Li Anshan crawled out of his tent early that morning and took a deep breath. He felt refreshed at once.
He didn't know why, but for the past two mornings, the air had seemed especially fresh.
"When the hell are these earthquakes going to stop—"
Muttering to himself, he heard voices stirring in the rows of tents around him. He slipped behind an open area with better reception and took out his phone to check for new messages.
Two days earlier, that "great star" had fallen, breaking into countless streaks of fire that scattered across the sky and came down all over the land.
As luck would have it, one "meteor" had plunged to earth not far outside town, near a conspicuous rural guesthouse.
Then the people in white coats and protective suits had rushed in.
The guesthouse and fishpond owners near the crash site, along with a handful of nearby households, had been temporarily compensated and evacuated.
A few curious people had gone over to look. The personnel, clearly an emergency response team, had quickly strung up broad swaths of yellow caution tape hundreds of meters from the crater. Almost all of them wore gas masks.
It was obviously no small matter.
But as it turned out, they had still underestimated it.
Before long, soldiers in camouflage arrived in military vehicles, along with more people in protective suits that covered them from head to toe, faces included. They imposed a strict lockdown. Within a radius of two or three kilometers, not just people but every larger living creature they could spot was cleared out.
Among the military-green tents, a temporary quarantine station went up in short order. Figures in blue-and-white protective suits even gave every nearby resident who came to register for safety at the mayor's urging an immediate