When the world burned, he hadn’t imagined he’d miss the noise.
Zhao Rui died in the apocalypse with dust in his lungs and blood on his palms, the last of his rations clutched tight against his chest. He remembered the explosion that split the horizon, the flash of light that erased both monsters and men, the way silence finally swallowed the screams. He remembered thinking—at least it’s over.
But then he opened his eyes again.
No ruined skyline. No ash. No twisted cities crawling with things that had once been human.
Instead—crickets. The faint squeak of a bicycle. The smell of soy sauce and steamed buns.
He blinked against sunlight that felt too clean.
The road beneath him was packed earth, lined with brick houses whose paint had peeled under the summer heat. A red slogan stretched across one wall “Build the Four Modernizations” its characters neat and bright. The year had to be the early eighties.
What the hell…?
He sat up slowly. His clothes were torn apocalypse garb, but his backpack was intact. When he unzipped it, the shimmer of his ability pulsed faintly against his fingertips: his spatial storage, a miniature universe still holding everything he’d hoarded in that dying world.
Canned meat, medicine, purified water, solar batteries—all still there.
He exhaled, half-laughing.
Apparently, the end hadn’t been the end after all.
A World That Wasn’t His
Days passed before he accepted it wasn’t an illusion. People here wore faded blue shirts, women carried baskets to the market, children stared at him like he was a film star lost on the wrong street. No one spoke of monsters. No one ran.
It should have been peace.
But peace was harder to survive than chaos.
He’d lived too long sharpening knives in the dark, sleeping beside the dead. Now, when someone offered him tea, his first thought was what do they want?
He kept to himself, renting a tiny room behind a noodle shop in a southern town. At night, he would look out at the streetlights—dim yellow bulbs buzzing against moths—and listen to the world breathe.
And every so often, when he saw two young men laughing too freely on the street before pulling apart as someone passed, he felt a pang of something old and cruel in his chest.
Because here, love like his didn’t exist.
Not openly. Not safely.
In the wasteland, he’d had no time for tenderness. Love had been a luxury, survival the only law. But now, in a world that pretended to be normal, loneliness tasted sharper. He caught himself watching hands brushing in the dark, shoulders touching under a shared umbrella, and he thought—will there ever be a place for me?
The law was silence, the culture restraint. Yet he couldn’t help but imagine it: someone steady, someone gentle, someone whose warmth wouldn’t vanish come morning.
Maybe it was madness to crave affection more than safety.
But hadn’t he already survived the end of the world?
And so, one humid summer night in 1983, Zhao Rui met the man who would change everything—a young factory engineer with oil-stained hands and eyes bright as a promise.
He was smiling when their gazes met across the flicker of a street-side movie projector.
For the first time since dying, Zhao Rui’s heart made a sound.
No comments:
Post a Comment