Liu Hong had a grand name, but all he wanted to do was check out and give up on life.
He had graduated from college two years ago, living a mediocre life where he was neither high-achieving nor successful enough for anything better.
"Just let the world blow up!"
"Forget it, the world might as well be destroyed tomorrow!"
"Let it all burn!"
Phrases like these had become his catchphrases.
His parents were divorced, and both had gone on to build new families. Liu Hong felt like a superfluous person; while other children were the crystallization of their parents' love, he was the kidney stone of his parents' affection.
Both of them had wanted to cut him out of their lives.
Under legal pressure, they paid his tuition until he graduated from high school, after which they left him to fend for himself.
He managed to attend college with the help of the national student loan fund, and from the day he turned eighteen, he shouldered the crushing burden of debt.
On weekends during college, he worked part-time delivering food, and at night he worked part-time as a waiter to earn his living expenses, struggling hard and bitterly to survive.
He always thought things would get better after graduation—surely a college graduate could find a job paying ten thousand yuan or so.
Only after graduating did he understand what "graduation means unemployment" really meant.
During graduation season, competing among numerous fresh graduates, he relied on his rich work experience and relatively decent academic grades to secure an offer from a small company.
Yet after entering the company for over half a year, he had to make room for someone with personal connections and was transferred to a sales position. Every day, he ran around bitterly trying to drum up business and secure orders, hoping to earn a bit more in commissions to pay off his loans and still have some savings left over for a few decent meals.
Then, just as he was approaching his two-year work anniversary—right around the time he would qualify for seniority pay and the year-end bonus—the company let him go under the pretext that his professional competence was inadequate.
That was when Liu Hong officially checked out.
The world was just like this: if you had connections, you could push someone out of an R&D role and into sales. If you had guanxi, you could lie around in the office every day and still rake in orders. Fine, whatever! Let the chips fall where they may! The apocalypse might as well come tomorrow!!
With a month's base salary paid by the company as severance, Liu Hong lay in his rented room for a whole month.
Finally, one day when he rode a shared bicycle out to buy groceries, leaning against a ginkgo tree by the roadside as he looked at the meager balance in his WeChat wallet, the pending credit card bills, and the student loan about to mature, he once again sighed aloud:
"Just destroy the world! Let tomorrow be the apocalypse! Then I won't have to pay these damn bills anymore!!"
This time, it seemed someone was annoyed by his noise. Hearing his request, in a momentary daze, he found himself standing on an asphalt road as the world suddenly began to shake violently.
An earthquake?
Liu Hong crouched on the ground, watching people with dark skin and white skin running around frantically.
*Wait,* he thought, *are there really this many foreigners in the Dragon Kingdom now?*
At that moment, the tremors grew increasingly intense, and Liu Hong began to panic. Even when he lay flat on the ground, the vibrations bounced him right back up.
*This city isn't on a tectonic fault line, is it? And isn't there an office building right next to me? I was even planning to go there for an interview a couple of days ago—why is this place so wide open?*
Still, Liu Hong didn't have time to overthink.
He obediently flattened himself on the ground, preparing to wait out the earthquake before running.
Suddenly, a fissure stretched across the ground from the distance.
*No way, is this earth actually going to end?! Don't mess with me! I'm only twenty-six! I've never even had a girlfriend, dammit!*
Liu Hong sprang up with a bound, astonishing even himself that, two years after graduation, he could still pull off such a high-difficulty acrobatic move.
Human potential truly was limitless.
He jumped to his feet and bolted sideways. The crack behind him was growing wider and wider; Liu Hong could never outrun the expanding gap, but he kept running desperately as the surrounding buildings began to collapse.
Suddenly, an airplane roared past right over his head, skimming close to him and several others before pulling back up into the sky. In the distance, a train streaked across the open air as everything around them fractured and shattered.
The asphalt road beneath Liu Hong's feet began to cave in as well. He thrashed his arms wildly, desperate to grab onto anything around him, and finally managed to catch hold of a palm leaf.
