Darkness. Endless darkness.
A faint, almost imperceptible tension crept through his nerves, a strange feedback that gave Shen Qing an eerie sense of familiarity—as if he had been here before, somewhere like this, in some half-remembered experience he could no longer place.
As his consciousness slowly clawed its way out of chaos, he began to think.
It did not take long for all his senses to sharpen, and then he realized it—
he was falling, endlessly, through a void.
The thought hit him all at once.
Damn it.
He had been shot in the head. Clean. Efficient. One bullet, and he was done for on the spot.
Fragments of memory flashed through his mind one after another, frame by frame, each one branded with caution and restraint.
He had lived in constant fear, always careful, always on guard, yet in the end he had still been crushed by that terrible reality. This time, it had truly ended his life.
He had lived too long. Seen too much. Or perhaps seen nothing clearly at all.
He was tired.
Too tired to keep struggling.
His mind could not help drifting back to everything that had happened before, and without warning, a crushing exhaustion spread through him from the inside out.
To explain it all, one would have to start a very long time ago...
Shen Qing. Male. Twenty-four years old. An ordinary office worker in a small company in a first-tier city. A man whose life had been anything but smooth.
As far back as he could remember, he had never had a mother.
According to his father, his mother had died in a car accident before Shen Qing was even a year old.
As for his father—after his mother's death, the man had completely surrendered himself to vice and ruin. Gambling, prostitutes, drugs—he touched all three. Back in their hometown, everyone saw him as nothing less than human trash, the kind of man people cursed behind his back and spat on when he passed.
After Shen Qing finished elementary school, he moved to the city with his grandfather, away from his father.
Maybe the man still had a shred of concern left for his son. Even though Shen Qing's father had long since given up on himself, he had never sunk so deep that he landed in prison.
Still, the damage done by growing up in a broken home had already carved itself into Shen Qing's life, and his childhood had come to an abrupt end the moment he entered middle school.
Perhaps even Heaven itself could not stand the sight of Shen Qing's father dragging around his hollowed-out shell of a body, living like a walking corpse.
In the second year of middle school, while Shen Qing was sitting in class, he was informed that his father had died after resuscitation efforts failed.
Later, the police officer who notified him explained that a woman from the corridor had called emergency services that morning. His father had been rushed to the municipal hospital, but he had been discovered too late. There had been nothing left to save.
Shen Qing knew that woman.
They had exchanged greetings a few times. She lived in the alley beside the neighboring residential block.
He had a rough idea of what had happened, but he had no desire to dig deeper.
The only mercy his father had ever shown him was this: he had never beaten him, never cursed him out.
Other than that, there was nothing worth remembering.
As for the rest—his teachers at school had treated him fairly well. Shen Qing had lived with his grandfather ever since he was young, and it stayed that way until he finished high school, when his grandfather and second uncle moved abroad.
After getting into a very ordinary university, Shen Qing could do nothing but rely on the monthly bank transfers that appeared in his account, using them as a poor substitute for missing the figure of his grandfather.
His college years were forgettable.
After graduation, he joined an ordinary company and worked there for seven years.
Then one day, after getting off work, it happened.
At night, he was hit by a luxury sports car—the kind he had only ever seen online. His body was flung into the air, and before he could process anything, he was smashed violently from the front of the car all the way to the rear.
In that instant, Shen Qing had only one thought.
Not a bad way to die.
He had never had a complete family, never known what a whole life was supposed to look like, but at least this was a relatively decent, almost dignified way to leave the world.
Maybe, just maybe, he might even meet them again in another world.
And then he fell into boundless darkness.
Shen Qing had never experienced death before. He had no idea where human consciousness went after life ended. But when he realized that he was still falling, the terror of dying too suddenly, too horribly to even react, swept through his awareness like a flood.
He did not know what was happening.
But one thing became clear to him—he could not keep falling.
He had the strong sense that if he continued to descend like this with nothing but his consciousness, then in the end he would simply vanish into nothingness, utterly erased, no longer existing in this world at all.
He needed to grab onto something.
So he began to struggle with all his might.
The sensation was like that of a person who could not swim, flailing wildly in water in a desperate attempt to stay alive. The problem was, he could not feel his body. He had no limbs, no muscles, no feedback of movement.
