from earth to abyss

Earth, a planet with a population of 8 billion,

— six years ago.

Under the yellowish sky, amidst the rolling hills and fields, stood a steel tower. Several broken wires hung from the top of the tower, swaying in the wind like willow branches.

A few tattered and faded plastic bags were caught on the large bolts protruding from the base of the tower. Next to them was a small moss-covered hut built inside the tower, about five or six meters above the ground. Mushrooms had started to grow on the outermost wooden beams.

A man with a scruffy beard climbed down the rope ladder on the outside of the hut. He picked up a black plastic bag piled at the base of the tower and walked towards his field.

The field was not far, just less than a hundred meters from the tower. To ensure he could eat fresh vegetables in the coming winter, the man had covered the field with a layer of discolored plastic film. Although the film had many holes, it was better than nothing.

The man worked in the field until dusk. Nightfall meant danger in the wild, and with his experience, he always returned to his hut before dark.

The so-called dangers in the wild included an increasing number of wild animals, both mutated and non-mutated. Some were friendly, while others were aggressive. If he had enough food, the man didn’t mind sharing some vegetables with the friendly ones, but it was late autumn, and without stored food, he wouldn’t survive the winter.

Living alone and relying on farming was extremely difficult. The man had to fight against the weather, against the land, and against various animals and plants.

In other words, nature was not always kind. The fields needed fertilizing and loosening, wild animals and insects always tried to steal the crops before him, and the weeds blown in by the wind always grew faster and more vigorously than the crops he planted.

The man thought that he would probably continue like this until the day he could no longer work. He might die in the field or be eaten by wild animals.

Fatigue, loneliness, and the beautiful memories in his mind constantly tormented him. Living to old age in this state? It was a dream! the man thought.

When he first started this life, the man often thought about ending it all, but the occasional voices from the radio always gave him a glimmer of hope. Over a year ago, the radio had gone silent, but the man had gradually gotten used to this life.

Am I the last person on this planet? Probably not, the man thought. There must be others like me surviving in many places.

He used to be a forest fire lookout. Because of this, he survived the first, second, third… and countless subsequent nuclear strikes in a remote location.

Thanks to his job, the supplies stored in the lookout and the rich biological resources in the forest helped him survive the famine that year.

Then came the bacteria and the mutated plants and animals caused by biochemical weapons and nuclear radiation. It was as if he was favored by the heavens, immune to airborne biochemical weapons. With his long-term experience in the forest, he never got injured in battles with mutated creatures.

The man had thought about returning to the city to find his parents or searching for more survivors along the roads. But he was thousands of miles away from his hometown, and the warnings from the radio made him fear leaving the wild to search for humans.

The radio said that humans had mutated too.

The man had no choice but to wander in the wild. As the number of wild animals in the forest increased, he had to move out of the forest to the open fields and hills.

Living on the power transmission tower was also a last resort. In his area, wild and mutated bears and tigers, and other animals of unknown origin, were excellent climbers. Living on the ground or even in trees was not safe; only the man-made steel tower provided security.

Three years ago, during a thunderstorm, lightning struck the tower. Fortunately, the builders had considered this possibility, and the lightning was safely conducted into the ground as designed. The man, living in the tower, was unharmed, which strengthened his resolve to stay there.

That night, the man heard the howling wind as he returned to his hut. In the faint twilight, he looked out the window and saw clouds rolling overhead.

“It looks like it’s going to rain heavily tonight.”

The man had experienced such weather many times. He skillfully closed the windows, placed heavy objects against the door, and hugged the human-shaped doll on his bed, falling into a deep sleep.

“Good night, dear. Good night, kids.”

That night marked the end of the man’s six years of good luck. As he had thought, surviving alone in such a post-apocalyptic wasteland until old age was almost impossible.

What the man didn’t know was that a massive funnel cloud was forming above him.

The probability of a tornado forming in the hilly area was low, but not zero. However, the chance of a tornado forming right above him, without giving him any time to react, was almost laughable.

Now, the Grim Reaper was raising his scythe from the sky, signaling an unavoidable fate.

In the last ten seconds before losing consciousness, the man was first awakened by the sound of the roof being torn off by the wind. He didn’t have time to grab anything before being swept into the air.

His vision went black, the roar of the wind filled his ears, and the high-speed spinning of his body threw all thoughts out of his mind like water being spun out of a washing machine, leaving only one last thought:

How can we humans die so pathetically!!

. . . . . .

He didn’t know how long it had been, or if it was just a moment. The man’s consciousness returned, and he immediately opened his eyes, seeing sand just one centimeter away.

The sound of waves crashing against the shore reached his ears.

A slight pain in his finger made him look at his hand, where he found a small dark green crab.

Am I by the sea?

