001 The Ten-Year Promise.
2030, Haicheng’s hillside villa district—
Under a sunshade umbrella beside an infinity pool, two rich young men lay sprawled out, playing a duo match in a canyon battle game.
Suddenly, with a huge ”splash,” a girl seemed to fall from the sky, landing right in the middle of the pool.
The two men by the pool were drenched by the spray and leapt up, jumping three feet high.
“What the hell—where did this thing fall from?”
“No wait, I think it really is your sister!” The refined-looking one with gold-rimmed glasses suddenly changed his tone after getting a clear look at the drowning girl’s face.
“Screw you, why didn’t you say so earlier…”
“Glub glub~” Shen Wuqiao had been knocked unconscious the moment she hit the water. After choking on water, she twitched twice and began sinking toward the bottom of the pool.
In the second before she lost consciousness, she saw the two men scrambling to jump into the pool. Her shoulders were gripped from either side and pulled upward, and at the critical moment of suffocation, her lungs finally drew in the life-saving air.
Once out of the water, she took a sharp breath, and the discomfort in her lungs triggered a fit of coughing. “Cough, cough~”
Shen Wuqiao opened her eyes and looked up at the handsome, unrestrained young man above her—his clean, clear eyes, his bold, flashy silver earring.
He clearly hadn’t yet been ravaged by the apocalypse; he still had the look an eighteen-year-old should have.
“Wubao, are you okay? I’ll call right now!”
“Call Big Brother and Second Brother…” Her voice was hoarse, but even more than that, it was urgent. “I have something very important to tell you all.”
Forty minutes later, a black Range Rover roared into the Lu family villa like a howling beast. Two handsome, tall young men stepped out of the car.
In the living room, Shen Wuqiao had already changed into dry clothes. When she came downstairs, she saw four people sitting on the sofa—two were her adoptive brothers she’d grown up with, one was her twin brother, and the last was the childhood friend from next door. All four were present.
Shen Jin saw the sister Lu Xiao said had fallen from the sky, and only relaxed after confirming she was all right.
“Wubao, weren’t you off doing archaeological fieldwork in some signal-less deep mountain forest? Why are you back early?”
Shen Wuqiao gripped Shen Jin’s and Lu Xiao’s arms tightly, her demeanor more solemn and urgent than they had ever seen:
“Brother, what I’m about to say might sound unbelievable, but you have to believe me!”
Lu Xiao and Shen Jin exchanged a glance, and the other two frowned in unison. They all sensed that something seemed off about the Shen Wuqiao before them, but couldn’t quite put their finger on what.
Shen Jin’s Adam’s apple bobbed. “…Go ahead.”
Four pairs of eyes fixed on her. In the ten-meter-high living room, the air inexplicably turned tense and heavy.
“Seven days from now, red mist carrying a mutant virus will appear all over the world. Many people and animals will be infected. Order will collapse—the apocalypse is coming!!”
In the eerie dead silence, only Shen Wuqiao’s rapid breathing could be heard. Lu Xiao and Shen Jin exchanged another complicated look, while Shen Xu and Li Chengxun seemed to be holding back laughter, or perhaps struggling to find the right words.
“She’s always scrolling through ‘Zodiac Apocalypse Shelters’ before bed lately. She’s probably gotten too into it,” Lu Xiao muttered quietly to Shen Jin.
“Did she get sick from falling in the water? Is her head all muddled?” Shen Jin reached out to feel her forehead.
“I’m serious! I really did come back from the apocalypse! My time superpower can only let me stay here for seven days at most. Everything I say next, you must remember!”
The anxiety in Shen Wuqiao’s eyes didn’t look feigned.
Lu Xiao leaned back on the sofa helplessly. “I said it from the start—what kind of major is that for her to study? Of all things, digging up people’s ancestral graves. Well, look at her now. Possessed by evil spirits, just like I predicted.”
Shen Wuqiao stood up from the sofa. “I knew you wouldn’t believe me. I can prove that what I’m saying is true.”
A few strands of damp hair still clung to her full forehead, making her already exquisite face look almost unfairly beautiful.
Lu Xiao toyed with the lighter in his hand. “Oh? Then your future sister-in-law is…”
“Not the woman you have a crush on.”
“How do you know who I have a crush on?” Lu Xiao looked like he’d seen a ghost.
“You have 1,314 photos of her saved in your cloud drive. The password is the date you first met her, when you made a bet with someone about her…”
“Stop talking, my dear ancestor!” Lu Xiao threw down the lighter and covered her mouth. “How could you possibly know all that in such detail?”
“Because the you of ten years later told me. And it’s not just you—Li Chengxun too.”
