — he sent through two more. 

[Do you remember what I said before? Your sense of direction is too terrible. Don’t come looking for me, just stay where you are and wait for me.]

[Baobao, I love you. Don’t come.]

Over these twenty-plus years, other than occasionally wishing for Yue Zhishi to reply to him with something a bit more than brotherly feelings, this was the second time Song Yu had hoped for something so intensely. He really wanted this faint reception to work for just a small fragment of time, so Yue Zhishi could see his messages, so Yue Zhishi wouldn’t come.

That one conversation at Yanghe Qizhe seemed to have become a certain foreshadowing between the two of them.

Song Yu unceasingly went to look for Yue Zhishi before he needed him. The one thing he needed Yue Zhishi to do was to wait in place, especially when it came to disasters — he was afraid Yue Zhishi wouldn’t be able to endure it.

But what he didn’t understand was — waiting in place was the thing Yue Zhishi was least able to do.

He would forever come looking for him. 

Song Yu didn’t know if those two messages, sent out in the middle of his strenuous tasks, were actually delivered to Yue Zhishi. He could only keep repeating to the volunteer, if there were any news, please let him know.

The snow grew heavier the longer it fell, and the command centre kept reporting to them the number of people they’d rescued. Each time that number increased, their emergency team would release another sigh in relief. The emergency mobile monitoring they supported so painfully also started to gradually show signs of its weakness.

The thick layers of snow covered a large portion of the land — the number of useful images sent through the drone continuously decreased. 

Luckily, after nightfall, dozens of people from the provincial capital’s emergency mapping team finally arrived at the epicentre, and they brought with them even more mobile surveyor control vehicles. They were finally able to create a larger ground force to survey the land. Song Yu, with his injury, wasn’t able to go out and take shots of the land like other people; the senior sisters and brothers in his team went out one by one under the direction of the command centre, and when the last person was about to leave, Song Yu reached out his left hand and caught hold of him.

He handed his phone, unable to be turned on, to that senior brother. “Senior, if you guys find somewhere you can charge phones or fix them, please help me.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll definitely help you think of a way to turn on your phone.”

Song Yu, along with two of the emergency mapping workers from the provincial capital and a firefighter, worked together on the mobile monitoring platform. His right arm wasn’t secured tightly enough and it very much hurt when it swayed, but the command centre kept confirming positions through the walkie talkie. He couldn’t stop, so he asked the surveyor next to him to fasten his arm a bit tighter, his other hand continuing to send out positions.

“We’ve got him, we’ve got him!”

“There’s someone here!”

The rescue workers’ voices in the walkie talkie were very unclear, but it was a kind of comfort, at least.

“It was such luck for you guys to be here this time. You’ve really been our saviour,” the firefighter said to Song Yu, driving the surveyor control vehicle. “You guys have given us at least twelve extra hours to rescue people. There’s only been one death so far, and it really has been through sheer luck.”

Song Yu didn’t think that was a good thing. He didn’t even want to hear the words of ‘death’ and ‘number of people’ linked together, but he just so happened to be the person confirming the number of casualties every ten seconds. It was very much an untimely thought, but he thought of Yue Zhishi, who hadn’t been able to finish the movie in the cinema.

Yue Zhishi had always felt traumatic stress when it came to disasters, but Song Yu thought, he himself should have it too. 

Experiencing Uncle Yue’s departure at such a young age and then continuously watching those news about disaster relief — repetitively stimulating himself like that would’ve been his own psychological response to the traumatic event. Song Yu hadn’t found a way to heal himself until he’d discovered his life plan to participate in emergency rescue.

He wanted to drink some water, but he couldn’t open the bottle with just one hand. He could only wait.

“I hope that number won’t increase.”

With each increase, another family would be broken. 

But disasters were unfeeling, and he knew his hope could only remain as a hope.

“I hope so too. It’s too hard.” The firefighter was also very young, possibly having just passed twenty. He was dressed in a bright orange firefighter uniform, his skin very dark, and he sighed, “Fuck… By choosing to work in this field, my girlfriend broke up with me.”

Not too long after, he laughed at himself and said, “Good thing we’ve already broken up…”

The surveyor also sighed with emotion. “You guys work at the frontline. It’s the most dangerous.”

