"Jin Xia... what are you doing...?"
"I... can't breathe... cough..."
"Hah... hah—"
Yang Jinxia stood in the darkness, silently watching tears roll from the girl's eyes on the hospital bed. Then, the scene rapidly receded and vanished into the distant darkness.
She opened her eyes and immediately sensed that something was wrong. This was not her room.
Where was this? How had she ended up here?
Kidnapped?
Looking at the gray, hazy sky above, her heart sank. In the few short seconds it took her to sit up from the ground, she had already prepared herself for the worst.
The sight before her shattered all her previous guesses and made her face turn pale as paper in an instant.
This was a city in ruins.
Collapsed skyscrapers and heaps of bricks and rubble filled her view. Beside her feet stood a warped aluminum alloy window frame, propped up at an odd angle and swaying gently in the mournful wind.
This was an apocalyptic world, silent as death.
The concept sprang into her mind. For a moment, she felt a deep chill rise from her heart. Terror spilled uncontrollably into her eyes, and her body began to tremble slightly.
Tap! Suddenly, a faint sound of pebbles knocking together came from behind her.
This was...
To her ears, that tiny sound was like a thunderclap. She whirled around.
Not far behind her, she saw a man climbing up from the ground.
Someone!
The man's appearance pulled her from her endless terror. To her, surviving alone in a world as silent as this was the most terrifying thing imaginable.
In an instant, she regained her composure and quickly weighed the pros and cons. Seeing that the man stood with his back to her without moving, she quietly slipped behind a half-collapsed brick wall