Bai Yang drew a circle on his scratch paper, then added an eye in the middle, and finally gave the circle six insect-like long legs.

He stared at it, reconstructing it in his mind, creating a 3D model, letting it slowly rise from the paper. What form should it take?

A one-eyed spider?

Or a large eyeball with six long legs?

Should the six legs be evenly distributed in a circle, or symmetrically arranged with three on each side?

The little eyeball standing on the paper surface began to scuttle about with a pitter-patter. It moved quickly, crawling from one end of the scratch paper to the other, then jumped onto the math textbook, crossed over the pencil case, and attempted to climb the stainless steel thermos. But its attempt failed – the smooth stainless steel surface offered no foothold. It managed two steps up the vertical surface before tumbling down with a series of rolls. The fall seemed to have dazed it. It shook its head, preparing for another attempt, when suddenly a Buddha’s palm descended from the heavens with an earth-shattering “bang!”, smashing the little creature into dust.

Bai Yang jolted from his reverie as someone’s weight pressed down on his shoulder.

“What’s this?” He Leqin curiously peered over, picking up the scratch paper from Bai Yang’s desk. “What did you draw here?”

“Humanity’s nemesis,” Bai Yang answered.

“Humanity’s nemesis?” He Leqin turned the paper upside down, staring at it for a while. “You call this humanity’s nemesis? Could it withstand a fin-stabilized discarding sabot armor-piercing round?”

“Have you watched EVA?” Bai Yang retrieved the paper from his hands. “This is the 19th Angel. It has an AT field – armor-piercing rounds can’t penetrate it.”

“Anno should hire you as a director. Come on, let’s go to the bathroom.”

He Leqin pulled him up.

BG4MSR had found the teacher’s notebook – this was a major discovery.

They had thought the teacher hadn’t left any materials behind, but clearly, she might not have remembered everything she’d used for drafting. “Journey to the West” had slipped through the cracks.

However, these were just rough notes, not a proper notebook, so the information was scattered, fragmentary, and chaotic, requiring careful analysis.

Bai Yang had BG4MSR start reviewing “Journey to the West” from the beginning, not missing any clues the teacher might have left – even a casually drawn circle could hold deep meaning.

“Little White Sheep, what have you been up to lately?”

He Leqin stood at the urinal, relieving himself while staring at the blue slogan in front: One small step forward, one giant leap for civilization.

Bai Yang stood with an empty urinal between them. “Why do you ask?”

“You’ve been acting strange lately, rushing home right after evening self-study, not even waiting for me and Yan-ge.” He Leqin glanced at him. “What are you so absorbed in?”

Bai Yang looked around, waiting until everyone else had left the bathroom before speaking: “Like I told you, busy saving the world.”

“Still not done saving it?”

“Saving the world – you think that’s easy?” Bai Yang said. “If I fail, Earth is game over, and we won’t even need to take the college entrance exam.”

“Then hurry up and fail.” He Leqin snorted. “You’d be doing a great service to all high school seniors nationwide. If you can get the college entrance exam canceled, you’d be our great benefactor – we’ll build you a monument.”

“Fine, I’ll quit then,” Bai Yang said. “You can build me that monument.”

He bantered with Young Master He, but his thoughts were scattered. Bai Yang increasingly felt that his brain had been filled with everything related to BG4MSR. Beyond that, his brain no longer considered any other issues. When doing homework, the problems looked familiar, but his mind went blank. Bai Yang didn’t know if this was normal – his brain seemed to no longer belong to him. Like a computer, it had been requisitioned by someone else, running twenty-four hours a day without cease, thinking about problems that had nothing to do with him.

Complex, chaotic information rolled through his mind, growing like a snowball, about to burst through his skull.

He couldn’t stop himself.

Bai Yang felt that one day, his brain would explode, and from it would emerge an already destroyed world.

“Think carefully about how to deal with the 19th Angel – it’s the chief culprit in destroying the world.”

Bai Yang closed his eyes. Perhaps only while relieving himself could he find a moment of peace.

Listening to the trickling water was as peaceful as listening to the rain.

“To deal with Angels, we should build Eva Unit-01,” He Leqin said. “Then select a few antisocial teenage pilots. Do you think I have what it takes?”

“How are you antisocial?”

“If it means I can pilot Eva Unit-01, I can be antisocial. Forget antisocial – even being schizophrenic would be fine. I don’t ask for much, just a beautiful partner like Asuka.”

“Aren’t you peeing right now?” Bai Yang said. “Look down at yourself.”

He Leqin looked down.

“Holy shit.”

“What’s wrong?”

