Once Upon in Nanjing-Chapter 12 - 11: A Thousand Miles of Marriage Tie With an Invisible Thread

Chapter 12: Chapter 11: A Thousand Miles of Marriage Tie With an Invisible Thread

The next day, Ban Xia got up early, humming songs as she tidied things up and bounced around the house.

Her mood was great.

For breakfast, she had kale and lotus seed porridge with smoked venison and purslane salad. The texture of the smoked venison was a bit tough after salting and curing, so it had to be shredded into fine strands to pair deliciously with the lotus seed vegetable porridge.

Today she's going out! To accomplish a historic meeting! After the destruction of human civilization, the remaining survivors are to meet again for the first time.

If humanity continues into the future, then this day will surely be recorded in history—the 8th of September, the day human civilization began anew. If religions still exist in the future world, then today is the seventh day in Genesis of the Holy Bible, the day when Moses led his people through the parted Red Sea. In the New Bible, hundreds of years later, it would be written: The moment Ban Xia turned on the radio, Maxwell conveyed the message through electromagnetic waves, and the survivors learned overnight that the city had awakened and humanity had been reborn.

"You who fell from the sky, onto the back of my horse."

Ban Xia hummed as she grabbed her bag, all the necessary equipment she needed to carry with her neatly spread out on the floor, filling up the living room.

She checked them one by one.

There were lighters and igniters; the igniter consisted of a magnesium rod and half a saw blade. When igniting a fire, you'd scrape the magnesium onto dry grass or paper to light it. Such igniters are simple in structure and waterproof.

"Your jade-like appearance, your clear-water-like gaze, a slight smile that warms my heart."

This time, Ban Xia packed twice the amount of dry food in her backpack, each piece of dry food carefully wrapped in plastic. If the number of people here increases in the future, then the pressure for food will grow as well.

Fortunately, Nanjing City has never been short of food.

"You who never look back, spread your wings!"

"Seeking direction, direction lies ahead."

The girl hummed as she stepped down the stairs, opening the door of apartment 703 downstairs.

The unit was empty, all its furniture moved away. As Ban Xia opened the door with a "creak", a small, furry, pointed face peeked out from the bedroom.

"Good morning, Mr. Weasel." Ban Xia greeted it, "Did I disturb your sleep?"

Quite accustomed to her, Mr. Weasel curled up at the bedroom door, scratching an itch with its front paw and squinting its eyes while yawning.

The weasel had lived here for many years; Ban Xia remembered it as the resident of 703 when she was younger. When apartment 703 was requisitioned by Ban Xia and her teacher as a distribution room, they did not drive the weasel away. Instead, they often brought it food, allowing the weasel's later years to be quite comfortable.

Ban Xia closed the door behind her and stepped into the living room, carefully avoiding the white PVC pipes on the floor. All the miscellanea in the unit had been cleaned out, leaving only a huge metal rack and a rust-stained silver cabinet standing against the wall. The rack was laden with a whole wall of car batteries.

Forty in total.

Forty car batteries with dense black cables coming out of them, splitting into dozens of white PVC conduits, exiting through the living room's french window, an impressive sight to behold.

Back in the day, her teacher took her to gather all the usable car batteries they could find here. Henceforth, all their electrical needs depended on these forty car batteries. A single battery provided 12 volts of voltage, and linking all forty batteries in series created a 500-volt high voltage power source. This massive battery bank was connected to the silver cabinet beside the rack, which was an EPS, short for Emergency Power Supply System, found by the teacher in the nearby Nanjing Agricultural University's hospital. It is essentially an inverter that could convert 500 volts to 220 volts.

The EPS is then wired into the stairwell, with the 220-volt AC power following the stairs up into apartment 804, powering Ban Xia's daily life.

In total, there were three sets of cables attached to the battery bank: two output and one input.

In addition to one output cable for the EPS, another output cable bypassed the EPS cabinet directly, extending out from the french window, trailing down the outer wall, and connected to the high voltage grid.

The high voltage grid is essentially a fence, about one person high, using insulating wood as supports, erecting a thick wooden stick every two to three meters, then running metal wire along the wooden supports, encircling the entire Zhongqin Garden building 11.

The metal wire is an outdoor telephone bare wire stripped of its sheath, consisting of three copper wires and four steel wires twisted together. The steel ensures strength, and the copper ensures electrical conductivity, making it an excellent material for the electrical grid.

There are six rows of wires on the wooden supports, spaced ten centimeters apart from top to bottom, insulated from each other and not in contact. Rows one, three, and five are positive, while two, four, and six are negative - under normal circumstances, they're clearly delineated, peacefully coexisting without interference. However, if an intruder touches the grid and connects the adjacent positive and negative lines, then the 500-volt voltage can kill the unwelcome guest.

Contrary to what many might think, the high voltage grid does not consume electricity when normally connected, as the circuit's positive and negative poles are open. Unless something hits it, it can remain there for a year without using much electricity.

What happens when it rains?

Ban Xia asked.

Doesn't it conduct electricity when it rains?

