After breakfast, lody Sumrs took Grace Sutton to the hospital.
Fortunately, the knife wound wasn’t deep, and since it had been treated promptly the day before, the wound wasn’t infected.
lody Sumrs was relieved to see this. As the doctor redressed Grace Sutton’s wound, lody went out to pay the bill.
While paying the bill, lody Sumrs took a look around. The last ti she was at this hospital, she thought it was rather quiet with few patients. But today, the hospital was surprisingly crowded. Many patients were suffering from infections and pneumonia caused by the volcanic ash.
It seed the air pollution was inevitably affecting a great number of people.
Unlike the previous heatwave, which you could escape simply by hiding in an air-conditioned room, the global atmospheric pollution was a different beast. Even wealthy families with air purifiers couldn’t be completely sure they were safe from the contaminating volcanic ash.
lody Sumrs finished paying, picked up the dication, and was about to head back when she spotted Clara Hayes and a bodyguard checking Sylvia Lancaster out of the hospital.
lody stood to the side, quietly observing them.
Sylvia Lancaster looked utterly haggard, while Clara Hayes was beside her, comforting her in a low voice.
lody watched them leave without a word. She recalled what Yuri Walsh had told her about the Sutton family doing a paternity test. ’It looks like the results are in,’ she thought. ’Sylvia Lancaster has been abandoned by both the Suttons and the Lancasters.’
’But why was Clara Hayes the one picking her up from the hospital? Where were Robert Lancaster and Elaine Hughes? And Simon Lancaster... he doted on his sister so much. Why wasn’t he by her side at a ti like this?’
Full of questions, lody walked over to the inpatient ward of the obstetrics and gynecology departnt. With just a few cans of at and fruit, she managed to pry out the information she wanted.
The caregiver who accepted the cans told lody everything she had seen over the past few days. She vividly described Ethan Sutton causing a scene and getting into a brawl with Simon Lancaster, and how the Lancaster family had abandoned Sylvia at the hospital.
lody’s brow furrowed as she listened.
Ethan Sutton had always claid his love for Sylvia was deep and unwavering, and Robert Lancaster and Elaine Hughes had told her on multiple occasions how sensible and well-behaved Sylvia was.
’To think they could abandon Sylvia so decisively.’
’Especially Robert and Elaine. Sylvia was the daughter they had doted on for twenty years, yet they had the heart to sever ties with her at a ti like this.’
Even the caregiver clucked her tongue in disapproval. "Those parents are truly heartless. Their own daughter just had a miscarriage and is so weak, yet they just dumped her at the hospital. They didn’t even pay her hospital fees! Aren’t they just leaving her for dead?"
lody remained noncommittal at the comnt. After thanking the caregiver, she picked up Grace Sutton, whose wound had been treated, and they left the hospital together.
*
lody was preoccupied with getting back to her space to make loquat paste, so she drove rather quickly on the way ho.
While passing through a section of road with no traffic police, lody noticed soone trying to flag down her car.
Having learned a lesson from Grace Sutton’s previous experience, lody didn’t dare to stop and drove right past.
Grace Sutton also grew tense when she saw the person trying to hail them. It was a classic case of "once bitten, twice shy." She knew that in this day and age, you couldn’t afford to be naively kind.
But as soon as the two of them returned to The tropolis Residences, they found a crowd gathered at the main entrance.
lody frowned and looked over. A van was pulling away from the complex entrance, and several residents were chasing after it, running and crying out.
They ran after the van for a short distance, but when it pulled too far ahead for them to keep up, they stopped, squatted down on the road, and clung to each other, sobbing uncontrollably.
The night was thick and the surroundings were quiet. Their cries carried clearly to lody’s ears, and her heart tightened in her chest.
Just then, lody saw Officer Tate standing by the entrance. She got out of the car and ran over. "Officer Tate, what’s going on? What happened? Why is everyone crying?"
Officer Tate answered with a grave expression, "Two residents committed suicide by jumping from their buildings. Another two passed away from high fevers caused by lung disease."
The van was taking the bodies of the four residents to be cremated. The people chasing the van and crying were the families of those four unfortunate souls.
Officer Tate sighed and continued in a low voice, "All four of them were in their twenties and thirties. In the pri of their lives, and now they’re just... gone."
It had been about two months since the volcanic eruption, and no one had seen the sun.
The endless darkness was like a giant curtain tightly shrouding the world. Volcanic ash covered the clouds, swallowing the light and blurring everything into obscurity.
lody’s heart grew heavy. She knew that prolonged exposure to darkness could trigger deep-seated negative emotions. Anxiety, depression, and anger would surge like a tide in the dark, making it impossible for people to escape.
On top of that, many people had developed respiratory and pulmonary problems from the ash. So had infections so severe that even breathing was painful, leaving them in constant agony.
Under this twofold tornt, the number of suicides was rising, and a suffocating despair filled the air.
lody returned to her car in silence. She decided she needed to get ho quickly and start making the loquat paste, even if it ant working day and night.
Grace Sutton saw the sorrow on her face and asked with concern, "Wh-what’s going on? Who were those people just now?"
With a somber expression, lody relayed what Officer Tate had told her.
Grace Sutton sighed as well, the dark atmosphere affecting her. "Perfectly healthy people, just gone like that," she murmured sorrowfully. "When will these hellish days ever end...?"
*
After several sleepless days and nights, lody Sumrs finally finished rush-producing five thousand jars of loquat paste.
After jarring the last batch of paste, she sent a ssage to Paige Walsh’s account, then had Albus manipulate the space to transport the loquat paste to the agreed-upon address.
A short while later, a ssage of thanks appeared on the chat screen. Paige Walsh’s research institute confird they had received the loquat paste and that the next step was to incorporate it into a proper dicine.
They expressed their gratitude for the paste lody had provided and said they would keep her updated on the dicine’s developnt progress.
After reading the ssage, lody finally let her worries go and collapsed onto her bed.
She had been working almost nonstop for days, either picking and washing loquat leaves, preparing dicinal herbs, or heading into The Arcadian Forest to cut down honeycombs. She felt like she was about to collapse from exhaustion...
’I hope this batch of loquat paste can help those patients with respiratory and lung infections,’ she thought. ’If it can ease their suffering, then all my hard work these past few days will have been worth it.’
With a weight lifted off her mind, lody smiled. She hugged Albus, closed her eyes, and prepared to rest for a while.
Suddenly, a notification sound echoed in her mind—
[Peach Blossom Value 20. Current Peach Blossom Value: 21.]
lody’s eyes flew open!
—Finally!!
The Peach Blossom Value had finally increased again!
And it went up by twenty points in one go!
lody happily hugged Albus and gave him a couple of kisses, saying gleefully, "This is great! I’m more than a fifth of the way there."
Her happiness lasted for a mont before she fell into deep thought.
’What exactly are the conditions for triggering the Peach Blossom Value?’
’Obviously, this increase was most likely because I donated a batch of loquat paste. So, did the value increase last ti because I donated the surveillance system for The tropolis Residences?’
’But I also donated compressed biscuits to the ergency response office before, and the value didn’t go up then.’
’A few days ago, I gave fever dicine to the people in the group chat who were sick, and the value still didn’t change.’
’So "donating" clearly isn’t the trigger condition.’
She still needed 79 more Peach Blossom Value points to unlock the next area, and lody still had no clue how to get them.
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