A sharp, throbbing ache radiated through Chen Yexun’s wrists as he held the backpack.
He turned to look at Li Chengyu behind him; his cousin’s face remained as pale as paper.
Yet surprisingly, Li Chengyu suppressed the violent churning in his stomach, biting his lower lip hard.
Beyond fear, his eyes held a strange numbness forged by brutal reality.
It seemed the parade of bloody horrors had forcibly raised the ordinary college student’s threshold for terror.
The woman beside him wasn’t as fortunate.
She crouched near the window, dry-heaving violently into a corner.
The sour stench of vomit mixed with the thick metallic smell of blood outside, creating a suffocating haze inside the enclosed cabin.
*For a normal person, throwing up like that after seeing this horror is totally expected,* Chen Yexun thought to himself.
Yet the sight unbiddenly dragged up a darker memory buried deep in his mind.
He remembered standing over a twitching body with a bloody knife in his hand while another person, tied to a pillar, vomited uncontrollably just like this woman.
He took a deep breath, forcibly severing the dangerous memory.
Now was not the time.
His arms were shaking uncontrollably from the desperate climb and the struggle against the machinery.
He needed to recover his strength as quickly as possible to face the inevitable ordeal ahead.
“Cousin, take over for me,” Chen Yexun said, his voice raspy with exhaustion.
“My arms are shot.
I need a rest.” Li Chengyu didn’t hesitate.
He nodded immediately.
“Sure, get some rest.” He scrambled over and took Chen Yexun’s place, pressing hard against the bloody, sticky backpack to plug the gap.
Chen Yexun didn’t relax right away.
He watched Li Chengyu’s positioning, his tone grim as he cautioned, “Keep it jammed tight.
We don’t know if the blood on those organs…
comes from a normal person or an infected one.
If infected blood splashes in and gets into an open wound or your eyes…” The consequences went without saying.
Li Chengyu swallowed hard, his eyes fixing with intense focus.
“Don’t worry.
Unless I suddenly get Parkinson’s, I can hold a damn backpack.” He leaned his weight in even harder.
Only then did Chen Yexun let out a breath.
He sank onto a nearby seat and pulled out his phone.
Asking Li Chengyu for help wasn’t just to rest.
More importantly, he needed to use this precious window to verify something: Was this nightmare localized, or…
He pressed the power button.
The screen lit up: 87% battery left.
Fortunately, he had fully charged it before leaving; it should last a while.
He immediately switched on power-saving mode and opened the short-video app he usually used for entertainment.
What greeted him was no longer funny skits or dancing girls.
The entire feed looked as if it had been soaked in blood.
Every thumbnail was either a blurry smear of dark red or a shaky, horrifying snapshot.
The headlines were even more chilling, shouting in giant fonts: [WORLD END!], [THEY’RE ALL SMILING!], [GONE MAD!
ALL OF THEM!], [HELP!
SOMEONE SAVE US!
I’M IN THE MALL RESTROOM!], [IT’S A METEORITE!
IT’S ALIENS!] Chen Yexun’s face remained impassive as his finger mechanically swiped upward.
But with every swipe, his heart sank deeper into an icy abyss.
A video shot inside an airport caught his attention.
The poster was hiding in a convenience store storage room, filming through a crack in the door at the terminal lounge.
In the bright lights of the lounge, a morbid feast was underway.
Several lunatics were laughing maniacally as they shoved horrific, spherical “trophies” into the headrest recesses of luxury massage chairs.
Not far off, a living man was bound tightly to a seat with slimy, dark red rope-like materials.
His face was blank, his eyes hollow, leaving only faint, unconscious pleas for mercy.
Most horrifying of all was a line of lunatics taking turns hopping enthusiastically onto the “decorated” massage chairs, like children playing hopscotch!
Every stomp was accompanied by a wet, crunching crush and a spray of unidentifiable matter.
Only when every “decoration” was trampled beyond recognition did their manic, ravenous eyes turn in unison toward the only “intact,” living man tied to the chair.
The video cut off abruptly amid a chorus of ecstatic, manic laughter and the victim’s blood-curdling, distorted scream.
Chen Yexun swiped away without expression.
The next video showed a street filmed from a high-rise apartment.
The once-bustling street below was now strewn with sickening red and yellow chunks, while several bodies hung like cured meat from lampposts and billboards.
