Hangzhou – Ten Days Later
Liu Shao sat at his desk, staring at his phone screen that lit up on its own.
That green bar had stretched a little, and now it was clearer:
ꪤ Solar Collapse — Module Loading ‐ 10%
He kept gazing at the number as if his whole life was hanging on it; every day, at the exact same time, nine in the morning, the bar advanced by exactly one percent. Never late, never early.
Ten days had passed since that foolish moment when he typed his stupid sentence. Ten days, and the world was no longer the same to him.
What was happening wasn't obvious to everyone… not yet, at least. But Liu Shao, with his wary eyes, was already seeing it unfold.
The sun had grown brighter than usual, even in the early hours. Its light sometimes burned his eyes the instant he looked out the window.
Some electronic devices had started failing strangely; phones shut down out of nowhere, computers rebooted themselves, even traffic lights in the city streets blinked out for a few seconds, leaving chaos behind.
And of course, temperatures were rising with no logic to them.
Yet on the news broadcast, the anchor laughed nervously, trying to calm people down: "An exceptional heatwave for this season of the year." As if it were just a passing anomaly.
At first, he thought it was all just coincidence. But every morning, when he looked at his phone and saw the bar grow… his sighs grew heavier.
Liu Shao replayed everything that had happened: he had found that cursed app, written a reckless ending, sent it off, and it seemed the app accepted it. Then the world began to shift, gradually, step by step.
He pressed his fingers to his temples and muttered to himself, "If this is real… then the fuller the bar gets, the closer we are to the end. The sun exploding… eternal sleep… painless death…"
He laughed helplessly. "That's not such a bad ending, really. But could I have condemned seven billion people to death… all because of a joke?"
He sighed, leaning back in his chair, staring at the ceiling.
"If the world must end, why should it end because of my words?" His low, mocking laugh echoed.
He wasn't afraid of the end itself, but of the crushing sense of responsibility. He could accept almost any sudden event, but not the thought that he was the cause—that everything he wrote could alter reality irreversibly.
"I'm just a tiny speck in the universe… if the world wants to end, let it end. But why must I be the cause?"
Liu Shao realized there was no point in just complaining. So, with a swipe of his hand, he reopened the app.
The same interface. The same white page. The same sentence: "How do you see the end of this world?"
But now there was a new line beneath it, one that hadn't been there before:
"The current ending: Solar Collapse."
"You may write a new ending, provided it is greater or more creative."
He read the sentence over and over, its weight pressing harder into his mind. Greater? Greater than the collapse of the sun?
A chill ran through him despite the heat, as though the app itself were mocking him.
If he tried to save the world, it would reject it. If he wrote a "smaller" ending, it would reject it too. The only way forward was something bigger, more dangerous, more dreadful.
But what could be more dreadful than a dying sun?
---
The questions circled him like a chain of rusted links.
He remembered his childhood as an orphan, the indifference he had built as a shield, the solitude that stole away any fear of loss. Yet… those shields didn't stop him now from feeling broken.
Perhaps because this time, the breaking wasn't his alone—it touched others he knew and didn't know: faces on trains, children in school uniforms, vegetable sellers closing their shops at dusk… and his friends.
He raised his eyes to the phone again, seeing the clock strike ten. Unable to endure the noise in his head any longer, he drank a glass of turmeric milk as he had since childhood, then left the apartment, fumbling with his key.
The air outside was different—an oppressive weight of heat pressing against his chest, as though the air itself was thick and saturated with strange energy. He hadn't gone out for anything specific, only to clear his mind of the voices.
The street stretched under his steps in monotonous length. The passersby moved without rhythm, shopfront lights fewer than before, shadows shorter.
People's eyes darted restlessly; some fiddled with their phones, others hunted desperately for the shade of a tree.
His senses stayed sharp: the sounds, the smell of baking asphalt, tiny sparks from electrical shorts here and there, even the hum of lamps sounding like the sighs of a sick city.
He hadn't gone far before he saw an elderly neighbor at his car, as if standing at his own crossroads, lifting the hood while steam rose, pounding his fist on the dashboard as though that could restore order.
"Why does everything keep breaking? Such a waste of money!" the man shouted in a hoarse rage.
Liu Shao exhaled and suggested, "Try taking it to Old Chang on Second Street. He's better, and cheaper than the rest."
Then he continued walking. He alone could connect cause and effect—himself, or rather, the app and his words.
A few steps later, he came across two women arguing outside a small grocery shop. One held a spoiled carton of milk, the other waved a bill showing doubled charges for ice that was no longer available.
The shopkeeper, frantic, pointed inside: "The power's out. We had to close early."
"My kids will sleep with nothing proper to eat when they wake up!" one woman cried, her voice tearing through the street's silence like a predator's shriek. "The meat in the fridge… everything is spoiling."
These complaints weren't mere passing words. They were the small, piled fragments of lives that didn't acknowledge the weight of "great stories."
Their faces, their voices, their simple needs—bread, milk, enough light—hurt Liu Shao more than he expected.
Every little grievance magnified a strange feeling inside him, a responsibility that had never been his… and now hovered heavily on his shoulders.
He walked further down the familiar street. When the sun edged past the rooftops, the air sharpened like a warm knife. The stress scars in his head armed themselves with unbearable heat. Sweat poured down his face.
Suddenly, a strange taste filled his mouth—then blood seeped slowly, steadily from his nose. He clutched it with trembling fingers, steadying himself on the curb to catch his breath.
The blood streaked down to his lips like a red thread, as if his body, too, were crying out against him. Once more, his reflection caught in a shop window: pale face, drenched in sweat, a smile nowhere to be found.
A passing boy handed him a tissue; Liu Shao thanked him and decided to head home before he lost his balance completely.
Each step back produced a new voice inside him, the endless debate with himself.
His thoughts wavered between excuses and confessions: "If I had written something else… if I had ignored the app… if I hadn't pressed send…" Then the reasoning would collapse midway, because the app had already told him. He knew its limits. He knew his choices weren't clear or safe.
He reached his apartment door. The room felt emptier than when he had left, the walls echoing, the air inside no different from outside—a smothering heaviness that wouldn't lift.
He sat on his bed, pressing his palm to his face as if trying to pin the world in place.
Inside him, a long monologue flowed: "Where did I go wrong? Should I have left the joke as just a joke? Why me?"
But beneath all of that was something else—a strange craving for accountability. Not only for himself, but for the entire world.
Not to seek comfort from another soul, but to see his actions ripple across the tiny details he once thought meaningless.
Perhaps he couldn't name it, but surrendering to it felt harsher than anything else. He no longer had the luxury of blaming fate or coincidence. His words were real, and their consequences had begun.
Liu Shao sat a long time in his own head, dividing blame between resolve and dreams. He wavered on whether to smash his phone to the floor, or burn it. But the thought itself—burning, hiding, erasing—was no solution.
Because the problem wasn't in the device, but in what was written on its screen, in the sentences he had typed, in the mysterious bond between words and reality.
At that moment, he realized that every simple step outside—his nosebleed, his angry neighbor, the women complaining about a shop closed for lack of power—wasn't just separate incidents. They were knots in a chain, and each knot tied directly back to what he had dictated with his own hands on a blank page, line after line.
He found no ready-made answer. But he knew one thing with undeniable clarity: the burden was now real, and the limited choices demanded a decision—not for his name or greatness, but for survival. For his own, for those he cared about, and for the small faces he saw on the street—faces that knew nothing about him, yet were suffering because something in the world had tilted off balance, because of him.