By the time you read this, I'm dead.

Who is to blame for my death?

Doomsday? Poor survivors? The darkest and most brutal thing that has happened underground lately? I'm sorry, but it's a secret I can't tell you about those horrible events, because if you know about it, you will lose the last faith in the human species.

Perhaps, I can only blame myself.

April 1. Sunday. Night, 22:19.

On a rainy night, I was on the second basement floor of the Future Dream Building, in front of the Calford supermarket book counter, where my latest book, "Dark Days – The End of the World is Coming", which is number one on the bestseller list. My name is Wu Hanlei and I am almost fifty years old. I looked at my picture on the cover and stood in fear in the store that was about to close. There weren't many supermarket customers tonight, and they all hurried past me, and no one came to me for an autograph. Because of my loneliness, I became more and more afraid, bowed my head and closed my eyes, and silently prayed to God that the end of the world would come soon.

Sure enough, when I looked up, the building began to shake violently, sinking rapidly, the lights flickering on and off, and the hurried cries of people echoed everywhere.

I seemed to see the dazzling light in the wilderness of the Qaidam Basin.

After the darkness of the earth and the corpses strewn across the field, I decided to speak up and save the last survivors of humanity. My words are the most authoritative, and after strong arguments, they fully believe my judgment - the end of the world has come, the earthlings have basically become extinct, and the future dream edifice has sunk into the ground, becoming the last Noah's Ark, although we will eventually die in a few days.

I became a leader who deserved to be, and even the owner of the mansion had to listen to me. Together, we worked out the rules of underground survival, and in addition to allowing everyone to collect as much food as possible, I, Luo Haoran, and Zhou Xuan were also responsible for managing the common survival resources - electricity maintenance, toilet sanitation, disposal of hundreds of corpses, and reasonable distribution of limited oxygen and fuel. You don't realize how hard it is. I don't know how many resources it would take to feed more than 20 people. Just like running a miniature state, where the people only know how to complain, the head of government has to think about the birth, old age, sickness and death of each person, and whether the whole society can function properly.

No one sleeps tonight.

There was only one person who didn't believe me, and that was the oldest seriously wounded, an old man with a flat nose in his sixties. I had a conversation with him in private—

"I don't believe in the end of the world, the Chinese have gone through five thousand years of ups and downs, isn't it still good now? There are so many countries in the world, you see how powerful the United States is, how can it be finished after the egg is finished? ”

In the face of his questioning, I calmly replied: "You have to believe in science, many civilizations in human history were also destroyed in an instant, and no one dared to believe it beforehand. ”

"You 'scientists' are all fed and talk nonsense all day long, if it weren't for that, who would pay attention to you? Who cares about the results of your lifetime in the lab? Unless you tell everyone that the earth is about to be destroyed, and none of you can escape, you will become the center of the world's attention. ”

"Well, whatever you think, please try to live!"

I'm sorry, I didn't remember his name until I died.

The next two days were perfect! Order was strictly followed, the survivors were well organized, and the seriously wounded were well cared for. Overall, it's normal, and no one has any excesses. The only fly in the ointment is that people can be obedient, but animals do not follow the rules, and there are situations where cats, dogs, and mice compete with humans for food.

Although, sooner or later, all food will be eaten, and no matter how much we save, the fuel will be depleted in a few days - when everyone will endure hunger, thirst, cold, darkness, loneliness, despair, and the stench of rotting corpses...... But I have a strange feeling that as long as I am here, I can lead these people to live until the end of the world.

The end of the apocalypse? This is a strange way of saying that I mentioned at the end of my book, that was the moment when the last human beings on earth had to face death because of hunger, disease, or old age. Was that seven days later? Or seven months later? Or seven years from now? When we all become ghould-eating monsters.

