The Floating City, slowly descending from the clouds, returned to the earth for the first time in over fifty years.
The moment the colossal city successfully landed, the mountains shook and the ground quaked. The sound was deafening, as if Death himself were tolling a funeral bell for humanity.
The main city’s power grid was completely paralyzed, and long-range communications were instantly severed.
They called to the Underground City Base for aid, only to learn, just before communications were cut, that the Underground City Base was also under assault by a tide of mutated insects.
As if by coincidence, on this very day, anomalous events surged toward humanity’s last remaining habitats.
No one knew if the Fog Zone Base was also experiencing the same disaster.
Yi Shuyun couldn’t help but think that if this truly was a “human clearance plan,” then this must be its final stage. Humanity had nowhere left to run.
The annihilation of a species has always been a silent affair. Perhaps humanity was not as special as it imagined.
Perhaps when humanity was gone, when Earth’s ecosystem returned to its primordial state and everything began anew, a brand-new intelligent species, a new humanoid civilization, would appear in a future that humans could neither imagine nor reach.
When they became advanced enough, would they be able to uncover the true reason for humanity’s destruction?
Someone in the Old World had once proposed a hypothesis: in the distant history that humanity could not probe, perhaps there had truly been other advanced civilizations similar to humans, but the traces of their existence had not survived the hundreds of millions of years.
So it was also possible that by the time a new advanced civilization appeared, the evidence of humanity’s existence would have already been completely buried by the long eons, and the mystery of humanity’s demise would be annihilated along with its civilization.
But humanity—
Would not resign itself to extinction.
The beast tide scattered across the ground instantly surged inward, and the human base shrank its defensive perimeter in the shortest time possible.
The fighter jets circling above the base, under orders, began an indiscriminate bombing campaign outside the defensive line.
The smoke of gunpowder filled the boundless fog. People were dying every minute, every second.
The buoyancy core was no longer protected; all military strength was concentrated on the Base Research Institute—humanity had to defend the hard-won fruits of its research.
If they could survive this beast tide assault, then as long as the research remained, so did the future.
The beast hordes attacked the human base with mad frenzy. Those not qualified to transfer into the final defensive perimeter ran for their lives through a land of overlapping blood and fire.
Some wailed in sorrow, some cursed in anger, some embraced for a passionate kiss at the end of their lives.
This was a doomsday carnival. Most people would not see tomorrow.
The life-and-death battle between humanity and the abnormal ecosystem was so cruel that not a sliver of hope could be seen, yet the instinct for survival still drove them to defend the last sliver of land with their flesh and blood.
Above and below, mutated beasts swarmed in like a black tide. In the dense fog, the black vines bloomed with crimson flowers, swaying in the wind, emitting a strange halo that flowed through this seemingly endless mist.
Every human still alive picked up any weapon they could find.
The wounded, as long as they could still move, would retreat, hastily inject themselves with an inhibitor, and then return to the front to continue fighting.
The mutated people, once feared and loathed by most ordinary humans, also became a line of defense for humanity at this moment. They used their own detested, mutated bodies to wage the most ferocious struggle at the end of their lives.
Dismembered bodies and pools of blood were everywhere.
They endured the dusk as the sky gradually darkened, endured the night fog thick with despair, endured the sunless dawn, and met the most frigid afternoon of the summer.
The fighter jets had long run out of fuel, the defensive perimeter had shrunk to its absolute limit, the already scarce heavy weaponry could no longer be used, and the stock of firearms and ammunition was critically low.
People who had injected inhibitors fought through their pain, dragging their slowly mutating bodies to continue the battle.
The number of survivors in the base was less than a thousand. The final line of defense was about to be breached—a bloody haze shrouded the entire world.
It felt like a nightmare from which they would never wake.
“Is this the end?” someone asked, their voice trembling with despair.
The dim, unlit hall of the research institute fell silent for a moment.
Suddenly, the roar of fighter jets came from the distance. A light of hope was rekindled in everyone’s heart.
“Reinforcements from the Underground City Base are here!”
“Did they repel the insect tide?”
“The Underground City held out! Do we… do we have somewhere to go?”
