Apart from the purely theoretical speculation of the Big Bang that gave birth to the universe, the most terrifying ultra-high-energy explosion ever observed in the universe was undoubtedly the Gamma-Ray Burst.
It was the most violent explosion in the universe. It truly existed and occurred frequently throughout the vast reaches of space, constantly threatening the existence of life.
The gamma rays it emitted were enough to kill every living thing in their path, while the tremendous energy released in a short time rivaled the combined lifetime output of hundreds of suns.
Even a single photon it emitted often carried energy hundreds of thousands of times greater than sunlight.
The energy briefly released when a massive star collapsed and exploded after exhausting its fuel was the enemy of life and the universe's strongest killer.
Gamma-Ray Bursts occurred almost every day throughout the universe, and their directions were random. If a planet harboring life happened to lie in the path of a Gamma-Ray Burst, the life on that celestial body would face total annihilation. Because they occurred so frequently, roughly one in ten million celestial bodies was swept by a Gamma-Ray Burst.
Earth had once been on the "victim list of Gamma-Ray Bursts" and had suffered a mass extinction. It had merely endured and, after a long age of desolation, given birth to life and civilization once more.
On April 1, 2017, beloved Earth would receive the Gentle Reaper's second visit.
A neutron star of immense density, billions of light-years away, collided with another neutron star, releasing a terrifying Gamma-Ray Burst on an unprecedented scale.
The explosion radiated for only forty-two seconds, yet along its path, that energy vaporized numerous stars, burst out of the galaxy, and traveled through the dark interstellar space for billions of years.
Like a randomly fired "stray bullet of death," it was something no one wanted to be hit by.
Life naturally hoped even more that this unprecedented Gamma-Ray Burst would exhaust its last scrap of energy in interstellar space and never enter another galaxy.
Yet things did not go as hoped. A spiral galaxy happened to lie directly along the "bullet's" trajectory, and the super-energy plunged headlong into this galaxy more than a hundred thousand light-years across.
It was the unlucky Milky Way Galaxy, which, after the baptism five hundred million years ago, had won the prize a second time.
Of course, compared with the vastness of space, the propagation path of a Gamma-Ray Burst was not particularly wide. If conditions allowed, a Gamma-Ray Burst could completely sweep through part of the galaxy before finally entering the black hole at the Galaxy Core and being devoured. That would be the best outcome, and also the most common one. After all, on the scale of the Milky Way Galaxy, energy of this magnitude was nothing extraordinary. The black hole at the Galaxy Core could accept and devour it all.
The only ones for whom this meant total annihilation were living things.
Unfortunately, a galaxy containing a life-bearing planet happened to be moving along the propagation path, making the civilization on it the winner of the "grand prize."
Moreover, because the Gamma-Ray Burst struck at the speed of light, the civilization on that living planet would not realize it had won until the moment of its destruction.
That "lucky winner" was Earth.
A super Gamma-Ray Burst cut in from a peculiar angle. Before it had time to vaporize the sun, it struck Earth first.
This burst was no weaker than the one five hundred million years ago. Its energy level was unprecedentedly powerful. Although it had expended a great deal of energy during its journey, it was still enough to render Earth incapable of nurturing life ever again, leaving it in an extreme environment until the end of its lifespan.
It was an instant kill. The life on Earth would have no chance to react and would end in an instant as it experienced all this.
Yet nature played an enormous joke at that second. The universe itself was an endless chain of coincidences, always filled with countless unknowns and miracles.
At the instant the terrifying Gamma-Ray Burst reached Earth's surface and plunged into the atmosphere, it strangely vanished.
Not only did surface life remain unharmed—even the atmosphere itself suffered little damage. The energy so immense that even the sun could only tremble before it was simply gone, as though an invisible space had swallowed everything at that moment.
The first to discover this Gamma-Ray Burst was the Spitzer Space Observatory.
It was in a deep-space orbit at the second Lagrange point. When the burst arrived, it was on the opposite side of Earth and escaped the attack. Only an hour later did it detect the abnormal visible light and radiation background left behind in space.
A massive amount of observational data was transmitted to Earth, directly throwing NASA into a panic.
"A Gamma-Ray Burst? Visible light was detected right on Earth's orbital path? This close?"
"Not only that—the energy level is extremely high! Judging from the remnants, its intensity during propagation was already about ten times that of the one observed in 1999!"
"What? God, we're still alive?"
In 1999, Earth had observed a distant super Gamma-Ray Burst whose energy was equivalent to the total energy released by the entire Milky Way Galaxy over two thousand years.
That had already been the largest Gamma-Ray Burst observed in human history. Now, they had observed an even larger one, breaking the record.
Its energy index was comparable to the total energy released by the entire Milky Way Galaxy over twenty thousand years!
The astronomical figure was terrifying. Of course, that was the peak value at the point of emission. After billions of years of attenuation during propagation, by the time it reached Earth, it was no longer enough to destroy Earth's molecular structure. Yet its radiation alone was sufficient to destroy Earth's ecological environment and turn it into hell.