Packs of lunatics wandered and played in the streets until violent banging and wild laughter erupted outside the cameraman’s door, cutting the video short.
The next one, and the next…
Factories, schools, hospitals, subways…
The settings varied, but the manic laughter and hellish scenes were identical.
In some videos, panicked people speculated into the camera that a passing meteor had altered Earth’s magnetic field or released some radiation, driving humanity mad on a global scale.
Others were filled with religious fanaticism, with creators screaming that this was “God’s divine punishment” and that only true faith could bring salvation, before launching into frantic prayers and proselytizing.
Chen Yexun swiped through them indifferently.
As for the cause of the madness?
He didn’t care.
Meteorite, virus, divine wrath, or something else—it made no difference to him.
He only wanted to find news about rescue forces.
Finally, he saw it.
A violently shaky video where thunderous explosions and…
laughter echoed in the background.
The camera occasionally caught the sky, where two fighter jets trailing black smoke performed impossible maneuvers—as if dodging an invisible enemy—before colliding in a chaotic evasive turn!
*BOOM!* A fireball exploded in midair!
In another clip, a main battle tank’s main gun was firing frantically into a neighboring residential building!
Every shell blasted a massive crater into the structure!
Around the tank, several uniformed bodies lay still on the ground, while others wrestled with invisible foes…
or former comrades.
All these fragmented, bloody pieces of evidence pointed cold and hard to a single truth: Madness.
It wasn’t just this mountain.
It wasn’t just this city.
Every single corner of the entire world had descended into the same living hell.
Chen Yexun turned off the screen and slowly put his phone away.
He looked up at Li Chengyu, who was still straining to hold the backpack, and at Chu Yao, who had just stopped vomiting and was leaning weakly against the wall.
“The whole world has gone mad,” Chen Yexun said, his voice terrifyingly calm, as if stating a fact that had nothing to do with him.
“I just checked my phone.
It’s not just us.
The entire world…
is the same.” Li Chengyu whipped his head around, all color draining from his face.
“The…
the whole world?!” Dead silence fell over the cabin.
Even the faint, frantic cursing outside seemed to recede.
Chu Yao, having barely gathered her senses, asked in a trembling voice, clinging to one final shred of hope: “What about…
the military?
Even if…
even if other places are gone, if we just wait here, what if…
what if a military unit passes by…?” “Passes by?” Li Chengyu blurted out heatedly, almost forgetting to hold the backpack.
“Look at those things outside!
They have brains!
We’re sitting ducks hanging here!
If they run out of stuff to throw, what if they find a saw or an axe and cut the cable?!
We’ll drop and turn into meat paste!” Chu Yao flinched at his outburst, her eyes swallowed by despair once again.
Chen Yexun offered a cold, mirthless smile, looking at her.
“What’s your name?” “…Chu Yao.” “Alright, Chu Yao.” Chen Yexun’s voice was calm, yet carried a chilling weight.
“Can you imagine a crazed soldier, holding a rifle loaded with live ammo, spraying bullets madly at the comrades he stood shoulder-to-shoulder with moments ago?” “Can you imagine him thinking that pulling the pin on a live grenade and charging a crowd is the most fun game in the world—that the splatter of blood after the explosion can ‘infect’ everyone around him like fireworks?” He paused, describing in vivid words the scene he had watched of the tank shelling the residential building.
The cabin plunged back into suffocating silence, filled only by the three of them breathing heavily.
Even the last shred of fantasy about outside rescue was utterly crushed by this bloody reality.
Just as the suffocating despair reached its absolute peak— The relentless pounding outside abruptly stopped.
The stomach-turning sound of bloody flesh slamming into glass vanished.
In its place, from the platform above, came a sudden, resounding, chillingly synchronized burst of…
manic laughter!
Unlike the previous chaotic, mocking noise, this laughter held a distinct, rhythmic excitement—the unmistakable sound of finding a new toy!
A sharp jolt of dread hit Chen Yexun’s chest!
An ominous foreboding instantly enveloped him, and he moved to stand up and check.
At that exact moment, Chu Yao, who had been staring out the window, let out an agonized, suppressed whimper.
She shook uncontrollably, raising a trembling finger to point in sheer horror at the blood-stained glass.
Her voice twisted and warped with absolute terror, barely recognizable: “Th-they…
look like…
they’re…
c-crawling…
crawling over here!!!”