Only those who have crawled back from hell truly understand how precious life is.
Tang Mo didn’t truly grasp the meaning of this saying until the first day she returned to the age of prosperity, when she ate her first meal.
In the bowl were not rotting worms coated in sludge, but fresh, vibrant green vegetables and crystal-clear grains of rice. The water in the cup was actually clear and transparent, not dark brown liquid mixed with metallic residue. Everything felt so wonderful that it almost seemed unreal.
Ignoring the shock of having been reborn, Tang Mo threw herself at the dining table and slowly—but continuously—finished three bowls of rice before finally settling down her chopsticks in satisfaction.
She had checked the date on her phone the moment she woke up. Today was July 14, 2150. There were still seven days before the apocalypse began.
For a modern woman living in a high-tech era, someone who had read countless sci-fi and fantasy novels and watched endless movies, rebirth was unbelievable—but not impossible to accept.
After waking up, Tang Mo spent only five minutes accepting the fact that she had been reborn to a time before the apocalypse. The rest of her time was devoted entirely to battling the food in front of her.
The number of times she could enjoy food like this was already counting down. How could she bear to wolf it down and waste it? She wished she could carve the fragrance of every bite deep into her soul, so she would never forget it.
The meal on the table had been set aside for her long ago by her mother. Tang Mo’s mother, Lin Yi, was not at home at the moment. Tang Mo remembered that it was summer vacation from university, and at this time her mother should be out working part-time.
If one were to speak of Tang Mo’s mother, Lin Yi’s life truly hadn’t been easy. When Tang Mo was five years old, her father passed away. Lin Yi raised her daughter alone through hardship, opening a small convenience store to support them. Now that Tang Mo was older and could help watch the store during holidays, Lin Yi still went out to work, trying to save up a dowry for her daughter. The bitterness of it all was something outsiders could never fully understand.
Thinking of the mother who loved her more than anyone else in the world, Tang Mo’s gaze darkened.
Tang Mo’s beauty had been inherited entirely from Lin Yi.
Now forty years old, Lin Yi showed almost no signs of aging. Calling her a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old girl would be an exaggeration, but she certainly looked like a mature, charming woman in her late twenties. Years of raising her daughter alone had not ruined her appearance; instead, they had given her a unique blend of gentleness and resilience.
Tang Mo remembered that around this time in her previous life, her mother had told her she had a boyfriend and planned to register for marriage if Tang Mo didn’t object.
But back then, Tang Mo had been sheltered in her mother’s ivory tower and knew nothing of Lin Yi’s hardships. She felt that remarriage was a betrayal of her father, that she would become a child without a home. She had opposed it with all her might.
In the end, Lin Yi broke up with her boyfriend out of consideration for her daughter’s feelings.
Who could have known that only three days after they separated, the apocalypse would descend?
At that time, Tang Mo was trapped at school and not by her mother’s side. When she finally returned home half a year later, she discovered that her mother had already passed away.
Her mother’s boyfriend came to see her then. He was a gentle, refined man, clearly from a wealthy family.
He said that when the apocalypse began, he had been out of town. By the time he rushed back, Lin Yi was already gone.
The grief in his eyes was unmistakable. Tang Mo knew clearly that everything was her fault.
Because of her guilt toward her mother and the man before her, Tang Mo refused his protection and chose to walk alone into the apocalypse.
Later, she often wondered: if she had allowed her mother to marry him, would her mother have survived? Had she personally strangled her mother’s chance to live?
But no matter how advanced technology became, no one ever invented medicine for regret. No matter how remorseful Tang Mo was, she could never return to the past.
If in this life her mother brought up marriage again, she would support her with everything she had and let her mother live happily. Tang Mo made this vow silently in her heart.
After eating her fill, Tang Mo closed the convenience store and returned to her room, carefully recalling everything she had experienced in her previous life.
Selling things now? Don’t be ridiculous. In the future, everything in the store would be priceless treasures. There was no way she would sell them.
Money? What was money worth? In one week, it would be nothing more than paper.
The apocalypse she would face was different from those written in novels. There were no crazed zombies—only endless hunger.
Seven days later, the land would turn purple-black. All plants growing in the soil would die, and no matter how hard people tried, nothing new could be grown.
Plants and meat exposed to the air would quickly wither and rot.
Water resources would be contaminated. Rivers, lakes, and seas would still look clear, but they would become poison. Anyone who drank it would be unable to withstand the toxins and would suffer organ failure.
Across the world, vast regions would be shrouded in dense fog. The fog was filled with danger. Very few who entered ever came out alive, and those who did would scream madly that terrifying things existed inside.
What exactly those things were, or how terrifying they might be—no one knew.
Gradually, fog-covered areas became places people feared to even look at. They would rather take long detours than risk passing through.
Perhaps heaven did not want humanity to go extinct all at once. While closing one door, it opened a window.
After the apocalypse officially arrived, human bodies began to mutate.
Everyone’s body was enhanced, though in different directions. There were five major attributes: **Vitality, Strength, Agility, Spirit, and Space**.
Aside from innate talent, all attributes could later be improved through personal effort or external means.
One month after the apocalypse began, the government reacted swiftly and issued each citizen a wristwatch bound to their personal ID, used to monitor their attribute values.
