One#
It rained all night last night. It wasn't heavy, but the sound of water droplets falling from the upstairs accumulated on the narrow metal awning of the rented room's window was enough to disturb Liu Wei's sleep. Liu Wei, who didn't sleep well, got up and opened the curtains, seeing signs of sunlight on the distant rooftops. It would be a good day today, but due to the Wuhan pneumonia epidemic, he no longer had the qualification to go out, even though he had just gone out to buy groceries yesterday. He opened the window to let the indoor and outdoor air exchange. He smelled the coolness of the outdoor air and faintly heard the chirping of birds, which made his mood a little better.
Liu Wei picked up his phone and read the text message he had just read in bed again. The message was from China Merchants Bank, informing him of his bill for the previous settlement period, which was significantly larger than his total cash amount. Should he borrow money in installments or use Ant Credit Pay? He thought, knowing that he had no other choice. He had been unemployed for almost half a year, and he had planned to find a new job to support himself after the Spring Festival, but the virus and the lockdown disrupted everything, and this virus had also disrupted the whole of China and had already affected the entire world.
Liu Wei left the window and prepared to boil some water for himself. There were still a few packets of instant coffee left, so he could make half a packet today. He hadn't had any for three days and missed it a little.
After filling the kettle with half a pot of water and placing it on the base, Liu Wei picked up his phone again and looked at some new app notifications he had received - a few advertisements interspersed with new data on the pneumonia epidemic. Without reading them carefully, he cleared all the notifications, as he had been doing for the past few days. It was as if he had lost his enthusiasm for real life. "What's the use?" If you asked him why, he would definitely answer with another question, and no matter what your objection was, he would not agree. It seemed that there was a commonality among humans that when they reached a certain age, they became stubborn; especially in China, where public discussion channels were controlled and limited, this age was usually very young - a wise person didn't even need to pay attention deliberately, they could easily find those young people who were already old and hopeless in their thinking.
Liu Wei was not a wise person. In China, it is extremely difficult to be wise. This not only involves finding ways to obtain more comprehensive information in a world full of high walls and controls, but also requires the courage to admit one's past mistakes and change oneself. The latter may be even more difficult than obtaining a doctoral degree from an Ivy League university in the United States with excellent grades, because although Chinese people are willing to admit their mistakes to others, they have never had the tradition of admitting their mistakes to themselves. Even when the cruel reality forces them to seek help from the outside world, they still insist on their own beliefs and start saying things like "it's just bad luck."
Click. The water had turned into boiling water, and Liu Wei could now make his coffee. He took out a packet and tore it open at the opening. Just as he was about to pour half of the coffee into his cup, he suddenly felt a sharp pain in his chest. The feeling was very clear, right in the center of his chest. An ominous premonition arose, and Liu Wei poured the entire packet of coffee into the cup.
He began to consider the possibility of being infected, which was not zero, as he had gone out to buy food and other daily necessities and inevitably came into contact with other people. However, Liu Wei was not worried. He felt that he was still young and even if he was unfortunate enough to be infected, he could probably survive with his own immune system. He had even made up his mind not to seek medical treatment and be quarantined in the so-called cabin hospitals if he really had a fever, as it would be the same waiting there, and perhaps worse, he would be fed some ineffective Chinese medicine.
Liu Wei poured the boiling water from the kettle into the cup, and the aroma of coffee filled the air, making him take a deep breath involuntarily. Then the sharp pain came again, and it increased significantly in intensity. The kettle overturned, and Liu Wei fell to his knees.
"Uh~" Liu Wei made a long trembling sound from his mouth, as if he was sucking in air as if he was really hungry and could only eat air. Great fear appeared in Liu Wei's eyes, as if he realized something or saw something. Shortly after, his eyes lost their expression and just stared blankly ahead; at the same time, he closed his mouth and slowly stood up. He stood in the most relaxed posture, slightly hunched, and then he lifted his head slightly and looked at the blank wall.
Liu Wei stood motionless in this posture for about ten minutes, even though the boiling water had created blisters on his feet, he didn't care. His breathing gradually slowed down, and when it finally stopped, the mutation began. His body volume began to increase proportionally and rapidly gained mass from an unknown source. His flesh pressed against the ceiling, but it seemed even harder than the reinforced concrete. The ceiling was penetrated, and soon the floor began to crack. After the mutation, Liu Wei's body stood up in the ruins of this thirteen-story residential building and continued to grow taller, finally stopping at a height of 91.2 meters, almost equivalent to 30 floors.
This naked body stood at the third ring road of the city, looking up at the sky with an expressionless face, at the clouds that would never stop gathering and dispersing.
