I stood in the middle of a street that stretched into darkness, and above me, the heavens were cracked open like an egg dropped from a great height. Not clouds. Not stars. Just fissures—jagged wounds that wept light the color of infection. It dripped. Slow. Patient. Each drop sizzled when it hit the ground, leaving small craters in the asphalt that smoked and stank of burnt sugar.
I did not know how I had come here. My last memory was... what? The farm. The wall. The wrongness in the evening sky. My bed. Sleep. But this did not feel like sleep. The air was cold and thick in my lungs. The ground was solid beneath my worn shoes. I could taste copper on my tongue, sharp and real.
A sound echoed down the street. It was not human. A high, chittering cry that rose and fell like laughter played backward. It came from somewhere to my left, where a building had collapsed into a mountain of concrete and twisted rebar. Something moved in the shadows there. Many somethings.
I started walking. Not toward the sound. Away from it. My legs carried me down the ruined street, past storefronts whose windows were shattered, whose signs hung by single chains. A bakery. The smell of old bread still clung to the air, underneath the copper and rot. A child's bicycle lay on its side, one wheel still spinning slowly, creaking with each rotation. No child.
The street opened into a wider avenue. And I saw them.
***
They were people. Or they had been people.
A crowd of perhaps fifty, standing perfectly still in the middle of the intersection, facing away from me. They wore the clothes of ordinary life—jeans, dresses, work uniforms, a school blazer on a boy who couldn't have been older than twelve. Their arms hung at their sides. Their heads were tilted back, faces turned up toward the bleeding sky. None of them moved.
I stopped at the edge of the crowd. My breath caught. Something was wrong with their skin. It was grey. Not the grey of death or sickness, but the grey of stone, of ash, of things that had been drained of everything that made them alive. And it was spreading. I watched a woman in a blue nursing uniform raise one hand—the only movement in the entire crowd—and press it against her own cheek. Where her fingers touched, the grey deepened. Cracks formed. Small at first, then spreading, like mud drying in the sun.
She crumbled.
Not fell. Crumbled. Her body came apart in chunks and dust, collapsing inward, her uniform sagging to the ground empty. The person beside her did not react. None of them did. They just kept staring at the sky, waiting for something I could not see.
Then, as one, they turned.
Fifty faces. Grey. Cracked. Their eyes were open but empty—not blind, but seeing something beyond me, through me. Their mouths hung slack. And they began to walk. Not toward me. Toward a building on the far side of the avenue, where I now saw movement. Living people. Huddled in the doorway of a bank, their faces pale with terror, their hands pressed against the glass as if they could push through it.
The grey people reached them.
A schoolboy walked up to a man who was beating on the glass with his fists, trying to enter a building to escape, and he reached out with one small, grey hand, and he touched the man's wrist. Just a touch. Gentle. Almost tender.
The man's skin turned grey at the point of contact. It spread—up his arm, across his chest, down his legs. He opened his mouth to scream, but no sound came. His eyes went wide, then empty, then cracked. He crumbled where he stood, his clothes falling in a heap.
The schoolboy turned to the next person. A woman. She was holding a baby—a real baby, pink and crying, its small fists waving. She saw the boy coming and she ran. She made it three steps before another grey figure—an old man in a postal uniform—stepped into her path and touched her shoulder.
She crumbled. The baby fell.
I was running before I knew I had decided to run. My legs pumped beneath me, carrying me toward the falling baby, my arms reaching out. But I was too far. Too slow. The baby hit the ground and lay still, its crying cut off. The schoolboy looked down at it. He bent. His grey hand reached out.
I closed my eyes.
When I opened them, the baby was grey. It crumbled into dust that scattered in the hot, still wind.
***
I walked. I do not know for how long.
The city was endless. Every street I turned down held new horrors. The grey people were everywhere—hundreds of them, thousands, wandering in slow, silent packs, touching anything that still lived. And there were other things too.
I saw a thing that had once been a man, but its body had swollen and split, revealing muscle that pulsed with its own light. It moved on all fours, its head twisted backward, its jaws unhinged to reveal teeth that grew and fell and grew again. It was eating something—someone—and it did not look up as I passed.
