You awoke in the middle of the night, your mind still in a haze. Unconsciously, you reached for the phone near your pillow, squinting to see the time in the dim light.
The numbers on the screen were distorted and hard to read. After staring for a while, you realized that your vision was being distorted by water droplets on the screen. Annoyed, you sat up, grabbed a nearby pack of tissues, tore one out, and cruelly wiped the screen. It was 2 a.m., and as you looked around, the situation was as expected: damp bedding, slippery walls, a floor that seemed freshly doused with water, and clothes that had been hanging out for three days and still hadn't dried, giving off a faint, foul odor.
You took a deep breath, and a musty, inexplicably fetid steam carried a hint of warmth into your nostrils. Waving your hand, you felt as if you could see a hazy mist lingering in the room.
This scene temporarily robbed you of any desire to sleep. You picked up your phone again and checked the weather for the next few days.
"…Here is the weather forecast for City X, released by the weather station at 6:00 this morning. Tonight to tomorrow: cloudy to overcast, west wind at force one to two, high temperature: 25 degrees Celsius, low temperature: 15 degrees Celsius. Air quality…"
After reading a few reports, your raised arms dropped heavily as if deflated. The damp season had not yet ended, and the view of the "Water Curtain Cave" in your room seemed endless.
The situation was really bad. Whether it was before you moved here or when you visited your neighbors a few days ago, you had never encountered such excessive humidity. You had also asked the neighbors, but the results surprised you.
"Conditions are okay this time." "Much better than previous years." "Maybe you didn't do enough; my house is fine." Such comments were everywhere, not only from neighbors, but also from parents, colleagues, and friends. It was as if you had committed a serious offense, and the damp season had spared everyone but you, subjecting you to this "water torture".
You tried to remedy the situation. Closed doors and windows. Dehumidifiers. Desiccants. Whether it was scientific measures or unverified online remedies, you tried everything, like grasping at straws. Every night before you went to sleep, you hoped with each new method you tried, only to be disheartened by the ubiquitous water droplets the next day.
After enduring this torture for several days, you decided to stop wasting energy and money and began to try to adapt.
When you walked, you carefully calculated the distance, making sure that each step had enough friction to support you before moving on.
Before starting work, you had to wipe the "dew" off your desk, even though it would soon reappear. To prevent it from seeping into important documents and computer equipment, you had stacked a considerable amount of waste paper as a protective measure.
The only method you could think of was to store clothes in vacuum bags.
……
To this day, with a little work, you could barely hold on. Although you weren't under much physical pressure, the mental suffering was real.
You sat on the bed in a daze for a while, then picked up your phone again, opened a few pages, and after a while, a tiny but long-lost excitement appeared on your face. Although the damp season had not yet ended, judging from the dates of previous years, these days were probably the last of its arrogant period, and a recovery would come after that. Perhaps after this day, its ugly appearance would gradually fade and disappear.
You knew that this was a hope, just like the prayers you had made several times before, hoping for effective dehumidification methods, but these two things were not quite the same. No matter how severe the humidity is, no matter how bad the damp season is, it is ultimately a kind of weather, and the weather will follow the laws of nature and eventually come to an end.
With this beautiful thought in mind, you lay down to sleep again, and the slightly damp blanket felt a little warmer now.
After a few hours, or maybe just a few minutes, you woke up. Unlike the last time, when you were startled awake, this time you were choked awake.
You were sure that even before you opened your eyes, the strange itch in your nasal cavity made you sneeze several times in a hurry. When the situation became a little better, you cleared your mind and blew your nose with all your might, blowing out some mucus bubbles and a lot of water.
You rubbed your nose hard to find out what was wrong. You stretched your body to reach the switch at the corner of the bed and turned on the light, only to see the scene in front of you.
In fact, it took you a while to see clearly because the fog that filled the room turned it into a sauna or steam room, making everything blurry. The wallpaper had changed color from being soaked, and drops the size of soybeans had gathered into streams that flowed steadily like a work of art. The water on the floor had risen to over four inches, with undulating waves that gave the illusion that you were not sitting in your own bed, but on a boat touring Venice.
"This ain't no damn special agent training," you thought.
When you finally snapped out of this shock, without thinking to pinch yourself to see if you were in a nightmare, you panicked, grabbed your phone, dressed in disheveled and damp pajamas, rushed out of bed, stepped barefoot through the warm water flooding the floor, and headed for the door.
Escape, leave this place quickly. That was your only thought at that moment.
You grabbed the slippery doorknob, forced the door open, and your stunned gaze met the scene behind the door. Your pupils constricted, you inhaled sharply, and then you began to cough uncontrollably.
Like a worldwide flood at the end of days, all drainage measures had completely failed. The living room, kitchen, and study were all flooded, and objects not buried below the "water line" were covered with water droplets, swelling as if inflated, small as beans, large as eyeballs, until absorption could no longer support them, falling into the water like ripe fruit falling from a branch, then condensing again, repeating endlessly. The temperature kept rising, from warm at first to sweltering now. You wiped your face, hands full of watermarks, unable to distinguish between sweat and tears. Everything in front of you seemed as unreal as a poorly generated image from an AI.
As you frantically wiped your face, trying to keep the annoying water from obscuring your vision, the coughing continued. The air seemed to be filled with countless water droplets that entered your lungs with each breath, making it feel like you were inhaling liquid. Unable to contain your fear any longer, you ran, staggering to the door to the outside world.
Perhaps it wasn't your time yet, or perhaps the distance from the bedroom to the door was not far. Despite your poor condition, miraculously nothing else was in your way, and you didn't slip or fall halfway. You threw yourself at the door, unaware of your sobs, and turned the doorknob that slipped in your hand.
In an instant, all the fog and droplets in front of you disappeared. In the distance, the sky brightened slightly, and a perfectly timed breeze blew in, refreshing your body. You looked up and took a deep breath, no longer coughing, but feeling incredibly relieved.
Turning slightly, you caught a glimpse of the same scene inside the house as before, with the water roiling several inches deep. However, instead of gushing out after you opened the door, it lingered at the threshold, as if blocked by an invisible wall.
For now, you couldn't afford to think about such things; the joy of rescue was the most urgent matter at hand.
You took another deep breath of fresh air and prepared to exhale slowly.
Suddenly you crouched down and felt the warm suffocation return to your lungs, uncontrollable coughing began again, one after the other, as if you were trying to cough out everything in your body.
What's happening? you thought as you coughed. There's no moisture in the air now, so why do you still feel…
You immediately stopped questioning because you felt something beyond the irritation in your lungs, something that shouldn't be produced in your body.
In your nasal cavity, your oral cavity, your esophagus, your airways, and other places you didn't know about yet.
In these places, water droplets were rapidly condensing, splitting, and coalescing.
You knelt down on the ground, coughing violently, spitting saliva from your mouth, desperately digging your fingers into your nostrils, trying to expel the water droplets. But it was in vain. You vomited violently, but only pools of mucus came out.
Trembling, you picked up your cell phone as if to make a final plea for help. Just turning it on consumed your last ounce of energy and the last glimmer in your eyes.
The phone fell to the ground, emitting a faint glow as a message appeared:
"Here is an announcement: After conducting surveys over the past few days, meteorological experts have discovered that the overall humidity level in City X is experiencing an abnormal decrease, which may cause fluctuations in other climatic elements. The cause of this phenomenon is currently being analyzed by our experts…"