I discussed this issue seriously with Zhou Xuan, assuming that all the food was eaten and the animals were killed by the survivors – just like prehistoric humans hunted wild beasts, and finally even cat, dog, and even rat meat were eaten, what would we rely on to survive? Eventually, will hunger force us to eat the carrion of corpses? My answer is: Yes. Zhou Xuan said, "I would rather starve to death than eat the flesh of the dead!" ”

"Then you can only choose to kill yourself early."

"No, I would choose to starve, but I wouldn't kill myself."

Looking at his unwavering and cold eyes, I felt more like a zombie, the last living creature to survive by eating carrion.

On the third day, Guo Xiaojun was brutally killed, and I felt that I might not live to eat the dead body.

Zhou Xuan and I asked Luo Haoran, and he could see all the surveillance videos, but Luo Haoran said that the murder scene was a surveillance corner, and the murderer could not be found.

That night, a more serious incident occurred - the shampoo girl Ah Xiang killed four seriously injured people, and when she attacked Zhou Xuan and others, she was killed by Zhou Xuan, who was just defending. Then, in the garage on the third basement floor, Yang Bing, a security guard who died in a car accident, was found.

Six people died overnight, and everyone was terrified.

On the fifth night, Mo Xinger was raped, and she identified the pervert as the white-collar Xu Pengfei.

What a pity! I've had sexual fantasies about this girl, who looks like a movie star and maybe gives birth to healthy and beautiful offspring. I almost fell out with someone for that - but it was just a fantasy, and I didn't have the courage to do it.

Early the next morning, Xu Pengfei stabbed the female cleaner Yu Pingxiang to death with a knife after attempting to rape Ding Zi, a third-year high school girl. Soon, Xu Pengfei's body was found on the second basement floor of the supermarket, and someone used an electric drill to drill into his eye and kill him with extreme cruelty. When we finished disposing of all the bodies, we found that Hae-mi, a junior in high school, was missing.

Immediately afterward, an even greater catastrophe struck – the last drop of diesel ran out.

The rest of the building was plunged into deep darkness, and everyone could only light candles, use flashlights and dry batteries to act, and became the most precious materials. No one bothered me anymore, each looking for a safe place to protect the limited food and water. Someone started slaughtering cats and dogs, cooking in an alcohol pot, keeping calories by eating meat - idiots, you guys are also consuming the last fuel!

I wandered alone in the darkness, touching the air of nothingness—in fact, the thinning oxygen, the more and more carrion from underground. I opened my eyes wide and saw nothing, like a blind man in despair......

Suddenly, a bright light flashed in front of him, as bright as ten thousand suns, the most beautiful and fantastic scene in the world, and in the blink of an eye, the eternal silence of the salty desert turned into a complete desolation like the moon. I hid deep in the observation bunker, holding a heavy military telescope, observing the nuclear test dozens of kilometers away. As everyone around me cheered for success, I saw tears in my father's eyes. Many years later, I was trying to figure out whether my father's tears were due to joy or sorrow, and if they belonged to the latter, for myself, for my mother, or for some other reason.

Why are you seeing these? Am I not at a depth of more than 100 meters? Isn't it among the last survivors of the apocalyptic human race? Yet, no matter how much I rub my eyes, I still see this scene from nearly forty years ago, a memory that has been buried in my brain for so long – the most inhospitable heartland of the Qaidam Basin, the true barren land of the earth.

Father, I still love you so much! Even though I'm nearly half a hundred years old. I have a strong feeling that you did not die at the end of the world, that you are still well nestled in a chaise longue, and your mind vividly recalls that beautiful silent night forty years ago, in the clear, almost transparent wilderness starry sky, pointing out to me which was the brightest star, Sirius, and which was the distant Orion Nebula.

I have very few childhood memories of my father, who was always hiding behind a PO box – no address or unit, only a special number, and if I wrote him a letter, it would take two months to receive it, thousands of kilometers away in Xinjiang or Qinghai. At that time, there were no telephones, and it was impossible to even send telegrams. On one occasion, my father sent me a letter with obvious signs of alteration, apparently fearing that he had leaked state secrets.