I saw creatures that walked on two legs but were not human. Short, squat things with green-grey skin and faces like crumpled leather. Goblins. The word surfaced in my mind from old stories, old games. They carried crude weapons—pipes, knives, a length of chain—and they moved in packs, laughing in high, ugly voices as they chased down survivors. I watched them corner a family in an alley. I heard the screams. I heard the laughter. I kept walking.
I saw larger things. Taller than any man, with grey skin and tusks that jutted from their lower jaws. Orcs. They carried axes made of black iron, and they did not run. They walked. Slow. Methodical. Crushing anything in their path. One of them swung its axe at a car and split it in half. Another picked up a grey person—one of the changed—and examined it with dull curiosity before crushing its skull in one hand. The grey person crumbled. The orc grunted and moved on.
I saw shapes in the sky. At first I thought they were birds—large birds, circling. Then one descended, and I saw it clearly. A bat. But not a bat. It was the size of a small car, its wings leathery and torn, its body covered in patchy fur. Its face was something from a fever dream—a pushed-in snout, needle teeth, eyes that glowed faintly red. It swooped down and snatched a running man from the ground, its talons sinking into his shoulders. He screamed as he was lifted into the air. The bat carried him to a nearby rooftop and began to feed. He was still screaming.
I looked away.
***
The sky grew darker. Or perhaps it had always been that dark. Time had no meaning here. I walked through streets that became narrower, buildings that leaned closer, until I was in a part of the city that felt ancient—stones instead of concrete, arches instead of doorways. The bleeding sky was barely visible here, just slivers of infected light between the crowded rooftops.
Something roared.
The sound was deep and rattling, felt in my chest more than heard. I turned a corner and saw it.
A wyvern. Or something like a wyvern I've seen in manhwas. It was crouched in the middle of a small plaza, its leathery wings folded against its sides, its long neck curved down to feed on something I could not see. Its scales were the color of dried blood, and a row of spines ran down its back, quivering with each breath. It was larger than a horse. Larger than a truck. Its tail, tipped with a barbed stinger, swept lazily across the cobblestones, scraping grooves into the stone.
It raised its head and looked at me.
Its eyes were yellow. Slitted. Intelligent. It regarded me for a long moment, its jaws working, something dark dripping from its teeth. Then it made a sound—a low, rumbling growl that I felt in my bones—and turned back to its meal.
I backed away slowly. It did not follow.
And then something charged towards me like a bullet.
I did not see it. I felt it. A cold, sharp pressure in my chest, just below my ribs. I looked down. A spear of black iron protruded from my body, its tip glistening with something that should have been blood. But there was no blood. No pain. Just the cold, and the wrongness of seeing a weapon pass through me as if I were made of smoke.
I turned. Behind me stood one of the orcs—the grey-skinned, tusked things I had seen in the city. It was huge, at least seven feet tall, its face twisted in a snarl of triumph. It held the other end of the spear. It had thrown it. It had killed me.
But I was not dead.
I looked back at the spear in my chest. At the orc. At the burning world around me. And I understood.
This was not real. Not in the way my body was real. I was not here. I was somewhere else, watching, experiencing, but not present. The spear had passed through me because there was nothing there to strike.
The orc's expression shifted. Confusion. Then anger. It roared and lunged at me, its massive hands reaching for my throat. They passed through me.
***
I do not know how I found the valley.
The city simply... ended. One moment I was walking through narrow streets, and the next I was standing at the edge of a vast open space, a bowl of green nestled between hills of grey ash. The sky above it was still cracked and bleeding, but the light here was softer. Cleaner. The air did not taste of copper.
And in the center of the valley stood a tree.
It was not large. Maybe twice the height of a man. Its leaves were pale gold, and they shimmered even without wind. Its bark was smooth and dark, like jade polished by centuries of rain. Nothing around it was touched by the rot. The ground at its base was green—real green, the color of new rice shoots, the color of life. Flowers grew there. Small white flowers that I did not recognize.
I walked toward it. My legs carried me without my willing them, drawn by something I could not name. The grass was soft under my feet. The air smelled of earth and growing things. For the first time since I had arrived in this nightmare, I felt something other than horror. I felt... peace.
I stopped at the base of the tree and looked up.
It was beautiful. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
And then I saw something.
It fell from the highest branch—not dropping, but detaching, floating down through the golden leaves like a single drop of light. It came toward me.
