CHAPTER 269: CHAPTER 267: CRUEL REALITY

Chen Xin did not stay long in the three towns. After helping the researchers upgrade their equipment for the second time, he also installed a finished set onto his own vehicle, upgrading the radar on his car to a signal station, then he left the three towns.

However, due to his cooperation with the government, his vehicle now had an additional staff member dispatched from a research institution.

The primary task of this staff member was to communicate and keep in contact with Chen Xin because, in the current situation, until the communication network is reestablished, contacting Chen Xin from the three towns is quite troublesome. Hence, they had to send someone to follow Chen Xin to know his whereabouts and establish stable communication through local official agencies.

Moreover, after establishing cooperation with Chen Xin, the government also needed to send the equipment and materials required for upgrades to Chen Xin through local official organizations, which also required them to assess the local transportation, communication, research, and industrial production capacities.

If the city where Chen Xin was located had very poor infrastructure, they might even need to persuade Chen Xin to relocate or enhance the local infrastructure, all of which are factors that need consideration.

Therefore, to facilitate better cooperation with Chen Xin, the research institution straightforwardly dispatched staff to follow him, conduct on-site investigations, and figure out the exact situation.

Chen Xin did not feel bothered by having one more person on the vehicle. After letting the person on, he stopped paying attention to him, as he was entirely absorbed by the information he accessed online after reconnecting to the network.

Because he had upgraded the radar on his vehicle to a signal station, Chen Xin could now access the network used by the research institution. Although this network currently only covers the three towns and areas that can physically connect with the research institutions in the three towns, Chen Xin still obtained a vast amount of information from it through the permissions granted by the research institution.

"Statistics on national population containment..." Browsing through the information on this internal network from his console, Chen Xin found a piece of information with a title that caught his attention.

Chen Xin clearly remembered that the national population before the disaster had reached 1.4 billion, but three months before the meteor strike, the national evacuation plan had projected a capacity to accommodate 1.2 billion people.

According to the information he read on this webpage, before the meteor hit, only 80% of the national population had been successfully relocated to shelters.

This is a rather grim statistic.

Out of 1.4 billion people, less than 960 million managed to enter shelters before the disaster.

Nearly one-third of the population did not make it into the shelters.

Perhaps these individuals could avoid the initial impact of the meteors, but the ensuing torrential rains, declining atmospheric oxygen levels, extreme cold temperatures, among other disasters, would be enough to ensure that any survivors outside the shelters would perish.

Their survival chances were already exceedingly slim, and even if some were still alive, it would be merely a prolonged struggle to survive in the apocalypse.

Furthermore, what makes this even more distressing is that attached to this statistical information is a report on the mortality rate within the shelters.

Since this is an internal network, the data on it are all official internal statistics, and there is no falsehood in them, yet this makes it even more uncomfortable.

According to statistics, in the first month following the meteor strike, the death rate within the shelters was relatively normal, about 3‰, which is considerably lower than the usual 7‰ mortality rate as most who made it into the shelters were young and healthy and not so easy to succumb to death.

However, as time went on, the mortality rate showed a noticeable increase. Three months after the meteor strike, when temperatures dropped below zero, this rate increased from 3‰ to 8‰.

This is not an unacceptable number; overall, in harshly cold environments, only this mortality rate was considered normal.

However, considering the birth rate of newborns was less than 1‰ and a negative population growth rate of over 7‰, it was terrifying.

And it’s important to note that this is nationwide population statistics, calculating the total average.

However, in reality, the mortality rate varied greatly among different provinces and regions!

In large cities like the three towns, due to their good foundational conditions and sufficient material reserves, the actual population mortality rate remained around 1‰ to 3‰. But in impoverished areas with poor foundational conditions, the county or city mortality rate exceeded 1%.

Indeed, the phenomenon of entire counties being abandoned, with hundreds of thousands relocating elsewhere, was not uncommon nationwide, and such substantial population migrations would evidently affect the statistical results.

Combined with the errors caused by the current communication difficulties, the real situation was only worse.

In addition, Chen Xin also learned from the webpage’s information that the tsunami impact following the meteor strike, along with the subsequent global fire consequences, caused the entire coastal area to disappear beneath the sea level.

Among the most severely affected was the Bohai Bay coastal area. The capital, originally located in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, had been completely submerged by seawater, with central agencies entirely relocated to the Sichuan Basin, and Yu City once again became the provisional Capital.

