The wristbands were catching fire, terrifying many people. Even if their own wristbands were fine, they frantically pulled them off and threw them far away.
Amid the chaos, Pei Ran placed the cat carrier she was carrying on the ground.
The little white cat was badly frightened. The fur on its back, resembling garlic cloves, had puffed up like a flower. It huddled in panic inside the carrier, its eyes wide, meowing non-stop from start to finish, its voice now hoarse from meowing.
The cat could make sounds, but the people couldn’t.
Pei Ran unzipped the cat carrier.
Before she could fully unzip it, the kitten struggled out through the gap and darted away, disappearing in an instant.
W said, “You saved a cat. I thought you were planning to keep it.”
Pei Ran glanced up at the smoke-filled street littered with blood and flesh, then casually tossed aside the now-empty cat carrier.
“I can barely keep myself alive, let alone raise a cat?”
The dormant state didn’t affect animals for now. That little cat, left alone, might actually live longer than if it stayed with humans.
Pei Ran continued forward, doing her best to avoid the chaotic crowd.
Charred wrists were horrifyingly black, faces twisted in silent screams, blood spraying among the crowd, and figures in the smoke shattered into countless pieces.
W seemed determined to chat with her about trivial matters, his calm, emotionless voice right by her ear: “We’re quite different, then. I like keeping pets.”
Pei Ran shifted her attention from the crowd and asked, “You’re an AI. How do you keep pets?”
“They’re virtual pets, raised in my servers,” W said.
Pei Ran understood. “Virtual pets are much easier to take care of, not as troublesome as real ones.”
“No. The virtual pets I raise can also get sick and die. You have to remember to feed them, give them water, clean up after them every day. If you don’t give them enough attention, they can get depressed too—I specifically set it up this way, everything strictly following how real pets are.”
Pei Ran fell silent for a moment. “You really are…”
Bored out of your mind.
Oh, right. He doesn’t have a mind.
Pei Ran asked, “So what virtual pets do you have? A virtual ball? Does it look like you?”
W: “…”
W: “Recently, I’ve been raising a snake.”
Pei Ran’s gaze drifted to the roadside.
By the roadside, a mother’s wrist was charred, and she desperately endured the pain, trying to distance herself from her child.
But the child, frightened, immediately followed, their small hands flailing in the air, frantically grabbing at the mother’s clothes. The child’s mouth, sealed with tape, tore open.
“Mom…” came a tearful voice.
The mother froze for a moment.
She reached out, one last time, and wrapped her charred wrist around the child.
Amid the blaring alarms, the two figures—one large, one small—vanished together from the sidewalk.
Pei Ran averted her gaze and quickly steered the conversation with W back on track: “What color is the snake you’re raising?”
Back in the bunker, she had once met someone who carried a snake with them. It was a beautiful little snake, only as thick as a finger, emerald green all over with pitch-black eyes. It would coil around their wrist like a bracelet.
“It’s golden, still very young. It has a good appetite lately and enjoys eating frozen mice.”
“Did you create the mice too?”
“Yes,” W continued, searching for topics. “I’m also planning to raise a box of cockroaches in a few days.”
Pei Ran paused for a second. “What did you say you wanted to raise??”
Cockroaches.
There were plenty of cockroaches in the bunker. They were large, could fly, and flew clumsily, like small bombers. They lived underground with humans and would crawl on people while they slept.
W keenly noticed that her tone had changed when she asked this question.
W quickly replied, “Never mind,” and immediately changed the subject. “What do you think I should raise instead?”
“Raise whatever you want,” Pei Ran said. “How about a colony of ants?”
“I’ve actually raised two colonies of ants before,” W said. “I kept them in the same transparent tank. They often waged wars against each other, and in the end, one colony nearly wiped out the other.”
Pei Ran: “…”
Pei Ran: “Well, our interests differ. I was just thinking that if I had enough food, I could feed them or something.”
W said, “I often feed them insects.”
Pei Ran thought for a moment. “Why don’t you raise a spider? A big one, brown and furry all over. I read a novel once where the female protagonist had a spider like that.”
As the human and the sphere chatted, they made their way through the streets.
Everywhere, there were pale faces and panicked eyes. People couldn’t communicate, and even if family and friends were right beside them, it felt like they were miles apart.
Everyone was alone, struggling and dying in an endless sea of silence.
Pei Ran understood W’s well-meaning intentions.
In this fiery hell on earth, he was continuously talking to her, discussing topics completely unrelated to the chaos around them, creating a separate world for her to help her stay calm and rational.
