Lu Zhao's seventeenth urge to quit his job struck as his leather shoe heel jammed into the subway grating. The evening rush hour transfer corridor pulsed with a suffocating tide of sweat-dampened suits mingling with cloying perfumes. On a nearby screen, a virtual idol chirped promotions for metaverse real estate, her AI-synthesized sweetness clashing discordantly with the ventilation shaft's metallic drone. It was a symphony of urban exhaustion.
Crouching to free his shoe, Lu Zhao felt the familiar weight shift in his briefcase. From its side pocket slid an unopened blister pack of Estazolam. His psychiatrist's warning from that morning echoed, sharp and unwelcome: "Mr. Lu, if you persist on three hours of sleep a night…"
A glint of silver in the drain gutter severed the thought.
There, wedged between rusted iron bars, was a coin. It spun impossibly on its edge. Leaning closer, Lu Zhao saw its rim wasn't serrated like standard currency, but etched with densely packed, unfamiliar wedge-shaped characters. This was no coin from any nation he knew. Curiosity overriding caution, he nudged it with his pen.
Agony, sudden and searing, exploded in his chest as if a branding iron had been pressed against bone. A choked gasp escaped him. He stumbled back, crashing against a steel support pillar, cold sweat instantly soaking through his dress shirt. Fumbling with trembling fingers, he pulled his collar aside. Just below his collarbone, over the third rib, a livid crimson mark was rising to the surface of his skin. It resembled an ouroboros, the ancient serpent devouring its own tail.
Then, the world stopped.
The escalator froze mid-step. A spilled latte hung suspended in mid-air, its brown droplets arrested in a perfect, impossible arc. Lu Zhao's gaze darted wildly. Every digital clock in sight – station timetables, security monitors, phone screens glimpsed in frozen hands – flashed a stark, ominous 00:00. The numbers on the security scanner display weren't just frozen; they flickered and scrambled like frantic insects.
"Attention all passengers…"
The sudden blare of the station announcement jolted him like an electric shock. But it wasn't the sound that paralyzed him with terror; it was the movement. The crowd, moments ago engrossed in their phones, was now stirring. Their motions were jerky, mechanical, like malfunctioning puppets. A girl in a sailor-style school uniform snapped her head sideways at a sickening ninety-degree angle, fixing him with a wide, vacant smile. A businessman in a rumpled suit dragged sharp fingernails down his own cheek, carving a precise, spiraling Fibonacci sequence into the flesh. From the napes of their necks, translucent filaments snaked upwards, converging on the station's vaulted ceiling, weaving themselves into a colossal, shimmering cocoon suspended in the void.
The coin on the grating melted. One moment it was solid metal, the next it was a pool of quicksilver, alive and purposeful. It flowed towards Lu Zhao, snaking across the grimy tiles with unnatural speed before plunging into the deep crease of his palm – his life line. He flailed his arm, trying desperately to shake off the invasive liquid, but it was futile. He watched in horror as the silver substance flowed beneath his skin, tracing the exact shape of the ouroboros brand now burning on his chest. A sharp, needle-like pain pierced his skull, and a voice, utterly alien, devoid of any human cadence, resonated directly within the grooves of his brain:
[Candidate 7142, Verification Complete]
A thick, blood-red mist erupted from the depths of the train tunnels. Where it touched the station floor, the concrete tiles cracked and buckled, giving way to jagged, archaic inscriptions – brutal, angular characters reminiscent of ancient oracle bone script. Lu Zhao scrambled backwards towards the ticket gates, his hand brushing against something warm and slick. He recoiled. The stainless-steel pillar he leaned against moments ago was weeping. Fresh, dark blood oozed from its surface. The familiar ceramic tiles lining the walls felt disturbingly yielding, soft and visceral under his touch, like exposed internal organs.