Two#
The year 2020 seemed destined to be filled with tragedies. It started with the ongoing Sino-US trade war from the previous year, followed by the assassination of a high-ranking Iranian official by the United States, which made people consider the possibility of a third world war. Then came the accidental shooting down of a passenger plane by Iran, the Wuhan pneumonia epidemic, and the death of Kobe. If Zhang Xiaofei were not a scientific youth, he would probably also be thinking about the possibility of the end of the world, as some conspiracy theories suggested. But Zhang Xiaofei was a scientific youth, or as he preferred to say, a "dead rationalist." One characteristic of a dead rationalist is believing in trustworthy experts. After all, he was not an expert himself, so he entrusted his trust to those who seemed to speak with data. Therefore, it was obvious that he opposed traditional Chinese medicine. He would say that there was no such thing as Chinese medicine or Western medicine, only traditional medicine and modern medicine. He also believed to a large extent that China needed a strong government to lead, so that China would not fall into chaos. He also believed that education could change a person's destiny, especially self-education, which was something that most Chinese people lacked. To a large extent, he also believed that all human problems could be solved through technological means. The corruption, wealth gap, educational inequality, and even freedom of speech that still existed were only because human technological capabilities were not enough.
He believed that the world was rational, even though human states seemed irrational, they could still be explained by scientific methods. They could be described by concise and elegant mathematical equations, even though these equations were likely to be approximations, reality would never deviate far from their descriptions, such as the conservation of mass-energy and the fact that twins under 20 days old cannot speak. So when such deviations from the norm really occurred, he was not prepared.
Zhang Xiaofei looked at the news, including Chinese news and English news after climbing over the Great Firewall. He also looked at news in other languages, but even with the help of Google Translate, he couldn't truly understand them. But even if he couldn't truly understand, it didn't matter. Like many issues he had discussed and even argued about before, he only needed to believe in a scientific description that seemed plausible. And now the most scientific description was that no one knew what had happened.
Phenomena like silent giant humanoid objects appeared simultaneously in many places around the world. The current statistics showed that 477 giants had been discovered, all of them without any known signs of life, all standing at a 45-degree angle, as if they were statues.
This is unscientific! Could it be aliens! Even though it was still winter and there was no heating in the north, Zhang Xiaofei was sitting in a chair, but sweat still appeared on his forehead. His brain was working at its limit, seemingly searching for a rational explanation for this extraordinary event, and using this rationality as the basis for his continued survival.
God? He thought of this concept with horror, something he had once sneered at. Does God really exist? Impossible, even if some intelligent beings had indeed obtained god-like power, they were still not gods. But then he thought, if a creature really possessed god-like power, what would be the difference between them and true gods? If true gods did not exist, then such creatures could completely use this concept to describe themselves; just like we can use "horse" to describe the optical image on the screen, it is not a real horse, just a shadow that looks like a horse, but we still call it a "horse."
Zhang Xiaofei continued to browse the news, hoping that some authoritative expert, preferably a physicist, would come out and say something about the possibility of these giants. But he didn't see it. The majority of what he saw were government announcements, and apart from "do not panic" and "investigation is underway," there was no important information.
After feeling his eyes sore from the repeated information, Zhang Xiaofei finally stopped. He stood up, pacing back and forth, feeling that this was a more serious matter than the pneumonia epidemic, and it might even surpass anything that had ever happened in human history. Because behind this event might be the truth of the universe that those explorers had been thinking about since ancient times.
"I don't understand!" He shouted with his hands covering his head, feeling that he had to go and see those giants in person. So he put on his clothes, picked up his phone and car keys, and walked out without wearing a mask.
Three#
Since the day before yesterday, Liu Hui had started coughing, and she felt that she was probably infected, but the doctor only told her to go home and isolate herself, without giving her a diagnosis, let alone admitting her to the hospital. She knew the reason why. The hospitals in Wuhan had long run out of beds. She belonged to the group that had been abandoned, the "cost" in "conquer the epidemic at all costs." She felt some resentment, but not much; she knew that someone had to pay the price, and she was just unlucky. If she could survive this disaster, she would enjoy life, travel to places she had never been before, like Tokyo, Paris, and Casablanca, whose name alone was enough to evoke imagination. She also decided that she would confess her feelings to that boy, regardless of the outcome. She thought that the most sorry person was her mother and the unspoken feelings.
Yesterday morning, the giant appeared, standing across the road from her home, right in front of her window.
Some people ran away, but she didn't, because she had nowhere else to go. Wuhan had been sealed off, so she couldn't return to her hometown in Sichuan, and she was alone in this city, with no friends, only some indifferent colleagues. Moreover, she also knew that if the giant wanted to kill her, she couldn't escape, and even if she could escape, the virus would not spare her. So, why bother to escape?
But even though she had made up her mind to die, Liu Hui couldn't help but feel ashamed. Because the giant was a male, standing naked in front of her window. Liu Hui could clearly see the giant's huge penis, dragging an egg sac, protruding from a mass of black hair, revealing half of the glans. It was so clear that Liu Hui could even see the slightly bulging black veins on it.
