In 1986, the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union, suffers the worst nuclear accident in history. This manga, an adaptation of Svetlana Alexievich’s Nobel Prize-winning oral history, does not follow a single protagonist but instead weaves together the真实 testimonies of those who lived through the disaster. The narrative begins with Vasily, a young firefighter who was among the first to respond to the blaze at the plant. His wife, Lyudmilla, rushes to his side only to find him transformed by acute radiation sickness, his body swelling and skin disintegrating. Unaware of the invisible poison emanating from him, she stays by his bed, driven by love, until he dies. She later learns she absorbed a lethal dose herself, which will affect her unborn child.

The story shifts focus to a chorus of other voices. Conscripted soldiers are sent into the irradiated zone for cleanup duty, ordered to shovel radioactive debris off rooftops and shoot contaminated animals in abandoned villages. These men, referred to as liquidators, are given no protective gear and are told they are simply digging earth and cutting wood. One young soldier describes realizing too late that the earth was glowing with poison, and years later, he notes that most of his unit has died or committed suicide. Another account follows a family forced to evacuate the city of Pripyat. A woman recalls being told to pack only three days worth of food, believing she would return home soon. She never did. Forced to become a refugee, she encounters the cruel stigma of being labeled a Chernobylite, treated as a contaminated outsider by people from other regions who fear her as if she were radioactive herself.

The narrative arcs explore the slow, creeping aftermath of the catastrophe. One chapter follows a group of hunters tasked with exterminating pets and stray animals left behind in the exclusion zone. They grapple with the emotional torment of shooting dogs that run toward humans for comfort, rationalizing the act by calling them walking corpses. Another arc focuses on the children born after the disaster. A father recounts the slow death of his seven-year-old daughter, Katyusha, from thyroid cancer, and his helplessness as doctors collect data from her but offer no cure. A mother named Larisa gives birth to a daughter, Katenka, born without an anus, vagina, or left kidney. When she insists to doctors that the radiation caused her child’s defects, she is accused of faking her daughter's illness for compensation money. The story follows her desperate fight to prove her love was not a curse, as she watches her child undergo multiple surgeries to create the organs nature denied her.

The setting moves between the burning plant, the sterile and secretive hospitals of Moscow where victims are quarantined, the muddy fields of the exclusion zone, and the cramped apartments of refugees. Through these fragmented stories, the manga documents the systemic lies of the Soviet government, the silence of the scientific community, and the way radiation severs people from their homes, their bodies, and their humanity. The narrative does not seek to explain the science of the reactor, but to preserve the prayer of ordinary people asking why their lives had to be destroyed.