WMSR – QT Chapter 48

 

WMSR – QT Chapter 48

By

siofra

Chapter 48

Author’s Note: Caught another little angel making up for past votes in the comment section today, love you guys~~ =(?o｀∗)=(?o｀*)=(?o｀∗)

The very first sensation that greeted his return to consciousness was the blinding glare of headlights and the screech of locked brakes, immediately followed by a woman’s terrified shriek. Bai Yichen only had enough time to process the massive, tumbling silhouette of a vehicle spinning through the air outside the passenger window. His pupils violently constricted as he instinctively grabbed a tight grip on the seat beneath him while curling his upper body downward in a defensive hunch. The next instant, a deafening crash echoed through the cabin, accompanied by a brutal shockwave of impact and an excruciating, blinding wave of agony lancing straight through his lower back.

Cold sweat broke out across Bai Yichen’s forehead in a fraction of a second. Swallowing down the hot, coppery taste of blood rising in his throat, he forced his eyes open to find the car utterly crushed and deformed—and himself completely trapped inside the wreckage.

Reacting on pure instinct, Bai Yichen looked toward the front seats. The man and woman in the driver and passenger seats had both deployed their airbags, but they were already drenched in blood, their breathing and vital signs entirely unknown. Drawing a deep, shaking breath, Bai Yichen immediately began searching for a way to save himself. Fortunately, while he had been sitting in the back row, the vehicle’s rear seats featured a manual recline and fold-down adjustment. Pushing with every ounce of remaining strength, Bai Yichen forced the seatback to tilt slightly further back. Combined with the fact that his current vessel was still that of a child, the cramped space that had been pinning him down finally loosened enough to allow some movement.

However, the moment he tried to shift, he realized he could only feel the agonizing, searing pain in his lower back, while both of his legs felt entirely disconnected, completely numb and unresponsive to any mental commands. Pushing past the rising panic, Bai Yichen wasted no time. Once he managed to clear a tiny bit of clearance, he braced his upper body weight entirely on his arms, dragging himself forward to stretch his hand toward the front seats to check on the couple.

Dozens of seconds later, Bai Yichen withdrew his hand with a stiff, rigid motion. Giving one last, heavy look at the two individuals in the front—presumably his parents in this current lifetime—he pushed open the rear door, supporting his weight with both palms as he laboriously crawled out of the vehicle.

Given a collision of this magnitude, nobody could guarantee whether the fuel tank had cracked or ruptured. If gasoline was leaking and happened to strike a spark, the entire wreckage could erupt into flames or trigger a secondary explosion in seconds. Therefore, putting as much distance between himself and the burning metal as quickly as possible was the only way to ensure basic survival.

Once free of the car door, Bai Yichen took in the desolate, horrific scene outside. Through the thick, choking blankets of white fog, several vehicles lay mangled across the highway in chaotic, twisted angles, all suffering catastrophic structural damage. At a glance, the car he had just crawled out of wasn’t even the worst hit.

Bai Yichen’s heart sank into an endless abyss as the true scale of this devastating multi-vehicle pileup settled in. Even more unsettling was the eerie silence hanging over the accident zone: apart from himself, he couldn’t spot a single living soul moving about, nor could he hear a single human voice.

Not a single cry for help. The people trapped inside those other cars…

Even though a chilling premonition was already tightening in his chest, the reality that no rescue personnel had arrived yet—and that he was the only one physically capable of moving, despite his half-crippled lower body—pushed Bai Yichen to slowly drag himself across the ice-cold pavement toward the nearest wrecked cars.

Because of the severe, searing agony tearing through his lumbar region, Bai Yichen couldn’t stand up at all, keeping his line of sight frustratingly low to the ground. Fortunately, not all the vehicles remained upright; two had flipped completely upside down. Crawling closer, Bai Yichen was met with several more horrifying, gruesome scenes of fatality. The crisp, clean air that should have greeted the early morning was instead choked with a heavy, sickening stench of raw gasoline and fresh blood, stirring a deep wave of nausea in his stomach.

