Chapter 108 - 102: Car Accident

Chapter 108: Chapter 102: Car Accident

The rain continued to fall. Liang City wore his rainboots and held a flashlight, walking along the muddy village roads with his colleagues to check door-to-door for any villagers who hadn’t evacuated yet. The megaphones played the same message on a loop: "The water is rising! All villagers must evacuate immediately! Evacuate immediately! Head to the resettlement site set up by the village committee! Head to the resettlement site..."

In truth, the greatest challenge at the grassroots level was neither the typhoons and floods nor the logistical supplies. It was the people who needed to be relocated but firmly believed their homes were safe. The countryside was vast. While some lived on the town streets, others built their houses near the mountains, leaving them vulnerable to landslides during heavy downpours. Those built by the river or in low-lying areas risked being completely submerged.

The villagers didn’t understand. They simply thought their houses—reinforced with steel and built with red bricks—were sturdy enough. Little did they know that such structures were nothing but a joke in the face of nature’s mighty power. The real difficulty lay in persuading them to follow the evacuation teams. The higher-ups didn’t care what methods were used; if lives were lost in the end, it was entirely the fault of the grassroots workers for not doing their jobs properly.

Despite all the pleading and reasoning, with village cadres and stationed officials taking turns to persuade them, some elderly villagers still stubbornly refused to move to the village committee or other resettlement sites. Liang City felt utterly exhausted. If getting down on his knees and kowtowing would have worked, he truly would have begged these people to leave with him.

And all of this was merely the preliminary work for flood prevention and control. He had already called Teacher Zhong, telling her that he would be working overtime tonight and sleeping at the staff dormitory instead of going home. He only said this to reassure her. There was no dormitory. He’d be lucky to find a staircase step to sit on at the village committee building. More likely, he would have to stand guard by the river or at an intersection until dawn.

Which grassroots beast of burden these days hadn’t experienced this? Before passing the civil service exam, they all thought, "As long as I can pass, I’d even be willing to die." After passing, their mindset shifted to, "I might as well just die." Under these current circumstances, probably very few people on the scene were genuinely willing to do this job; perhaps their ideological awareness just wasn’t high enough. Yet, everyone had still shown up.

Watching the floodwaters steadily rise, everyone present felt extremely anxious. After finally managing to evacuate those stubborn villagers, they had to grab hoes and follow the village cadres around to clear the waterways. The drainage conditions in the countryside were vastly inferior to those in the city. If the water wasn’t drained promptly, sinkholes could form at any minute—massive cavities would suddenly appear beneath the paved roads because the underlying sand and soil had already been washed away by the seeping currents.

Fortunately, after nine o’clock in the evening, the rain gradually began to lighten. As long as it didn’t rain continuously, it was manageable, meaning there would be enough time to drain the water before a flood could form. Unrelenting torrential rain was what they feared the most. However, this didn’t mean that Liang City and his team’s work was finished. They still had to wait until the danger was completely eliminated before allowing the masses to return home. In short, they were destined to pull an all-nighter.

Meanwhile.

After taking a shower and checking that all the doors and windows in the house were tightly shut, Chen Jingle closed the front door and returned to his room. Considering the loud sound of the rain tonight was somewhat distracting for reading, he stopped at eight-thirty and switched to scrolling through short videos.

After training his algorithm for a while, he rarely came across videos of people trimming donkey hooves, knife-forging competitions, or scantily clad beauties anymore. Now, his feed consisted almost entirely of culinary cooking videos and foreign travel vloggers. Scrolling down with his mouse wheel, he stumbled upon another video series about state banquet cuisines.

He thought, "Perfect, this is the one!"

Watching food videos was great in every way, except that it was hard on the stomach. Watching them for too long would inevitably make him unbearably hungry, compelling him to find something to eat. Before he knew it, snacks and fruits practically flew into Chen Jingle’s mouth as he watched. Another benefit of watching videos was that time passed incredibly fast. The era of short videos had indiscriminately impacted all previous information mediums—whether print media, text-based novels, or long-form videos. It left people feeling like they had less and less time in their days.

By the time Chen Jingle finished his after-class learning for the day, the sound of rain outside the window had ceased.

He thought, "I wonder if it’s still raining on Liang City’s end. I hope everything is fine."

He remembered a severe typhoon from his childhood. Back then, there were no evacuation notices; his mother simply grabbed him and ran to a neighbor’s single-story house, where they hid for a whole day. When they returned the next morning, they discovered that many of the roof tiles on their own house had been blown away. Because of this, he knew full well just how powerless ordinary people were in the face of natural disasters.

Back in July of this year, Jiangbei had already experienced a heavy rainfall that lasted for half a month, flooding many areas. To think that it was happening again just over two months later.

He thought, "How troublesome."

Although his mind was weighed down with worry, it was time for bed. Just like usual, he took care of his personal needs and lay down in bed. The lullaby the system sang to him tonight was rather fitting for the occasion. It was the children’s song, "Catching Loaches."

"The pond is full of water, and the rain has stopped..."

"The mud by the fields is full of loaches everywhere..."

"..."

Chen Jingle’s mind was full of thoughts, but fortunately, with the system’s help, he fell asleep smoothly. He didn’t even dream. Just like always, he closed his eyes and opened them again, and the night had passed in a flash.

As for Liang City, although he was still stationed at the village committee’s resettlement site and had to go out for occasional patrols, the rain had at least stopped. There was only an occasional drizzle, which was nothing to worry about. In such a highly stressful work environment, he couldn’t sleep anyway.

He thought, "I’ll just wait until dawn and go back to the office to sleep."

Just like that, the night passed.

At six o’clock in the morning, Chen Jingle woke up on time. To his relief, even though the sky outside was still gloomy this morning, the rain had finally stopped.