Yi Shuyun clutched the torn flesh of her arm, peering through the blood-stained, shattered glass window at the rescue jets circling outside.
She didn’t know if it was an illusion, but the dense fog seemed to be slowly dissipating, and the beast horde’s assault on humanity was no longer so greedy and witless.
The beast tide gradually receded. A few mutated beasts were still attacking the dilapidated human base, but the arrival of reinforcements blocked them outside the final line of defense.
The hope of survival had arrived like a miracle.
The beast hordes fell silent. The black vines fell silent. The human gunfire fell silent.
The world fell silent.
—The God who judged the world, at the final moment before the apocalypse, had declared humanity innocent.
“Did they succeed?” Yi Shuyun murmured in a low voice.
How laughable, how tragic.
The survival of humanity had truly rested on a single thought from that quiet and stubborn girl.
A glint of tears welled up in her eyes.
Countless birds chased the setting sun. Humans, separated by thousands of mountains and vast distances, felt the warmth of the same sunset spilling over the world at this very moment.
“The fog is clearing! The fog is clearing!”
As the beast tide receded, a girl covered in blood, treading over the wreckage, ran toward a building that everyone had been desperately defending.
For the first time in half a century, the afterglow of the setting sun shone into this isolated land that had been shrouded in dense fog.
Through the window, it illuminated a face as old and withered as deadwood.
The fiery glow of the sunset burned the clouds in the distance. The children who grew up here had never seen such a sky.
An Li stopped in her tracks, dazed, staring blankly at the scene before her.
“Mr. Shi, this is…”
“Is it over?” The old man squinted his eyes, gazing at the long-lost sunset.
Something in this world had changed, silently and without a trace.
Shi Wenlin looked at the large screen behind him. The monitoring data for the new ecosystem had lost its pattern. The mysterious energy that the black vines had emanated across this land for decades had, at this moment, completely vanished.
The invisible hand that had constantly pushed all creatures to hunt and merge with one another, forcing humanity step by step toward extinction, had suddenly disappeared.
The moment the great fog dispersed, the bodies of countless infected people also slowly stopped mutating. Their bodies did not revert, but they would no longer continue to deteriorate into non-human forms.
It seemed humanity had finally survived to see the light of day again.
For over fifty years, all the calamities had been like a small joke played by a farmer on the turkeys he was raising.
Some stood frozen in a daze, some leaped for joy and laughed out loud, some knelt and wept bitterly in the afterglow.
And many more had not lived to see the fog disperse.
They had either died long ago or died just before the dawn.
In a place far beyond their sight, a fighter jet flew through the rapidly dissipating fog. The pilot seemed to have lost his way, circling endlessly in the mist.
It wasn’t that he didn’t know the way back to the human base, but he had lost two young women.
They had vanished into this fog for the future of humanity. He couldn’t bring himself to leave them behind and return alone.
The city wasn’t large; human feet couldn’t have taken them too far. No matter what, he had to find them.
He had never thought this great fog would one day dissipate, and when it did, he saw in the distance the incomparably huge Ecological Mother Flower, blooming furiously at dusk as it burned the clouds crimson.
As he drew closer, he saw a lone figure, as if her soul had fled her body, squatting motionlessly and silently beside the bottomless abyss.
Liu An walked to her side. “Let’s go. Back to the base…”
Chai Yuening looked up at the sky. The last rays of the setting sun were still piercing, and she couldn’t help but squint.
After dozens of seconds of silence, she pushed herself up on her knees. Her legs, from squatting for so long, must have been numb, as she stood unsteadily.
Liu An was suddenly afraid, afraid that this person who had been squatting quietly before him just a second ago would, after one final smile, resolutely leap into the abyss.
He stepped forward and grabbed her arm. He saw her mouth open, but her eyes were just red, and she couldn’t say a word. For a moment, he didn’t know what to do.
Liu An said, “She wouldn’t want you to die here.”
After what felt like a long time, Chai Yuening said softly, “I’ll stay with her for a while.”
With that, she collapsed as if drained of all strength, lying down on a patch of ruins, staring blankly at the giant flower above.
Finally…
She slowly closed her eyes.
She wanted to say, don’t mind me, my heart can’t escape this abyss.
