"How did the world end?" Sitting atop the swaying pickup truck, Lin Chichi looked at He Ao across from her, shrugged, and said slowly, "About a month ago, I woke up one day and it was gone."
That caught He Ao off guard.
"It wasn't actually that simple," the long-haired girl beside them said slowly. "I was asleep that night when I suddenly felt the earth shaking. Then my brother burst in, stuffed me into an off-road vehicle—"
At this point, her voice paused slightly. She wrapped her arms around her knees, as though recalling something terrifying. "I sat in the car and watched the skyscrapers behind us collapse like sand piles. Screams were everywhere. Sparrows flew over our heads, then fell with a crackling patter like a torrential downpour."
Her voice gradually lowered. "The off-road vehicle's driver turned the wiper up to maximum, but still couldn't fling those birds away. Dense bird corpses nearly covered the whole vehicle. All we could see was bright red blood staining the entire front windshield.
At the time, my mind was completely blank. There were a lot of cars on the road at first, but then there were fewer and fewer. Fewer and fewer."
The people in the truck fell briefly silent as they listened to her. The pickup truck continued rocking along the bumpy road, and everyone's expressions grew increasingly grim.
The long-haired girl continued hoarsely, "I leaned out the window and watched the cars outside. Some cars would be driving along when the people inside suddenly vanished. The uncontrolled vehicles crashed into one another and blocked the roads, so we had to get out and go around those vehicles burning with flames."
"Fire blazed across the earth, covering the entire city," He Ao said softly.
It was somewhat similar to the