A small shape no larger than my thumb, shaped like a teardrop, colored like old bronze. It stopped in front of my face. I could see it clearly now. The surface was smooth, but there were patterns in it—veins of lighter bronze that shifted and moved, like something alive. It hummed. A low, warm vibration that I felt in my chest. It was a seed.
And then the tree withered.
All at once. The gold leaves turned brown and fell. The dark bark cracked and flaked away. The branches shrank and twisted and turned to dust. In the space of three heartbeats, the tree was gone. The green at its base began to fade, the flowers wilting, the color draining back into the grey of the dead land.
But the seed remained.
A voice spoke. Not in words. In understanding.
"Plant me before the sky breaks. I will hold the ground. You will hold the gate."
I reached for the seed. My hand closed around it, and it was warm—so warm—and solid, and real. The only real thing in this world of ash and death.
Then the world shattered.
***
I was standing in a vast open space of green. An open field, like the valley but larger, brighter, untouched by any rot. A lake near me, its water was sparkling. The sky above was clear and blue—real blue, the color of a summer morning. I could breathe here. I could think.
I looked down at my hand. The seed was still there. Warm. Heavy. Smooth as river stone.
I remembered. I was supposed to plant it.
There was a higher slope in that land. I walked toward it, my feet sinking slightly into the soft grass. The ground rose gently, and at the top of the slope, I could see a small lake in the distance, its surface still and silver. This felt like the right place. The heart of this strange, peaceful world.
I knelt. The soil was dark and rich, giving way easily as I dug with my hands. I placed the seed in the hole and covered it with earth, packing it down gently. Then I walked to the lake, cupped my hands, and brought water back—two handfuls, three, four—sprinkling it over the freshly turned soil.
I waited.
Nothing happened. The ground did not shake. No tree burst forth. Just the seed, sleeping beneath the earth.
The world began to fade. The green field, the lake—all of it grew thin, translucent, like a painting left too long in the sun. The last thing I saw was the small mound of earth where I had planted the seed. And then—
***
I woke sitting up, gasping.
My room. The kang warm beneath me. The smell of wood smoke and old timber. The faint grey light of early dawn through my window. I was home. I was alive. My chest was whole—no spear, no wound, just the pounding of my heart and the sweat soaking through my shirt.
A dream. It had been a dream.
But the seed in my hand was real.
I looked down. It lay in my palm—no larger than my thumb, shaped like a teardrop, colored like old bronze. Warm. Heavy. Smooth as river stone. The same seed I had planted in that green field. The same seed that had spoken to me in the dying world.
The house was silent. Outside, the dogs were quiet—too quiet.
Then the panel appeared.
Not in front of my eyes. Inside them. A rectangle of soft light that hung in my vision no matter which way I looked, translucent, like seeing through clean water. Characters in gold—not printed, but written in light.
SYSTEM INITIALIZED.
HOST: ZHANG WEI.
GUARDIAN OF [The Tree Of Life]
TIME UNTIL PHENOMENON: 13 HOURS, 3 MINUTES.
I stared at it. My heart was not racing. It was something else—a cold stillness, the kind that comes when you stop denying what you already know. The dream. The wrongness in the sky last night. The dogs—they had been dreaming too, I realized now. They had seen something.
The panel changed.
NEW ABILITY UNLOCKED: APPRAISAL.
NEW ABILITY UNLOCKED: SYSTEM STORE.
NEW ABILITY UNLOCKED: BLESSING OF LIFE.
NEW ABILITY UNLOCKED: SPATIAL POCKET.
And then suddenly…
Something flooded inside me, a rush of knowledge—like remembering something you never learned. The angle of a plow blade that would turn soil without breaking its structure. The ratio of ash to lime for a mortar that would last a hundred winters. The way to graft a fruit tree so the wound healed faster than the fungus could spread. The weight of a hammer that would not tire your arm after a thousand strikes. And things I've never heard of anywhere.
I knew these things. Not as facts. As instincts. As if I had been doing them for hundreds of years instead of twenty-three.
And underneath that, something else. A presence. A warmth in my chest, behind my sternum, like a second heart. I closed my eyes and saw it: the tree from my dream. Not dead. Alive. Small, no taller than my knee, but growing. It stood in an open field of green that existed nowhere and everywhere—inside me like an inner space. A consciousness that had not been there yesterday.
