The air in the subterranean city always carried a cloying, artificial sweetness. It was the scent of synthesized starch and recycled oxygen—a mixture that was perfect, sterile, and suffocatingly stagnant, like a pond of dead water.
Chen Mo sat at his workbench, toying with a rusted mechanical pocket watch. The casing was worn smooth, its original engravings long gone, but when he ran his thumb over it, he could still feel the faint tremor of the gears meshing inside.
It was the most luxurious sound in the year 3500: the sound of time passing.
“Take me with you, Chen Mo.”
The girl sitting opposite him was Su Qian. She looked young, her skin pale as unexposed film, but her eyes held something Chen Mo had never seen on the faces of the Immortals—a desperate resolve, like the final flare of a candle before it burns out.
“Do you know what the surface is like right now?” Chen Mo didn’t look up, continuing to wipe the watch glass. “A radiation dust storm just passed. The lead filtration mesh outside is probably half-clogged. Going up there is suicide.”
“My telomeres have three days left,” Su Qian said softly, her voice cutting through the air like a scalpel. “I don’t want to become a pile of data here, uploaded to the cloud, formatted, and downloaded into a new clone. I want to take me—this version of me—and see a real ending.”
Chen Mo stopped. He looked up at Su Qian. As a “Memory Curator,” he had heard too many deathbed ramblings. Most were greedy pleas for eternal life. Only Su Qian was craving death.
“My shuttle has no viewports, only external sensors,” Chen Mo said coldly. “What you’ll see is a black-and-white feed filtered through data, accompanied by a screen full of radiation alarms.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Su Qian smiled. She pulled the pocket watch from her pocket and slid it across the table to him. “As long as it’s real, even if it’s black and white, I want to see it.”
…
The shuttle, an old heavy-duty crawler nicknamed “Old Iron,” was a clumsy steel beast covered in three inches of lead plating. It crushed the concrete foundation of the isolation gate and burst out of the underground city’s protection.
The moment the tracks touched the surface, Su Qian’s neural connection request popped up.
Connection established. Visual sensors syncing… Auditory sensors syncing…
Chen Mo watched the data jumping wildly on his dashboard. The wind speed outside had exceeded eighty kilometers per hour. He skillfully manipulated the joystick, keeping the crawler balanced on the uneven ruins.
“Chen Mo, I see it.” Su Qian’s voice trembled in the comms channel. “My god, is that the sky?”
Chen Mo glanced at his screen. The world outside was a turbid gray-yellow. Thick radiation dust clouds wrapped around the Earth like a giant shroud. Sunlight couldn’t penetrate the barrier,透ing out only a sickly, dim gray glow.
“Don’t be scared. This is just the norm in the ‘Silent Zone’,” Chen Mo said into the mic. “The air is full of metal particles. One breath would turn your lungs to stone.”
“No, you don’t understand.” There was excitement in Su Qian’s voice. “Look at the mountains; they’re purple. And those crystals on the ground… they’re glowing.”
Chen Mo slowed the vehicle. The shuttle was traversing the ruins of an ancient city. Skyscrapers were now just twisted steel skeletons, like ribs of a leviathan exposed after death, stabbing at the dead sky. The ground was covered in a thick layer of “glass rain”—sharp crystals formed when the heat of nuclear explosions a millennium ago had melted the sand and gravel.
The wind blew, and the crystals rubbed against each other, creating a crisp, dense sound. Through the high-sensitivity pickups, it sounded like a grand wind chime concert to Su Qian.
“Is this the sound of death?” Su Qian asked.
“It’s the sound of radiation dust hitting the hull,” Chen Mo corrected. “Careful, there’s a field of ‘Ash Sculptures’ ahead.”
The shuttle maneuvered around a massive wreckage. It was a group of trees carbonized instantly by high heat, frozen in the positions they were blown into by the shockwave. Covered in a thick layer of violet radiation dust, they looked eerie.
Su Qian controlled a micro-probe, moving it close to a plant growing out of a crack in the concrete.
