Ch 122: Opening a Survival School Before the Zombie Outbreak

12:00 a.m., City C.

The alarm rang, and Mo Chen sprang out of bed, quickly turning it off before plugging her phone, tablet, and other electronic devices into their chargers.

A checklist was taped beside her bed, filled with tasks that had to be completed within the one hour of electricity each day.

Charge devices, boil water, heat food on the induction cooker…

After finishing these preparations, she glanced at the time. It was exactly 12:10 a.m.

During the first ten minutes after power returned, connecting to the internet was nearly impossible, so she had long since adjusted her routine to handle other chores during that window.

The kettle hummed loudly, while the rice cooker and induction stove worked simultaneously. Over the next hour, all three appliances would run continuously, boiling and sterilizing as much stored water as possible for the entire day ahead.

While waiting for the water to boil, Mo Chen opened her phone and refreshed her feeds as she ate.

Her district had unfortunately been assigned the midnight electricity slot. Even getting a hot meal required staying awake until midnight, completely disrupting her sleep schedule and daily meals.

Before the apocalypse, Mo Chen had been a typical young person. Staying up late and eating midnight snacks had been routine, and going to bed early used to feel uncomfortable.

Now, being forced to wake up at midnight just to eat made her long for a healthy schedule instead.

Fortunately, the local government had promised that electricity schedules would rotate between districts every two weeks to ensure fairness.

After persistently refreshing for six minutes, she finally connected to the internet.

She checked the safety messages her family and friends sent punctually every day, replying to each one, then glanced at her pinned group chat and saw several hundred unread messages waiting.

The group was large, but members logged in at staggered times, so real conversations rarely happened. Most people summarized key information, dropped it into the chat, and disappeared again.

Despite being only a few hundred messages, the amount of information inside was overwhelming.

Mo Chen’s expression grew serious. Bracing herself, she tapped into the chat, already prepared to see bad news.

She wondered how many people had died while she was offline this time.

Mo Chen had graduated from university only this year. On the afternoon the virus outbreak began, numerous classmates posted pleas for help in their university group chat. With so many participants, messages were quickly buried. Many people reposted repeatedly, while others were lost entirely in the flood.

Noticing the problem, Mo Chen created a shared document to compile all help requests in one place.

The method proved extremely effective. The document was quickly forwarded into other alumni groups, then to graduate students, faculty members, and even teachers’ families, all of whom began submitting requests.

By that evening, the document had spread across the entire city and even neighboring provinces, accumulating thousands of help entries.

Although many people nationwide were doing similar work, Mo Chen’s document had appeared early, and its clear, simple formatting made it easy to understand. By coincidence, it spread widely.

That very night, people from other regions contacted her asking permission to copy her format and create help documents for their own provinces and cities.

With lives at stake, Mo Chen readily agreed.

As traffic increased, formatting errors and accidental edits became common, so she organized a volunteer team dedicated to maintaining the document. Translated on Hololo novels. She also created a Weibo account to aggregate documents from across the country, both to promote the resource and recruit volunteers.

The account, named “@Spark Mutual Aid Document,” gained massive attention overnight, boosted by reposts from major influencers.

Before nationwide power restrictions began, fewer than twenty-four hours later, hundreds of volunteers had joined, and the account had surpassed one million followers.

After electricity rationing started, Mo Chen coordinated volunteers according to their regional power schedules, ensuring that someone was always online twenty-four hours a day.

From an outsider’s perspective, this was already an extraordinary achievement.

But as the organizer, Mo Chen felt no joy.

At the beginning, she had been energized, secretly believing her actions might save many people.

But over the next two days, as entries in the document appeared and disappeared, she realized something devastating: most entries were removed not because help had arrived, but because the victims were confirmed dead, prompting volunteers to delete them manually.

Many others vanished after registering, all contact lost. Mo Chen already knew what that likely meant.

Unupdated entries slowly sank to the bottom, like a long list of the dead.

Only then did she realize that having more information also meant carrying more pain.

The desperate pleas filling private messages and comment sections, the names of people dying one by one while waiting for rescue, made her increasingly afraid to log in.

She began to dread seeing them.

She continued out of responsibility, yet her empathy dragged her into overwhelming anguish.

Yesterday, she had heard news that nearly broke her.

A civilian volunteer rescue team that had set out after seeing her document encountered an infected individual with terrifying speed. Of the eight rescuers, only one escaped alive, and even he had been bitten. After reporting his companions’ deaths, he locked himself inside a room and mutated two hours later.

Since hearing that, Mo Chen could not stop questioning herself.

She could not suppress the thought: if the document had never existed, would those eight people still be alive?

This virus was different from previous natural disasters. Civilian rescue teams could not truly intervene. Perhaps the correct choice was for everyone to remain at home and wait for official rescue…

She had barely rested all day, yet when midnight arrived again, Mo Chen still logged in on time.

What greeted her this time, however, was completely unexpected.

The moment she opened the group chat, instead of death notices, she was met with a stream of uplifting messages.

[Update: In City D today, 47 help requests were removed because the people involved were rescued safely. Thirty were saved by official teams, and seventeen by unidentified volunteers.]