In fact, my father's letter just told me that my ancestor was Wu Chengen, the author of "Journey to the West". His descendants were unknown, and it was not until the Qianlong period that some people were promoted to the rank and the first to soar. During the Daoguang period, the ancestors of my family did Hanlin editing, and the four brothers were famous for their poetry. My grandfather studied in Japan, participated in the Xinhai Revolution, and later became rich in business. After the Anti-Japanese War, his father went to the United States to study theoretical physics and was Einstein's protégé. In the fifties, my father, with patriotic enthusiasm, gave up his high-paying position in the United States, followed Mr. Qian Xuesen back to China, and participated in the development of China's first one*. Ever since I was born, he has been hiding in the middle of the desert, recording and studying data on every nuclear explosion. To this day, his name can still be seen in the list of meritorious heroes of the two bombs and one star.

That year, my mother committed suicide.

My grandfather is a well-known historian, and my mother is a professor of history at Peking University, researching the origins of ancient Chinese civilization. Her mother's research was unlike any other, and she focused on archaeological discoveries abroad, especially ancient human fossils found in Africa. At that time, Chinese academics believed that Peking Man, Lantian Man, and Yuanmou Man were the direct ancestors of modern Chinese, and that we evolved into humans in China alone. But my mother boldly put forward a new view, arguing that the ancestors of the Chinese, like other races, whether they were white, yellow, black, all came from Africa more than 100,000 years ago. The Peking Man has long been extinct like the Neanderthals and is not related to modern Chinese. Her views shocked the academic community and were characterized as a foreign slave philosophy and a foreign version of Chinese civilization. She was also branded as a reactionary academic authority. Peking University students denounced her as a Soviet spy or a spy of US imperialism, and that she was the vanguard of imperialism and social imperialism in the annihilation of the Chinese nation. After being beaten by her own students for hours, my mother climbed onto the Weiming Lake in the cold winter of Layue, broke the ice and drowned—I saw my mother's body fished out of the icy lake water, like a sleeping beauty who never wakes up.

That year, I was ten years old.

I left Beijing alone, secretly climbed on a train carrying goods, starved for three days and three nights, and survived to Xining. A few months ago, my father, thousands of kilometers away, was suddenly transferred out of Project * and was instructed by the Supreme Commander to go deep into the desert of the Qaidam Basin to participate in a mysterious project called "Project 101" - this is the number of my father's post office box.

Between the cold mountains and grasslands, I begged for survival along the road, and fainted with hunger several times. I was rescued by a Mongolian herdsman who didn't know what the "101 Project" was, only that on the other side of the wilderness, Jiefang trucks often came and went. I followed them, following the deep ruts of the truck, through a no-man's land with only Tibetan antelopes, to a truly barren land, a legendary permanent bunker. The heavily armed soldiers took me to the underground headquarters for interrogation, and then I met my father.

He didn't recognize me, but I did. When I said his name and that of Mom, he was surprised and held me in his arms – he didn't know that Mom had committed suicide.

My father's warm tears hit my face, and I have lived in the "101 Project" base ever since.

It was the closest to the nuclear explosion test site, there was a guard company, and my father was the only researcher. I had a lot of free time in the desert, and my father, who was not as enthusiastic about hunting Tibetan antelopes as everyone else, became my teacher, and in addition to mathematics, physics and chemistry, he also taught me language, history, and geography. By the time I was twelve, I had almost reached the level of a graduate student in physics. My father never talked about his research, forcing me to sleep every day after dark, and he went into a laboratory that protected me from radiation and stayed up all night.

