The water had already reached their waist when they decided not to stop.
It was early July 2026, and Typhoon Maysak had turned the streets of Guangxi, in southern China, into a raging river.
The torrential rains left 375.000 people affected, flooded entire schools, and even caused a dam to burst. Amid that chaos, a rescuer moved step by step against the current, firmly holding a baby in their arms.
They were not the only ones: elsewhere in the region, in Hengzhou, another team improvised a bucket to pull a small child from the waters. Different stories, the same instinct.
As the disaster struck hundreds of thousands, some people decided that no river would be strong enough to snatch away a life that had barely begun.