“But what isn’t dangerous? Those young nurses, all of them so small, still need to lift stretchers when there aren’t enough helpers. I was watching them trying to save people, and so many of them were crying as they worked.” He shook his head, the vehicle continuing forward. “We’re all humans, who wouldn’t be afraid. My hands were fucking shaking the first time I participated in emergency rescue at nineteen.” 

“There will always need to be people to come out and help during these shit times. What else can we do? We can’t just sit and watch as other people die.”

Song Yu was silently listening, and he abruptly felt like his own anxiety had somewhat eased away — he was also no longer continuously confirming the number of deaths. Being directly in the disaster area, performing a job that could lead to saving people, Song Yu finally stopped feeling such a strong resistance towards disasters.

Because he now held the initiative — he was now part of a group of people who could come out and help during the worst times.

Right before dawn, they arrived at a plot point and picked up a surveyor holding onto a shooting instrument. When the surveyor came inside, he immediately asked if there was someone called Song Yu in here.

Immersed in data collection, Song Yu didn’t raise his head; he only turned around after someone patted his shoulder.

“A volunteer collecting data about missing people is looking for you.” The surveyor placed down his instrument and called out to someone outside, and then a volunteer arrived.

“You’re Song Yu, right?” The volunteer crossed off Song Yu’s name on his name in a fluster, rejoicing. “This is great, this is too fantastic, that’s another person off the list…” He told the firefighter the place he needed to go to; it just so happened to be the place they needed to monitor the safety of: the disaster victims’ shelter area. 

The volunteer gave Song Yu the old cellphone he was holding. “Someone’s looking for you, I think it’s your boyfriend. See if you can give him a call.”

At that moment, Song Yu felt a fierce punch of pain through his heart, as though it had been brutally stabbed by a sharp object. He needed to breathe for a good few seconds before he could open his mouth.

“Is he safe?”

“He’s safe. He’s with my friend.”

But his phone call didn’t connect — Yue Zhishi’s phone was turned off.

Song Yu had never been so agitated before, the short two kilometre journey feeling extraordinarily long. When they finally arrived, he pulled on his down outer jacket with the help of a volunteer, and he rushed down, holding the volunteer’s phone, to go search for Yue Zhishi.

It was too dark; all he could see were large blue tents, and they obstructed his view.

His eyes frantically swept around as he silently said Yue Zhishi’s name again and again.

Until a certain tent was torn open, its stiff waterproof material slowly collapsing, and an illusory-looking person appeared in front of him — for an instant, Song Yu lost all the strength in his body.

Yue Zhishi was wrapped in an extremely thick mountaineering down jacket, and a large bag was on his back, looking as though it would crush him under its weight. He held an oxygen bottle in one hand, while his other hand clutched a tent rod. He looked like a real volunteer.

He didn’t think they would be in a place like this when they saw each other again. As he’d rushed over, he’d thought Yue Zhishi would’ve broken down, would’ve had his asthma flare up from his extreme emotions — he’d thought Yue Zhishi would’ve perhaps gotten lost on his way here, or would’ve even been suffering from the cold because he hadn’t prepared well enough.

But Yue Zhishi had been even more courageous and rational than he’d imagined. He even managed to provide sorely needed assistance during a time when people were in short supply.

“Song Yu…” Holding onto him, Yue Zhishi suddenly realised something wasn’t right. He touched Song Yu’s arm over his down jacket, and his voice started to quiver. “What’s wrong with your hand?”

“Nothing, just a small injury. It got hit by an instrument.” Song Yu held onto the back of Yue Zhishi’s head and kissed his forehead several times, and then he quickly brought Yue Zhishi onto the car and told him to sit down. “Do you feel unwell anywhere?”

Yue Zhishi shook his head, no longer crying. “I’ve already taken some altitude sickness meds, as well as some vitamins. I feel like I’ve adapted a bit by now.” He couldn’t help but stress, “Song Yu, I didn’t get sick. I’ve kept myself in check very well. I bought a lot of useful things on my way here, and I even bought you some water and things to eat. You haven’t eaten yet, right? What about your seniors? I bought some food for them too…”

Seeing Yue Zhishi open up the bag on his back, Song Yu suddenly couldn’t speak. He didn’t expect Yue Zhishi to be so rational, to have been able to do these things in such a short amount of time. For a moment, he felt a complicated mix of emotions in his heart.