She didn’t know how long she lay there, didn’t know if the person beside her was still waiting, refusing to give up. Her heart just felt so tired, so tired she was about to lose the strength to breathe.
In a daze, it felt as if something was coiling around her arm, bit by bit, along her fingertips, her palm, her wrist.
It was cool and refreshing, like a dream…
After the destruction of the Old World, the black vines brought a dense fog that seemed like it would never disperse. The brand-new ecosystem that was quietly nurtured in this great fog swept across the entire world in just a few short decades.
Humanity’s scientific framework completely collapsed in this disaster. All research seemed futile. Just when they had finally seen the dawn of the apocalypse, they suffered another devastating blow, and the entire species once faced extinction.
But in the end, the great fog did disperse.
No one knew the source of this disaster, nor did anyone know why it had suddenly spared humanity. Only a particularly absurd story circulated among the survivors.
Humanity’s over-exploitation had disturbed an ancient god sleeping in the abyss. The destruction of the Old World was a divine punishment, and what appeased the ancient god’s wrath was God’s mercy upon humanity.
From then on, the great fog no longer filled the world, creatures no longer merged with one another, the energy of the black vines could no longer be extracted, and the Floating City, which used that energy for buoyancy, was forever grounded from the sky.
The Floating City Base suffered devastating damage. After the fierce battle, fewer than seven thousand survivors could be found.
The Underground City Base, which had also been assaulted by beast hordes, had ninety thousand survivors after the war, thanks to its more robust internal fortifications.
The two major bases merged into one and rescued all of the hundred or so survivors from the Fog Zone Base.
When the lawless fusion between species stopped, human genes were no longer coveted by mutated beasts.
Everything seemed to have returned to the way it was in the primordial era of the Old World. To wild beasts, humans were just one of many types of prey. There was plenty of food in the world, and they no longer needed to risk their lives against the highly cohesive human race. The dangers humanity faced naturally lessened a great deal.
The genes of surface creatures gained their own stability, and humanity’s research into the black vine ecosystem finally turned a new page.
Many indescribable new species, previously unnamed, either went extinct without a sound or were given their own names. After their habits stabilized, they slowly propagated and expanded their populations.
Two years after the great fog dispersed, humanity built a brand-new base on the surface. They moved most of the Old World species from the Underground City’s simulated ecological zone to the surface, doing everything they could to cultivate and breed them, wanting these creatures that originally lived on the surface to return to the sunlight along with humanity.
They were no longer the masters of this world, but they still wanted to return to the surface, to enjoy the sun and the rain, to feel the natural wind, and to breathe the freshest air.
Most humans had developed irreversible physical mutations during that final battle, and newborn children also had some strange genes, more or less. Fortunately, they were generally humanoid in shape. Since everyone was like this, there were no strange looks exchanged among them.
It no longer surprised anyone if a family’s child was born with wings, if another’s had a small tail, or if another was naturally covered in scales.
You Lan had never thought that she, too, would one day come to the surface.
The summer sun was incredibly harsh, and the hot wind that hit her face was a temperature the Underground City Base had never had.
She dragged her luggage, and like the countless other residents beside her who had never left the Underground City, she gazed at the boundless blue sky with the most incredulous eyes.
“Boss You!”
A familiar voice brought her back to her senses.
You Lan looked behind her. Ren Dong, in a wheelchair, was being pushed toward her by Du Xia. She smiled, her eyebrows curving. “First time on the surface, how is it?”
You Lan let out a soft “hmph.” “It’s hot. I’m about to melt.”
Ren Dong: “You don’t like it?”
You Lan: “I love it.”
As she spoke, she closed her eyes and took a deep breath.
Finally, remembering something, she opened her eyes and asked, “Where’s your captain?”
Ren Dong: “She just learned to fly a plane a while ago. Left a short message and took off.”
You Lan: “Where’d she go?”
Ren Dong: “The world is so big. Off to see it, I guess.”
You Lan: “On a honeymoon?”
Ren Dong smiled and patted the two large suitcases beside You Lan. “Are those heavy? Have Lu Qi help you with them.”