“I’m involved in this as well?” Li Chengxun looked utterly bewildered.
“Last week, you took Grandpa Li’s lion-head walnuts that he’d polished for twenty years and used them to play fetch with the dogs, then framed your blackout-drunk Uncle Li, claiming he’d used the walnuts as a snack to go with his wine.”
Shen Wuqiao’s words made the two men whose secrets had just been exposed twitch at the corners of their mouths.
Shen Wuqiao then turned to Shen Jin, whose expression was dark and brooding, and said with complete seriousness, “Big Brother, in three hours, Uncle Shen will call and ask you to come to the company. He’ll offer you 5% of the company’s shares and give Second Brother 3%, then have you work for his youngest son, managing the company for him.”
“Impossible! The company belongs to Big Brother.” Shen Xu frowned, indignant.
“None of that matters anymore. When you go, don’t fight it. Just sell the shares at a high price. The apocalypse is coming—we need to convert all our money into survival supplies!”
Perhaps it was the certainty in her tone, but for a moment, all of them began to waver.
The four of them looked at Shen Wuqiao, and at last something different appeared in their eyes. “This apocalypse you mentioned…”
“You can keep doubting me, but there are only seven days left. We have to act now. Big Brother, in one of Dad’s newly developed tourism projects, there’s a natural cave called Tenglong Cave. It’s deep in the mountains, set into sheer cliffs—perfect as a shelter!”
Lu Xiao was skeptical. The tourism project hadn’t been made public yet—how could she know about it?
Refusing to believe it, he immediately made a phone call. His father’s stern questioning came through the receiver: “How do you know about Tenglong Cave, you brat? Who told you? Hello? Hello…?”
Lu Xiao’s heart began to race. “Wubao, what do you need us to prepare?”
“Big Brother, you’re in charge of reinforcing the shelter and planning the storage areas for supplies, the living quarters, the livestock area, and the underground planting area.”
“Chengxun, you’re in charge of stockpiling medicine and basic medical equipment. Choose medicines with the longest shelf lives, and make sure everything is moisture-proofed.”
“Big Brother and Second Brother, you’re in charge of daily necessities. Divide up the purchasing between you. All rice, flour, and dried goods must be vacuum-sealed, and focus on staple foods that can be stored long-term.”
“There’s an underground spring in the cave, but we still need to stockpile enough drinking water and install large-scale water purification equipment.”
“Then shouldn’t we also get fuel? And power storage equipment?” Shen Jin asked in a low voice.
“Yes! And most importantly—don’t alert Uncle Shen and his family.”
Three hours later, Shen Jin indeed received a call from Father Shen. When he came back, he said nothing—he simply had one more bank card in his possession, holding two hundred million.
Day seven, inside Tenglong Cave—
Lu Xiao: “If the apocalypse really comes, how long do you think we’d survive?”
Li Chengxun clapped him on the shoulder: “Cheer up. If the apocalypse doesn’t come, we’ll die even faster.”
“Holy hell, so we’re dead either way?”
Shen Wuqiao pointed out the window: “Look, the fog is rising. I have to go back too.”
The four of them looked up, and terror instantly exploded in their eyes—because Shen Wuqiao’s body was visibly turning transparent before their very eyes.
“Wu Bao, what’s happening to you?” All four lunged at her, but they couldn’t grab hold of anything.
“Don’t look for me. See you in ten years!”
Their eyes nearly split with grief: “Wu Bao—”
A thousand li away, at an archaeological dig site, Shen Wuqiao, a junior majoring in archaeology, was cleaning out an empty coffin whose occupant’s remains had been stolen.
Suddenly she heard someone calling her. Her phone, which had lost signal for days, actually connected.
Inside Tenglong Cave, the four of them saw that familiar face—that face stamped with innocence—and each one looked as if they’d seen a ghost.
If this was the real Shen Wuqiao, then who had been with them these past few days?
Before Shen Wuqiao could even exchange a word with her brothers, a scream came from above the tomb chamber: “Ah! The fog is poisonous!”
She watched her classmates and teachers collapse one by one in the blood-red fog, then rise again in grotesque, twisted postures.
With nowhere left to run, she chose to leap into the empty coffin, summoning every ounce of her will to survive, and slammed the lid shut…
PS: This chapter opens in reverse order. Some readers may wonder—what exactly did the female lead change by coming back? Why doesn’t Chapter 2 pick up where Chapter 1 left off?
The early part of the main storyline depicts the female lead’s growth arc—the process of her awakening her time superpower.
The plot you’re looking for, the one that continues from Chapter 1, does exist and will come—it’s just in the later part.
That said, the earlier storyline is exciting too. The author doesn’t write filler.