!
Half a month later.
"Get up! Get out of bed! Stop rotting in here and hurry up!"
A sudden chill hit Su Jin as his mother violently yanked the blanket off his body.
"All you do is eat and sleep! Can't you find something productive to do? Another delivery arrived. More canned food! You buy it but you don't even eat it!"
The endless nagging drilled into his ears. Su Jin furrowed his brows, blindly groping the bedside table until he found his eye mask and snapped it back over his face.
Rolling over, he let out a muffled groan. "Ugh... you never stop."
"Get your ass out of bed! That RV you bought the other day nearly gave your father a heart attack!" Mother Su stood with her hands on her hips, glaring daggers at him. "You get a little cash in your pocket and suddenly you're burning it all? What exactly are you trying to pull?"
"You refuse to go on blind dates, you refuse to go to work! You just lay around the house all day hoarding garbage! You've been dodging work for so long, how do you expect your boss to keep a good impression of you..."
"Oh, for the love of..." Su Jin wrapped his pillow tightly around his head, his face twisting in agony as he mumbled, "Mom, I am begging you, can you drop it? You're actually killing me. What's the crime in sleeping? I'm on vacation..."
Smack!
A heavy palm struck hard against Su Jin's ribs.
"Lazy brat! You make a couple of dimes and suddenly you think you own the sky!"
"I made that money for you two..."
"Don't give me that! Your father and I don't need your spare change. Just get your own life in order. If you ever manage to get married without begging us for a handout, we'll thank the heavens."
"Beg you for money? I'll pay in cash... buy the house myself. Why would I need you two?"
"Well, that's fine by me. It'll give your dad and me some face when we go out..." Mother Su perked up, before her tone swiftly darkened again. "But the way you hemorrhage cash, you won't save a single cent. Get up and return that RV and those cans right now. Listen to your father; don't throw your life into chaos just because you have a few dirty pennies to rub together."
"Can't return them. They're an investment for the future. When the apocalypse hits, don't come crying for my canned peaches."
"Psychopath! I already made your food. Get out of bed and eat!"
The shrieking source of his headache gradually faded down the hall. Su Jin lowered the pillow, sprawling his limbs out wide to sink back into the mattress.
The past half-month had been dead quiet. Wang Yuntong's camp hadn't dared to breathe in his direction; after all, the entire gang had been stripped bare and humiliated, and Su Jin still held the high-definition footage holding their reputations hostage.
If that video leaked, they'd be laughingstocks in every corner of the underworld.
Since then, he had simply returned home to rest and recuperate.
But the domestic bliss lasted barely a week before he devolved back into a despised, nagged-at shut-in.
He couldn't entirely blame them. He was acting like a lunatic, unable to suppress the gnawing urge to buy a survival RV and stockpile doomsday rations.
Every passing day was a meat-grinder of sleeping, eating, and doom-scrolling, letting internal friction hollow him out.
Just as the edges of his vision blurred into sleep, his phone violently rang next to his ear.
"Tsk... who the hell is it now?" Su Jin snatched the phone through the fog of exhaustion.
"Brother Hui, still dead to the world? It's Lei Dong. My mom ran into yours yesterday and said you were back in town. You at the house?"
"Leizi? Aren't you stationed in Nanjing?" Su Jin pushed himself up, rubbing the sleep from his face.
"I took some PTO and came back. Let's grab some food. We'll hit the bottle tonight and get a massage, my treat."
"Alright, alright. The usual place."
Su Jin exhaled a lungful of stale air, forcing himself out of bed to wash up.
Lei Dong was his iron-clad brother from high school. They had stayed in tight contact even after college.
Face-to-face meetups were a rare luxury these days. If an old friend was offering free food, he wasn't about to turn it down.
Returning to his room to dress, his eyes drifted to the crisp notification letter that had been sitting on his desk for weeks.
Su Jin let out a helpless sigh. Ultimately, he snatched the paper and shoved it deep into his pocket.
...
"Yo, Brother Hui, word on the street is you made a killing."
Inside the steamy hotpot restaurant, Su Jin casually swished a slice of raw beef through the boiling red broth. He glanced up at Lei Dong with a faint smirk. "Who gave you that intel?"
"My mom, obviously. Yours was flexing hard at the plaza dance." Lei Dong arched a brow, grinning. "She said by the time your mom was done bragging, the rest of those old hens were dying of jealousy. Half of them were begging to set you up on blind dates. So, what's the actual number?"
"A little over a million."
"Holy shit! What kind of gig pays out that much in one go?" Lei Dong's eyes practically bulged out of his skull.
"Took point on a new hospital project. Moved a massive amount of medical equipment. It was blood money, honestly. Once the check cleared, I tossed my badge. I'm taking an extended sabbatical."
"Bullshit. What is there to even do in this dead-end city? You aren't seriously planning to coast on that million for the rest of your life, are you?" Lei Dong's face was painted with raw skepticism.
"It wouldn't be the worst thing. Waiting tables or running food deliveries sounds like a vacation to me," Su Jin replied, his tone deadpan and completely serious.
"Did you take a blow to the head?" Lei Dong leaned over the bubbling pot, narrowing his eyes. "You didn't make that cash by selling your ass and catching some heavy trauma, did you?"
"If I could have just sold my ass, I would have taken the deal. That corporate meat grinder was a hell of a lot worse." Su Jin let out a cold, venomous bark of laughter. "Enough about my trauma. What about you? Still rotting at the observatory?"
