Li Wei stared at the shovel in his hand, its wooden shaft smoothed by years of his father's sweat. The earth beneath his boots was dry that morning, cracked like the skin of old men, thirsty for rain that hadn't come in weeks. The fields behind him stretched toward the distant mountains, stubborn and hungry, refusing to bloom. He wiped the back of his hand across his brow and looked up at the sky, pale and empty.
No clouds. No mercy.
The Sichuan sun bore down like a silent executioner.
His father's voice echoed faintly behind him, calling instructions, then coughing—always coughing. The man had been coughing for three years, ever since the pesticide barrel broke open near the west field. But they couldn't afford a doctor. They could barely afford to eat.
Dig deep," his father rasped from the porch, voice like gravel soaked in smoke. "The roots don't grow shallow."
That was his father's favorite phrase. About crops. About people.
But Li Wei knew better now. Roots didn't matter when the soil was poisoned.
He had been digging for hours, pretending to care about the carrots they'd plant next week. In truth, he was counting the days until he could leave. The acceptance letter had arrived two weeks ago—Beijing University, Department of Classical Literature and Historical Studies. Full scholarship. The envelope was still hidden under the loose floorboard in his bedroom, right beneath the rotting corner of the bedframe. He hadn't told his parents yet. Not because he feared they would refuse—he feared they would beg him to stay.
And he wasn't sure he could say no if they did.
His younger sister ran past him barefoot, chasing a chicken. The bird flapped toward the well, wings flailing, feathers loose in the wind. Her laughter rang out like a small bell in a quiet temple. For a moment, Li Wei allowed himself to smile.
That moment ended the way all good things did: with blood.
The neighbors came at sundown.
Five men. Three with knives. One with a rusted hunting rifle. The fifth was the magistrate's nephew, a round-faced boy who once begged Li Wei for help with his essays.
They accused his father of stealing fertilizer.
It was a lie, of course. But lies in the village carried more weight than truth when they came from a magistrate's mouth. They dragged both parents out of the house. His sister screamed. He tried to fight. Someone hit him in the back of the skull with a brick. He remembered the cold taste of dirt in his mouth. He remembered the smell of burning hay. He remembered his mother crying his name one last time before the wind swallowed it.
When he woke up the next morning, the house was ashes.
The fields were trampled. His sister was gone. They said the magistrate sent her to live with an aunt in Mianyang, but Li Wei never saw her again.
He didn't cry.
He didn't speak.
He dug through the blackened wreckage of their home and found the floorboard still intact. The letter was untouched. He folded it, placed it in his coat, and walked down the road leading away from the village.
No one stopped him.
No one dared.
He arrived in Beijing with two shirts, a bag of peanuts, and rage so tightly coiled inside his chest it had replaced his lungs.
They welcomed him like a prize. He was a poor boy from the countryside who spoke in perfect Mandarin, quoted ancient poets, and wrote essays that made professors weep. They called him a miracle.
But they never asked what he had buried to get there.
In the university dorms, he kept to himself. He shared a room with no one. He never joined clubs. He declined invitations to parties, study groups, trips to bars. When others laughed, he remained silent. When they complained about their grades or breakups, he looked through them like glass.
At night, he read.
Not just history, but the uglier parts of it. The purges. The betrayals. The regimes that thrived on death. He studied how empires fell and why.
The answer was always the same: the people.
People killed each other for power. For status. For food. For land. For ideology. Sometimes just for the pleasure of cruelty.
He read until he no longer believed in humanity at all.
Then the world began to die again.
It started slowly.
A fever in Chengdu. Strange behavior. Attacks. Hospitals overwhelmed.
The media downplayed it. "Localized panic." "Unconfirmed reports."
Then the trains stopped running.
Then the police blocked off entire districts.
Then Li Wei saw a man leap onto a woman's back in broad daylight and bite her ear off before anyone could scream. No drugs. No warning. Just blood and teeth.
He didn't intervene.
He only watched.
And when the crowd panicked, he walked away before the screaming began.
The university closed the next day. They told students to return home.
Li Wei had no home to return to.
He waited.
Barricaded in his dorm. Rationed food. Listened to the radio static deepen.
Three nights later, the dorm was overrun.
He escaped through a service ladder.
He watched his professor fall three stories, splatter on the concrete, and then rise again with bones cracked like puzzle pieces forced together.
He did not flinch.
He moved like a ghost through the empty streets of Beijing, scavenging, observing. He learned fast.
The infected were not the worst of it.
It was the people.
Within two weeks, the survivors had split into groups. Some formed cults, convinced this was divine punishment. Others became predators, stripping the weak of supplies, dignity, life.
Li Wei joined neither.
He traveled alone. Silent. Focused.
He once watched a group of bandits torture a man for a bag of rice. When they left him bleeding, Li Wei approached the dying man, sat beside him, and waited. When the man's breath stopped, he took the rice and left.
He saw a mother lock her son outside a supply closet to save food. The boy screamed until his throat bled. When he turned, infected already charging, the mother slid the bolt shut.
Li Wei kept walking.
This wasn't new.
This was just the mask removed.
When the infected finally overran the west gate of the city, the sky burned red with smoke, and the television tower collapsed in a storm of sparks. Li Wei stood atop an overpass, wrapped in a tattered black coat, and stared down at the chaos below.
Bodies writhed across the expressway. Fires consumed buildings. Choppers fell like insects from the sky. Somewhere, a woman howled Li Wei's own name, but he knew it was just coincidence. No one left alive knew him anymore.
He lifted the machete he had scavenged from a police station.
He had cleaned it. Sharpened it. Named it: Silence.
And then he moved.
Through the rot. Through the carnage. Through the ruins of what the world pretended to be.
Not to save.
Not to avenge.
But to survive—and, perhaps, to punish.
The world had allowed his parents to burn.
Now he would watch it rot.
And he would decide who deserved to live in what was left.