Zhou Jiayue did not expect her father to believe her immediately. As long as she planted this seed of doubt in his mind, even if he still refused to believe her when the time came, there would be far less resistance when she tried to persuade her parents to leave.
Having settled one of her worries, Zhou Jiayue went out to Xinhua Bookstore. After browsing around for a while, she picked out more than a thousand books that could earn her points.
There were too many people around in the bookstore, so Zhou Jiayue could not put the books away right there. Instead, she made an arrangement with the bookstore owner and asked the store to deliver the books to her home at an agreed time.
After leaving her phone number with the bookstore, Zhou Jiayue went to the county library.
Xing County was only a small county, so naturally the library was not very large either, but it still had fifty or sixty thousand books.
Zhou Jiayue spent the entire day sitting in the library, until her waist and neck were sore. The apocalypse had not arrived yet, so naturally she could not physically collect the books from the library. Otherwise, she would have been arrested.
She could only scan and read the books, which greatly reduced her efficiency.
Racing against time, Zhou Jiayue sat in the library at noon and ate two steamed buns she had bought that morning. After an entire day, she had only managed to scan and read around seven hundred books.
The library closed at nine in the evening. By the time she returned home, it was already completely dark.
In order to understand the rules governing the system’s collection of books, Zhou Jiayue conducted an experiment. She discovered that even if two copies of the same book were identical, the system would still consider them to be two different books if the notes written in them were different.
However, the notes had to be related to the content of the book. They could not simply be meaningless words written without any connection to the text.
Zhou Jiayue thought deeply about it and analyzed the standard the system used to make its judgment.
Different notes reflected differences in the thinking patterns and language habits of the people who had written them.
Could it be that besides differences in content, another standard the system used to determine whether books were different was the difference in the writer’s thinking pattern?
Zhou Jiayue came to a conclusion and decided to buy some more books from the bookstore tomorrow.
Even books with almost identical content could have different layouts. Take textbooks for example. There were the People’s Education Press editions, Jiangsu Education Press editions, Beijing Normal University Press editions, and various other versions. The actual content of the books was not much different, but the order and arrangement of the material could vary greatly.
Different arrangements often reflected differences in the way the person who organized the book thought and structured their system of knowledge.
If this worked, she could accumulate even more points.
Points meant supplies. Every point she could save was one more point she had!
Two days later, the provincial leader who had originally been scheduled to come to Xing County for an inspection was exposed for corruption. He had already been placed under supervision the previous day.
When Zhou Lihua saw the news, he was completely stunned.
That evening, when he came home for dinner and saw Zhou Jiayue, the complicated expression on his face was impossible to conceal.
After dinner, Zhou Lihua once again spoke privately with Zhou Jiayue in her room.
This time, Zhou Lihua was the one who spoke first.
“Jiayue, did anything else happen in that dream of yours?”
Zhou Jiayue thought for a moment before suddenly remembering something she had overlooked.
She grabbed Zhou Lihua’s arm and asked nervously, “Dad, aren’t you supposed to go to the quarry near Wu Village tomorrow?”
“How do you kno…” Zhou Lihua stopped himself as soon as the words left his mouth. He immediately realized that his daughter must have dreamed about this as well.
“Dad, don’t go! That quarry is going to collapse!”
In her previous life, it had only been a few days after she returned to school when her younger brother called her and told her that Dad had been injured by falling rocks while trying to save someone at the quarry.
Her parents had been afraid that she would worry, so they had deliberately kept it from her. If her younger brother had not called her, she would never have known that this had happened.
At the time, she had wanted to take leave and come home, but after her parents found out, they made a video call with her and told her that only his arm had been hit and that he would be fine after spending half a month in the hospital. They told her not to make a special trip home.
During the video call, her father’s condition had indeed not looked particularly bad. Since transportation in Xing County was inconvenient, making the round trip would also have been troublesome, so she ultimately did not return.
If her father had not brought it up, she would almost have forgotten about it.