"Still rotting. The pay is garbage, but it’s an iron rice bowl. I’ll probably still need my parents to subsidize my mortgage down the line." Lei Dong took a sullen sip of his beer.
"What more do you want? You're a high-tier scientist. Half the city would kill for your cushy office."
"Scientist, my ass. Now you sound exactly like those gossiping old hens." Lei Dong tapped a wet finger against the wooden table. "I run image processing algorithms. I'm a glorified graphic designer, not an astrophysicist."
"Different trades, different worlds... Still, rubbing shoulders with the scientific elite has to count for something. Sounds bleeding-edge. Have you seen anything interesting?"
"Nothing is interesting." Lei Dong offered a bitter smile. "It's the same sterilized data every single day. But... speaking of interesting, right before I took my leave, two reports crossed my desk. It was highly classified, and frankly, completely unhinged."
"Oh? Let's hear it." Su Jin casually dropped another strip of beef into the rolling boil.
"I don't have the granular details. But at the Lijiang observatory, two technicians completely lost their minds while mapping deep space... And it wasn't just isolated to the mainland. Several staff members at international observatories went rabid and started violently attacking their colleagues on the exact same night. A statistical impossibility! It’s like some straight-up Cthulhu horror. You know what Cthulhu is, right?"
"And that's not the worst of it. Several major celestial bodies that we've tracked for decades... vanished. They just wiped off the map. We don't know if something massive eclipsed them or if they were straight-up deleted. Tell me that isn't eldritch territory!"
A microscopic tremor ran through Su Jin's spine. His chopsticks froze mid-air above the boiling broth as he slowly, mechanically raised his eyes to meet Lei Dong's.
"Are you certain?"
"Jesus... what the hell is with that look? You look like a serial killer about to snap. Scared the shit out of me." Lei Dong's posture stiffened, suddenly unnatural. "I'm serious. Why would I lie about that? Fragments of it even leaked to the news. There are encrypted clips floating around Douyin. Idiotic clickbait accounts are treating it like a creepypasta."
"Hmm... that's the internet for you." Su Jin forced his muscles to relax, smoothly changing the subject as he shoved the meat into his mouth.
Lei Dong narrowed his eyes, studying him. "Brother Hui, I can smell the burnout on you. What the hell actually happened out there? You cashed out big but you look like a walking corpse. You need to snap out of it. Where's that ruthless project manager energy you used to have?"
"I'm just navigating a blind spot. I don't know which route to take next." Su Jin drew a slow, deliberate breath, locking onto Lei Dong's gaze. "Leizi, if you had a gun to your head, what would you choose? Live out your entire life as a cowardly statistic, or step up and play the hero for one fleeting second?"
"In this corporate meat grinder? Everyone is a coward. I signed up to be a coward the day I took a desk job. What kind of middle-school anime question is that?"
"Fair enough. Bottoms up."
The two glass rims clinked sharply before they both drained their alcohol.
Beyond the fogged-up glass, a heavy rain began to assault the city. The downpour violently escalated, a deafening drumbeat against the pavement.
Su Jin turned his head toward the storm. A phantom, freezing dampness suddenly invaded his lungs. His stomach gave a violent, involuntary lurch.
"Looks like a washout. Let's hit the billiard hall. By the time we finish a few frames the rain should—holy shit!" Lei Dong cut off, scrambling to kick a plastic trash bin squarely in front of Su Jin.
The relentless drumming of the rain had finally shattered his composure. Su Jin's stomach convulsed, a tidal wave of acid and phantom gore surging up his throat.
Through sheer, agonizing willpower, he managed to swallow down the bitter bile before it breached his lips.
Lei Dong slowly lowered the bin, inhaling sharply. "What the actual hell is wrong with you? Your entire frequency is completely out of sync."
"Cough... hah." Su Jin wiped a bead of cold sweat from the corner of his mouth, letting out a hollow, raspy chuckle. "Collateral damage... I haven't been digesting things well lately. Just drive me home."
...
Standing alone on the dark balcony, Su Jin clamped an unlit cigarette between his teeth, staring up into the lightless sky.
The torrential rain continued to shred the city skyline.
He cast a brief glance over his shoulder. The warm glow of the television illuminated his parents, safe and oblivious in the living room.
Turning back to face the sprawling, electrified grid of modern civilization, a violent storm brewed behind Su Jin's eyes.
For over two agonizing weeks, he had tried to bury the trauma. He had tried to anesthetize himself with mundane reality.
Yet his central nervous system and survival instincts were entirely detached from his rational mind.
Seeing the ruin of others as his own ruin... No matter how desperately he wanted to deny it, the bleeding edge of reality was already showing apocalyptic fractures.
His eyelids grew impossibly heavy. His consciousness violently bypassed dimensions, hallucinating the towering skyscrapers before him crumbling into an endless, blood-soaked wasteland.
When his eyes snapped open, the illusion shattered. Su Jin plunged his hand into his jacket pocket.
Fear was just a biological response. Courage was an executive decision.
He had already looked the abyss in the eye and signed the contract. There was zero strategic value in stalling, zero logic in self-deception.
He didn't even need to unfold the crinkled 'Company Notice'. The paper spontaneously ignited into a swarm of ethereal, drifting sparks, aggressively drilling into the meat of his right hand to sear a burning stigmata onto his skin.
[Third Generation Sinder, Welcome to the Company!]