You Lan raised an eyebrow and smiled. “There are plenty of people who want to help me with my bags. I won’t trouble you guys.”
As she spoke, she glanced around. Her eyes suddenly lit up, and she waved at someone in the distance. A person came over with a quick, limping gait.
The afternoon sun lazily peeked out from the clouds, spilled on this newly built human city.
A broadcast announcement sounded.
Many people subconsciously stopped to listen.
The broadcast said that Exploration Team 1203 had discovered rose seeds in an Old World ruin to the north.
The rose, once declared extinct by humanity, would bloom again in this world in its next flowering season.
—The people of the Old World liked to give it to the one they loved most.
End of Main Story
Author’s Notes:
I’m late, but the main story is now complete.
I want to say something, but for a moment I don’t quite know where to start, so I’ll just say whatever comes to mind. It’s a bit long-winded, so feel free to skip it.
Readers who have seen my other works should be able to tell that this novel is definitely outside my comfort zone. Whether it’s the post-apocalyptic setting or the survival-type battle scenes, every part of it nearly made me tear my hair out while writing.
It was a brand-new attempt, a flop and willful, but I don’t regret it one bit. Because as early as last year, I said that when my author follows reached ten thousand, I would reward myself by writing a purely niche post-apocalyptic story, and the concept for this story began back then.
It’s hard for me to explain how much I care about them. The feeling they give me is quite different from the protagonists I’ve written in the past, but I can’t put my finger on why it’s different. It’s quite magical.
This isn’t a complicated story. Humanity destroyed the ecosystem, and the ecosystem punished humanity. The inspiration came from Ling Cage and some fragmented information revealed in its prequel manga, Yue Kui Zhuan, about the Mana Flower bringing about a new ecosystem. It’s just that my protagonists aren’t Mark or Ran Bing, not a person and someone burdened with responsibility. I wanted them to be ordinary yet extraordinary. Their ordinary identities meant they didn’t have to bear such heavy responsibilities, but the love deep in their hearts made them willing to carry that weight for each other.
Ultimately, I don’t want to express any particular viewpoint with this novel, nor did I intend to preach. All the rights and wrongs, good and evil, are laid bare on the surface. And Chai Yuening, who possesses extremely strong empathy, is not someone who easily judges good and evil, right and wrong. So in this novel, whether it’s the collective or the individual, the rightness or wrongness of all people and events is for you, the readers, to judge. However you see it, that’s how it is.
This novel has no important supporting characters. The so-called main group was never even listed in the supporting character section. I wanted to lock the perspective onto Chai Yuening, to let everyone follow a relatively ordinary, kind person and watch this world slowly be destroyed, bit by bit. Despair and hope arrived intertwined. She was never broken by it; instead, in the countless people who were just passing through her life, she saw the brilliant and tenacious power of life, and saw that there were thousands upon thousands of unnamed guardians in this world.
Chai Yuening’s kindness influenced everyone around her. Although some comments said she was a “holy mother,” I still believe that kindness is not being a holy mother. It is precisely because she is kind that she could, through several choices, become the one and only person to “infect” Chu Ci. If any of her choices had deviated, the relationship between her and Chu Ci would have changed.
Because Chu Ci is not human. She does not possess human thinking, nor does she understand human emotions. She looked at this world with a muddled understanding, like an observer with a God’s-eye view. Life and death made little difference to her. She was alive because she had the instinct for survival, but in fact, she was indifferent to everything, showing no fear in her eyes even when facing death.
In my heart, she is a character with a divine quality. Not to say that she is good, but that she is truly observing this world, pitying this world, and, despite not understanding, is willing to sacrifice herself to save this world—even though all of it is just to make Chai Yuening happy. It’s like—when a god judges the good and evil of mortals, a human shows them the good in the world, so the god declares mortals innocent.
Of course, Chu Ci is not a god. She is just a plant infected by humanity, a part of the Ecological Mother Flower, who will ultimately, for the sake of one human, truly integrate into the human world.
I don’t want to analyze or explain too much more. If you need to rely on the author’s notes to understand what the author wants to express in a novel, then that’s pretty pointless, isn’t it? This is the last novel; what I wanted to say is between the lines. Whatever you see is what it is.