"This… this can't be happening," he stammered, fumbling for his phone. His shaking fingers swiped to the emergency dial pad. But before he could hit call, the screen dissolved. In its place bloomed a stark, pulsating red countdown, framed by ominous black blocks:
■□■□ 365 23:59:47 ■□■□
Across the platform, a digital billboard advertising bottled water flickered violently. The image of a pristine water bottle shattered explosively on screen. The cascading shards of virtual water didn't fall; they hung suspended, each droplet refracting a horrifying cosmic vista: a shimmering, flattening wave – a dimensional weapon – engulfing an emerald-green planet. Fleets of alien ships caught in the wave distorted and flared into brilliant, chaotic patterns, eerily reminiscent of Van Gogh's Starry Night. As the familiar "Yibao" logo on the virtual bottle morphed into intricate Babylonian cuneiform, the very air of the station was split by a sound – a pure, resonant shing! like a masterfully forged blade cutting through silk, followed by a low, reverberating dragon's roar.
A figure materialized, stepping onto the platform as if descending ripples of solidified light.
She was clad in crimson, a stark slash of color in the monochrome horror. Between her thigh-high socks and short skirt, slivers of pale skin were visible, wrapped in bandages that seemed ancient. Dark stains seeped through the wrappings, forming complex, shifting patterns Lu Zhao dimly recognized – not mere oracle bones, but the archaic glyphs of the Sumerian King List, chronicling reigns stretching back tens of thousands of years. In her hand, she held a long, straight sword – a Tang dao. Stardust, impossibly real, dripped from its honed edge. Where each droplet struck the ground, it didn't splash; it burned, searing miniature black holes into reality that snapped shut with tiny bursts of distorted light. The pommel, intricately carved with the gluttonous Taotie motif, pulsed with an inner radiance so intense it made the space around it shimmer and double-expose like a flawed photograph.
"Remember," the girl's voice was calm, detached, cutting through the station's unnatural silence. As she spoke, her lips stretched impossibly wide, tearing towards her ears in a grotesque parody of a smile. Yet, the expression wasn't terrifying; it was rendered disturbingly serene, even sacred, by the swirling, miniature galaxies churning within her pupils. "When the countdown reaches zero…" she continued, her galaxy-eyes locking onto his, "…smile into the void."
Lu Zhao's temples throbbed. Years of watching gritty crime procedurals kicked in. Instinct drove him towards the red emergency box housing the fire hose. But the ancient bone-script characters etched into the floor reacted. They surged upwards like living things, coiling and hardening into thick chains of verdigrised bronze. They clamped around his ankles with crushing force before he'd taken two steps. He was yanked backwards, not across the floor, but through a jagged tear in the fabric of space that had appeared behind him. As he was dragged into the impossible darkness, his final glimpse of the familiar world was the wide, emerald-green eye of a stray cat perched on a railing. Reflected in that feline pupil wasn't the station he knew, but a nightmarish distortion: the entire platform twisting, warping, collapsing in on itself, folding into the impossible, non-orientable shape of a Klein bottle.
Beyond the tear, for a fleeting, horrifying instant, he saw them: countless monoliths, stark and silent, adrift in the infinite blackness of interstellar space – tombstones for civilizations long extinguished.
The fall lasted an eternity compressed into a single heartbeat, or perhaps a heartbeat stretched across eons. Time lost all meaning. Then came the impact – a jarring, bone-rattling collision with a surface that rang like a massive, ancient bell. Lu Zhao lay winded on cold, intricately patterned bronze. Groaning, he pushed himself up onto his elbows.
He was in a vast, incomprehensible space. Suspended around him, hanging in a void that defied gravity and perspective, were 302 identical cages. Each cage, wrought from the same dark, unidentifiable metal, bore the same prominent symbol: the ouroboros, the serpent devouring its tail. Directly across from his own cage, a man in a flimsy hospital gown thrashed and screamed. His flesh wasn't just melting; it was liquefying, sloughing off his bones like hot wax. The man's agonized shrieks didn't just fill Lu Zhao's ears; they resonated with a terrifying, impossible familiarity. They were the exact same tones, the same cadence, as the station's automated announcement, now twisted into a horrific welcome:
"WELCOME TO THE FINAL DESTINATION—"
(End of Chapter)