“It’s huge.”

Ban Xia sat at the table, opening “Journey to the West” before her. To avoid missing anything, she diligently turned the pages one by one. The teacher had casually used this book for notes – whether Chinese characters or formulas, everything was quite messy, without beginning or end, making it exceptionally difficult to understand.

“Page 151, Volume Three: Shooting Stars Like Summer Fireworks – Chapter 12, ‘Xuanzang Sincerely Holds a Great Assembly, Guanyin Appears to Transform the Golden Cicada,'” Ban Xia spoke into the handheld microphone. “This page has two English words: Xuan, and Zang.”

“Okay, Xuan, Zang, I’ve noted them down,” Bai Yang wrote on his paper, then paused slightly. “Miss, these aren’t English words – they’re pinyin, the romanization of Xuanzang’s name. OVER.”

It seemed the teacher would sometimes do meaningless little things in her spare time, like adding pinyin to “Journey to the West.”

“Page 152, there’s a very large question mark on this page, about the size of the whole page.”

“Okay, one large question mark.” Bai Yang drew a big question mark on his paper. “OVER.”

He was recording the notes the teacher had left in the book. These cryptic words and formulas were beyond what Ban Xia and Bai Yang could fully understand on their own. Bai Yang’s task was to record them completely so that when Zhao Bowen returned, they could hand them over to more qualified people for research and interpretation.

“Wow, this is a drawing.”

“What kind of drawing? OVER.”

“It’s drawn very roughly, I can’t quite make out what it is…” Ban Xia rotated the book on the table. “Is it a sun?”

On page 153 of “Journey to the West,” the teacher had drawn a large sketch in black ink. In the upper half of the page, she had drawn a sun – or perhaps a moon. The strokes were messy and repeatedly smudged. If not for the other components in the drawing, one might have thought it was just the result of the teacher mindlessly drawing circles. What made Ban Xia recognize it as a celestial body was the rays of light emanating from it – fine straight lines radiating in all directions from the circle.

In the lower half of the page, the teacher had drawn a straight line, presumably the ground.

Above the ground were square buildings, and dense high-rises, all shaded with messy shadows.

Ban Xia understood now – this was a city under the light of a black sun or moon.

There were people too.

Tiny stick figures, many of them. But Ban Xia suddenly became puzzled as she stared at the sketches, examining them one by one.

These little figures all had one obvious abnormality.

Had the teacher drawn them wrong?

Why were they all headless?

The current situation was somewhat unexpected for Bai Zhen. He had finally established what sounded like an impressive Amateur Radio Emergency Communications Command Center for Reversing the Future and Saving the World – just by name length alone, it was equivalent to combining NORAD with DARPA. But since its establishment, all he’d been doing was acting like a secondhand electronics dealer from Huaqiangbei.

“If we use Hikvision cameras, we’ll need to connect via a network port,” Wang Ning sat across from him on a small stool, holding connection cables. “Or we use USB ones and connect via USB port – which is better?”

“Whichever is easier to work with,” Bai Zhen answered.

“For image transmission, we’ll need to remove the relay first, right?” Wang Ning asked.

“Yes, since the radio only has one mic jack, we’ll need to remove the relay to connect the motherboard. The connection method is similar though,” Bai Zhen nodded. “It can’t have both remote control and image transmission capabilities simultaneously – can’t have both fish and bear’s paw, at least not currently.”

The powered Celeron 3150 industrial control motherboard hung on the wall, covered in connection cables.

“Did you visit your hometown recently?” Wang Ning suddenly asked.

Bai Zhen looked up at him, then nodded. “What about it?”

“Is your old house still there?”

“Of course it is, still in good shape,” Bai Zhen said. “I even reinforced it.”

“Old Bai, tell me if everything goes to hell in the end…” Wang Ning leaned forward, gesturing around. “Would digging a basement to hide in help?”

“That’s like asking if digging a hole in the sand would help when a tsunami wave comes crashing down,” Bai Zhen said. “Do you think it would help?”

“But aren’t you digging too?”

“What else can I do? Small fry like us, what options do we have besides digging holes?” Bai Zhen shrugged. “What, you want to fly to space?”

“I’m thinking of buying a house in your area,” Wang Ning said. “Help me keep an eye out.”

“Rural homesteads can’t be sold – you can’t get the paperwork done.”

“Private deals are fine, I don’t need the property certificate, just usage rights. The certificate will be worthless paper anyway in the end,” Wang Ning said. “I need to dig a hole too.”