That entire palm tree plummeted straight down into the earth beside Liu Hong, and Liu Hong fell right along with it.
Just when he thought it was all over and the world was finally destroyed—even feeling a twinge of relief that he wouldn't have to repay his various debts or face this screwed-up world anymore—he plunged straight into the water.
Liu Hong knew how to swim and struggled hard to surface, but blocks of concrete kept crashing down around him with no time to dodge. When his arm was broken by falling debris, he kicked hard with his legs; the instinct for survival drove him upward.
After taking a blow to the head that left a gaping wound, getting one arm broken and the other slashed, and suffering a deep, bone-showing laceration across his back, he finally broke the surface of the water.
Enduring the pain in his arm, he pulled over a wooden board floating nearby, managed to press it underneath himself, and lay down on it. The palm leaf he had grabbed earlier was long gone, god knows where.
Liu Hong lay on the board, collecting his wits. Only then did he feel the burning pain on his back. He rolled over onto his stomach on the board and looked around.
The surroundings had already turned into a vast expanse of water. The city Liu Hong lived in wasn't known for high altitude, but it wasn't coastal either—where did all this water come from?
Was sea level rising this fast? Or was it seawater flooding back inland from an earthquake? But it couldn't possibly flood this far inland! All the way into an inland city?
At this point, Liu Hong still hadn't realized the severity of the situation. He stubbornly believed that his area was just suffering from a disaster, much like the Wenchuan earthquake in 2008—no, judging by the looks of it, even worse than Wenchuan.
Liu Hong thought to himself as he lay prone on the board.
Just then, a wave swept a shopping bag toward him. Liu Hong stared blankly as the shopping bag was deposited right beside his wooden board. *What is this, room service?*
*Give me some medicine instead! Or send me a doctor!! What good is a shopping bag?! This seawater stings these cuts like crazy!!!*
But right after that, he saw the apartment building on his left tipping over toward him while the seawater surged up on his right.
The last image burned into Liu Hong's eyes was the city sliding completely into the ocean, before he was flipped over by the waves and plunged back into the sea.
The seawater surged, and rubble drifted underwater with the currents, repeatedly bludgeoning Liu Hong with heavy impacts.
Liu Hong wanted to open his eyes to dodge, but the waves were far too violent. He was like a blade of grass in the ocean, drifting wherever the current took him with no control over his own movements.
Excruciating pain flared through his body every now and then; Liu Hong knew that meant he was getting struck by debris again.
Amidst this agonizing torture, Liu Hong thought he was finally going to die. He could no longer hold his breath, and seawater poured into his mouth, but he couldn't care less anymore. *Fine, let it be. If I die, I die.*
*Still, to suffer so much torture right before dying—who knows what kind of sins I committed in my past life!*
With that, Liu Hong clenched his fists tight, enduring the physical pain and the sensation of impending death by asphyxiation.
Finally, after about five minutes of such torment, Liu Hong finally felt the arrival of death.
*Is it finally time to die? After crying out for the apocalypse so many times, it's finally here. With the whole world dying along with me, I suppose I got my money's worth in this lifetime. Besides, I still have a lot of money I haven't paid back—talk about a bargain!*
With that, he completely abandoned the struggle, his hands tightly clenched as he calmly resigned himself to death.
After the seawater completely submerged the city, everything finally grew quiet. Liu Hong finally died, floating up from beneath the surface of the water.
A white man floated on the sea, both hands clenched into fists, his stomach bloated, his face deathly pale. His left arm was bent at an unnatural angle, his right hand bore a massive gash that continuously oozed blood, and there wasn't a single patch of unblemished skin on his entire body—he was covered in lacerations, looking as though he had been subjected to death by a thousand cuts before perishing.
Clutched tightly in his hand was a shopping bag as he drifted across the sea. At that moment, corpses began to surface one after another from beneath the water; it seemed these were all the people who had perished in this catastrophe.
Suddenly, the shopping bag gripped tightly in the corpse's hand vanished from the white man's grasp.