Only consciousness.
Only resistance.
Resistance against the fall.
Resistance against what he understood to be "real death."
At last—after struggling for who knew how long—Shen Qing saw a sliver of light ahead of him.
Like a drowning man glimpsing the straw that might save his life, he desperately tried to move toward it. It felt like hope. Like the one thing standing between him and oblivion.
Again and again, his consciousness lunged toward the light.
Again and again, it failed.
That streak of light remained maddeningly distant, as though fixed in place beyond his reach.
Then, just as his falling body descended to the same level as the light, Shen Qing felt a surge of despair. He was going to keep falling. He was going to miss his final chance to survive.
And then—
whoosh.
His entire being was sucked into the light.
He snapped his eyes open.
The next thing he heard was the harsh sound of his own ragged breathing.
Shen Qing realized—
he was alive again.
Above him was a night sky scattered with only a few lonely stars. The sensation at the back of his head and across his body told him he was lying on the ground. Then his sense of smell returned, and with it came a thick, nauseating stench of blood flooding into his nose.
...?
He had only gotten off work around eight or nine. If he was waking up now, it had to be close to midnight.
Had nobody helped him this entire time?
Sure, his company was not in the dead center of downtown, but there were more than a dozen companies in the building, and three shopping malls nearby. There should have been people everywhere, coming and going nonstop.
Were people really this cold now?
At the very least, someone could have called an ambulance!
For one brief moment, Shen Qing felt that humanity was not worth it.
Just as he tried to sit up and get a look at his surroundings, he discovered that his arms seemed to have no strength in them at all. His chest burned with agony, and in the span of a heartbeat, pain surged back into every inch of his body so violently that he cried out.
Out of the corner of his eye, he looked around.
Mud.
He seemed to be lying in mud. Looks like the impact had thrown him into a flowerbed.
Before he could think any further, a blood-smeared face suddenly leaned down from directly above him.
Sparse, filthy strands of hair hung in clumps. Its eyes were pitch-black. Its features were twisted with fury and distortion, so grotesque they barely looked human.
Shen Qing stopped breathing.
His eyes flew wide open as he stared at that monstrous face hovering inches above his own. For a moment, he forgot the pain entirely.
What the fuck is that?!
The face suddenly opened its mouth.
Broken bone fragments mixed with shredded flesh dribbled out and splashed onto Shen Qing's face. He did not even have time to spit it out before he saw an abnormally thick-knuckled hand raising something like a crude wooden club and smashing it down toward his head.
Splurt.
The world returned to darkness.
This had to be a dream.
Shen Qing had not yet recovered from the horror he had just seen when he realized he was back in that state again—
falling through darkness.
After forcing himself to calm down, he thought it through.
The good news was that he probably was not fully dead yet.
The bad news was that this was not much different from being fully dead.
He kept replaying his previous situation in his mind, but for a young man raised on strict materialism, the whole thing was too bizarre, too absurd. He could not make sense of it at all.
Then he saw that streak of light again.
And once more, he began his futile struggle.
As expected, he came back to life.
But not completely.
Before long, he died again.
This time was even worse.
The moment he opened his eyes, something was already gnawing on him. He had maybe eight seconds of consciousness before he realized the lower half of his body was gone. He did not even get a chance to look before he died again.
After dozens of times—maybe more—Shen Qing finally pieced together the truth of his situation.
He was still trapped in a state where he could resurrect again and again.
That streak of light was the source of it.
Though "resurrection" was not quite the right word.
It felt more like transmigration.
Because every single time he came back, the body he awoke in was already grievously injured—so badly injured that, under normal circumstances, there would have been no saving it.
Which meant the original owner of that body was almost certainly already dead.
Shen Qing was simply arriving in that corpse and reviving inside it.
The problem was that every place he revived in was absurdly dangerous. The creatures he encountered were unlike anything he had ever heard of or seen before—nightmarish monsters beyond imagination.
If he had not occasionally glimpsed living humans a few times, he might truly have believed he had transmigrated into some horrifying world where humanity existed only as prey.
Once he understood that he could keep dying and coming back, Shen Qing gradually became bolder.
