Chapter 1 – Life 0 – Year 0 – The Apocalypse

The end of the world came with a simple announcement: NASA satellites had detected an unusual comet that had approached the sun very closely without burning up. Most people had just long enough to read that announcement and forget about it before the sun unleashed a solar flare like none seen before, headed straight towards Earth.

The force of the flare caused auroras to be visible in skies all over the world. Not that many were paying attention, as the more important effect was the total short outs of all electronic devices. Cell phones? Gone. All the satellites? Dead in orbit. Even high-tech shielded server rooms were reduced to expensive bricks, all data was lost.

Then came the earthquakes. Basically, every continental faultline massively shifted at once, and rumor had it, even a few new cracks in the crust were created right there and then. I heard tell of places experiencing their first real earthquake in recorded history, and even those were no small thing. Many of the coastlines also flooded from undersea earthquakes, new lakes even formed.

I heard all of this second-hand of course. We were still pretending things could go back to the way they were back then, so we tried to keep informed of how the rest of the world was handling things. Communication across continents was nearly impossible save for a few small courier planes (old ones, with no electronic autopilot). Print newspapers, which were a dying artform, had to come back in a major way. At first, people tried to keep things positive, highlighting acts of bravery from the military and public services to keep people alive.

Then, as time went on, things got a little stranger. People started reporting that even brand-new electronic components, made after the solar flare hit, were still complete non-starters. Fires and explosions started popping up, even from simple things that had never been controlled by computers or electricity. Guns started to misfire frequently. Scientists said with what little testing they could accomplish, it seemed flammable chemicals like gas or gunpowder were becoming… more flammable than usual.

Then things got even *weirder*. People with home telescopes were reporting there were fewer stars in the sky, with new ones disappearing every couple nights or so. Plants and animals of unusual size were being discovered all over, especially sea creatures washing up on beaches. A picture of an angler fish the size of a small whale was re-printed many times, with special focus on the massive bite wound that must have killed it.

With farming becoming more difficult, both due to unusually tough plants and the dangers of wildlife, starvation was increasingly common. Modern society relied on a massive amount of food to be created every day, more than could be accomplished by a small army of people without technology. Many turned to hunting the strange animals for food.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

The star situation got worse and worse. Eventually, the cause was partially discovered. A telescope-camera designed to take many pictures a second caught a single frame of a perfectly circular object moving into position to block a large star’s light. People started to recall the comet reported before the solar flare and wondered (not for the first time) if that was what caused it. They were correct.

11 months after the flare, in the light of the sun, moon, and literally nothing else, 6 massive objects appeared in the sky. They were about 3-quarters the size of the moon, and each one was a solid color. Blue, Yellow, Brown, Red, White, Green. They were all positioned in an orbit that made at least 2 of them visible anywhere on Earth, every night. People who looked at them closely reported some sort of mental effect over time. The blue one made people melancholic, the yellow one made them tired, the brown made them arrogant, the red made them angry, the white made them anxious, and the green made them calm. None of these happened instantly, but the effects were confirmed as best as they could be. This was all on top of the awe people felt just from having all known celestial bodies save the Sun and Moon replaced with 6 new ones.

We were all very scared these days, not just the ones who looked at the white mini-moon. So much had happened, so many had died, and no one was sure if they would be next, or if things would get worse somehow. They did. Get worse, that is.

Exactly one year after the flare hit, giant crystals descended from the 6 orbs. They fell without any kind of aerodynamics or re-entry heating, according to those who knew such things. They hit the ground at somewhat regular intervals, there was typically one every 10 square miles or so, though with some variation. Each crystal was colored the same as the orb they came from.

And from the crystals came… monsters. They came out of the crystals like they had been sleeping inside. If we had thought the mutated animals were bad enough, these things had zero percent self-preservation instinct and one hundred percent “attack humans on sight” instinct. In the days that followed, it was discovered they attacked anything that moved, not just humans. They even attacked monsters of different types if they could. They were killing machines, plain and simple.

You might have noticed that while I’m telling a lot of the story of the world, I’m not mentioning much about myself. Well, that’s because I don’t really remember much about myself. Amnesia, you may wonder? Yeah, something like that. You see, I vaguely remember being some sort of scientist. I vaguely remember being one of the first people to discover that comet, before the solar flare hit. And I vaguely remember living in a secure compound while everything around us went to hell.

And… I *distinctly* remember that compound being breached by giant deer-like monsters. And that as I tried to run away…  one of them sped up to impossible speeds and gored me with its antlers. And then it stabbed my body, again and again, until it was sure I was dead…

I was dead… wasn’t I?

But then… how am I putting these words into thoughts? Is this… my life, flashing before my eyes? But then how-

And then, a message appeared in my mind’s eye.

Choose your next Focus: Yin or Yang

…what?