Chapter 1: The End of the World?

Page 1 of 3

July 14, 2027. Summer.

This was a luxury villa district in Binhai City, yet it stood apart from all the other villas around it. There was no pursuit of refined or opulent décor here. Instead, the entire structure had been cast from thick reinforced concrete, reinforced further with perimeter walls and steel plating — the unmistakable silhouette of a doomsday bunker.

And that was precisely what it was.

"Mr. Shen, if you'd just sign here." A man in a black suit — compact and powerfully built — stepped forward and presented a contract to Shen Yu.

It was the acceptance agreement.

Shen Yu did not reach for the pen immediately. He glanced sideways at his secretary.

"Everything has been inspected. No major issues overall, but there are twelve minor defects in the finishing details." The secretary's name was Ji Mingshu. She was beautiful, though that was never the first thing anyone noticed about her.

Her posture, her bearing, her dress, her makeup, her expression — all were immaculate, without a single lapse. Combined with her height of one hundred and seventy-five centimeters, she projected an unmistakable air of authority from the very first moment.

Even the general manager of the construction company standing before her couldn't help raising a hand to wipe the sweat from his brow.

He instinctively averted his gaze from hers.

Having worked through this entire project, he had come to deeply appreciate just how formidable this woman was. She might have walked straight out of a television drama about ruthless professional women.

By contrast, the chairman and president of Xingyun Corporation standing beside her seemed, at first glance, rather ordinary. Yet given his background — having built everything from nothing — and his age, so wildly incongruous with his accumulated wealth, no one who knew anything about him could afford even a flicker of contempt.

"Mr. Shen." The construction company's general manager spoke again. "Those defects are all minor. This is the first 'doomsday fortress' we've contracted and completed, and we have no intention of damaging our own reputation. Please rest completely assured. Any follow-up corrections needed, we will come at a moment's notice — we can put that in the contract."

A guarantee?

The corner of Shen Yu's mouth curved ever so slightly, as though he found something faintly amusing.

He said nothing, however.

He simply signed.

The general manager let out a long breath of relief and smiled. "If Mr. Shen is satisfied, we'd be grateful for any word of recommendation."

Page 2 of 3

"Is there much demand for this kind of project these days?" Shen Yu asked idly.

"Enormous. Inquiries and orders are climbing every single day." The general manager — himself a man of considerable means — spoke with a note of quiet bitterness.

But he also understood that this was not someone who invited idle conversation. Seeing that Shen Yu had no further questions, he excused himself and hurried away.

He had his own doomsday bunker being built back in his hometown, and he needed to oversee its progress remotely.

In times like these, anyone with a little money, a little influence, a little capability, was making preparations of one kind or another.

The theme of those preparations was singular: the apocalypse.

Roughly half a year ago, the United Nations Space Risk Monitoring Division had issued a sudden warning. A small asteroid was hurtling toward human civilization and would make direct impact with Earth eight years hence.

Had that been all, it might not have caused such alarm.

Eight years was not a short span of time, and the asteroid itself was not especially large. Calculations suggested that even with no intervention whatsoever, it would at worst bring catastrophic devastation to a localized region — hardly enough to warrant talk of the end of the world.

But then, three months ago, a meteorite — subsequently confirmed to have originated from that same asteroid — struck Earth ahead of schedule. From that moment onward, everything changed utterly.

Talk of the apocalypse, and the atmosphere surrounding it, had been rising to a fever pitch with each passing day.

Shen Yu had sensed that something was different as early as half a year ago and had begun making preparations immediately. Yet even so, unease still gnawed at him.

A man who had built himself up from nothing to where he stood today in just seven short years had not done so on talent and fortune alone.

He had his own trump cards — or rather, he had gained access, before anyone else, to a certain truth that others could not reach.

And precisely because of that, he understood, more clearly than most, just how dire the situation truly was.

"Boss." His secretary extended a tablet toward him, her voice grave. "This livestream began six minutes ago. Its online traffic has been spiking sharply. The location is overseas — the Eastern District of Xibang, a mid-sized city called Woodriff with a population of approximately eight hundred thousand. Last night, someone in that city uploaded footage of a meteorite impact."

On the screen, a blonde, blue-eyed woman stood before the camera, dressed in what appeared to be a journalist's uniform. Her expression was one of despair. Though she was fighting to hold herself together, her voice trembled.

"I know I'm going to die. We're all going to die. This is truly the end of the world — the punishment of God."

The woman appeared to be standing on the balcony of a high-rise building. From the angle of the shot, she was at least ten or twelve stories up, and the street below was entirely out of frame. Yet even so, the background was saturated with noise — overwhelming, unrelenting noise.

Hysterical screaming. Tremendous crashes. Furious, unceasing gunfire that rolled across the entire city in waves.

Page 3 of 3

And threading through it all, the thick columns of black smoke that rose and rose into the sky.

From sound alone, one could picture the chaos consuming the city below.

"I have done many wrong things in my life." The terror in the female journalist's face had long since passed the point of concealment. She trembled as she spoke, her voice cracking with something between confession and weeping. "I have wronged my parents, my husband, and my profession. I cannot count how many false stories I wrote — for hollow glory, for meaningless money. It is too late for any of that now. But at least — at least at the very end — I owe the world the truth."

The camera shook. She had clearly picked up the phone that had been resting before her and moved toward the balcony's edge.

What appeared before the lens was a vision of such staggering, terrifying horror that the word 'inferno' seemed barely adequate.

It was not the burning streets or the burning buildings. It was not the people screaming and fleeing in blind panic.

It was the figures.

Bloody, mangled, grotesque — and moving with terrifying speed.

They made no sound. No roaring, no howling. They were like silent, merciless hunters. A single leap carried them eight or nine meters into the air. The white bones of their bodies had erupted outward into jagged spurs and spines, allowing them to scale the faces of high-rise towers with ease, their movements blindingly fast.

And there were more of them with every passing second.

One could see clearly — countless creatures smashing through windows, tearing through walls, pouring into buildings, hurling people bodily through the air. The victims struck the ground far below with a sound like wet ruin, their screams cutting off into silence.

Shen Yu's expression had grown grim.

He could not say what a trained combat professional would make of such footage.

But to his eyes, the assessment was plain: strength, speed, durability — all of it, exceptional.

More troubling still — some of these creatures, despite the shredded flesh and exposed bone, were still wearing human clothing.

Shen Yu even watched with his own eyes as people who had been reduced to pulp on the pavement below began to twist and writhe and pull themselves upright, transforming into new creatures.

Zombies?

Zombies of this caliber?

And furthermore — this bore no resemblance whatsoever to the phenomena that had accompanied either of the two previous meteorite impact events.