By nine o’clock that morning, the head count in the canteen was thirty-seven.
Since the chaos began, over a dozen students had rushed down from the dorms—men and women alike. Some were brave; others were simply desperate, forced to flee their rooms in a frantic bid for survival.
The dorms in this area were mixed-gender. A sports student from Men’s Dorm A wiped sweat from his forehead, hissing in pain as someone helped bandage his wound.
“We have a British Shorthair in our room,” he explained, his voice strained.
“My roommates went on a trip to the next city over a couple of days ago, so I was left in charge of the cat. This morning, I woke up to the sound of the litter box on the balcony scratching.”
He fell silent, a bitter smile twisting his lips. A sanitary pad, provided by one of the girls, was pressed against his arm and taped down with clear adhesive.
“I didn’t think anything of it. I’d stayed up too late playing games the night before and just wanted to sleep.”
“And then?”
“And then,” the athlete said, terror still etched in his eyes, “the cat smashed through the glass balcony door.”
The dorm’s balcony doors weren’t the reinforced kind used outside the canteen—just ordinary glass. Even so, breaking one was no easy feat for an adult man.
The brief statement alone told everyone how much strength the mutated house cat must have possessed.
He swallowed hard, his head hanging low, unsure whether to cry or laugh. “…In the end, I killed it with a chair.”
A heavy silence fell over the cafeteria. Dou Qing noticed Fang Yangyang’s soft, shaky breath beside him. He turned to look at her, seeing a glimmer of pity in her clear, bright eyes.
He reached out and squeezed her hand tightly. Fang Yangyang seemed to snap back to reality. She offered him a small smile and entwined her fingers with his.
***
The athlete stood a full 1.9 meters tall, his build sturdy and powerful from years at the gym. His arms were corded with solid muscle.
After explaining how he’d sustained his injuries, he raised his head again, his eyes rimmed with red. “We’d had that cat in our dorm for almost two years. We’d already agreed to let me keep it at home after we graduated next year.”
No one commented on the fact that pets weren’t allowed in the dorms.
Outside, stray cats and dogs prowled, their eyes fixed on the people trapped inside. The garbage trucks had already emptied the bins outside the canteen during the night, leaving behind only a few scraps.
The mutated animals seemed to possess several times their original strength and agility. A white, short-snouted stray dog lunged forward, knocking over a concrete-bottomed trash bin with a single blow.
As the bin rolled, the remaining refuse slid out. The dog stepped forward, sniffed the mess, and began to eat.
Inside the cafeteria, the silence was absolute. Everyone had witnessed the scene.
“Their size… their strength…” someone stammered. “They’ve all grown.”
“Is this it? The apocalypse?” another voice asked in a daze. “No way. 2012 is long gone. The Maya prophecy was a hoax, wasn’t it?”
The more timid students had already broken down into soft sobs.
Communication was impossible. No 5G, 4G, or 3G—not even the basic 2G network could connect. In the modern world, total isolation only required three things: no signal, no internet, and no battery.
It was the first day of the apocalypse.
Between four in the morning, when it all began, and six in the evening, the Jiangpu Canteen had taken in thirty-eight students fleeing from outside. Including those who had already been inside, there were now sixty-seven people in total.
The Jiangpu Canteen.
This was where the male lead and second male lead of the original novel would form their massive group. Fang Yangyang remembered the plot: they were supposed to enter the canteen at seven o’clock that evening, leading a group of over a dozen people.
Among them were several key supporting characters who would later play indispensable roles in rebuilding the base after the world ended.
She stared at the canteen doors. Dou Qing gently touched her shoulder.
“Tired?” he asked softly.
“I’m okay. Not really.”
No one could sleep. Only those unlucky enough to have been mauled by the stray cats and dogs lay slumped on the canteen tables, drifting in and out of consciousness as their open wounds ached and festered, untreated.
“Hungry?”
A few hours ago, the cafeteria workers had taken stock of the remaining food. Without cold storage, they relied on daily market deliveries, and the remaining supplies—assuming nothing spoiled—were only enough to keep fifty people alive for a week.
After the count, the workers and a few students who knew their way around a kitchen managed to cook up a huge pot of rice and vegetables. Th canteen’s electricity was flicking on and off, and the staff only managed to finish the meal after switching to the gas stove.
Everyone got a small portion, just enough to stave off the worst of their hunger.
As for the convenience store, it wasn’t open twenty-four hours like the cafeteria. The owner was gone, the iron gate pulled shut. Even if someone wanted to buy things from there, they were out of luck.
Fang Yangyang had a pinkish-blue backpack full of dry rations, but she didn’t say anything. She simply went along with the crowd and ate the communal meal.
“I’m not hungry,” she said softly. “I just ate.”
Dou Qing’s heart finally settled.
The air in the cafeteria was thick with panic and anxiety. Students from the dorms kept glancing outside. Some, the types who preferred staying in and had stocked up on instant meals, had no intention of leaving their rooms to join the crowd in the canteen.
Others waited in their dorms, hoping everything would return to normal soon—opening and closing their windows over and over, but never coming down. And then there were the students in the sports science dorms, where people kept pets… and accidents happened when they were caught off guard.