On one occasion, my father made an exception and allowed me to participate in observing a nuclear test, and he put on a full protective suit and thick glasses, and hid in a sturdy bunker to observe the explosion up close with a high-powered telescope through a narrow opening. The nuclear test was so successful that it shocked the world the next day, and it is said that the Kremlin's owners were stunned and revoked their planned plan to destroy China. I will never forget the tremendous light and flames that seemed to sweep over my face and destroy the whole world in a matter of seconds. As I wiped the tears from my father's cheeks and thought back to the light that was as dazzling as New Year's fireworks, a thought suddenly flashed through me: only when that day will it be the grandest festival on earth.

After that day, my father began to open up his research results to me, including the latest geophysical survey data. It's no wonder that every few days, a loud explosion is heard in the wilderness, and the soles of your feet are violently shaken. Nuclear explosions can't be so frequent, there must be other reasons - they are using * to cause artificial earthquakes, through which seismic waves propagate downwards and explore the secrets of the depths of the earth. Many mineral resources are found in this way, but they are not prospecting, but have more important objectives. The man-made earthquake created by my father was powerful and could reach the intensity of a natural earthquake. Fortunately, there are no people within a radius of hundreds of kilometers, otherwise even the strongest buildings would have collapsed, and we would have to live in bunkers.

One night, when the radiation did not exceed the standard, my father took me out of the bunker alone without any protective gear. We lay on a high hill, looking up at the clear starry sky, on the plateau at an altitude of more than 3,000 meters, in the eternal wilderness, all the stars are close at hand.

"Daddy, will these stars live forever?" Even though there was a hard rock underneath me and the temperature was chilling, I still enjoyed it. I think it was the only moment of my life when I felt happy.

"No, although it is called a star, it is not eternal, and like each of us, there is birth and death."

"Do the stars die?" For some reason, my mind came up with my mother's corpse, my mother scooped up from the unnamed lake covered with ice.

"Yes, with the occasional luck, you can see the explosion of a supernova with the naked eye – the explosion in the process of a star's death."

"Why can't I see it?"

"Someday, you'll see." My father smiled and stroked my head.

His hands were so big and warm, and they warmed my heart. However, I asked sadly, "If even the stars die, will the earth also die?" ”

Suddenly, a string of meteors pierced the night sky.

The father replied with great seriousness: "Yes, the sun will die, the earth will die, and so will the human race." ”

"Dad, I'm scared."

At the age of twelve, I was so scared, more afraid than seeing my mother's corpse, more afraid than wandering in the wilderness infested with hungry wolves, I was afraid that the day when everyone was going to die, the bad people who killed my mother, and all the good people, died no differently!

My father took me into his arms, breathed a lot of heat out of his mouth, and said to himself, "What is life? We are born and then we die. ”

Soon I learned from my father that the object of the so-called "Project 101" was not nuclear weapons or intercontinental*, but when the Earth would be destroyed. It will be destroyed either by the nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union, by the destruction of the environment by the evil capitalism, or by the natural catastrophe itself. However, when the time comes, no matter what the Eastern socialist camp is, or the Western capitalist camp, or a handful of imperialist monopoly bourgeoisie, or three-quarters of the world's toiling masses who are struggling in dire straits, they will all be wiped out in ashes anyway.

While observing the data of the nuclear explosion, my father also found that in the past ten years, the earth's crustal activity has become more and more abnormal, and various disasters have continued, and even predicted the Tangshan earthquake a few years later. Although Project 101 was just an inadvertent instruction from the Supreme Commander, my father was so obsessed with the project that he never left the Qaidam Basin for several years, working day and night with artificial earthquakes, dense data, and a starry sky that made people desperately lonely - if it weren't for my company, he would have gone mad.

His father's research not only went deep into the earth, but also pointed to the sky, which equipped him with state-of-the-art radio equipment that could transmit signals directly beyond the solar system. He is convinced that he has received a mysterious electromagnetic signal, but it is only due to technical obstacles that he cannot decipher - in short, an alien message.

I was thirteen years old.