“The quarry is going to collapse? That won’t do. I need to call Secretary Meng right away.”
Two minutes later, the call ended. Zhou Lihua claimed that he had relatives living in Wu Village who had noticed that the mountain at the quarry seemed unstable that day and showed signs of an impending collapse. He persuaded the leader to cancel the visit to the quarry scheduled for the following day.
Immediately afterward, he urgently notified the village secretary stationed in Wu Village and told him to organize the village officials at once, persuade the workers still at the quarry to leave, put up warning barriers around the quarry, and carry out publicity and mobilization as quickly as possible to prevent villagers from approaching the area.
After taking care of everything, Zhou Lihua let out a long breath of relief.
When he met his daughter’s gaze, Zhou Lihua looked slightly uncomfortable before smiling and saying, “Jiayue, if the quarry doesn’t collapse tomorrow, your dad is going to be in quite a mess.”
Zhou Jiayue burst out laughing. “Dad, you believe me now!”
In truth, Zhou Lihua still found the whole thing somewhat unbelievable.
When he had called the leader just now, he had already realized that he might have acted too rashly.
Yet because of the conviction deep in his heart, he had still forced himself to go through with it and report the matter.
This also showed that, deep down, he had already begun to believe that his daughter might truly possess the ability to foresee the future.
For the next half hour, father and daughter discussed what they should do in detail.
When Zhou Lihua saw the long list of supplies Zhou Jiayue had written down and the chat records on her phone with the landlord in Fu City, he finally realized that his daughter had already done so much without telling them.
Wang Yumei did not know what the father and daughter had been discussing these past few days, but judging from Zhou Lihua’s reaction, it seemed that Jiayue really had not borrowed any high interest loans. It seemed she had genuinely misunderstood her daughter.
Thinking about this, Wang Yumei’s face turned slightly red. She had simply been too worried and had frightened herself without properly asking what had happened.
The next day, Zhou Jiayue continued going to the library as usual. While she was there, she received a call from her university counselor asking why she had still not returned to school.
Zhou Jiayue paused before casually saying that she had been in a car accident and broken her leg, so she had directly taken two months of leave.
To prevent herself from being exposed, she even asked Old Zhou to cooperate and speak with her counselor over the phone.
As expected, the quarry collapsed.
The incident attracted the county’s attention, and Zhou Lihua received private thanks from his superiors several times.
According to the original schedule, Secretary Meng Hong’an should have been inspecting the foot of the mountain when the quarry collapsed. If Zhou Lihua had not made that phone call, he might have been struck by the falling rocks. Even worse, he might have been buried beneath the rocks and lost his life on the spot.
Thinking about what could have happened, Meng Hong’an was filled with lingering fear. It could be said that Zhou Lihua had saved his life.
Meanwhile, while Zhou Jiayue was still scanning books in the library, a system notification suddenly sounded in her mind.
【Successfully rescued 12 people. Reward: 1200 points.】
Zhou Jiayue froze. Her first thought was, When did I save anyone?
Her second thought was, Saving one person gives 100 points!
The cheapest rice on the market now cost two and a half yuan per jin, while one point could be exchanged for one hundred yuan.
Doing the math, one person was actually worth four thousand jin of rice!
What a huge profit!
After the system notification, another line of text appeared on the screen of the little golden house in Zhou Jiayue’s mind.
【New way to obtain points unlocked: Save lives. Successfully saving one life grants 100 points.】
One hundred points!
Zhou Jiayue felt tempted, but if she had a choice, she would still choose to honestly sit there and read books.
A small favor can create gratitude, but too much kindness can create resentment.
Once you help someone, if that person encounters trouble again in the future, you may still be the first person they turn to.
The apocalypse was about to arrive. Who knew whether someone she saved might betray her for a bite of food the very next second?
People could betray you, but books could not.
Besides, she still had not figured out when exactly she had saved those twelve people.
Could it have been the quarry today?