Once We Lived in Nanjing

Ban Xia gasped for breath as she hoisted the hefty amateur radio relay station onto the table. Just like BG4MXH mentioned, the thing was both huge and heavy. She found it in the storage room of the Jiangsu Province Amateur Radio Administration, on a floor more than twenty storeys high. With the elevator not working, she had to rely on her legs to move up and down each floor. After running two trips, her legs felt as if they had been filled with lead. Ban Xia stopped to rest intermittently and leaned against the round pillars at the entrance of China Merchants Bank to catch her breath when tired.

Just like Wang Ning and Bai Zhen said, in the post-apocalyptic era, no one wanted relay stations. Ordinary people didn't recognize them, and those who did had no use for them. When Ban Xia found them according to the diagrams she had, they were dumped haphazardly on the floor and the tops of cabinets, covered in dust and thick cobwebs, creating a joyous homeland for spiders and cockroaches.

Cockroaches especially liked to nest inside such small boxes. Ban Xia flipped the relay station upside down and shook it, and the American cockroaches came pouring out en masse.

They scattered in panic, oblivious to their path, while Ban Xia stomped on them with the soles of her shoes, crushing them until they burst.

The girl, with her flashlight in hand, navigated through the dimly-lit hallways. It was evident that when disaster struck, the people here evacuated in a hurry. Work was abruptly left behind, never to be resumed, and time froze in that moment. Their desks, filing cabinets, and printers remained untouched. As Ban Xia stepped on the layers of dust on the floor, she shuffled through the scattered papers underneath, casually opening drawers and tossing anything that caught her eye into her pockets.

Scavenging wherever she went was the norm for Ban Xia's life. All of humanity had left her with a massive inheritance so vast that she could never exhaust it in her lifetime.

The ecosystem of the tropical rainforest is stratified, from the ground to the canopy, with different creatures living at different heights, forming parallel circles of life. The ecosystem of the city is similarly stratified, from the sewers below to the rooftops of high-rise buildings, each housing distinct communities of organisms with varying densities. Ban Xia climbed the stairs step by step, the higher she went, the less sign there was of large animal activity.

On the first and second floors, one could still see the feces of some ruminant animals, but above the fifth floor, only traces of feral cats remained.

At the twenty-fifth floor, all that could be seen were rats, cockroaches, and bird droppings.

Ban Xia found a total of three relay stations in the storage and office areas. Luckily, the building of Jiangsu Province Amateur Radio Administration was tall and didn't get flooded often, so the relay stations hadn't been submerged. If they had been, they would have long since been destroyed.

For any electronic product, moisture-proofing is crucial. Water is the mortal enemy of all delicate instruments. Short-term submersion can cause the motherboard to short circuit due to leakage, while long-term submersion can rust the integrated circuits, which are crafted on a nanometer scale, into a worthless slab of metal.

When discussing this matter, Wang Ning and Bai Zhen directly pointed out the two biggest difficulties:

First is moisture-proofing.

Second is battery power.

Old Wang and Old Bai were well aware that post-apocalyptic Nanjing wouldn't be short on electronic components. As the saying goes, Zhongguan Village in the north and Zhujiang Road in the south, the dens of swindlers in Beijing and Nanjing could rival Jin Yong's novels where "Beijing holds Qiao Feng, and Nanjing Mùròng." If one were to point out which was the pits, it could only be said that there isn't the worst pits, only ever more egregious ones. Post-apocalyptic Zhujiang Road was bound to be a haven of electronic waste, where finding something wasn't difficult, but finding usable components was another matter.

After the apocalypse, Nanjing City became a coastal city. The sea breeze could blow directly into Qinhuai District, and the climate underwent tremendous changes. The humid and rainy weather posed a huge obstacle to the long-term preservation of electronic products.

Bai Zhen, with a background as a naval technical officer, had served in the military for many years. He knew all too well that once the climate became damp, anything and everything could grow mushrooms. To combat the pervasive threat of fungi, humanity had to resort to every trick in the book, using the essence of the accumulated wisdom from millions of years of hard-earned evolution—the dazzling crown of human civilization born from the chemical industry—to finally master an effective method—

Cover it with a plastic bag.

Plastic bags are a godsend.

If there were any inventions throughout human history that were both the most brilliant and the worst, the first would be nuclear bombs, and the second would be plastic bags. The plastic bags used casually in everyday life became one of the most useful tools in the post-apocalyptic era. No other material was lighter, more flexible, sturdier, translucent, and waterproof than plastic bags. In myths and legends, Cowherd merely stole Weaver's clothes while she bathed, yet the clothes were nothing more than this; essentially, deities were just flitting about in plastic bags—If such an object were to appear in an ancient-themed RPG game, it should at least be a legendary material, probably named "Fragment of the Heavenly Garment of the Weaver."

Bai Zhen instructed that most unopened and unused electronic products would have a plastic packaging bag, and told Ban Xia to keep an eye out for them, as items preserved in sealed packaging bags had a higher survival rate.

Ban Xia loaded the three relay stations onto a small trailer, securing them with ropes, and then headed home.

The first thing she did upon returning home was to undress. She carried the relay stations one by one to the eighth floor, placed them outside the door, then went inside to strip. She threw all her clothes onto the floor and, with a scream, let her hair down and rushed into the bathroom.

Too dirty.

Really, it's just too dirty.

Those who knew thought she was off to find a relay station; those who didn't, might think she'd just returned from a coal mine.

What's most abundant in a building that hasn't been inhabited for twenty years?

Dust is the most abundant.

Ban Xia wore a blue short-sleeve top and beige trousers when she left. When she returned, both had turned black. Twenty years of ancient dust, as richly settled as ink. She entered as a fresh young girl and emerged as Cinderella; another round through, she'd leave as shadowy as a specter.

After showering in the bathroom, the drenched girl didn't bother dressing, simply donning an apron to begin cleaning the relay station she brought back.

The relay station was dirtier than she was.

Ban Xia fetched a basin of water, soaking a torn rag in it, a plum blossom screwdriver clenched between her lips while she lugged the relay station in, placing it on the floor to start cleaning.

First, she wrung the cloth to wipe the exterior. Then, gripping the screwdriver with a pair of pliers, she muscled open rust-spotted screws to pry off the casing, tipping out all kinds of bizarre items… dead spiders, mouse droppings, desiccated insect corpses, shells of cockroach eggs. Ban Xia shook her head, wiping the relay station clean, giving the cables a cursory inspection for integrity before plugging it in to see if it still functioned normally.

Cleaning three relay stations took her four hours, from five in the afternoon until nine at night. In between, Ban Xia grabbed some food and, after completing all her work, took another shower.

Of the three relay stations, only one showed signs of life when powered on. One had clearly snapped cables; the rubber sheaths on the cables were so brittle they'd break off just by bending them. Another, with no apparent damage, simply wouldn't light up when switched on.

The girl picked up the functioning relay station and placed it on the table.

"The model is—MOTOROLA…"

"Received, Motorola. What else? OVER."

"Also... CAUTION, TO REDUCE RISK OF FIRE OR ELECTRIC SHOCK REPLACE WITH SAME TYPE AND RATING OF FUSE."

Ban Xia didn't understand what that meant, reporting the letters off the casing one by one like chanting sacred texts.

"Er… Miss, those aren't the model numbers, that's just a warning about fire hazards and electrocution, OVER."

"Ah?"

The girl was startled.

"The model number definitely includes digits, young lady, OVER."

"Alright, let me check again…" Ban Xia looked it over, "GR3188/GR3688."

"Got it." Bai Yang nodded, removing his headphone and shouting towards the door: "The model number is GR3188/GR3688!"