It was in that year that China changed a lot. The hugely invested "Project 101", as well as my father's apocalyptic research, were dismissed as absurd nonsense. My father was reluctant to leave the underground lab, and after all the personnel had been evacuated, we held out for a while, and he wanted to continue to sort through the shocking data until all the supplies were exhausted and we waited for death in the snow before a team of soldiers rescued us. My father was forcibly sent back to Beijing to continue his nuclear weapons research, and the data he had painstakingly collected for years was easily destroyed.

He's crazy.

I thought my father would not live for a few years, but I didn't expect that he would live in a psychiatric hospital for more than 30 years, and he still sits in a recliner, describing the nuclear explosion to his fellow patients from morning to night. Half a month ago, I made a special trip to see my father, and he almost didn't recognize me anymore. I held his hand tightly and looked at his cloudy eyes, as if I had returned to the wilderness of the Qaidam Basin, and looked at his starry gaze - I regret that I could not carry my father's ashes to the cemetery, because he would outlive me.

My time is running out.

In January of this year, while attending an academic symposium on the end of the world in the United States, I fainted in front of the crowd. The best doctor in the United States diagnosed me and confirmed that I had a malignant tumor in my brain – if I was lucky, I would have to live for about half a year.

After the initial shock, I calmly accepted the result and instructed the doctor to keep my condition absolutely confidential. I gave up on treatment and just took some painkillers with me. The doctor couldn't tell the cause of my illness, and I naturally thought of the terrifying light—was it when I was twelve years old, observing the results of a nuclear test up close? There are many cases of sudden brain cancer due to nuclear radiation, such as the rescue workers in the Chernobyl nuclear accident, some of whom have a sudden attack decades later, but it is not excluded that they will be safe and sound for the rest of their lives - such as the father who has observed many nuclear explosions but lived to be 80 years old in good health.

I don't regret that life is so short, and I don't regret that I don't have a family and children, not even the opposite sex that I really love. I am proud that there has never been a Chinese scholar who has achieved such a high level of popularity in the world as I have – I don't care about the Nobel Prize in Physics. I can set off a movement that affects the depths of the soul of hundreds of millions of people, and people of all colors, nationalities, and walks of life adore me to the fullest. They did their best to arrange what was going on after their deaths, calling for peace, opposing war, and promoting the unity of mankind.

Before the Last Judgment came, I was their God.

I only have two regrets, one is that I can't give my father's funeral, and the other is that I don't know if I can see the end of the world. It's like I've waited all my life and never seen a supernova explosion with the naked eye.

I'm sorry, believe me and adore my readers, I've been waiting for this day for so many years, looking forward to the end of the world with all my might—since the snowy day when my mother's body was fished out of the lake of unnamed flowers, since I witnessed the rays of the 10,000 suns of the nuclear explosion, since I was lying in the dark wilderness with my father discussing the death of the stars......

Before the real end of the world comes, I want to choose a place with the most potential. I don't want to choose an area with a high incidence of earthquakes, near an active crater, or a place prone to geological disasters...... They will say that I picked it on purpose, and I wanted to find a bustling downtown area, a place where disaster was least likely.

Future Dream Building.

I surveyed the geological structure of all cities on China's eastern coast and found that the city has experienced significant land subsidence in recent decades, especially in the area around the building. I privately monitored the building and confirmed that the building was sinking badly, and that a chemical plant on the outskirts of the city had pumped a lot of groundwater in recent years, resulting in a huge hole in the city's ground. If there are some external conditions, serious geological disasters can occur. So, I chose this day, April Fool's Day, a rainy night, and went to the Future Dream Building alone, entering the second basement floor of Calford Supermarket - so that I felt like I was back in an underground shelter, standing in front of the bookshelves full of my works, and praying for disaster......

Did I move God? If, you exist.

April 1. Sunday. Night, after 22:19, I believed.

I also convinced all the survivors underground that the end of the world was coming. Those people were convinced and saw me as the last savior.

Is this the last chance fate has given me? I will die at the end of the world, with all the honor and praise, before my brain is eroded by a malignant tumor.