From the canteen, Dou Qing looked toward the nearest dormitory building. It was Chunya, the Xichi Single-Room Female Dormitory, where the eight-thousand-yuan annual rent was double that of the four-person rooms.
From the outside, the ground-floor windows and doors were already completely obscured by a thick, wildly growing green vine.
Dou Qing hadn’t noticed it at first. It was only when he happened to glance up at the building that he realized Fang Yangyang’s dorm was in Chunya—and on that very floor.
“Yangyang,” he said, his voice gentle and clear, tinged with relief. “Is that your dormitory?”
Fang Yangyang looked up absently. Her phone was in power-saving mode, all background apps closed, and she had several fully charged power banks in her backpack as spares. She followed his gaze, her face suddenly turning pale. “Y-yes,” she stammered. “It is.”
“It’s a good thing you weren’t in your room,” Dou Qing said, his brow furrowing slightly as his warm palm squeezed her hand, which was trembling from shock.
“…”
“Yes,” she whispered. “A good thing I wasn’t there.”
A glint of moisture shimmered in her eyes, and Dou Qing felt a sharp pang in his chest. Yet, for some reason, he felt a strange surge of relief at their current situation.
When the apocalypse struck, Fang Yangyang hadn’t been in her dorm—and he was right by her side.
To depend on one another, to support each other in times like these.
What a wonderful thing.
Dou Qing gazed at her exquisite profile, captivated. He squeezed her hand gently, his grip steady and reassuring as he soothed her.
“Do you want to try to sleep for a while? I’m here with you.”
“…” Her gaze was heavy with sorrow and despair. “I can’t sleep,” she whispered. “I’m worried about my family.”
A chill crept down Dou Qing’s spine, like a snake slithering over his vertebrae. He’d suddenly remembered that Fang Yangyang had a family. He, on the other hand, was alone in the world with no ties to bind him.
He cursed his own insensitivity, though his expression remained calm. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry for what?” she asked, glancing at him in surprise. The blush on her nose and her trembling eyelashes betrayed her deep distress.
“For not being able to help you with anything.”
“…”
She didn’t say a word, only pressed her fingers into his palm and sighed softly. “It’s okay. Just having you here is the best thing I could ask for.”
As the apocalypse descended, Yan Fengji hurried out of the laboratory building, his companions trailing behind.
They had just escaped the medical school’s classrooms, where mice were shrieking and gnashing their overgrown teeth. If Yan Fengji hadn’t shouted to the senior students absorbed in their data, the creatures would have chewed through their wire cages, launched themselves out, and possessed the first person they found.
Now, after their calls to family had gone unanswered, the senior students were gripped by anxiety. One senior brother, who lived on campus with his wife and child in the graduate and doctoral dorms, resolved to return for them. Despite the others’ pleas, he insisted on taking his mountain bike from the laboratory parking lot.
It was four or five in the morning. The streetlights were dim, and the road was choked with overgrown greenery. Red-eyed stray animals darted across the asphalt.
Yan Fengji had failed to stop him. The group watched in grim silence as the senior brother’s back receded into the gray dawn.
A cold dread gnawed at Yan Fengji’s gut. Just as the figure on the bicycle shrank to a speck and vanished at the end of the road, a sickening thud echoed through the air.
—The sound was a sickeningly familiar crunch, like two cars colliding.
A senior student clamped a hand over her mouth to stifle a scream, her face drained of color. “Old Yang…”
Yu Zhi, another senior, couldn’t hold back. He lunged for a nearby bicycle, determined to ride out and see what had happened. This time, no one stopped him.
“Old Yu, don’t go!” someone shouted.
“Something’s happened to Old Yang! I have to check on him!” Yu Zhi retorted, already fumbling with his phone to unlock a shared bike. He lived off-campus and usually drove, but his car was parked in a lot a hundred meters from the building. A shared bike was his only option now.
The QR code scanner refused to load. The network signal was dead.
Yu Zhi froze, the gravity of the situation finally sinking in. “I can’t scan the code without a signal…”
The senior student’s face remained pale as she snapped, “Are you stupid? How could you even think of going out there?”
She caught her breath, about to say more, but Yan Fengji spoke softly, “We have to wait for daylight.”
Four o’clock in the morning: the mice had stirred, and they had realized something was wrong.
Four-thirty: Senior Brother Yang had met his end.
By nine in the morning, the sky remained a heavy, oppressive gray, though it was significantly brighter than it had been at four.
Yan Fengji and the four other graduate students had spent the last several hours securing the building. They locked down every room housing experimental animals and dismantled any equipment that could pose a hazard.
They also scavenged for weapons: a blowtorch, fire extinguishers, fruit knives, and iron bars pried from the window grates.
They had managed to stave off hunger with a few instant meals left behind in the labs.
Around three in the afternoon, they prepared to leave the building.
The area around the research facility had never been known for its stray animal population—perhaps because of the chemical runoff ponds nearby, which kept wildlife away.
As they made their way out, they spotted only a few scattered cats and dogs.
