Homeland

"Brother Luo Yan, this way, please."

Xia Jie, Xia An'an's father, warmly beckoned Luo Yan down a flight of stairs.

At the bottom of the stairs was a hall converted from a storage room. It wasn't dim at all; shafts of sunlight streamed down into it.

Xia Jie and the others had opened skylights in the ground and used glass gathered from the village to make windows. That way, the underground space wasn't dark during the day, and they didn't have to worry about rainwater getting in.

They had also installed a ventilation duct themselves. Through an air intake on the surface, fresh air could be drawn underground, preventing the place from becoming stuffy.

These arrangements seemed simple, but Luo Yan knew they were anything but.

After the disasters, surface survivor camps like this one generally had no electricity.

On top of that, they lacked tools.

To achieve all this, Xia Jie and the others must have put in an enormous amount of hard work.

From Xia Jie's introduction, Luo Yan learned that this village, called Ximen Village, had once had two thousand permanent residents.

But now, fewer than a hundred people remained—only seventy-eight in total.

Before Falcon Base was destroyed, Ximen Village's proximity to the base meant that the village's men would take turns going there to make a living.

They exchanged their labor for supplies, allowing the elderly and children here to survive.

It was clear that the residents of Ximen Village lived in extremely difficult conditions.

Even so, they still held on to hope.

At that moment, in the hall,

an elderly man in his early sixties, dressed in plain clothes, was teaching several children to read.

"That's Teacher Liu Guo."

"He's a retired teacher, and one of the disaster survivors."

"For the past three years, he's