I Became the Director of a Wasteland Asylum

As the embers of civilization quietly die out in the “psychological wasteland,” the dams of trust have already collapsed. In the post-pandemic era, social media’s divisions and the hardened walls of information echo chambers have turned survivors into isolated islands of suspicion. Every glance could spark a bloody shootout. It is an age in which people arm themselves to the teeth against others, yet crumble inside from loneliness. Yan Mu is an utterly ordinary, unarmed man who still tends an abandoned library after the cataclysm. And yet he himself is the most powerful “safe zone” in this wasteland. He possesses an inexplicable “soothing field” by nature: angry shouts become calm murmurs in his presence, and tightly gripped weapons lower of their own accord. When two of the most savage raider gangs aim their guns at each other over a box of canned food, Yan Mu merely adjusts his glasses, walks between them, and asks softly, “Maybe we can talk first?” The “Oasis” community he builds has no walls or barbed wire, yet it is more desirable than any military fortress. Here, people learn to trust again, and children’s laughter replaces wary silence. With books as his shield and listening as his spear, he turns one frenzied stronghold after another into rational allies without shedding a drop of blood. This is not a story about conquest. It is the legend of a man who uses his unique gentleness to carry out a grand “rebuilding of the spirit” in a world riddled with wounds, personally planting seeds called “civilization” and watching them sprout anew.