Zhao Bowen’s heart slowly sank, sank into his abdominal cavity, sank into his large intestine, sank into his bladder, sank to the floor below, and sank into the ground.

A group of people sat in silence in the living room, the channel was also silent. The entire team had stayed up all night with BG4MSR until sunrise when the command finally confirmed mission failure—no one wanted to face this reality, but facts were facts. Whether you looked at them or not, they remained there, like a mirror reflecting people’s wishful thinking. From the beginning of Project Dongfang Hong until now, everyone has been clinging to false hope. The Fireworks succeeded, the Two Generals succeeded, so there was no reason Miss Qiu wouldn’t succeed—but what reason could there be?

Looking back at the Three Laws of Time Courier, this world would inherently obstruct anyone trying to escape the Great Filter. Leaving Earth was the most reliable method, but it wasn’t 100% guaranteed to succeed.

Even ordinary space missions had failure rates, let alone a spacecraft crossing twenty years. Any component could malfunction. Once a spacecraft develops problems, it becomes nothing but scrap metal drifting in an orbit in the middle of nowhere. The cold, harsh reality had torn away everyone’s self-deceptive fig leaf. Only when everything had settled did people realize that no one had any real certainty, though everyone had pretended to be confident.

The entire project team had gone back to square one, leaving Old Zhao sitting on the sofa eating an apple, his heart pounding, his hands trembling, cold sweat beading on his forehead.

Shit shit shit shit shit shit shit.

He had lost a nuclear bomb.

Holy fuck.

A normal person would be having a heart attack by now. Zhao Bowen wished his heart would be courteous enough to have one too. After all, an ambulance would arrive downstairs within three minutes of calling 120. He’d rather be hospitalized, hooked up to a ventilator, lying unconscious—perhaps when he woke up, someone would be standing by his bed solemnly saying: “Comrade Zhao Bowen, the crisis has been fully resolved, your mission is complete!”

“Fuck me…” Zhao Bowen said, clutching his hair tightly.

Now no one knew where that nuclear bomb was. It could be lost at any point in time along any stretch of orbit, with no possibility of recovery.

“The responsibility is mine,” Wang Ning said.

Everyone else was stunned.

“When I was burning incense at Qixia Temple, I only asked Buddha to bless the rocket’s successful launch,” Wang Ning sighed. “I forgot to pray for the spacecraft’s successful return.”

“Then you deserve to die,” Bai Zhen said. “Kill yourself to apologize to the Party and the people.”

“Phone!” The mobile on the coffee table was vibrating. Wang Ning tossed it in front of Zhao Bowen. “What do we do next? Is there any chance we can find it?”

“No chance,” Bai Zhen said. “The first requirement for escaping the Great Filter is avoiding human interference. Once the spacecraft entered orbit, it cut off all contact with the ground. No one can find it.”

“But we know its orbit,” Wang Ning said. “Can we urgently send a spacecraft to chase it down?”

“What do you think this is, Star Wars?” Bai Zhen rolled his eyes. “Has humanity ever done anything like that? And even if you could somehow catch up to it, you’d become the reason for the mission’s failure.”

“Fuck.”

“Old Zhao! That…”

Bai Zhen turned his head about to say something, but Zhao Bowen pushed past him.

Old Zhao pushed them aside and walked out the door without a word, going downstairs. His body swayed unsteadily, head hanging low, back hunched, looking like he might faceplant on the ground at any moment.

Bai Zhen wanted to speak but held back.

“Old Zhao… holy shit!”

Sure enough, he took a tumble. Zhao Bowen missed a step and fell on his rear, bouncing bounce bounce bounce bounce bounce down to the corner landing.

Bai Zhen and Wang Ning rushed forward.

They scrambled to help Old Zhao up, but he did not react. He just frowned, pursed his lips, adjusted the tortoiseshell-framed glasses on his nose, gave his two old companions a cold look, then continued downstairs.

The two old friends stood there helplessly. They saw resentment in Zhao Bowen’s eyes—what was he resenting? The team’s incompetence? The spacecraft’s unreliability? Or this world that left no way out?

But whatever he was resenting, the facts were set in stone. Both old friends knew clearly that Zhao Bowen’s emotional outburst was just giving up in despair. He had no options left.

Such a massive plan, mobilizing unimaginable human and material resources, had still failed at the final hurdle.

Old Zhao was broken.

When Zhao Bowen reached his usual spot for smoking at the building entrance, he found others had already claimed his territory.

It was Bai Yang and Lian Qiao.

The two sat there side by side, motionless.

“Make room.”

Old Zhao squeezed in between them.

His pants were covered in dust and torn, but he didn’t care. He pulled out cigarettes and a lighter from his jacket pocket, lit one, and put it in his mouth.

“Director, smoking is harmful to your health,” Lian Qiao reminded him.

“Not many years left to live anyway, harmful or not doesn’t matter,” Zhao Bowen said with the cigarette in his mouth. “What are you two doing sitting here?”

“Discussing if there’s any way to salvage this,” Bai Yang said.

“Just you two?” Old Zhao sneered, somewhat contemptuously.

“Well, now we have you, don’t we?” Lian Qiao said. “Director, does command have any backup plans?”

“Sure, we have one more rocket, one more spacecraft. Theoretically, we have another chance,” Zhao Bowen answered. “As long as we can wait two months, wait until the second nuclear bomb is ready.”

Another two months—truly just a theoretical chance.

No one knew if BG4MSR could hold out for two months under the Big Eye’s threat. Nobody was optimistic. The longer things dragged on, the more disadvantageous it became for us—this was the consensus.

“Uncle Zhao, why don’t you dig around some more?” Bai Yang said. “This country is so big, maybe there are secret weapons hidden somewhere, some extraordinary experts hidden away, lots of potential power that hasn’t been tapped yet…”

“There’s nothing left,” Zhao Bowen irritably cut him off. “Where else can I dig? I’d have to dig through to the Earth’s core. There are over a billion people in China, but in any given field there are only a handful of top experts you can count on two hands, maybe not even five fingers’ worth who could help. Anyone who could be recruited, I recruited long ago. Keep digging? What do you want me to do, dig up Sun Wukong from the Five Elements Mountain to help?”

He was truly fed up.

Why did these people keep asking such stupid questions? Why did they always imagine there would always be a solution? Why did they always think everything could be salvaged? If there were perfect solutions to everything and happy endings for everyone, how would there be so many tragedies and disasters in human history? God himself died in the gutter long ago, praying to deities was useless. If you can’t handle it you can’t handle it, if it’s fucked then it’s fucked, can you fucking understand that, you idiots!

He should never have taken on this mess. Let the world be destroyed if that’s what’s coming. The sooner it’s destroyed the cleaner it’ll be, everyone can turn into orange juice and go meet Rei Ayanami.

Old Zhao smoked sullenly.

When his emotions collapsed, he became quite hysterical.

“It’s too early to say the mission failed,” Lian Qiao said. “It might just be delayed. Maybe the spacecraft will arrive tonight?”

“That’s possible,” Zhao Bowen’s face was corpse-like. “But technically speaking, it either arrives on schedule or it never arrives at all.”

“I believe it will come back,” Lian Qiao said very seriously.

“Yeah,” Zhao Bowen said coldly while finishing the sentence in his mind:

You’re just that kind of idiot.