To the Start of a New World

2.0 - Apocalypse

Author's Note

This chapter introduces the apocalypse setting of the main story. Please be advised of body horror/character death.

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It had been an ordinary day. Three years had passed, and Lu Hao had started his first year of university. After finishing his classes late in the afternoon, Lu Hao returned to his dorm room to find his girlfriend, Xia Weiwei, waiting for him.

Lu Hao's roommates grumbled, but after Weiwei cooked them a sumptuous dinner, their complaints subsided.

That evening, Lu Hao and Weiwei fooled around a bit before falling asleep together in bed.

It had been an absolutely ordinary day.

And then, deep in the night, when all were asleep and a thick blanket of clouds had rolled over the earth, a light sparked in the shadowed sky.

Similar to a flash of lightning, the strange red light illuminated the entire world for one brief moment. The red faded into darkness, leaving only the shadows of the clouds behind. The wind blew in circles, the clouds drifting heavily above a world that had just begun to change.

Far below this sky, in the specks on the Earth that were the bodies of human beings, a strange phenomenon began to unfold. People began twisting in their sleep, their insides roiling, the very cells inside of them churning and transforming. Their closed eyes snapped wide open, the whites around their pinprick pupils bleeding red from bursting capillaries. Their fingers and toes hooked into corpse-like claws, and their limbs froze with a pain and agony so great that when these suffering people screamed, the deathly sound of millions of cries rose and harmonized into a single haunting wail.

In Lu Hao's narrow bed, two bodies thrashed in pain. Lu Hao awoke screaming, his body overheated and profusely sweating. He jackknifed upright, and after blinking his hazy eyes, he looked down at his tingling hands. His veins glowed beneath his skin, simmering like the embers of a fire. The unnatural light faded slowly, leaving his body as it seemed before.

But Lu Hao could tell something was different. His skin vibrated with a pulsing instinct to fight. His ears prickled from an overload of sound: car sirens from neighborhoods away, animals barking and screeching, running water left unattended. And from beside him, a wheezing, rattling sound.

Lu Hao looked over to see Xia Weiwei's twisted figure reaching out to him, the bloody balls of her eyes running down her face as her skin began to droop and melt. Her teeth gleamed in the shadow of her wide open mouth, which issued a terrifying and inhuman squeal.

Lu Hao raised his hands to protect himself, and somehow a power rushed through him. The tips of his fingers crackled, and the next Lu Hao knew, he was alone on the bed.

On the floor was a smear. Ash and dust and a crimson stain that had been a person, once.

When he realized what had happened—not only in his dorm, but in the rest of the country and perhaps even the world as well—Lu Hao battled his way out of the university campus. The horrific remains of students milled in every hall and crawled in the darkness outside. The few people who hadn't become monsters tried their best to flee, but it was nearly impossible to escape from this crowded campus. Lu Hao had only managed to rescue a handful of people, bringing them to the university's car park. The group parted ways there. Lu Hao stole a dead man's car and drove without rest to his parents' home in F City.