This strongest takes all world is perfect for someone like me, who desperately hates paperwork.
In my previous life before the destruction of the world as we know it, I was quite a scientific person. Or so I thought anyway (at least until logic fell apart). Wanting to study biology and medicine, a traumatizing experience drove me away from my beloved field; filling out paperwork.
Those movies where mad scientists have fun making monsters and cause explosions? The really interesting articles they always post on various science news sites that make the process sound entertaining? A lie. In reality, every single action in the lab has to be recorded to be considered valid. You get me? I thought I was going to die if I had to fill out one more lab report.
Anyway, that’s why I, Yuling (玉凌), became an artist instead. A dead artist now, if you want to be honest about it.
Aaaaaaaaaa! Just when I was just about to break it into the editorial and advertising world too!
My luck is really bad!
Or so I thought. Anyway, apparently I had some talent beyond crying over paperwork. Unfortunately, I still died.
Huh, you want to know what happened? Fine, it’s not like I’m stirring old ghosts from the grave.
At the time, I had been an office lady (filling out paperwork) getting ready to jump into a world with no employees, only sole-proprietors, a freedom of some sort in the old world (even more paperwork). I was flying high, ready to take control of my fate once more (full of paperwork).
When that happened.
Apparently my world isn’t a purely scientific one, otherwise there’d be no way for that to exist. A thing that defies the laws of physics - an existence akin to magic.
Turns out it’s only possible due to several factors - blood lineage, heavy practice, and generally being your all around unproductive citizen in the eyes of modern society because all you do is supposedly meditate in the woods.
Blood lineage though, only influences a few things; mainly whether or not you get to have access to the rest of the factors. Blood lineage means that your family is old. Like blue blood old. So old that the government has to make quite a lot of exceptions.
Well, no thanks to them and the deeply boiling resentment from people fed up with conservative tradition that cost a lot of blood, the conflict finally opened its maws to the unsuspecting modern world.
Think Zombie Apocalypse Meets Except For the Zombies Aren’t Zombies But Superpowered Humans. Apparently there’s some kind of barrier that was erected some thousand years before all of this that decreased the amount of knowledge and power that normal people had access to. Which, due to said conflict, erupted, filling the drained world with power once more. Or something like that.
It’s actually not that bad if you’re one of them, but plenty horrible if you’re like me, a normal, every day, peace loving citizen just trying to make your way through a destroyed and ruined economy thanks to the previous generations.
It was utterly devastating.
It didn’t take long for some governments to fall apart, especially where I lived, the great United States of some such. It was the proverbial final nail on the coffin. All those years of boiling resentment, hatred, oppression. Well, they do say the average lifespan of eras tended to be around three to four hundred. It’s the obvious result of years of self destruction due to conservative values (well isn’t this a reoccurring theme, huh?).
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
10 years. That’s how long I managed to live after the cataclysm. Pretty long for someone who ended up as cannon fodder for the conflict between great forces. Yeah, we all like to think we’re the main characters of our stories, but in the end we’re just supporting red-shirts for some other power’s rise to the top.
I can’t call those 10 years to be fruitless, though.
After what happened, some of the masters from the ‘other world’ (let’s just call it that for now, since it’s become the world as we know it) decided to help these hapless peace induced citizens survive. I was one of the lucky few; apparently I was just in the area that a real big wig was meditating in. He saved me from an early death and secured my future as cannon fodder; a rank up from road kill.
I showed great promise, he said, and that it was a pity I appeared too late. Maybe in another 20 years I could be a normal ‘person’ in the other world. If I ever lived that long. Most of the people from the other world started training from the age of a toddler - the time where the body is in it’s greatest potential for growth. Also there was generations of genetics to consider too. A family sanctioned breeding program, man the other world was wild.
I wanted to say ‘that sounds like some wuxia story’ but I felt like that would be breaking the fourth wall a bit too much. It was probably because they existed that we had that kind of genre, although much to my delight my master said the other world was probably closer to xianxia than wuxia. Wuxia’s too optimistic. In this world, only the strong are king; all others are lowly ants.
He mentioned that, judging from my ability, I probably had some family history in the other world too; the Cultural Revolution and various other influences did mostly sever and smash the bonds between the ordinary people and the other world in and around China during the mid 20th century. I couldn’t answer that because I honestly didn’t know anything about my own family. My aunt did mention about a family tree shrine somewhere but I never got the chance to visit.
My master taught me the basic spirit gathering techniques used by the other world, as well as the advanced ones from his school. He had a pupil once, he told me, but the poor kid died early during an earlier conflict. He was desperate to find a new person to pass it down to, but up until now, no one was suitable.
To properly utilize my master’s school’s techniques, one had to have a great deal of base life force, and that’s exactly what I had. Or something like that. To be honest, the whole thing was so out of the realm of logic that I was only half following through. My master snorted and said it’s not something you can just understand.
Anyway, after years of bitter practice, I did get somewhere. Somewhere being among the lowest gooks. I guess someone took a shine to my intelligence and thought I’d be a great backup strategist or something. Not that it did them any good because we were annihilated some time later after narrowly surviving for an admirable amount of time.
I probably would have lived a lot longer by myself. They like to say your chances of survival is higher with more people, but that’s only if you’re someone with no survival skills. In fact, the difficulty level increases due to the greater amount of differing opinions and varying levels of skills and understanding - not to mention all those stacked up egos and influx of emotions. If you can’t centralize power in a group, you’re not likely to make it for very long. Not to mention, when you’re by yourself you don’t have any burdens to care for. Suddenly the life and death choices are a lot easier.
The unfortunate thing is, most humans can’t be lone wolves. Being lonely is, frankly, terrible. Maddening. Despite my master’s final words, I still decided to join some form of community, even if it was just a fringe group. It was fun, honestly. I felt more alive than I had up until the calamity. Something about facing the end of the world brings together people in a genuine bond.
Until you’re the only one left. Life was cheap at that time.
It would be a lie to say I was fine with that. I wasn’t. I’m still not fine. In fact, thanks to that, I had a solid foundation for my next try at life.
I don’t know if there’s a higher power, but whatever happened in that great unknown of the universe, I was somehow given a second chance. I wasn't reborn back to my pre-apocalypse life, thank god (if they exist), but given something even better.
If there really is a god out there, I’d love to thank them. That previous life of suffering, loneliness, indifference, and grief - paved the way for a future that repaid back everything and then more.
This, is my story…