Chapter 3188: Unexplicable
Right now, it was the darkest time before dawn. Blurry mist was spreading between the sky and the earth. The entire world seemed to have been swallowed by a monster and fell into its stinky stomach. Only the lone lamp in the supper stall was resisting the intense darkness.
Dream Traveler should be sleeping. Li Yao was not sure whether or not calling him so early would make him unhappy.
However, on second thought, judging from the emotional a.n.a.lysis between the lines of Dream Traveler’s words, he must’ve been lonely and desperate to communicate with friends who had similar experiences.
Li Yao could not wait any longer. He made up his mind and dialed the number.
The gloomy and gloomy ringtone echoed for half a minute, but no one picked up the call. Maybe the guy had set his phone to silent mode before he went to bed.
Li Yao waited for more than ten minutes. When he was about to call again, the light above the supper stall turned off.
The sky in the east was vaguely dyed in a hideous color of blood, while weird stars were blinking in the west. Below Li Yao’s feet, the earth was shaking as if it had turned from a solid into a broken half-fluid. A mysterious and terrifying force was about to break out of the ground.
The owner and his wife as well as the customers around Li Yao were all shaking.
An earthquake?
Li Yao, the owner, and the other customers looked at each other in bewilderment, not knowing what was going on.
Jiangnan City was located in the eastern coastal region, not in the plate tectonic belt. In history, serious earthquakes were rarely seen, and in the last thirty to fifty years, not even the shadow of an earthquake had been seen.
Therefore, it was not until the shaking of the earth became more and more serious, when the pots and pans of the supper stalls collided with each other, that everybody suddenly came back to themselves.
The owner and his wife shouted and pushed the food stall to the center of the road, avoiding the skysc.r.a.pers on both sides of the road. Other than that, there seemed to be nothing else that they could do. They all lowered their heads and watched the hundreds of windows shake at the same time.
Very soon, lights were turned on in the windows of almost all the skysc.r.a.pers. Cries of chaos were echoing nonstop. Some people were leaning their heads out of the windows, half-dressed and half-asleep. Thankfully, the intensity of the earthquake was not too high, and the people’s heads were still clear. No one dared to do anything stupid like jumping down from a three- to five-story building. Quite a few people ran down the stairs, panting. They gathered in the middle of the road and in the square, looking at the clear sky in confusion.
The earthquake subsided for three to five minutes.
No, to be more precise, it was not an earthquake, but an earthquake. The epicenter of the earthquake should be very far away from Jiangnan City. Such an earthquake could not cause any substantial damage.
Since it was already dawn, the people who had gone through a false alarm were not willing to go back to sleep just like that. They gathered in twos and threes to discuss and guess where the serious earthquake had taken place. There were also some hot-blooded young men who were grinning as they stared at the girls who were thrown out in a hurry without even wearing shoes. There was not the slightest bit of tension in the air.
But for some reason, Li Yao felt cold fear.
The prophecy of Dream Traveler was coming true one by one. At first, it was the death of the creator of the fantasy world. Then, it was the earthquake and other natural disasters.
Li Yao stared at the news page on his phone and refreshed it time and time again. Sure enough, ten minutes later, a new message popped up.
“In the early hours of this morning, a 9.2-magnitude earthquake took place in the Western Pacific Ocean. The epicenter of the earthquake was very close to the Edo Bay and has already caused serious chaos in the eastern part of the islands. According to the tsunami warning issued by the Fusang Meteorological Department, there are still tsunamis at least fifteen meters high that are attacking the islands one after another. Sources have pointed out that the earthquake may be the greatest crisis that Fusang has experienced since the Second World War. It is even possible that this is just a precursor of a series of strong earthquakes!”
Since it had just happened, the news was very brief.
But Li Yao knew that the shorter the news was, the bigger it was.
It was obvious what had happened. The Fusang Islands were a series of islands located in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, but the city of Jiangnan was standing on a solid continental shelf. The earthquake that took place in the east of the islands had even affected the city of Jiangnan, which was thousands of kilometers away. Was such an earthquake really only 9.2?
The news websites had their own procedures. It was impossible for them to respond to an earthquake so fast. However, the short videos sent back by the citizens far away in Fusang were already spreading out on social media. Through the shaking videos, one could see that the super metropolis of the planet was soaked in flames and smoke. Earsplitting alarms were ringing louder and louder, as if they were back to the bombing of World War II. There were also rumors that more than half of the nuclear power plants on the east side of the island had suffered a serious nuclear accident. The radiation index was even higher than that of Chern.o.byl. The situation had gone out of control.
Li Yao cursed silently. He had a feeling that everything had been peaceful a moment ago, but in the blink of an eye, a storm had broken out.
Not good!
He suddenly felt a chill run down his spine as he ran desperately towards Zhang Daniu’s neighborhood.
“If—if what Dream Traveler said is true, won’t Zhang Daniu be in great danger?”
Li Yao had no time to hide himself. He dashed through the alleys like an arrow released from a bow. “Although the earthquake in the Pacific Ocean couldn’t cause much damage to Jiangnan City, the aftershock of the earthquake should be enough to kill one or two people!”
Li Yao ran into the old neighborhood.