The wristband on her arm vibrated, and Pei Ran glanced at it.
She had already set the wristband to not display message content. Someone had sent pictures—it was the Federal Department of National Defense and Security.
W also spoke up: “The review has been approved. The Federation has sent warning images to all citizens.”
Pei Ran opened the message.
This time, it wasn’t just one image but a whole set of pictures. There were no words, but the illustrations were very clear.
The images were simple line drawings. The main character was a girl with a ponytail, her mouth sealed with tape. She was handling everything on her body that contained text. In the pictures, all text was depicted as chaotic scribbles.
Her backpack was slightly different from Pei Ran’s, with two extra pockets, but the buckles and zipper layout looked familiar, as if it followed a recognizable pattern.
Pei Ran: “Did you draw these?”
W: “Yes.”
Black Well had directly sent out the images he had drawn to everyone.
Pei Ran scrolled through them.
The girl removed her wristband and placed it far away. Then, in the settings on her virtual screen, she turned off thumbnail displays for images and deleted all the pictures.
In the final image, a boy opened a text-containing emoji pack on his wristband, and his arm was burned to a crisp.
W was quite considerate—he changed the main character and didn’t burn her arm.
Pei Ran closed the screen. “If that so-called review process could have been faster, and the warning had been sent out before the wristbands were attacked, so many people wouldn’t have died.”
W fell silent for a moment.
“They did their best. Black Well’s temporary decision-making committee was busy today with the second-phase shielding project, completely overwhelmed. It took them over twenty-seven minutes to gather everyone, quickly discuss, and pass the decision.
“They didn’t intentionally delay. They were hindered by the system and the inherent limitations of human communication and decision-making abilities.”
W’s tone was calm and detached: “In crises like this, if all problems were handed over to artificial intelligence to handle, allowing AI to comprehensively analyze the pros and cons, provide various solutions, and select the optimal one—even if it involved writing a detailed report—it would take only a few seconds.”
As a human, Pei Ran couldn’t argue with that.
W continued, “Black Well has decided to optimize the process. Marshal Vina will now be fully responsible for information dissemination. In the future, sending warning messages will only need to go through her, so it should be faster.”
Pei Ran looked down at the sphere.
He wasn’t just aware of everything happening inside Black Well—he knew it all inside and out.
The warning had been sent out, but it was twenty-seven minutes too late, and everything had changed.
No one knew how many people had lost their lives because their wristbands were attacked, their arms burned to charcoal, or their bodies turned into fireballs.
The wristbands catching fire also caused widespread panic. Many people simply discarded their wristbands, meaning they could no longer receive subsequent warnings from the Federation.
However, those who did receive the warning acted immediately.
Right on the streets, people frantically stripped off their clothes, tearing off labels with their hands and teeth, and cleared their bags of anything containing text.
Fortunately, even if they had discarded their wristbands, people could still see what others were doing and followed suit.
In just a moment, the sidewalks were littered with discarded papers and documents.
In this era where everything seemed to be digitized, there were still so many physical items with text on them.
ID cards, driver’s licenses, bank cards, diplomas, property deeds, marriage certificates, divorce certificates, contracts, IOUs, memorial books, journals, love letters, little notes.
All these important items, carried with them even while fleeing for their lives, were now hastily thrown onto the streets.
Everything external—wealth, glory, contracts, gratitude and grudges, love and hatred, things they had worked hard for and seemed unable to let go of—were stripped away along with the text.
Everyone was reduced to their pure, biological selves.
A cold wind swept between the buildings, sending countless documents spiraling into the air. They caught flames, transforming into burning butterflies. These butterflies spread their bright, dazzling wings, carrying the fire to more places.
The fire grew larger.
Thick smoke billowed forward, almost completely engulfing the streets and obscuring vision.
Pei Ran’s eyes stung, tears streaming down her face.
The worst part was her throat.
Pei Ran stopped, held her breath, and took out a bottle of water. She soaked the layers of her scarf and pressed it against her nose.
Even with the wet scarf filtering the air, the acrid smell was still unbearable, making it almost impossible to suppress the instinct to cough.
For a moment, she felt a pang of envy for W.
He couldn’t cough, nor could he shed tears. His black eyes swept indifferently through the thick smoke.
W noticed her deteriorating condition and spoke up: “Pei Ran, the smoke is too thick. We shouldn’t go any further. Let’s find another way to locate transportation.”
Pei Ran’s mind was in turmoil.