No, the teacher patted her head, as long as the voltage is below a thousand volts, we don't need to worry about the rain.

The solar panels are responsible for charging the battery bank, which Ban Xia and her teacher took down from the streetlights—after the disappearance of mankind, the solar-powered streetlights were still working, lighting up punctually after dark, eerily shining by themselves in this silent, deserted city, like the lingering souls of human civilization after its demise.

The solar panels were all hung on the outer walls of the balcony, not laid flat on the roof to avoid bird droppings. A solar panel produced about ten volts of voltage, just right for connecting to a battery - a simple and crude arrangement, but the simplicity in design required a significant effort in practice, and handling the entangled cables was exhausting.

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After connecting the cables, the house was like a cave of silken webs. To make maintenance easier, Ban Xia and her teacher organized and bundled the cables into white PVC pipes, protecting them from being gnawed by mice.

Mice are extremely fond of gnawing on cables.

That's why Ban Xia and her teacher decided to keep Mr. Weasel in apartment 703. With Mr. Weasel around, mice wouldn't dare to be too rampant.

Every two days, Ban Xia came down to check the power supply. She paused in front of the battery bank for a long while, then knelt down to pull out the gasoline generator from underneath the rack, brushing off the dust.

"Mr. Weasel, oh Mr. Weasel, what do you think about having other people stay here with you, would that be alright?"

Ban Xia turned her head and asked.

Old man Huang lay on the floor, his button-like little black eyes staring at her, his front limbs covering his moist nose, looking innocent.

"Alright, alright, we're not going to kick you out." The girl chuckled, "This place isn't fit for living anyway. Let them move into the apartment opposite."

Old man Huang tilted his head, not sure if he understood.

Bai Yang yawned and came out of his room, allowing his mom to seize the moment to mop the floor.

She could only enter his room after he came out, to avoid seeing anything she shouldn't.

His dad was scrolling through headlines at the table, while the TV was on, broadcasting the news on CCTV13 channel, the anchor's voice serving as the background music in the house:

"It is believed that our country will officially launch the Sound-Seeking Project next year. This will be our nation's first proactive effort to search for habitable exoplanets or even extraterrestrial civilizations. The Sound-Seeking Project could inject new vitality into the exploration of exoplanets..."

Bai Yang sat down on a chair with a plop, took a sip of water, and pointed to the TV screen, saying, "It would be awesome if we had such a big antenna, right? Using it for radio communication would be mind-blowingly cool, wouldn't it?"

His dad glanced up and said, "That's FAST, a radio telescope."

"Can it transmit, too?"

"It can only receive, not transmit," his dad said. "That big dish can hear the whispers of aliens; using it for amateur radio would be a sheer waste. You stayed up late again last night playing with the radio, didn't you?"

Bai Yang turned to look at his mom and nodded discreetly.

"How did it go?"

"There was one, the 'black station' I mentioned to you before, I made contact with her again, it turns out it's not a black station." Bai Yang answered, "BG4MSR."

"BG4MSR?" His dad frowned.

"Her callsign."

His father tried hard to recall, then shook his head, "I haven't heard of this callsign. Maybe someone who recently got their license... CRAC hasn't held any exams lately, have they? Ah, I'm not too sure, I've uninstalled that stupid spectrum app."

"I've uninstalled it too."

"Why?"

"It's not working again." Bai Yang said, "Let's not talk about this. Dad, can you give me some advice? BG4MSR asked me out, today at 6 pm, at the intersection from Muxuyuan Street to Zhongshan Men Road. What should I do?"

Now, in retrospect, Bai Yang didn't know why he had agreed so readily - his acceptance was clear-cut, yet he couldn't sleep all night, tossing and turning.

This must be the dilemma of a pure-hearted young boy, right?

That's what Bai Yang thought.

"Oh?" His dad was quite nonchalant, "Is she from Nanjing, too?"

Bai Yang nodded.

"That's good; just go, then. Frogs often meet offline, you can exchange some technical knowledge." His dad was unfazed, "Do you know how your mom and I met?"

"How did you meet?" Bai Yang was startled, thinking could it be a love story spanning a thousand miles tied by amateur radio? Did they meet through a radio station?

"We met through matchmaking."

Bai Yang: ...

"What I mean is, you don't have to be like me." His dad explained, "Back then I was in the army, I had no choice, I had to resort to matchmaking. If I hadn't been driven to that, could I have married a woman as perfect and outstanding as your mom?"

"How am I?" His mom popped her head out from the bedroom, and the indoor temperature immediately dropped by five degrees.

"...Could I have married a woman as perfect and outstanding as your mom?" Dad continued.

His mom huffed and withdrew back into the bedroom.

Both father and son breathed a sigh of relief.

"Yang!" His mom called out from the bedroom, "I don't mind who you meet with. If you want to go, you can, but you must complete all the math worksheets that have been handed out today! Teacher Liu emphasized in the group chat that we are going to review them tomorrow!"

Bai Yang sighed. Before six o'clock this afternoon, there was still a mountain of books and a sea of questions waiting to crush him.

Is there anything more difficult than this in the world?