The tree was in me. The seed had not just been planted in the dream. It had been planted in my soul.
I opened my eyes. The panel was still there, patient.
THE TREE OF LIFE IS BOUND TO YOUR SOUL. PLANT ITS SAPLING IN THE EARTH BEFORE THE PHENOMENON. IT WILL KEEP YOU SAFE FROM DANGERS.
A branch materialized in my other hand. I had not seen it appear. It was simply there—a cutting no longer than my forearm, with two small leaves the color of pale gold. The same leaves from the dream. It was warm. It pulsed faintly, like a heartbeat.
I got out of bed.
***
The house was still asleep. I moved through the dark rooms without making a sound, my bare feet finding the cold stone floor, then the wooden threshold of the back door. The dogs stirred as I passed. I was thinking I'm getting mad, but still my body moved on its own. Hei lifted his head, looked at me, and did not bark. He knew. They all knew.
Outside, the sky was the deep blue of false dawn. The stars were still out, but the east was paling. I walked across the courtyard, past the outdoor stove, past the tool shed, past the well. The air was cool and damp and smelled of soil and leaves and the distant promise of rain.
I stopped in the open space in front of the orchard.
It was the center of our property—it was like the heart. From here, you could see the orchard to the west, the rice paddies to the east, the vegetable gardens to the north, the vineyard to the south. My grandfather had once told me that this was where the original house had stood, before the land reform, before they moved it closer to the road. The ground here was old. Deep. It had been walked on by four generations.
This was where the tree would go.
I knelt. The soil was cool and loose. I dug with my hands—not because I had no tool, but because it felt right. Fingers first, then palms, scooping out a hole the size of a bowl. The earth clung to my skin, dark and rich, and I could feel it responding to something. Not me. The branch.
I placed the cutting in the hole. Held it upright with one hand while I pushed the soil back with the other. Packed it down gently, the way my father had taught me to plant seedlings—firm enough to stand, loose enough to breathe.
Then I sat back on my heels and waited.
For a long moment, nothing happened. The branch stood there, two pale gold leaves catching the first light. It looked small. Fragile. Like something a chicken could scratch out of the ground.
Then the panel appeared again.
THE TREE OF LIFE (SAPLING) HAS BEEN PLANTED.
FIRST BLESSING AVAILABLE. THE FIRST BLESSING IS STRONGER THAN ALL SUBSEQUENT BLESSINGS. IT IS RECOMMENDED FOR USE ON THE TREE ITSELF.
I understood without being told. This was not a gift to hoard. It was a gift to give.
I placed my palm on the soil above the cutting's roots. Closed my eyes. And I blessed it.
The word is not accurate. There is no word in our language for what I did. I poured something out of myself—not strength, not will, not hope. Something unknown. Something that had been sleeping in the seed and had woken in my chest when the tree took root inside me. It flowed down my arm, through my palm, into the soil.
The ground shook.
Not hard. A tremor, like a heavy cart passing on the road. But I felt it in my bones. The cutting grew.
It did not grow the way a tree grows—slowly, invisibly, over years. It grew the way a flame catches: all at once, from nothing to something. The trunk thickened and rose. The branches split and spread. The leaves unfurled—not just gold now, but green shot through with veins of amber, and then more green than gold, and then green so deep it was almost black at the edges.
Within a minute, the cutting was a tree.
Five meters tall. Two meters wide at the crown. Its trunk was thicker than my thigh, its bark smooth and dark, its roots visibly pushing through the soil in all directions, spreading outward like rivers finding their beds.
I sat back. My hand was tingling. My chest felt lighter, as if I had given away something I had not known I was carrying.
The tree pulsed once. A wave of warmth radiated from it—not heat, but something else. Something that felt like safety.
The panel appeared.
THE TREE OF LIFE HAS REACHED INITIAL MATURITY.
THE LAND WITHIN THE WALLS IS NOW BLESSED.
NEGATIVE EFFECTS OF THE PHENOMENON WILL NOT REACH THIS SPACE.
I stood up. The sky was lighter now—the blue of early morning, the stars gone. The tree stood in the center of our land, and I could feel it. Not see it with my eyes. Feel it. A presence at the edge of my awareness, like knowing someone is standing behind you even when you cannot see them.