Because of its topographical relationship, the North China Plain no longer existed, and the Northeast Plain was likewise affected by the tsunami, turning the entire Yangtze River’s middle and lower plains into a vast marshland.

Of the four major plains in Flame Country, three have been lost, leaving only the Guanzhong Plain unconquered by seawater.

According to precious observational data brought back by Zhang Chengguang and his team, the coastline had moved from its original location at Hu City into the territories of Anhui Province, with the entire Su Province now an underwater icy seabed world.

The famous Lu Province Peninsula can now drop the character "P," truly becoming an island, and the other parts of Lu Province weren’t much better, being severed from the mainland and transforming into an isolated island. One would have to travel west to Changshan to finally see land.

Even Chen Xin’s hometown in Anhui Province, the northern Huainan Region, had more than half of it disappear beneath the sea level.

However, the south, due to its mountainous terrain, was spared from severe impacts; most of Guangdong Province and Fujian Province, being mountainous, were not submerged by the sea, and even neighboring Zhejiang Province preserved much of its land.

But most economically developed cities in these regions were coastal, and particularly, the Pearl River Delta and the Yangtze River Delta, due to their proximity to the sea, were in the first batch of areas demolished by the tsunami.

It can be said that Flame Country’s most important grain-producing areas and economically developed regions vanished in the tsunami impact that followed the meteor strike.

As for the ice cap melting and sea-level rise caused by subsequent global fires, it merely froze the lands not yet spared by the tsunami beneath ice layers.

If one has a basic understanding of Flame Country’s topography, one can clearly determine that most of the third tier in the three-tiered country only has a few remaining areas such as the Liaodong Hills, Daxing’an Mountains, Taihang Mountain, Shandong Hills, and Southeastern Hills, with other places effectively vanished.

As for the first and second tiers, which were less severely affected, the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and Inner Mongolia Plateau are typical of sparsely populated vast areas, and the Tarim Basin was even more of a desolate desert and Gobis, with arguably only the Loess Plateau, Sichuan Basin, and Yungui Plateau as the finer regions.

The once first-tier cities like Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou had all perished, leaving the truly super metropolises in Flame Country now only the three towns and Yu City.

If the government hadn’t relocated coastal populations inland before the disaster, the national population loss could’ve been not one-third but half.

Chen Xin now understood why even his small hometown’s below town could take in tens of thousands of people because the coastline had extended into Anhui Province! East of Anqing was now the sea!

Looking at these data and satellite images, Chen Xin’s heart grew unbearably heavy.

Although life post-disaster was far from what it was pre-disaster, Chen Xin managed to live decently well due to his system ties. Plus, his city’s situation was not unbearably bad, which gave Chen Xin the illusion that things weren’t all that terrible.

Especially seeing the state forging ahead with post-disaster reconstruction in the three towns during his visit to E Province, he even felt that this apocalypse was manageable, and the difficulties were only temporary, believing everything would get better once again.

Yet now, observing how one-tenth of the nation’s land had sunk below sea level and one-third of the population was already lost when catastrophe struck, he realized that this doomsday disaster was indeed an actual apocalypse.

In fact, even in the city where Chen Xin resided, due to its proximity to Dongting Lake, the water had also flowed back into it during the great wave, and the entire lake area expanded to the size akin to the ancient Yunmeng Marsh.

If not for Chen Xin’s city being situated on relatively elevated hilly terrain, it would have likely already been swallowed by the sea.

This led Chen Xin to lament that human civilization, built over thousands of years, can be as fragile as sandcastles before this apocalyptic calamity, easily destroyed by the force of nature.

Due to this catastrophe, much of the economic progress made by Flame Country over recent decades had been reduced to dust; it was as if everything had regressed by decades in an instant.

These devastating stats and satellite images felt heavy on Chen Xin’s heart.

He pondered deeply, yet he did not fall into despair.

For the people of Flame Country, through history, we have endured countless hardships, yet no matter what disaster struck, Flame Country has never been defeated.

When the sky falls, we shape stones to patch it; when the floods come, we learn not from oracles but from digging channels to divert the water; when diseases spread, we do not beg for miracles; against every disaster, there will always be those in Flame Country who refuse to retreat.

Just like what the sage before the flood said, Flame Country’s people are unconquerable in times of disaster! We will rebuild our home and overcome all hardships!