Chapter 3: White World

[Breaking News:

The United Aerospace Administration has issued an urgent bulletin.

A high-density planet with a diameter roughly equal to that of Mars is rapidly approaching Earth.

It is expected to impact the surface in five minutes.

4.5 billion years ago, a similarly sized planet, Theia, collided with Earth, creating the Moon and sparking the origin of life.

Today, 4.5 billion years later, human civilization will end with this very same type of collision.]

“……”

Is today seriously not April Fool’s or something?

Wu Xiaomi was stunned.

She had just managed to help Xiaozhi recover her health and now, a few minutes later… the world was ending?

The fireball in the sky was rapidly growing larger. One could already feel the searing radiation from the ground.

“Fallout shelter! Where’s the nearest fallout shelter?!”

People clung to their final hope, frantically searching for nearby emergency shelters on their phones.

But the broadcast voice mercilessly shattered that last sliver of hope.

[The Aerospace Administration advises: All humans should abandon resistance, adjust their mindset, and say their final goodbyes to loved ones. This impact will utterly destroy the Earth. It cannot be stopped. It cannot be avoided. No one will survive.]

“……”

Wu Xiaomi and Bai Xiaozhi looked at each other.

It was all so absurd… It made one want to laugh.

“So this is really the end of the world?” Bai Xiaozhi asked.

“It really is,” Wu Xiaomi doubled over, laughing.

She felt like a total clown.

If she had known death was this close, why even bother trying to find a cure?

Could there still be a miracle? 

If she made another deal with the devil, would she gain enough power to stop the asteroid?

Devil! Show yourself! I want to make a deal!

No response.

It was hopeless.

“…Forget it,” Bai Xiaozhi sat down on the ground and looked up at the approaching “sun.”

One sun had already set beyond the horizon— another “sun” now rose, plummeting toward the earth.

“So pathetic… neither my brother nor I have ever been in love.” 

Bai Xiaozhi gazed with envy at the couples in the park.

In their final moments, lovers embraced each other tightly.

As if holding each other would make death less bitter.

A few people, desperate to survive, had turned into looters— grabbing supplies in one last act of “zero-dollar shopping.”

They clung to the belief that the broadcast was a lie.

They decided to take one final gamble and hide with stolen goods in the shelters.

Pretty women, too, had become “resources” in their eyes.

“Xiaozhi, hide.”

Wu Xiaomi held Bai Xiaozhi tightly, the two girls curling up together under a stone bench in the park.

Bai Xiaozhi blinked her curious eyes, staring at Wu Xiaomi’s flawless face.

“You’re really pretty.”

Seriously… now of all times?

Clatter—

Amid the chaos, an old man’s radio fell beside a park bench.

From it came static and the sound of a newscaster choking back sobs.

[It is now exactly 7:00 PM, Beijing time.]

[This is FM106.4, Voice of Asia. I’m your host, Huang Xiao. It was an honor to have lived in this world and to bring you this final broadcast.]

[Ten seconds to the end of the world: Ten… Nine… Eight… Seven… Six…]

In their final moments, Wu Xiaomi and Bai Xiaozhi leaned close together, resting their heads on each other’s shoulders and counting silently.

Five.

Four.

Three.

Two.

One.

……

Heat engulfed them, followed instantly by blinding light.

Wu Xiaomi instinctively shut her eyes. 

When she opened them again, she found herself in a milky-white world.

The floor was white. 

The information boards were white. 

Everything here was a soft milky white. 

It looked like…

Heaven.

Bai Xiaozhi was still in her arms. 

Around them, on the vast pale ground, were countless others—staring around in the same stunned confusion.

“Are we dead?” Bai Xiaozhi blinked.

“Maybe… but also maybe not.”

Wu Xiaomi looked up at the sky.

It was like seeing things from the surface of the Moon— she could clearly see Mother Earth during her final moment.

A massive high-density planet had slammed directly into Earth’s core.

The once-blue planet now glowed molten red from the impact, and in an instant, shattered into flaming debris— scattering across the solar system.

Earth was gone.

It had taken 4.5 billion years of evolution to bring forth humanity, and countless generations of human effort to create civilization.

And now, all of it was erased by one simple, “gentle” collision.

Wu Xiaomi even saw the Eiffel Tower drift past above her in space— before crashing into the Statue of Liberty’s torch.

Weirdly comedic.

“What is this place? Is it really heaven?”

But she had just made a deal with the devil.

Even if there was an afterlife, someone like her couldn’t possibly end up in heaven, right?