“Better dig deep then. If we live close by, we can connect them underground,” Bai Zhen pulled out a soldering iron from under the tea table. “Do you know how to dig trench fortifications?”

Wang Ning sighed.

“What the hell is all this? Everything was fine, how did we suddenly get hit with the end of the world? Couldn’t it wait until after I’m dead?”

“Back in ’99, weren’t people also crying about the end of the world everywhere?” Bai Zhen pulled out a roll of solder from under the tea table. “Accept reality – life just doesn’t follow logic.”

They say when the sky falls, the tall people will hold it up, and ordinary folks can always find survival space in the cracks.

But Wang Ning and Bai Zhen already knew the ending – they understood this was an inescapable disaster, one from which no one could be spared.

“Stock up on supplies – food, water, necessities,” Bai Zhen said. “When society stops functioning, nothing will be easy to find. We might have to return to primitive living.”

“No matter how many supplies we stock up on, how long can we last?” Wang Ning asked. “What about the next generation? What about your son and my son?”

“At this point, how can you consider so much? Still dreaming of a life where you can drink Wuliangye after work and get foot massages on weekends? Prepare yourself for hardship,” Bai Zhen said. “No matter how tough life gets, it’s better than being dead. Living one more day is one more day.”

“No, no, this won’t work,” Wang Ning shook his head. “As Chairman Mao said, surrender will never work – you might get through the first day but not the fifteenth.”

“When did he say that?”

“Anyway, this won’t work. We need to fight the enemy outside, destroy them – that’s the correct strategy,” Wang Ning’s attitude grew firm.

“Do you know what kind of enemy we’re facing? Giant eyeballs three or four stories tall with six long legs, crossing moats in three steps, impervious to weapons, immune to fire and water, ruthless and murderous,” Bai Zhen’s description turned rhythmic as he continued. “Planes and tanks are like paper before it – how do you fight something like that?”

“How do you know it’s impervious to weapons?”

“The future people know they’re impervious to weapons because they’re all dead.”

Wang Ning fell silent.

He also knew that future humanity had failed.

The military was destroyed, and nothing was left – this indicated an overwhelming power gap. In the face of such an enormous disparity, any preparation would be futile.

Think about that massive black moon hanging overhead – that was despair.

How could humanity possibly have the power to resist such an enormous force?

If this weren’t fact, Wang Ning would never believe humanity’s future would have two moons – it defied reason! If there were gods in this world, Wang Ning truly wanted to have a chat with them: how could you be so unreasonable?! We were living our lives happily and peacefully, how could a black moon suddenly appear one day?

“Just come dig holes with me properly, dig early, dig deep, dig down dozens of meters, carry forward the fine tradition of tunnel warfare,” Bai Zhen said. “Do what we can, accept fate’s decree.”

“Can you get any weapons?” Wang Ning asked. “Like 120mm rockets?”

“What are you thinking? Where would I get 120mm rockets?” Bai Zhen rolled his eyes.

“It’s just because the country bans guns. If guns weren’t banned…”

“Even without gun control, you couldn’t get rocket launchers. Maybe if you went to the Middle East to trade with guerrillas, you might get a Type 107 rocket artillery,” Bai Zhen said. “But you couldn’t bring that in either.”

Though they chatted idly, their hands never stopped working.

Wang Ning had Little Zhu find a museum-worthy Philips CRT monitor, with an enormous rear end, sitting on the tea table.

BG4MSR hadn’t found any usable LCD monitors – she said they just smoked instead of lighting up when plugged in. Only two heavy CRT monitors might still work, so Wang Ning and Bai Zhen instructed her to open the monitor cases and leave them in the sun to bake.

Cathode ray tube monitors had high voltage inside and couldn’t get damp, so they needed to remove any moisture before powering them up.

“Besides tinkering with this electronic junk, what else can we do?” Wang Ning straightened the monitor, pressing its buttons with clicks.

“This is all we can do,” Bai Zhen said helplessly.

When the Amateur Radio Emergency Communications Command Center for Reversing the Future and Saving the World was first established, they had been full of ambition, vowing to contribute their part to saving all of humanity. But spending their days in a pile of garbage, as time passed, both men increasingly realized their limited capabilities – what could two balding, hair-losing, middle-aged fat uncles do?

Even as doomsday approached day by day, they could only huddle in their room tinkering with electronic waste.

This was the tragedy of ordinary people.

The more they worked, the more powerless they felt. At this point, Wang Ning and Bai Zhen could only pin their hopes on external forces, hoping someone could bring a turning point, bring powerful assistance, and bring a glimmer of hope.

“That bastard Old Zhao… when the hell is he coming back?”