The panel changed again.
NEW NOTIFICATION SYSTEM ACTIVE.
YOU MAY NOW OBSERVE THE BLESSED LAND AT ANY TIME.
AN EYE HAS BEEN OPENED.
And I saw.
Not with my eyes. With something else. The property unfolded in my mind—every corner, every field, every building. The orchard with its twenty-three varieties. The rice paddies with their knee-high stalks. The vegetable gardens, the fish pond, the vineyard. The animal pens with their sleeping inhabitants. The house where my family still slept. The wall.
I could see it all at once. Not as a map. As a living thing. I saw the dogs shift in their sleep. I saw the fish turn in the pond. I saw the leaves on the fruit trees tremble in a breeze I could not feel. And I saw notifications—small gold characters floating above certain spots, telling me things I had not asked to know.
Rice paddy. Health: Strong. Yield projection: High.
Cow, female. Health: Good. Late-stage pregnancy detected.
Well. Water level: Stable. Purity: High.
I blinked. The vision did not go away. It simply waited, patient, like a second set of eyes that never closed.
***
The tree was still growing. Not visibly now—but I could feel it, roots spreading underground, reaching toward the wall. And as they reached, the wall began to change.
I walked toward the eastern boundary. The stone wall rose three meters high, grey and solid, the wall we had spent nearly everything to build. But now, vines were growing up its face. Not slowly. I watched them emerge from the soil at the base, green shoots that thickened as they climbed, their leaves unfurling in seconds. They spread across the stone, weaving together, covering the grey with living green.
And the wall itself was changing. The stones seemed to settle—not settling, growing. The mortar thickened. The gaps filled. The wall did not get taller, but it got denser. I could feel it through my feet: the ground beneath the wall was also changing, roots from the tree threading through the foundation stones, binding them together.
I walked the perimeter. The vines were spreading everywhere, climbing the north wall, the south wall, the east and west. And where they climbed, the wall grew thicker. A meter more in thickness. One and a quarter meters had become two and a quarter. The vines were not just decoration. They were armor.
At the top of the wall, the vines had woven themselves into a flat surface—not a path, but something that could become one. I climbed the wooden ladder we kept near the north gate and stood on top of the wall for the first time. The vines held my weight. The stone beneath them did not shift.
From here, I could see the town road in the distance. The Lins' property. The mountains to the west. And I could see the sky. Still blue. Still normal. But somewhere beyond the horizon, something was waiting.
The panel appeared again.
THE BLESSING HAS STRENGTHENED THE BOUNDARY.
ALL NATURAL ELEMENTS WITHIN THE WALLS HAVE BEEN ENHANCED.
CROPS AND LIVESTOCK WILL NOW PRODUCE BLESSED GOODS WITH TEMPORARY AND PERMANENT EFFECTS.
I read the words twice. Temporary effects. Permanent effects.
I thought of the vineyard. The rice paddies. The cows and chickens and ducks. The medicinal herbs my grandmother tended. Would they change? Would the vegetables we ate tomorrow be different from the vegetables we ate yesterday?
The panel answered a question I had not asked.
BLESSED CROPS MAY GRANT STRENGTH, SPEED, OR OTHER ATTRIBUTES WHEN CONSUMED.
SOME CROPS ARE MARKED: "BLESSED BY ???" THESE GRANT PERMANENT ENHANCEMENTS.
THE ORIGIN OF THE BLESSING IS NOT FULLY KNOWN.
The question marks were strange. The system did not know everything. That was somehow comforting.
I climbed down from the wall and walked back to the tree.
It stood in the center of the open space, five meters tall, its leaves rustling in a wind that did not touch me. The ground around it was already different—greener, softer, covered in small flowers I had never seen before. The air smelled different too. Cleaner. Sharper. Like the first rain after a long drought.
I sat down at the base of the tree, my back against its trunk, and closed my eyes.
The inner space was still there. The small tree inside me had grown too—it was now the same size as the one outside, as if they were mirrors of each other. The field of green around it had expanded. And I understood, without being told, that this inner space was mine. A place I could go. A place where the system lived.
I opened my eyes. The panel was waiting.
TIME UNTIL PHENOMENON: 12 HOURS, 12 MINUTES.
I had just half a day left now.