The time to fall asleep had come, but she lay in bed unable to sleep, as if every time she closed her eyes, she would imagine the scene of that giant penis penetrating her vagina. But she was still a virgin, and she had never even used a sex toy. Her sexual experience was at most occasionally rubbing her clitoris before falling asleep. So this imagined scene frightened her and made her unintentionally moist. At three o'clock in the morning, she still couldn't fall asleep, but she began to rub her clitoris to relax. She closed her eyes and tried to relax, but she always unconsciously thought of the giant outside the window. She had a feeling that the giant could see through everything, and perhaps he was mocking or even despising her in his heart.
She rubbed herself, feeling a tingling sensation, but always feeling that something was missing. She touched her vulva, spread a layer of moisture on her fingers, then withdrew her hand from under the covers, and gently licked it, tasting a slight saltiness. She continued to rub, feeling more and more relaxed, and gradually succumbing to drowsiness, falling into illogical dreams.
"Liu Hui" - she saw her name in her dream, written on a small piece of hard paper, tied to her hand with a black ribbon. She was dead, being placed in a yellow body bag. She saw her face, already turning purple. It finally happened. She thought, the most sorry were her mother and the unspoken feelings. Then she saw her black lips move, giving her a sudden glimmer of hope. The mouth of the corpse suddenly opened, and a huge penis emerged, with dark, curly hair inside the mouth like an abyss.
Liu Hui woke up with a cough, was she having an attack? Gasping for breath, frightened, and lost. She thought, touched her forehead, but didn't feel any fever, but maybe it was because her whole body was hot, so she couldn't feel the temperature difference. Maybe that's it, but what else could she do?
She sat up, pulled back the curtains, and then took off all her clothes in the cold air, and began to masturbate. She vigorously rubbed herself, moistening her vagina, and then inserted her middle finger into her vagina, feeling a slight tingling sensation. Then she inserted her ring finger as well, creating a more fulfilling experience.
"Ah~" she couldn't help but moan, this was the first time she moaned from pleasure, "Ah~" she experienced it, she imagined it, she fell into hell, she ascended to heaven...
In the aftermath, she hid back under the covers and began to cry. "I don't want to die." She looked at the giant, maybe he could hear her, "Save me."
Four#
Today, Wang Zexi saw the news of the locust plague again, and a smile involuntarily appeared on his face. For the past ten days or so, he had often worn this smile as he paced back and forth in his room because he had come to believe that the end of the world was near, and it was playing out as the prophecy had foretold: plague, famine, war, death. These disasters would soon descend upon humanity, bringing punishment to the guilty, and there were no innocent people left on Earth, not even babies who were born with inherited sins.
All survivors were guilty, including himself. Wang Zexi, full of anticipation and fear, had already prepared himself for death in his heart, but he knew that he couldn't bear the pain. He hoped that the impending death would be quick and efficient, preferably without him even realizing it.
Before death, his only wish was to see humanity repent. But all signs indicated that humanity would never repent, at most they would hypocritically pray for forgiveness when disaster finally struck. But if they were forgiven, they would think they had found a shortcut to cheat, until the next punishment came. Humanity never truly remembered.
Wang Zexi remembered seeing people in movies who desired the destruction of the world. Most of them had a tragic childhood, and only a few seemed to have an innate tendency to desire destruction. Wang Zexi didn't know which category he belonged to. Although he had some painful experiences in his childhood, it was by no means a tragic childhood. After all, most of the time he was happy, but he also felt that he was not someone who naturally desired the destruction of the world. He even thought of himself as kind, although he opposed humanity as a whole, he did not want to see any individual suffer in front of him. His unstoppable empathy was the main force that restrained him and allowed him to continue living an ordinary human life until now.
Now, the disaster had come, bringing him hope of escaping from all of this, as he knew he couldn't do it alone.
Cowardly? Thinking of this, Wang Zexi sighed and picked up the phone that was placed on the sofa. There were a few messages from his mother, mainly asking if he had bought new masks.
But Wang Zexi hadn't left the house for five days. He had originally planned to go out today to buy groceries, but in the end, he didn't go. In fact, he no longer planned to buy masks. Besides, he probably wouldn't be able to buy any.
"Bought them," he replied to his mother's message, not wanting to worry her and avoid some trouble of explaining. In previous years, he would explain a little when talking about his thoughts, but now he no longer provided explanations to anyone. One reason was that he couldn't explain it clearly, and the other reason was that he had realized since a certain point in time that he didn't need to be understood by anyone.
"How many did you buy?" his mother immediately replied.
"Five," Wang Zexi added, "each person can only buy five, there's a limit." This would make it more believable.
"Eat more vegetables."
"I know," Wang Zexi replied, then put his phone aside, not even looking at any new messages.