It was a mutated fluorescent moss. In the dim light, it emitted a faint blue glow. The probe’s data showed that its cell walls had mutated severely; it was greedily devouring the surrounding radiation energy.
“It’s beautiful,” Su Qian whispered. “Underground, all plants are green because they simulate photosynthesis data. But this moss… it’s blue. It mutated to survive. It’s living. It’s struggling.”
Chen Mo fell silent. He looked at the tiny blue dot on the screen, and something hard in his heart seemed to crack. In this age of immortality, people were used to perfect climate control, a life without accidents. But here, in the wasteland, life was a cruel miracle.
“We need to go to the highest point,” Su Qian said suddenly. “I want to see the sunset.”
“Are you crazy? The sun is just a gray-white disc now; you can’t even make out the outline.”
“No. Today is the Spring Equinox.” Su Qian’s voice held a nearly obsessive certainty. “According to my calculations, the dust density in the atmosphere will have a brief void this evening. I’ve run the numbers. We can see it.”
Chen Mo sighed and shoved the throttle forward. The crawler roared, beginning its climb up the abandoned mine known as “The Cliff.”
As altitude increased, external radiation readings skyrocketed. The shuttle’s cooling system ran at full capacity, humming loudly.
Warning! Hull temperature critical! Warning!
“Chen Mo… I’m getting cold.” Su Qian’s voice suddenly sounded weak.
Chen Mo checked the life-sign monitor. Su Qian’s heart rate was dropping; the telomere degradation was finally affecting her organ function.
“Hang in there. We’re almost there.” Chen Mo gritted his teeth, forcibly overriding the safety limiters and overloading the engine.
Finally, the shuttle broke through the last layer of dust clouds and stopped at the edge of the cliff.
It was evening.
A miracle occurred.
Just as Su Qian had calculated, the thick dust clouds overhead split open. The sun, hidden for three hundred years, finally revealed its true face.
It wasn’t white. It wasn’t gold.
It was deep red.
The red was thick as blood, heavy as iron. The light pierced through the heavy dust clouds, undergoing extreme Rayleigh scattering, dyeing the entire world in a bloody hue.
The distant mountains cast long, black shadows, like countless hands reaching out from hell to grasp the last afterglow. The glass rain on the ground reflected this crimson light, turning the entire wasteland into a burning sea of fire.
“Chen Mo…” Su Qian’s voice was tearful. “It’s so big. It looks… painful.”
“That’s light burning,” Chen Mo said, staring at the screen, his eyes moist. “It’s burning through the dust with its last strength.”
“It’s magnificent,” Su Qian murmured. “So this is how an ending can look. Unlike the lights underground that just go black when switched off. This sun… it’s bleeding. It’s screaming. It’s… alive.”
Su Qian controlled all the sensors, greedily recording every frame. She turned the probe toward the blood-red sky, toward the black mountain shadows, toward the blue moss glowing on the wasteland.
“Chen Mo, thank you.”
“Don’t sleep, Su Qian. Watch a little longer.”
“I saw it… I really saw it.”
Su Qian’s voice grew fainter, finally dissolving into a soft static hiss.
Chen Mo looked at the screen. Su Qian’s heart rate had flattened into a straight line.
But he didn’t disconnect. He let the shuttle sit there, letting Su Qian’s “eyes” continue to gaze upon the bloody wasteland.
After what felt like an eternity, the sun finally sank below the horizon. The sky returned to a dead gray-black.
Chen Mo unplugged the neural connection. The silence in the cockpit was absolute, save for the mechanical pocket watch ticking tirelessly.
He picked up the watch, pushed open the hatch, and walked out.
The wind was cold, carrying sharp shards of glass that chimed against the lead plating. Chen Mo walked to the edge of the cliff, dug a small hole, and buried the watch.
He didn’t return to the underground city.
He sat beside the glowing blue moss, looking up at the turbid moon overhead. For the first time in this world of immortality, he felt a bone-chilling cold and loneliness.
But he knew that beneath this wasteland, deep within the glass rain, a pair of eyes was forever gazing at that bloody sunset.