Chapter 1: The Omen

December 21, 2012, 6:00 p.m., the night sky of Beijing was ablaze with lights, streams of cars weaving through the city in ceaseless motion. Within Chaoyang District, between the second and third ring roads, at No. 5 North Hepingli Street, the news anchor on Channel One was reporting international events: “A mass suicide occurred in Oregon, United States, leaving 185 dead.” … Li Fengyi’s elderly mother, impatient, changed the channel with the remote.

At seventy years old, she belonged to a generation where most were illiterate, unable to understand, nor willing to watch such news. She muttered under her breath, “Why would anyone want to die when they’re alive and well? Back in the year the Japanese devils came, the elders led us in a great escape, and none of us died…”

She only knew how to press the up and down buttons to switch channels, but everywhere she turned, the news was the same. The events of 2012 left her thoroughly vexed. “If it’s not America, it’s Britain, or Italy, or France…” Western countries were regularly struck by mass suicides, and even an old woman who once could barely name two or three foreign countries now knew America, Britain, France, Italy, and the rest.

Li Fengyi happened to return home just as his mother was muttering. He looked to his wife, Wang Shujuan, for explanation.

Wang Shujuan pursed her lips. “2012 again—another mass suicide.”

Li Fengyi slipped off his leather shoes, put on slippers, and asked, “Which country this time?”

Wang Shujuan, holding onto their one-year-old son who was eager to roam, replied, “It’s America again.”

According to the Maya prophecy, December 21, 2012, was supposed to be the day humanity would vanish. Various organizations had sprung up, preparing for the apocalypse—most of them in Western democracies, their preparations mainly consisting of suicide. Those who were ready had already departed last year; the steadfast waited until December 21 to make their move.

Li Fengyi found it all quite laughable, doubting the accuracy of the Maya prediction.

Predictions about the invention of cars, airplanes, the day humanity would perish—he regarded them as utter nonsense. He had no faith in those fortune-tellers who claimed to see the future yet could not foresee their own fate.

How could a race capable of predicting the inventions of the industrial age fall so easily to Spanish colonizers, whose civilization was barely at the dawn of naval exploration?

Was it perhaps the vengeful spirits of the Maya, exacting revenge on Western colonizers?

Sometimes, he mischievously wondered whether the slab carved with the Maya calendar simply ran out of space, unable to fit a longer timeline.

The prophecy claimed that after December 21, 2012, the sun would never rise again. Yet when Li Fengyi returned home, the streets showed no signs of panic. In the cold winter, the wind swept through the branches, curling around every alley, and everyone hurried home as usual.

On December 22, 2012, the sun rose as always, celestial bodies continued their rapid dance across the universe, and Western countries breathed a sigh of relief. Those elites in various countries who admired the West also relaxed. Ordinary people worldwide, confused and nervous, found their behavior inexplicable.

Li Fengyi’s mother, ever credulous yet never fully believing, embodied the contradictions of traditional Chinese faith—she didn’t believe in the apocalypse, but the nervous atmosphere unsettled her.

She recounted, as always, the Japanese invasion of Xuzhou, her ancestral home. The repeated raids, the villagers fleeing en masse, her parents leading the family to hide in the lake, enduring hardship, hunger, and cold—not once did anyone think of dying.

Life was good now, and those countries seemed even better off than China, so why would they seek death on their own?

Every time chaos erupted, there’d be robbers, murderers, arsonists. Food would run out, people would eat clay, some would even consume human flesh. “Pitiful…” she reminisced, “I had an uncle…” Then she’d recount how a relative was killed with a club in a confrontation, “Had he only had a stone in his hand, he wouldn’t have died…”

Nine-year-old grandson Li Yutian would always grumble, “Grandma, you’ve told this a thousand times.” Then he’d bury his head in his meal.

One-year-old son Li Yuze struggled to toddle around, Wang Shujuan constantly supporting him, her mind preoccupied with troublesome clients at work. Li Fengyi felt his head about to explode.

Ah, ordinary family life was warm, but terribly monotonous.

Another two years passed. In those years, the West kept revising their apocalypse theories, claiming errors in the conversion between the Maya calendar and the modern calendar, endlessly postponing the end. Waves of Western doomsday organizations kept emerging, embarking on their one-way journey to death.

Elites in various countries sweated, devising new excuses to defend the West. For these years, they were all “Westerners,” digging up their ancestors from the grave to prove they once suffered from albinism…

The whole world grew weary of their antics…

On January 20, 2015, the Chinese observatory announced the discovery of a meteor, five hundred kilometers in diameter, heading for Earth’s orbit—or rather, Earth was moving toward the meteor’s path. The probability of collision was yet unknown. Soon, major observatories worldwide released similar reports.

As time passed, the likelihood of collision increased, and as global anxiety reached its peak, the meteor, influenced by the gravitational pull of the solar system—primarily the sun—fractured into a belt of small particles.

The latest forecasts from all observatories agreed: Earth would pass through a gaseous mist formed by the small bodies, an event akin to the dust of Halley’s Comet sweeping over the planet in 1910.

Another batch of Western doomsday organizations emerged and perished; elites sweated anew…

Eventually, a certain restroom elite prepared to defect. He confided to a friend, “I just took some money, but I can’t keep doing these rotten things.” No sooner had he revealed this thought than someone approached him with a few sheets of paper and a conversation. He resumed his steadfast defense, continued sweating, and ultimately suffered a heart attack…

On Friday, May 29, 2015, Li Fengyi’s company had developed quite smoothly over the years, finally reaching ten employees. That year, Li Fengyi was thirty-five.

His company was located at 107 North Dongsi Street, Tianhai Business Tower, inside Beijing’s second ring road.

Li Fengyi, of average stature, was regarded by friends and business partners alike as both outwardly and inwardly honest and kind. In 2008, he moved to Beijing to pursue his career. A year later, he brought his wife and one-and-a-half-year-old eldest son. Another year passed, and he realized the salary of a software engineer couldn’t support a family of three, let alone buy a home in Beijing, where housing prices continued to soar. He decided to go out on his own.

Half a year into solo work, he switched to hardware development, initially hiring part-time technicians for projects. In 2011, after his father passed away, he brought his mother to Beijing for her retirement. His younger son was born, and he established his own small company, gradually hiring full-time staff.

At 12:25 p.m., as the observatory predicted, Earth passed through the meteor haze. Humanity felt nothing. Only the insects in the city scurried about in chaos, pets seemed a bit uneasy, howling at the sky, and zoo animals slammed against their barriers in a frenzy—their instincts had degraded significantly.

In the wild, the city animals’ poor relatives without residency permits ran madly, sensing impending catastrophe…