At least now he had some courage to test things, to observe, to see whether there was any possible way to survive in one of those hellish scenarios—to learn more each time he revived.
That "testing" continued for who knew how many deaths.
Eventually, Shen Qing felt as though he had died himself numb.
By the end, he could even calmly take in the full extent of his miserable condition right before dying. It was practically One Hundred Ways to Die starring himself.
He kept cycling between darkness and resurrection, over and over, with no sense of time passing. As the number of deaths rose, Shen Qing became certain of one thing:
the world he revived in was completely different from Earth.
He saw humans unlike any he had known—speaking languages he could not understand.
He saw all kinds of humanoid creatures wielding tools and weapons that looked like something straight out of science fiction.
And then there were the monsters.
So many monsters.
And it was worth mentioning that every one of them was more twisted and grotesque than the last, shattering Shen Qing's understanding of the world over and over again.
Until one time, after reviving yet again, Shen Qing found that there were no terrifying monsters nearby.
No one was pointing a gun at him.
In fact, aside from several corpses, there was nothing there at all.
At last, he let out a breath of relief.
He had survived.
He checked his body and found a wound in his chest large enough to fit a bowl. It was healing—slowly, visibly—and the speed of recovery was even more horrifying than the wound itself.
Then he examined the dead bodies around him and realized that all of them appeared to have had their hearts dug out.
Staggering on unsteady feet, Shen Qing began to walk into the distance.
He had no idea where he was.
No idea what identity this body had once possessed.
No idea which direction he should even go.
But he knew one thing clearly:
after finally getting a start that was not pure hell, he had to do everything he could to stay alive.
Later, Shen Qing was rescued by a human wanderer of the wasteland, and he followed that group as they drifted across the wilderness for more than half a year.
Only after gradually learning some of their knowledge of the wasteland did the mysterious veil over this world begin to lift.
This was a planet called Waste Planet.
The people who saved him usually referred to the land beneath their feet simply as the Wasteland.
They were a herbivorous human group of the wasteland, a people who had still managed to preserve some shred of humanity. They survived by scavenging junk and hunting across the wilds.
At all times, they had to avoid monsters known as Predators and Hunters, while also keeping out of the way of carnivorous tribes and slave traders that roamed the wasteland.
It was a bizarre, dazzling, grotesque world.
In the south were tribes that worshipped gods.
In the north were city-states built by slaves.
There were beastkin of every kind—creatures called demihumans, humanoid in shape but animal in nature.
There were also the blue-blooded "instrument humans," indistinguishable from ordinary humans in appearance.
There were followers blessed with power by the gods.
There were Predators corrupted by the so-called Second Moon.
There were Awakened individuals who manifested all kinds of abilities.
There were gene warriors whose bodies had been altered by genetic modification.
What kind of stitched-together nightmare of a world is this?!
The more Shen Qing learned about this place, the more he felt that surviving on this wasteland—with no rules, no order, no guarantees of any kind—was simply too hard.
Fortunately, he had encountered a herbivorous wandering group.
According to them, when carnivorous tribes stored food, their favorites were meat slaves and wind-dried human flesh.
Every time Shen Qing thought of that, he felt that, all things considered, he had been lucky.
Later, Shen Qing drifted across the wasteland with this group for three years.
Little by little, he learned how to survive in the wild. He made friends. He came to understand the southern wasteland and the rules that governed life there.
Until just one moment ago, when that cautious, painstaking existence was finally shattered after being discovered by slave traders.
A group of slave traders fully equipped with thermal gear and weapons was a force that a band of survivors armed with nothing but pole rifles could never hope to resist.
Shen Qing watched helplessly as the people who had saved his life, his friends, the uncles and aunties he had come to know, were beaten to the ground one by one and shoved into cages.
He did not want to stay silent anymore.
Three years of survival had made him careful. Cautious. Patient.
But in that instant, the hot blood of being human—buried for so many years—erupted completely.
Shen Qing suddenly tore himself free from the slave trader pinning him down and reached up to snatch the gun pressed against the back of his head.
Then came a single gunshot.
Bang.
And under the slave trader's mocking, disdainful sneer, Shen Qing collapsed stiffly to the ground.