Unfortunately, on the seventh day, the world I had sketched had completely collapsed.

God is not on my side.

When I was leaning alone against the wall—the load-bearing wall of the whole building—I could feel a slight vibration—not from the ground, but from above. I was vaguely aware of something. No one listens to me anymore anyway, and this Garden of Eden has become a hell on earth. I crept to the movie theater on the ninth floor and swept into the darkness with a large flashlight, and while the dome was mostly intact, the cracks had increased and widened. I paid special attention to the pipes, such as the sewer pipes and ventilation pipes, which were all blocked by rubble seven days ago, but now there is air circulation - someone has opened them! If it weren't for the fresh air coming through these crevices and pipes, I would have suffocated to death last night from lack of oxygen.

Sure enough, I found a bottle of mineral water in one of the pipes. It's just the smallest kind of bottle, wrapped in a layer of plastic paper, with a few words printed in bold font -

Survivors of the underground, please do not fear and despair, the world is watching you, and your loved ones are looking forward to your return day and night. We'll soon be able to get the last few dozen meters through and get you back to the ground. Please be sure to conserve your energy and maintain order, as we will continue to deliver water and food. Perseverance is victory!

Other survivors would have been overjoyed to see the bottle of water and the words, waiting for the rescuers to arrive.

However, I took out a lighter, burned the plastic paper, and drank the mineral water.

The end of the world, really, is not yet here.

Maybe in a few days, or a few hours, or a few minutes, someone will come down from the sky and get everyone out – that's not what I wanted!

For you, the end of the world has passed, and for me, the end of the world has finally come.

I'll be rescued to the ground, and countless cameras will be on me — someone will spit on me, call me a clown, call me a shameless liar, and even call me a god who sells pseudoscience and spreads superstition. All those who follow me on the earth will be scattered overnight.

The rescued survivors would point to my nose and say, "It's all because of your Wu Hanlei's remarks that we despair of the world and no longer have hope of being rescued, which ultimately led to those incomparably terrible events!" "Those are truly horrific events that I dare not speak out about, for fear that they will make the six billion people on the ground more desperate.

When I was abandoned by the whole world, it might not be a few weeks before I was alone in a small hospital, lying in a filthy hospital bed, tormented by a tumor in my brain until I became a zombie.

I don't want to endure such a shame and die later. So, I figured out how to plug the pipe and continue to make it a grave.

Quickly leave the ninth floor, put on a mask and go back to the fourth basement floor - most of the corpses are decomposed, full of a stench that can make the living faint. But I still approached the corpses, all of them unrecognizable, but still like my friends from yesterday. I was not afraid at all, pushing away a few dead people with bulging bellies, and pulling up a pile of scattered limbs until I was completely buried in the depths of the mountain of corpses.

Now, in front of my eyes, there are no corpses in front of me, and I am reminded of what my father said to me under the mysterious starry sky on a cold night in the Qaidam Basin many years ago: "What is life? We are born and then we die. ”

Haha, that's just the case, death is just the end of all life, who can escape this day? It's just that they are a little more miserable, and instead of being burned to ashes, they become a meal for rats and maggots underground. Sure enough, a few maggots crawled over my face, slippery and itchy, but I didn't feel scared.

Wait a minute - I think I saw something.

Although, there is no light.

That...... That...... Not human...... I'm sure ...... It's not human......

What is it? No, don't! It came to me. Oh! I don't care about you! No!

Unfortunately, I can't resist, is this a creature in hell?

I don't know if my mother has ever regretted it after throwing herself into the frozen Weiming Lake. At this moment, I really regret that I committed suicide by hiding in the pile of dead people - because I didn't want anyone to see my face when I died!

Father, if you can still hear it, if you're still blowing the cowhide of nuclear weapons with a strong male nurse in a psychiatric hospital — I love you, Father!

I will wait for you in another world, and may the starry sky there be as stunning as that of the Qaidam Basin.