The man sat up and looked behind him, seeing an endless expanse of ocean. A few white clouds floated in the distant sky, and countless seabirds dove into the water. The strong sunlight made his body feel hot, so he stood up and walked towards the nearest tree.

Where is this place?

The man looked around while checking his body. There were no wounds, but according to his memory, he should have been swept up by a powerful wind—likely a tornado—and then ended up here.

The temperature was high, and the man, wearing only long-sleeved pajamas, felt hot. The dense green forest behind him indicated that he was in the south. This stark contrast made the man feel like he had traveled a great distance, considering the previous weather was cool autumn in the north.

This is too strange. What happened?

With this question in mind, the man began to walk along the beach.

In an unknown situation, walking along the beach was safer than heading inland. It was also easier to spot people or be spotted by others—if there were still people in this world.

The man thought sadly, but a faint hope arose in his heart due to the strange circumstances: if such a bizarre thing could happen, could even stranger things occur?

However, after walking for about half an hour, nothing strange happened. The beach seemed to stretch infinitely forward and backward, always curving at a distant point, hiding its end and any signs of life.

Yes, there were seabirds and crabs from the sea, but the further inland he looked, the fewer animals he saw. The forest was eerily quiet, as if all the birds had flown to the sea. The feeling of loneliness and desolation began to spread, and the warm weather couldn’t stop the man’s heart from growing cold.

Honestly, the man hadn’t seen another person in almost five years. The last time he saw a human was five years ago when he encountered a female survivor outside a seed store in the countryside. She fled like she had seen a ghost, and the man didn’t even get a chance to speak to her.

In this situation, hoping to meet someone was too much to ask. The man thought: God, if I can’t meet a person, at least let me see a dog or a cat.

Nothing, there was nothing. After making a mark, the man tried walking into the forest. Strangely, he saw a path made of sand. A path meant there had been people, but there were large pieces of glass on the path.

The man examined the glass closely and found that it was made from the sand on the ground, and it had been there for a long time. The edges of the glass pieces were no longer sharp. This phenomenon was puzzling, and the man couldn’t help but wonder what had happened here.

As he pondered why these glass pieces hadn’t been moved for so long, he noticed another detail he had overlooked while walking: there were many fallen trees along the path.

But these trees had been down for more than a year. Most of them were decayed, with new trees growing around them. The lush grass and shrubs covered most of their presence. If it weren’t for a row of red mushrooms that stood out from the surrounding environment, the man would have had a hard time noticing the fallen trees.

The man first noticed one fallen tree, and as he paid more attention to the fallen logs on the ground, he quickly found more. The more he walked, the more he found, to the point where it became strange.

Something strange had indeed happened, but it was like an unsolvable puzzle.

If humans had cut them down, these trees wouldn’t have been left lying there. Moreover, the breaks were not clean; the trees seemed to have been violently snapped, like in a super typhoon. But the problem was that the trees had fallen in different directions, which ruled out the possibility of a super typhoon.

Could it be giant mutated animals? the man wondered. He had seen many mutated animals, most of them ugly and deformed, but hardly any that had grown to such a size. This explanation seemed far-fetched.

The man’s confusion grew, and he could only keep walking forward, trying to find something to answer his questions and figure out where he was.

It was already past noon when the man remembered to measure the latitude. Unfortunately, it wasn’t exactly noon, so he couldn’t get an accurate measurement. He picked up a relatively straight stick and stood it in the ground, estimating the latitude by comparing the length of the shadow to the length of the stick, assuming it was noon.

Seeing that the shadow and the stick were about the same length, the man knew he was roughly at 45° latitude, north or south. Whether he was in the southern or northern hemisphere was still unknown.

As the man pondered his next move, an unusual sound gradually came from the distant sky.

He held his breath and listened carefully. The sound was growing louder—it was a whistling noise, moving quickly, like a jet plane flying overhead. There must be something flying in the sky!

A feeling he couldn’t describe spread through his heart. He hadn’t felt this way in a long time!

It’s people! It must be people!

He looked up at the sky, straining his eyes to find the source of the sound, but he couldn’t see the plane.

Then he remembered: planes fly so fast that by the time the sound reaches the ground, the plane has already flown a long distance away from where the sound was made. So now, the plane must be further ahead in the direction the sound came from!

After estimating the direction, the man ran towards it. He had never been so happy because he finally knew he was not alone. There were others like him in this world! There were people! There were people!!

“Ahhhhh—” the man shouted, crying with joy as he ran wildly, almost swinging from tree branches like Tarzan.

He quickly reached the end of the path in that direction—a beach he had passed earlier. Through the trees, without the leaves blocking his view, he finally saw what he had been dreaming of.

In the distant sky, two fighter jets were flying in formation!