The confused survivors began getting to their feet and looking around.

“Look at the sky!”

Just as Earth was completely destroyed, a massive string of glowing numbers suddenly appeared overhead:

[Current surviving humans: 7,574,003,411…]

Seven and a half billion?!

“Survivors?”

“We’re still alive?”

The joy of surviving a catastrophe came as an instinctive surge—

But that joy was quickly replaced by a void of confusion and hollowness.

Alive?

What does it mean to be alive now?

An old man, once full of vigor, seemed to wither in an instant—

He had planned to travel the world with his late wife’s ashes, to fulfill her lifelong dream of seeing the world.

But he had barely begun the journey when the world exploded.

A pregnant woman and her husband sat on the ground, dazed.

They had once looked forward to their child’s future with hope.

Now, they were terrified of his birth.

Would their child be born just to face the end times?

“Why…” A high school senior broke down sobbing.

It was the same girl who had just bumped into Wu Xiaomi earlier, blushing shyly with her English book.

Born in a poor mountain village, the college entrance exam was her only way out.

She had studied desperately, not daring to waste a single second, all for June of next year.

But now, there would be no more exams.

Like everyone else, the efforts of their first half of life had been rendered meaningless in an instant.

Everything modern civilization had once bestowed— status, value, progress, that was stripped away completely by this collision.

……

Only despair remained in the air.

“Everyone, calm down!”

In the suffocating silence, a voice called out.

“Calm down! Please, calm down!”

The voice shouted hoarsely, trying to still the surrounding sobs.

Wu Xiaomi looked over.

It was a frail-looking man.

He raised both hands.

“Everyone, please! Don’t panic. The Earth is gone— yes. But it’s okay… because we still have a chance!”

“The Earth is gone! Our home, our savings, all of modern civilization, everything is gone!” someone cried out.

“What chance could possibly be left for us?!”

“Did you see the whiteboards?”

The man knocked on the white board beside him, like a teacher calling for attention.

Wu Xiaomi had noticed them too— throughout the milky-white space, similar white boards stood scattered all around.

“I don’t know how it works, but this board seems to function like a kind of store, something we can use to exchange things.”

Wu Xiaomi focused her vision on the board in front of her.

There was a flicker in the air, and then three bright-blue options appeared, floating in front of her like a holographic game menu:

 [Resources]

 [ ? ? ? ]

 [ ? ? ? ]

The second and third were locked— currently unavailable.

Tapping on [Resources] opened a list showing houses, food, soil, and various other materials.

But to exchange for anything, a currency called [Strategy Points] was required.

“I browsed through the options earlier,” the man continued.

“Everything from Earth can be exchanged here using Strategy Points. Which means—”

“If we can collect enough points, we can rebuild Earth. Right here in the solar system!”

Hearing this, people quickly brought up their own lists to confirm it for themselves.

Wu Xiaomi had already seen it, so she just waited quietly for the man to go on.

“I know how much this hurts. I feel it too.” 

The man’s eyes were bloodshot.

“My name is Kang Jie. I’m a middle school physics teacher. I just started the job today.”

“To be honest, my childhood was terrible. My parents divorced early and left me to fend for myself.”

“It was a teacher who took me in and helped me turn my life around. That’s why I dreamed of becoming a teacher like him, someone who could guide kids to grow up with dignity, to grow up whole.”

“But today, that dream shattered. Just like yours.”

“We’ve all been thrown into this godforsaken nowhere. The thousands of years of human order and science all of it turned to dust…”

“But so what?!”

Kang Jie’s words felt like they were directed at everyone else, but also like he was talking to himself desperately trying to believe what he was saying.

His face was red, veins bulging on his temples, body trembling with intensity.

“We’re still alive… WE’RE STILL ALIVE!

As long as we’re still here, we can rebuild it all from scratch!”

“No more dirt? We’ll lay it ourselves—cover every inch of this world with soil and rock and earth! We’ll stack up a new goddamn planet! No more trees? We’ll plant them! We’ll regrow the whole damn Amazon! No more oceans? We’ll flood them back! Pacific! Indian! Atlantic! Arctic!”

“Starting today—we’re survivors! We’re pioneers! We are the creators of this new world!”

“We get to build it however we want—

We are our own gods! Our own Buddhas! Our own divinity!”

“And someday, I’ll walk into the school I built with my own hands, and watch my students grow into adults…”

“Don’t cry! There’s no need to cry!”

“Because everything we lost today—we’ll take it all back. Not a single piece is missing!!”