When he noticed Song Yu’s silence, Yue Zhishi placed his bag to the side.

“You definitely wouldn’t have wanted me to come.” 

Yue Zhishi lowered his eyes, his voice very weak. “Maybe you also thought I would’ve given you only trouble, but I really couldn’t take doing nothing except waiting for you… I couldn’t wait.” 

Finally, Song Yu couldn’t hold back anymore. He reached out his left hand and grabbed Yue Zhishi’s hand, saying in a very soft voice, “I’m sorry. I’ve made you worry.” 

Somewhat hurriedly, he explained, “My phone was broken right at the start, and it’s not with me right now. I sent you a lot of messages halfway through the day, but maybe they weren’t sent out…” 

Yue Zhishi lightly embraced him, stroking his shoulders and back very comfortingly. “It’s okay, gege.” 

“I’m not afraid anymore, now that I’ve seen you.” 

They were like so many other people in the disaster — they consoled each other like small, fragile beasts trapped inside. The lucky ones could hold each other, while the unlucky ones could perhaps only do their best to push their fingertips near the other person, under the ruins.

Love endowed them with the strength to survive.

Once he solved the issue in the special feeder machine’s surface layer code, Song Yu was forced to rest after getting injured and working over ten-plus hours. He kept checking how Yue Zhishi was reacting to the high altitude and realised he was doing better than he’d expected.

Taking out all the various kinds of altitude sickness medication he’d purchased, Yue Zhishi gave them to Song Yu and the other people in the car, as well as biscuits and buns. The volunteers had yet to get to them when they were passing out food earlier — they’d only been given water. The firefighter hadn’t eaten anything all night, and he filled himself up with a few buns as he drove, pushing away some of his hunger.

“Thank goodness you’re here. I was about to start going dizzy, and that would’ve been too dangerous while driving.”

Yue Zhishi kept shaking his head. “I’ve bothered you guys.”

“One extra person means one extra portion of strength,” one of the surveyors said, smiling.

They briefly rested in the car for a few hours, Yue Zhishi waking up from a headache as dawn was about to break. He took some more meds and then leaned back into his seat; he gently eased Song Yu over, who was so tired he couldn’t sense anything, and had him lay down on his legs to sleep. Yue Zhishi curled over and lightly covered Song Yu’s head and shoulders, protective.

Aftershocks came later than they’d expected, and they were even given warnings before the aftershocks actually came. The first one arrived at 8:10am, lasting sixteen seconds, with an estimated intensity of 3.2. The second one came an hour and a half after the first one and lasted eighteen seconds with an estimated intensity of 3.0. The tremors were weakening. 

Everyone stayed alert once they heard the warnings. There were far less casualties compared to the first high magnitude earthquake.  

At noon, they drove to the central tent area to get their lunch. Since Song Yu was injured, Yue Zhishi lined up for him, and he suddenly heard someone calling out through a loudspeaker in the midst of volunteers and victims. “Is there anyone here who can speak foreign languages? University students are fine, too. And is there anyone here who understands law? We really need help!”

Yue Zhishi gazed in that direction, standing near the front of the line. The person holding the loudspeaker had no luck and was unable to find anyone.

A worker in front of him sighed. “We’re so remote, other than those on a holiday, where would we find university students or lawyers…”

Another person then said, “I hear a foreign tourist’s been injured. A few local disaster victims are also demanding compensation. It’s always like this every year, we’re still struggling to save people when others are starting to make a fuss. We simply don’t have the capacity. Volunteers who can provide legal advice are too rare.”

The two of them departed, leaving behind only Yue Zhishi. He took the food he was given and left the lines.

To him, it was truly very difficult to face a disaster site directly.

The male volunteer requesting help once again shouted into the loudspeaker, “Anyone who can speak foreign languages? Any volunteers who can provide legal assistance? You don’t have to be a lawyer, it’s fine as long as you understand legal procedure! If you can do either of those things, please contact the volunteer headquarters! We’re at…”

He’d only finished half of his words when a young boy, face pale, walked to him and said, “Hello.”

“I should be able to help.”