At that very moment, society on Earth continued operating peacefully, as though nothing had happened. There had not even been any space-station docking missions during this period, so none of the space-station laboratories had suffered casualties. Otherwise, when the Gamma-Ray Burst arrived, anyone aboard stations such as Tiangong-2 in near-Earth orbit would have borne the brunt of it. No one could have escaped.
This bizarre phenomenon left the staff of every space agency utterly baffled.
The staff at the observatories of every country that later detected the remnants of the "afterglow" were completely dumbstruck. Their faces turned deathly pale as they murmured in belated terror.
"Why aren't we dead?"
Several Chinese and European aerospace engineers could no longer stand. They slumped against whatever was nearby, their lips trembling.
This was simply too lucky—so lucky that it was unscientific and unreasonable!
The only explanation was coincidence, some unknown coincidence. Perhaps an unimaginably complex chain of chance had allowed Earth to escape disaster.
The mere fact that Earth had survived so bizarrely was enough to keep experts in human aerospace research studying it for decades, even centuries, to come.
Within hours of the event, a joint research team was established by the global aerospace community. Experts and engineers from China, Europe, and the United States shared data and devoted themselves to investigating and verifying the "mystery of Earth's survival."
The first step in their research was to determine whether they should deny that the Gamma-Ray Burst had reached Earth. If scientific evidence could disprove that fact and show that the afterglow in space was merely an astronomical illusion, then Earth's survival would make perfect sense.
However, ironclad data showed that none of this could be an optical illusion. Far too much matter in outer space had suffered violent gamma-ray impacts, and many space-observation satellites that had been struck had been rendered completely inoperable.
"Was Earth truly in the path of propagation? Did it merely graze past us?"
"No... no, it struck Earth directly. The source was angled toward the North Pole. Its path passed neither the sun nor Jupiter. Look! This is the visible-light spectrum of the Gamma-Ray Burst's afterglow. It's obvious! It entered the ecliptic plane at an angle, meaning it hit Earth! It even reached the atmosphere!"
"Unbelievable. The Gamma-Ray Burst passed through Earth, yet we're completely unharmed?"
"No, no, no... it didn't pass through! Look! The propagation path ends abruptly at Earth. There is no radiation remnant on the other side. That means the Gamma-Ray Burst... vanished when it reached Earth!"
"Vanished... what does that mean? Was it absorbed by Earth? Or refracted by the atmosphere?"
"How could that be? Do you know how much energy it would take to destroy Earth? Expressed in equivalent yield, only seventy quintillion tons of TNT!"
A quintillion was ten thousand quadrillion, or 10²⁰, an enormous unit of quantity.
Yet even that many tons of TNT equivalent amounted to less than a drop in the ocean compared with the total energy of a Gamma-Ray Burst.
The physicist said, "The sun's energy released in a single day is equivalent to eighty quintillion tons of TNT, enough to blast Earth apart once! If you multiply that by ten, the energy would be enough to reduce Earth to nothing but dust, with all the remnants blasted out of the Solar System."
"Try to imagine how much energy the sun releases over ten billion years."
Another physicist said, "I've calculated that. It's approximately 1.8 times 10⁴⁸ joules. Enough to destroy Earth... ten to the twenty-fifth power... times over."
"Exactly! And that's only the energy released by the Gamma-Ray Burst in 0.0002 seconds. Do you still think Earth could absorb that energy? And as for refraction... even if our atmosphere had experienced some incomprehensible coincidence and miraculously refracted that energy, where did it go?"
"We only observed the afterglow of the Gamma-Ray Burst's arrival... but no trace of its departure... Could all of this be..."
"God's protection?"
After those words, everyone fell silent.
With their knowledge, they were helpless before this mystery and felt profoundly ignorant.
Although they were overjoyed to be alive, as scientists, they were also deeply saddened to discover that they had no reasonable explanation for humanity's good fortune.
The first meeting of the joint research team yielded only one result: naming this Gamma-Ray Burst the Gentle Reaper.
It was April 1. In the cities, it might have been April Fools' Day. But in the aerospace sectors of every country, the foremost scholars would not treat it as April Fools' Day. They would call it Humanity's Day of Good Fortune.
For the time being, no country planned to make the incident public. However, it would probably not be long before many civilian organizations also observed the "Reaper's" afterglow.
The experts and scholars were filled with countless questions, yet they had no idea that at the moment the Gentle Reaper arrived and vanished,
in a small inland fourth-tier city in China, a young man suddenly collapsed and lost consciousness.
He was merely a passerby on the street. One moment, he had been walking energetically; the next, he collapsed as though something had struck him unconscious.
Although he appeared to have no external injuries, a kind passerby still went over to check on him.
After confirming that he had truly fainted, they hurriedly called 120 and sent him to the hospital for emergency treatment.
The entire incident was nothing more than an insignificant occurrence in the city, not even worthy of a news report.
No one would have thought it would have any far-reaching consequences.
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