Two years later.
The clouds were wrong.
They didn't roll in like usual storms. They didn't thunder. They hung — thick, low, and pulsing like they were breathing. A dark crimson hue bled through their edges, and beneath them, the air held the weight of something ancient and angry.
Chen Yu stared at the sky with one hand shielding his eyes. His jacket was fraying at the sleeves, and an empty shotgun hung from his shoulder. "Alright," he muttered, "who pissed off the sky gods?"
No one answered.
Li Wei stood at the tree line, silent, eyes narrowed.
Rui crouched near a bush, carving a small piece of bark into a wolf's tooth. Her hair was longer now, tied in a tight braid, her childish roundness worn away by hunger and survival. But her eyes… those had only gotten stranger.
"They're coming," she whispered, without looking up.
Chen Yu grinned. "Who, my dear prophet? The Jehovah Witnesses?"
"No," she said. "Worse."
It started with a drop.
One.
Thick. Red. It landed on Chen Yu's nose. He touched it and blinked.
"Guys. I think the trees are bleeding."
Then it rained.
Not like a downpour — no rhythm, no grace. It spat from the sky in uneven, angry bursts. Red droplets. Sticky, metallic-smelling, warm.
Li Wei's body tensed.
Rui stood up, blade in hand. "Don't let it touch your skin."
"Little late," Chen Yu muttered. Already wiping his arms, he looked up. "What the hell is this?"
Li Wei dragged them under a fallen concrete overpass, breath tight. "Cover your mouths."
In the distance, trees shuddered.
Animals screamed.
Then silence — the deep kind — like something massive had held its breath over the entire Earth.
One day earlier.
South of the ruined province, in what remained of a research citadel called Ascendancy Site 3, a last-ditch experiment failed.
Dr. Ma Yichen had warned them.
"This pathogen was never supposed to breach airborne thresholds. We don't have the buffers for that."
But the others didn't listen.
The experimental 'antivirus' was launched through aerosol drones — a desperate measure to counteract the ever-mutating strain of the undead virus, which had long since started affecting animals. Birds had begun to carry it. Wolves hunted in infected packs.
They thought if they could sterilize the atmosphere…
They were wrong.
The virus bonded to the sterilization mist. Fed on it. Became airborne.
And then the sky turned red.
They didn't even have time to send a second message.
Now.
Rui shivered violently under the overpass. "They're screaming."
Chen Yu looked around. "Who?"
She pointed at her temple. "Them. Inside."
Li Wei pressed his hand to her forehead. "You're burning up."
"I don't think it's mine," she whispered. "It's them… the others. They're feeling it. All of them."
In the valley beyond, a deer stumbled into view.
Its skin bubbled. Its antlers cracked and split.
It opened its mouth — and let out a human scream.
Then it sprinted into the trees, its legs moving far too fast, too wrong.
Chen Yu pulled out a rusted dagger and muttered, "We're officially in a horror film. Someone get the end credits ready."
Hours passed.
The red rain didn't stop.
It soaked into the soil, coated the leaves, turned streams into ribboned trails of thick crimson.
And the world changed.
Infected humans — long dormant in nests or buried in collapsed cities — began to move again. With purpose.
Animals mutated faster. Packs began to organize.
Li Wei saw it with his own eyes: crows circling not in chaos but in formation. Wolves communicating with barks that resembled words.
Chen Yu found a journal from an abandoned survivor. One line repeated, over and over:
The rain feeds them.
The rain wakes them.
The rain thinks.
They wandered east, avoiding cities, moving only at night.
Rui grew quieter. Her dreams got worse.
"Sometimes I'm back in the lab," she told Chen Yu one morning, as they scraped mold off a dead man's bread stash. "Only I'm not in the bed. I'm… standing behind the glass."
"Watching?"
"No. Recording. Like I'm the one in the coat."
Chen Yu leaned back and sighed. "Rui, I say this with love: if you become a mad scientist, I'm calling dibs on the title 'Assistant of Doom.'"
She didn't laugh.
Instead, she pointed at a gnarled tree up ahead.
Hanging from it were four bodies. Naked. Covered in fresh vines.
"Those weren't here yesterday," she whispered.
Weeks later.
They found an outpost.
Well-fortified. Abandoned, but clean.
Li Wei didn't trust it. He never did anymore.
But it had solar panels. Dried food. Water filters.
"We stay a week," he said.
Chen Yu started painting the walls. Rui collected broken toys and arranged them in complex patterns on the floor.
"Why toys?" Li Wei asked one night.
"They're markers," she said. "For the other me."
Chen Yu raised an eyebrow. "You got a twin somewhere? Please tell me she's nicer."
"No," Rui whispered. "She's worse."
One night, it rained red again.
But this time, something else came with it.
A hum. Deep. Not audible, but felt in the bones.
Rui curled under a shelf and screamed. "Don't let it in!"
Chen Yu covered her with blankets. "What? What's coming?"
She clutched his hand. "The Ascendancy didn't just experiment on me. I was only one file. One failed batch. They made others."
Li Wei turned slowly.
"How many?"
She didn't answer.
But she didn't have to.
Outside, in the woods — something massive moved.
And it laughed.