But these were no longer ordinary animals. Their size and appearance bore no resemblance to the cute, clever pets they had once known.
Seeing the group’s numbers, the presence of young, able-bodied adults, and the weapons they carried, the creatures held back. They merely watched from a distance, their blood-red eyes fixed on the group in a long, haunting stare.
They found no sign of Senior Brother Yang—only his mountain bike, tangled in a fallen branch that blocked the road.
There was no blood, just the faint gray scuff marks of tires skidding against the pavement.
They passed it in silence. They were dozens of meters away when Yu Zhicai finally found his voice, his words trailing off in a daze. “Old Yang… he…”
A cat’s shriek tore through the air, and Yu Zhicai swallowed the rest of his sentence.
It took a long moment for him to snap out of it. He wiped his eyes and forced himself forward. “Let’s go. We need to get to the Jiangpu Canteen.”
Yan Fengji, whose decisiveness had naturally made him the group’s de facto leader, glanced at his watch. They encountered Meng Zizhao and his own small group of men and women coming from another path.
The two groups merged. Yan Fengji and Meng Zizhao exchanged a few words, and then they set off together toward the Jiangpu Canteen.
“You and your group… you stayed up all night analyzing data and never went back to the dorms?” Meng Zizhao asked.
“Yeah,” Yan Fengji replied.
“We were just doing our morning drills,” Meng Zizhao explained.
Flight students had to maintain a strict physical standard, and the spiral staircase training was a mandatory hurdle. With the small-scale assessment approaching, the group—save for Meng Zizhao himself—had taken advantage of the empty training ground to practice and build muscle memory.
Yan Fengji and Meng Zizhao were both campus celebrities. As a senior and junior, they had acknowledged each other in passing and were acquaintances in their broader social circles.
One was a scion of the revolutionary elite, a textbook example of a privileged child raised in the government compounds—brilliant, capable, and resourceful. The other was the heir to an aviation dynasty, a pilot who had earned his license abroad at eighteen before entering the aviation program in China with top marks.
He was handsome, outgoing, and well-connected.
Their fathers were close, so by all rights, the two young men should have gotten along well.
In reality, they rarely found common ground.
“…”
Meng Zizhao was usually the talkative one, unlike the taciturn Yan Fengji. But now, he had no desire for conversation. His brow was furrowed, his gaze constantly sweeping back to ensure the rest of their group was keeping up.
Streaks of blood stained the road, mingled with torn flesh and discarded clothing. The concrete, once thought to be a clear path, was now shattered and heaved upward by thick roots, making travel difficult.
Their journey, which they had expected to take only a few dozen minutes, dragged on.
Since the two groups had first encountered each other that afternoon, they had navigated a landscape of fallen branches and swarms of stray cats and dogs, all while witnessing the visible horrors strewn across the ground.
The medical students fared better; their experience with animal dissections and cadavers had desensitized them to such sights. The aviation students, however, fought back nausea as they trudged toward the cafeteria.
They knew their destination, but not why they were heading there, until Yan Fengji offered a brief explanation:
“The Jiangpu Canteen has food reserves. There are two convenience stores nearby, and a campus clinic near the dorms.”
Xichi University spanned thousands of acres, a vast campus that included not only student housing but also residential complexes for faculty and their families. It was a self-contained society, complete with its own shopping, medical, and entertainment facilities.
“Also,” Yan Fengji added, “the nearest Yinyue Stage is just two hundred meters from the Jiangpu Canteen.”
The campus’s Yinyue Stage was the hub for the College of Arts and Sports’ broadcasting students, who managed the school’s cultural activities. It, along with the president’s office and other branch stations, handled all official announcements.
This made the Jiangpu Canteen their best option for a temporary base.
“And lastly,” Yan Fengji added, “the cafeteria’s exterior glass is reinforced.”
As they made their way to the destination, they paused several times to count their numbers: Yan Fengji’s group had five; Meng Zizhao’s had seven.
By the time they spotted the Jiangpu Canteen, it was 6:50 p.m. They reached the building at exactly seven o’clock.
The ground outside was slick with spilled slop, the stench overpowering. Inside, the dining hall’s chandeliers flickered. Through the glass, they could see dozens of people—sitting, standing, or leaning against the walls—in a space designed to feed three hundred.
Men and women were scattered inside, dressed in pajamas and casual clothes, their faces pale and streaked with tears.
Yan Fengji’s gaze swept across the Chunya Dormitory, his Adam’s apple bobbing as his pupils constricted when he spotted the floor hidden by greenery. Suddenly, he heard Meng Zizhao chuckle beside him.
“She seems to be the only one not crying.”
Yan Fengji followed his gaze.
Fang Yangyang leaned against Dou Qing’s shoulder, her eyes fixed silently on the cafeteria’s entrance. Her face, as beautiful as peach blossoms, was moist with a shimmering light that didn’t quite look like tears.
“What was her name again? The Department Belle from the Foreign Languages College, Fang Yangyang, right?”
Her bright eyes swept over them with an unreadable expression. She stood up, and the young man beside her, frowning at them, rose to join her. Together, they walked to the cafeteria’s entrance and opened the door.