At this time, quite a few people had already gathered on the road of the neighborhood. The elderly were light sleepers, and once they were woken up, it would be very difficult for them to fall asleep again. They simply gathered together to discuss what had happened just now, preparing to do some early tempering.
Naturally, Li Yao was no longer able to use the gecko-climbing technique in front of everyone. He could only obediently walk up the corridor to the fifth floor. Time was of the essence. The door was locked. Li Yao simply let out a low roar and kicked open the door of Zhang Daniu’s house.
Thankfully!
Zhang Daniu was still madly typing on the keyboard, letting out a series of dense sounds of impact. The earthquake a moment ago didn’t have the slightest bit of effect on him. His pair of eyes turned from deep-set to bulging, completely dyed red.
As he expected!
The bookshelf on his left was piled up with thick, heavy hardcover books and encyclopedic dictionaries that had been tilted by the earthquake. Along with the author’s exaggerated tapping movements, the angle of the tilting became more and more obvious. It was like a crumbling cliff that could collapse upon him at any moment.
Many of the hardcover books and encyclopedias were printed on copper paper. They were extremely solid and looked no different than bricks. If somebody was. .h.i.t in the head, there was no telling what would happen.
“Brother Niu!”
Li Yao roared and lunged forward.
The moment he lunged over, the bookshelf, together with the encyclopedia and the hardcover books on it, indeed collapsed. The sharp edges and corners of the book went straight for the author’s temples.
“Huh?”
Zhang Daniu suddenly s.h.i.+vered. He was woken up by Li Yao’s shout and turned around in a trance.
“Let’s go!”
Li Yao had no time to block or hug the author. He simply jumped up and kicked the author into a corner, while he bore the consequences of the collapse of the bookshelf in the author’s place.
“Ah!”
Li Yao and Zhang Daniu screamed at the same time.
When Li Yao finally crawled out of the messy pile of books, the first thing he did was not to check his own injuries but to look at Zhang Daniu in the corner.
Thankfully, he had restrained his strength in time. Other than a black eye and a swollen face, it seemed that his brain was not hurt at all.
Zhang Daniu finally woke up.
But he was even more confused than when he was sleepwalking. He stared at Li Yao in bewilderment for a long time, and his face gradually changed from confusion to pain. He rubbed his hands, his head, and his a.s.s hard.
“What—what is going on?”
Zhang Daniu held his head and grimaced. “My head hurts. I remember that I was drunk…”
“That’s right.”
Li Yao crawled out of the pile of books and stood in front of the author. He nodded and said, “Brother Niu, it’s quite normal for you to have a headache after a hangover.”
“Then why is my hand also in excruciating pain?”
Looking at his fingers that were as swollen as carrots, Zhang Daniu discovered that his fingernails were somewhat cracked. He asked in disbelief, “What—what did I do exactly?”
“You may not believe it.
Li Yao replied, “You’ve been writing in your sleep.”
“Is that so? Did I sleepwalk again?”
It seemed that this was not Zhang Daniu’s first time doing “writing in a dream”. He was not suspicious of this. Instead, he touched his a.s.s and said, “Ah, my entire body hurts. It hurts so much. Especially my a.s.s. My a.s.s hurts a lot, too. That’s not right. When I get drunk, I can even get up my a.s.s!”
“Uh…”
Li Yao thought for a moment. “Brother Niu, you’ve been writing in your sleep since eleven o’clock in the morning. You’ve been glued to the chair for five to six hours without moving at all. Your blood circulation is not smooth. It’s perfectly normal for you to have backache, including hip discomfort.”
“Is that so?”
Zhang Daniu scratched his a.s.s and agreed with the theory for now. But after staring at Li Yao for a while, he suddenly remembered something else.
“You are… Oh, you are fellow student Li Yao, the senior brother of the ‘little rabbit in the sea of stars’. We drank together last night. But, hey, but as I recall, didn’t you leave last night? Let me think. You sent me home and you left. You even closed the door very hard. I have an impression that you must have left!”
Zhang Daniu reached for his phone. “What time is it? Why are you here?”
“It’s 5:30 in the morning. Brother Niu, you don’t know, but something big has happened—an earthquake!”
Li Yao said, “A 9.2-magnitude earthquake just took place in the Western Pacific Ocean. Even our city was affected by it. I was worried that something might have happened to you, so I came to check on you as soon as possible. Now, I’m in time!”
“What?”
Zhang Daniu’s eyes were wide open. He was suddenly wide awake. “Because of the earthquake in the Pacific Ocean, you came all the way from school to warn me at five o’clock in the morning… How—how did you get in?”
“Well—”
Li Yao did not know how to respond.
The two looked at each other in bewilderment. Suddenly, the muscles all over Zhang Daniu’s body tightened, and his face turned pale.
“Wait, you did go back to school last night, didn’t you? Even if you didn’t go back to school, you just dropped me off at home and left, right?”
Zhang Daniu asked in a trembling voice.
“…That’s right.”
What else could Li Yao say?
“Then, now that you’ve sent me home, if you leave—”
Zhang Daniu asked, “How did you know that I would wake up in the middle of the night to write a novel?”