In the autumn of the seventy-fifth year of the Red Dynasty, the court announced the holiday arrangements for the new year, which surprised most people: New Year's Eve was scheduled outside of the statutory holidays.
Although the official announcement also included the sentence "encourage units to implement paid annual leave and other systems, and arrange for employees to rest on New Year's Eve (February 9th)", it still caused a lot of uproar. This voice echoed in all directions, occasionally surging into the strictly controlled comment section, turning into phrases like "the page you visited is incorrect, or the page does not exist" or "according to relevant laws, regulations, and policies, some search results are not displayed".
But if you have good hearing and listen carefully, you can still hear something in this tumultuous voice—something beyond the cheers; such as "fuck your grandpa", "idiot", "your brain capacity is less than that of a cicada monkey~"...
Anyway, this is the arrangement that the court has already decided, and any unusual voices will not hinder the overall situation.
So the days passed like this. At least for me, it was like this, because even if the court arranged a day off that day, I might still need to work an extra hour or two for that salary. The only thing worth celebrating is that my job does not require dealing with clients, so I don't need to search, copy, paste, modify names, and send blessings.
Two weeks before the annual leave, my boss made a decision that he thought was quite generous: half a day off on New Year's Eve. When he announced this decision, he jokingly teased us, thinking he was being humorous: "No one is allowed to work overtime for the other half day! This is an order! Hahaha."
No one said "fuck your dick", after all, we still need him to pay us.
We also laughed along.
Sitting in front of the computer, my eyes have lost focus, because my thoughts have seeped out of the closed window and are searching for a trace of the New Year atmosphere in the polluted city air.
I choked, from the heating repeatedly heated by the computer and the haze that turned the city sky gray.
Coughing, it was a cough that exploded the alveoli, as if it was going to squeeze my eyeballs out of their sockets.
And while the muscles of my eyeballs were being squeezed by the tight muscles and the pressure of the tear ducts, some indescribable illusions were also forming in my mind. I don't know if these illusions come from the neurons being uncontrollably rubbed, or if they directly emerge from my mind; in any case, these illusions appeared, and they seemed to start to make sense.
It was like a half-dream and half-awake drunkenness, like being silently chopped in the chaos of logic deficiency, and then the universe was born, and the creator died with it. He died, transformed into everything, and also divided memories among everything. I got a little, and I created my own gods. Strictly speaking, those gods were not created by me; they came from the minds of my ancestors, they were the superposition of brain waves, the intersection of images, the embodiment of hope or nightmares.
I fainted.
I knew I fainted, because suddenly I lost all perception of my body—coughing, suffocation, and muscle soreness all disappeared. Instead, my consciousness became extremely clear, it was an unprecedented feeling, like the significantly amplified feeling of clearness after rain, or the feeling of transcending that has never been clearly defined. For a few moments, I even felt that I had understood everything, but my memory capacity is limited, and the next moment I forgot almost everything.
But I remember Him, this huge deity or demon or ancient monster surrounded by billions of translucent bodies.
People call Him "Xī" or "Xīshòu", an evil god who wakes up on New Year's Eve every year but is hypnotized again by the noisy and joyful sacrifices. He has no self-awareness, no goals; He is like a conditional function:
if sacrifice, then sleep; else destroy
We are the objects He wants to destroy, the substitutes for sacrifices.
His billions of compound eyes gaze at our souls, purging the accumulated fatigue and resentment, and incorporating us as sacrifices into His body.
We become a subset of the gods.
We summon flames within the city, burning the streetlights and billboards closely connected to civilization. We are the gods of destruction, demanding sacrifices from humans.
The earth trembles under our anger, becoming a disaster measured by Richter scale and monetary value. We are not interested in human lives, we only enjoy the screams.
The accumulated karma of a year is transformed into tangible black mist according to the exponential function 𝑓(x)=eˣ, and the fine structure constant α dissolves a random π fraction of each sinful body as the probability of being spared. Fear brings us pleasure, and chunks of flesh are a form of art.
When this day is over, we will sleep again, leaving only countless pairs of blood-red eyes opening in the dim sky in the memories of the surviving humans.
I hope this time, they can remember.