[City S had 458 entries removed today… wait, what is happening?? A huge chunk disappeared all at once. I thought someone deleted things by mistake.]

[City A reported 53 rescues today. Thirty-one were carried out by civilian volunteers. Are civilian rescuers suddenly overpowered or something?]

[That City S number is kind of terrifying.]

[Why did the number of rescues suddenly jump so much today? I compared it with official rescue data, and there’s no major increase. So the change must come from civilian volunteers. But I asked around, and none of the local rescue teams say it was them.]

[Good news! Remember the person I mentioned before, the one trapped near an extremely fast infected? She was honest about the danger, so nobody dared approach. I was honestly losing hope… but she got rescued today! And it was done by a group of students. I almost cried when I heard.]

[Congratulations! That’s amazing. But seriously, those students are unbelievably brave.]

[They’re like warriors descending from the sky!]

[Go check the trending page. Someone posted about it.]

After days filled with death reports, the group chat finally carried a hint of vitality. Even the volunteers’ tone felt lighter.

Of course, the rescue numbers being discussed only reflected entries within the Spark Mutual Aid Document. Many more rescued people had never registered there at all.

Those who left requests in the shared document were typically skilled internet users. Naturally, they did not seek help in only one place.

Documents, chat groups, social platforms… their pleas existed everywhere.

As a result, although Fangzhou students often obtained information from other sources, the outcomes partially fed back into the document’s statistics.

The more Mo Chen read, the more unbelievable it felt. Translated on Hololo novels. Across provinces nationwide, the number of rescues had suddenly surged in a single day. Even more astonishing, despite infection numbers rising sharply and infected individuals becoming more common on the streets, not a single rescue volunteer had been reported injured or killed.

What was going on?

Seeing the last message in the group chat, she hurriedly opened Weibo.

There were fewer new trending topics these days. Even when people had internet access, most no longer wasted time browsing social media. Yet today, several bloggers she followed had reposted similar updates.

Most posts came from people who had previously asked for help and were now reporting back.

They began by thanking everyone for their concern and reposts, confirming that they or their loved ones were safe, then describing their rescuers.

Mo Chen quickly noticed that nearly half of them mentioned the same keyword:

Fangzhou.

Perhaps by unspoken agreement, even before Sun Wei and the others created an official account, students responding to grateful survivors had consistently left behind that single name.

And when survivors described their rescuers, the wording was strikingly similar: “very young,” “students,” “extremely capable,” “well-equipped.”

Some rescuers arrived alone; others came in groups of three or five. Judging from the locations and posting times, they could not possibly be the same team, yet their characteristics were astonishingly alike.

Mo Chen felt confused.

Where had this mysterious organization suddenly come from?

The answer finally appeared in a post from City S.

It was written by a mother who had previously posted a plea searching for her daughter. In detail, she explained that the rescuers were students from a local university in City S called Fangzhou. According to her, nearly the entire student body had spontaneously formed a massive volunteer organization. Some students organized help requests, while others with combat capability formed teams to conduct rescues.

They had not only saved her daughter and parents-in-law but also rescued more than a dozen other trapped people.

After reading it, Mo Chen felt both admiration and confusion.

She marveled at the students’ kindness and courage, but she was equally astonished by their capabilities.

…So were the rescue cases outside City S also done by those same students while traveling back to campus?

Impossible, she thought, smiling at her own imagination and quickly dismissing the idea, unaware she had nearly guessed the truth.

No matter what, the name Fangzhou had now etched itself deeply into her mind.

Nearly twenty minutes had already passed. Not daring to waste more time, she prepared to resume her work when her phone suddenly vibrated.

An incoming call.

The caller ID showed City S.

A strange intuition rose in her chest.

She answered. “Hello?”

A clear female voice came through the line.

“Hello, may I confirm that you are Ms. Mo, the owner of the ‘Spark Mutual Aid Document’ account?”

“Yes, that’s me.”

“Thank you. I’m a contact representative from the civilian volunteer organization ‘Fangzhou.’ My surname is Tian. The situation is urgent, and we were worried you might miss a private message, so we contacted the platform to obtain your phone number. We sincerely apologize for the intrusion.”

The young woman named Tian spoke apologetically, then briefly introduced Fangzhou’s situation.

The moment Mo Chen heard the name, her eyes widened. When she learned that Fangzhou had nearly two thousand volunteers, each capable of independently confronting infected individuals, her breathing quickened.

She understood completely what such a force meant.

“…We are currently compiling help requests from across the country and assigning them to volunteer teams after sorting. We hope to cooperate with you by organizing the information you currently manage…” Tian Tiantian continued explaining.

Mo Chen snapped back to attention and interrupted excitedly.

“No problem!”

She was intelligent enough to understand that if Fangzhou could obtain her contact information directly through the platform, they must have official backing or at least official trust.

As for the data they requested, it was already public information. The only thing she needed to contribute was manpower.

What was there to hesitate about?

Manpower was the one thing they had in abundance.

“You can ask us to do anything you need.”

Thinking of the thousands of people Fangzhou had helped rescue across the country that day, Mo Chen felt tears welling up.

For the first time in days, she saw hope.

₊˚.🎧📓✩