Whether it was due to the unbearable intensity of the back pain, the lingering shock of the crash, or the sheer psychological horror of the sights greeting him, Bai Yichen suddenly felt a wave of dizziness wash over him. Amidst this disorientation, however, a faint sound drifted through the air—the distinct, muffled wail of a child.

No— Bai Yichen violently shook his head, struggling to pull his scattering focus back together. It was real! There was genuinely a crying sound!

Turning his head sideways to isolate the direction, Bai Yichen began crawling toward a severely damaged taxi parked a short distance away. Given the season, it was evidently winter; not only was the fog suffocatingly dense, but the asphalt surface felt freezing, biting right through him. After dragging himself forward a few yards using his palms, the skin on his hands was already scraped raw, mottled with angry patches of red and blue and embedded with fine, jagged bits of grit and gravel.

Yet he felt virtually none of it—or rather, compared to the screaming agony tearing through his lower back, these superficial injuries had faded into absolute insignificance. Reaching the side of the taxi, the infantile crying grew noticeably sharper and clearer. Bai Yichen strained to lift his torso up, peering through the shattered glass of the rear window until he caught sight of a tiny, moving hand.

In a far more prominent position, the taxi driver slumped forward over the steering wheel at a completely unnatural, grotesquely twisted angle—a posture no living human could possibly survive. In the back, the limp body of a woman clad in a goose-yellow puffer jacket draped motionlessly over the rear seat. Yet, trapped underneath her torso, a tiny hand protruded outward, and the muffled weeping he had heard moments ago was coming directly from that spot.

It was glaringly obvious: this mother had expended every last ounce of her dying strength to shelter and shield her child.

The taxi’s right-side doors had been completely crushed inward by the impact and were completely jammed shut. With no other option, Bai Yichen had to drag himself around to the opposite side, reaching out to yank on the left rear door. Predictably, the door remained locked and immovable. To protect passenger safety, the rear-left doors of commercial taxis are typically rigged with child locks. Fortunately, a portion of the window glass had already shattered away, and because the vehicle was an older model relying on traditional manual door-locking knobs, it offered a slim chance of being forced open.

Yet “slim chance” applied only to someone with a fully functioning body. For Bai Yichen in his current state, reaching the exterior door handle was manageable enough, but trying to thread his arm inward through a high, jaggedly shattered window opening to manipulate the interior lock was an entirely different nightmare.

Clawing at the slick, slippery metal frame with both hands while biting back the waves of agonizing pain stabbing through his back, Bai Yichen strained to hoist his torso upward. Once he achieved enough height, he thrust his arm through the jagged gap in the glass to fish for the manual lock switch.

Hiss— Bai Yichen winced, drawing a sharp breath. Even though he moved with absolute caution, his paralyzed lower limbs refused to bear any weight, forcing his entire body mass to hang off a single arm while his other hand reached blind into the window frame. Naturally, his posture slipped, robbing him of proper leverage. Before he could correct himself, the sharp, fractured edges of the broken safety glass sliced multiple bloody gashes across his exposed forearm.

Ignoring the warm, spreading moisture slicking down his skin, Bai Yichen gritted his teeth and forced the lock open. Pushing the door wide, he was greeted by the tear-streaked, terrified face of a toddler wedged beneath the seat.

Pausing for a brief second, Bai Yichen reached out first to gently brush away the strands of hair glued across the mother’s face by drying blood. With another stiff, reluctant motion, he withdrew his hand, letting out a silent, heavy sigh over the sheer devastation of this catastrophe and the unknown toll of lives lost.

Having confirmed the mother’s fatal status, Bai Yichen’s immediate priority was to retrieve the surviving little boy. The mother’s arms remained locked around the child in a vice-like grip, as though clinging to a maternal instinct even past the threshold of death; despite exerting every ounce of strength he could muster, it took a grueling amount of effort to pry those stiffened fingers apart.