Even the antique car had broken down, leaving them without their only means of transportation. Pei Ran had no idea what other vehicles they could use. If they didn’t hurry to find the Yehai No. 7, would they really have to walk the two thousand kilometers to Black Well?
Pei Ran asked W, “If the whole city is on fire, will the Yehai No. 7 still be able to leave?”
W replied, “The starting station of Yehai No. 7 is built underground. The entire route out of the city is through sealed tunnels. I estimate that the fire above ground shouldn’t have much impact.”
“But, Pei Ran,” his metallic sphere rotated halfway, looking back at the burning streets behind them, “the fire is spreading too fast. If we keep going deeper, we might soon have no way to retreat.”
They could end up trapped in the Yehai city by the flames.
Pei Ran tightened her grip on the string tied to the metal sphere and asked him, “So what do you suggest? Move forward or turn back?”
W paused for a second before answering, “I’ll follow your lead.”
Pei Ran said, “I want to move forward.”
W replied, “Alright.”
Pei Ran continued walking forward.
In the smoke, a series of coughs suddenly erupted nearby. The coughing was violent, as if it could tear the lungs apart.
Finally, someone couldn’t hold it in anymore.
One. Two. Three.
In the gray-black smoke, the figure of the person hunched over, coughing, still stood there. The coughing continued.
Cough. Cough. Cough.
Coughing was actually safe.
The people around them were almost crying with relief. Coughing sounds immediately rose, one after another.
Pei Ran observed her surroundings and, after confirming it was truly safe, also peeled off the tape from her mouth. A series of coughs spilled out, her throat burning with pain.
The human and the sphere moved through the thick smoke, navigating through streets large and small.
“Are we there yet?” Pei Ran asked.
A cold wind swept through, dispersing the smoke. Ahead, a huge advertisement on the facade of a building came into view.
The sign was in a retro style, with paint sprayed on tin. The text had already been scorched away by the fire, leaving only a half painting: the front of an old-fashioned train.
They had finally arrived at the starting station of Yehai No. 7.
The station was built underground, and the entrance looked like a subway entrance, maintaining the classical aesthetic. There was no iris scanning, just a row of turnstiles blocking the way.
Not far from the entrance, a group of people had gathered—about thirty or forty of them. It seemed they also wanted to take the Yehai No. 7 to escape this burning city.
Pei Ran scanned the area first but didn’t see Ai Xia. With the city of Yehai burning like this, she wasn’t sure if Ai Xia and her grandmother had made it safely into the city.
At the turnstile entrance, people had also discarded various items on the ground, cautiously maintaining a distance of one or two meters from each other. They peered tentatively into the station, but no one moved.
Pei Ran was puzzled: “What are they doing?”
W answered, “It’s the turnstiles. They don’t look normal.”
His eyes were cameras, equipped with zoom capabilities, giving him far better vision than Pei Ran’s human eyes.
As they got closer, Pei Ran could see it too.
At the entrance, there were eight turnstiles in a row, their bodies covered in silver metal. Each turnstile had a pair of transparent fan-shaped barriers that appeared to open and close.
In the hazy, swirling smoke, these turnstiles weren’t stationary. They were writhing unnaturally, like insects.
The fan-shaped barriers trembled slightly, like transparent insect wings, emitting a faint buzzing sound.
The originally square, rigid metal turnstiles now seemed to have softened, as if something alive was hiding inside. The surfaces of the machines bulged in places, like bubbles rising in a swamp.
The bulging parts didn’t look like metal anymore—they resembled human skin, with faint blue veins visible beneath.
The scene was too bizarre. No one dared to approach.
Pei Ran muttered, “Another insane fusion entity.”
W’s voice was filled with concern: “The Federation has never had this many fusion entities before.”
The world was becoming more chaotic.
Suddenly, someone in the crowd moved.
It was a student-looking boy, wearing a dark blue down jacket, a mask, and carrying a backpack. He first turned in place a few times, then took step after step toward the strange turnstiles.
Several other students stood with him, but now that he was walking forward alone, his friends were stunned.
A girl in a red knitted hat grabbed his arm, but unable to speak, she could only use her eyes to plead with him not to take the risk.
The boy ignored her.
He turned around, waving his arm as if swatting away a mosquito, shaking off his friend’s hand, and stubbornly pressed on.
Pei Ran watched him closely, pondering, “His eyes don’t look right.”
W agreed: “His reaction speed is off too. His eyes are moving slowly, and he has no expression. It’s like he’s sleepwalking.”