The higher a person’s attributes, the stronger their combat power—and the higher their status in the apocalypse.
Combat power might not matter much in peaceful times, but after the apocalypse, it was the greatest guarantee of survival.
Especially after half a year, when mutated beasts ran rampant, the stronger one’s combat power and overall attributes, the higher their chances of surviving.
In her previous life, Tang Mo’s attributes had been fairly average.
Her initial attributes were extremely low, except for Spirit. Lacking the ability to protect herself, she desperately exchanged all the beast crystals she obtained later for Vitality and Strength, hoping to improve her survivability.
Years into the apocalypse, research centers finally figured out how to use human spiritual power. Only then did Tang Mo realize that the attribute she had thought was most useless—Spirit—was actually the strongest of all.
But by then, it was too late. She was no longer the girl with outstanding spiritual power. All she could do was sigh at the unpredictability of fate and continue struggling to survive.
To obtain food and maintain the minimum energy needed to live, she had to join a team mission once every month.
Her previous life ended during one such mission.
It was a mid-tier mutated beast. As the female team member with the lowest attributes, she was used as bait by her teammates and ultimately died in the beast’s jaws.
There was no one to blame. In a world that devoured people, the weak were beaten down. She was weak, so she died first. It was fair.
Tang Mo’s heart had already been tempered into steel. She felt no resentment toward her teammates’ strategic choices.
The only thing she hated was herself—for losing the most important thing at the very beginning of the apocalypse. If not for that, she wouldn’t have been so helpless.
Thinking of the days she spent alone in the apocalypse—hungry, frightened, and constantly on edge—Tang Mo clenched her fists tightly.
Those days had been truly hard. Trapped in school for the first six months, starving and suffering. When the fog surrounding the campus finally dispersed, the world had changed again. Famine turned into rampant mutated beasts. Humanity’s suffering hadn’t ended—it had only just begun.
Every day was lived in fear—fear that the next moment she would be torn apart and swallowed by a beast, leaving nothing behind.
In this life, she absolutely refused to live like that again.
Though reborn, she couldn’t stop the apocalypse from coming, nor could she become a savior.
All she could do was save herself—make her days in the apocalypse less passive—and let her mother live. Live well.
Thinking of this, Tang Mo’s heart began to race. She placed a hand over her chest, trying to calm herself.
Suddenly, her hand brushed against something hard. She instinctively grabbed it—it was the jade pendant she had worn since childhood.
The moment she saw the small, exquisite jade pendant, Tang Mo’s eyes lit up. Overwhelming joy surged through her, her heart pounding wildly as her entire body trembled uncontrollably.
The five attributes of humanity in the apocalypse were Vitality, Strength, Agility, Spirit, and Space.
Everyone possessed some amount of the first four, either innately or later on. But the Space attribute was unique—only a small number of chosen individuals had it. For most people, Space was zero.
Even if someone found Space attributes in rare treasures or beast crystals, they would need to accumulate at least 100 points to activate it.
What did 100 points mean?
Simply put, a crystal from a low-level beast contained only one attribute point, with an extremely small chance of being Space. To gather 100 points of Space, one would have to kill at least 10,000 low-level beasts.
In Tang Mo’s previous life, her team could only hunt one or two low-level beasts per month. The spoils then had to be exchanged for supplies and divided among over a dozen people.
So, everyone in the apocalypse knew: Space was a matter of fate. If you had it from the start, you had it. If you didn’t, then as an ordinary person, you might as well give up on it for life.
In her previous life, Tang Mo’s Space attribute was also zero—but she had worn her jade pendant for over ten years.
When she was first trapped at school, she discovered something special about the pendant: inside it was over ten square meters of space. More importantly, it wasn’t empty—it was packed with supplies.
With just one glance, Tang Mo knew it was a complete replica of her family’s convenience store.
During summer vacation, she had personally arranged the goods in the store. There was no way she could mistake that familiar layout.
Her family’s small supermarket had been moved into the space, and everything inside could be taken out and used.
For Tang Mo, who had been trapped at school without food or water, this was an incredible blessing. But before she could enjoy it for more than two days, she accidentally lost the pendant while completing a mission to catch fish at a pond.
The pendant wasn’t valuable, and she had never replaced its old cord. The cord had long since weakened and snapped without her noticing.
Losing something she had never possessed would have been fine—but to have it and then lose it was a devastating blow.
She searched the water for three days and nights without success. In the end, hunger drained her strength, forcing her to give up.
Just days later, she lost contact with her mother.
From then on, Tang Mo drifted through life in a daze. She had no energy for anything, cared little about missions, and earned the resentment of her classmates. Those six months were unbearable. Her food rations grew smaller and smaller.
Now, looking at the jade pendant still safely in her hand, Tang Mo stroked it again and again.
Something this important—she would never, ever lose it again. Even if she herself were lost, she would not let this pendant disappear.
Though she knew the pendant’s mutation only occurred after the apocalypse, she still couldn’t help but close her eyes, gripping it tightly and imagining its form.
If this were after the apocalypse, she would only need to touch it with a bit of spiritual power. There would be no need for such effort.
But without spiritual power now, this troublesome method was the only way she could try.