Apocalyptic Forecast - Chapter 1
Chapter 1: Prologue: The Last Dinner
Translator: EndlessFantasy Translation
Editor: EndlessFantasy Translation
Year 2020.
Mount Everest.
There was a rending crash in the distance.
Enormous glaciers slid off the pitch-black peaks, falling into the tumultuous sea.
The vicious ocean of ice surged, rising into waves hundreds of miles tall. It looked almost as though it would extend to the very end of the world. In response, there was a breeze from the end of the world, carrying with it the odor of ash and dust.
The world suddenly felt so very small.
The tall dome of heaven seemed to be pressing down on the earth, turning into a solid thing of pure white metal. Through the large crack in it, one could see the stars in the universe slowly fading.
They were like lights gradually melting into the darkness after the electricity was turned off.
Suddenly, it felt as though nothing was left in this vast world. All that remained was the narrow platform at the peak of the world, and the work cabin they had built on a moment’s notice.
A fishing rod was propped up on the edge of the platform, and a fishing line was tossed into the ocean, bobbing on the surface of the murky water.
The bored fisherman wore a felt hat and lay in his deck chair.
As though to kill time, he even had an old chessboard with him. Ignoring the constant sound of crashing in the distance, he played around with the pieces nonchalantly.
Perhaps due to the passage of time, the black and white pieces were already missing a member or ten. Of the ones remaining, the king and the bishop were chipped and worn as well. Time had left cracks all over their surfaces.
Even a large corner of the chessboard itself was missing. The black and white squares were twisted and merged into each other, forming a large patch of messy gray instead.
However, the surprising thing was no matter how the mountains shook, the pieces remained resolutely in their squares. They did not move even an inch.
“President, there’s word from NASA—”
The assistant with heavy spectacles walked out of the cabin, holding the last piece of luggage. “—Their fourth transfer is now complete, and the New York Stock Exchange has been fully uploaded, so they’re leaving now. They wish us the best of luck.”
“Good riddance.”
The president shook his head crossly. “Those guys from the Governance Bureau are such a pain. They’re always taking their own sweet time, and they can’t even move out quickly.”
“They have to save a backup, after all. After ‘Heaven’ crashed down, the data can only be transferred using hard disks now.”
“Don’t be a fool, child.” The president snorted. “Those guys just like to stay until the very last second. As if they’re oh so good at keeping to the clock, hmph! It’s not like it’d kill anyone if they moved ten minutes earlier.”
“Ahaha.”
The assistant laughed awkwardly but did not reply. Instead, he reached over and saw the laptop left to sit next to the chessboard. Aside from two tabs from his earlier search, ‘how to fish in the Himalayas’, the screen only displayed a real-time satellite image now.
That satellite from the old NASA was still stubbornly performing its duty until now, transmitting the images from all the way up there in space without a hitch.
Unfortunately, the image on the screen was no longer the beautiful starscape of the past. Instead, it was a battered battlefield.
Countless chaotic whirlwinds covered the entire blue expanse, and underneath that layer of tornado clouds, thick at parts and thin at others, all they could see was field after field of heartbreaking scorch marks.
At the same time, a huge crevice slowly appeared on the satellite image. An enormous scarlet line of several thousand kilometers rapidly stretched and expanded, pulling the sickly yellow land and grey-black ocean with it. Finally, it even moved the cyclones and tore another hole in the ozone layer.
“That’s an earthquake, right?”
The assistant gasped in awe and put his face closer to the screen. “How impressive. I had no idea it would be this magnificent.”
The president raised his head and gave it a glance, understanding immediately. “It’s a geothermal explosion. Since the core started to cool down, the third wave is being released from the North and South American tectonic plates. If we don’t do anything about it, it’ll probably end in about sixty years… Look, New York already sank into the ocean.”
“What a waste. I haven’t seen the Statue of Liberty yet.”
“Well, I have.”
The president pulled his gaze back. “It’s nothing much, really…”
There was a sudden crash from the distance, and something seemed to light up from the depths of the ocean. The bright red light tossed and turned in the pitch-black darkness, illuminating the agonizing scorching glow from underneath the earth’s crust.
A breeze of fire blew from the ends of the ocean, carrying with it grey dust and white fog. It threatened to cover the entire surface of the world.
As though the entire world was boiling in seawater.
“It looks hella lot like teppanyaki.”
“Hmm?”
“Teppanyaki, I introduced it to you before, right? It tastes really good, you know.”
As though he was feeling sleepy now, the president lay in his chair and covered his face with his hat. He looked like he was going to sleep, and his voice sounded soft and dreamy. “A long time ago, a friend of mine from Weizhou told me that there are two types of teppanyaki, one from Kanto and one from Kansai. We usually eat the Kanto type cuz it’s simple and easy, but the really tasty one is from Kansai.
“That’s cuz they only put a really thin layer of oil on the grill when they start cooking. As long as it’s hot enough, the fats from the ingredients will cook themselves. Apparently, that way you can really taste the natural freshness and original flavor of the food…”
The assistant was silent for a moment before he said, “That sounds quite cruel.”
“That’s right, but aren’t humans innately cruel creatures?” the president retorted. “If eating that means we survive, we’ll eat it. That’s the most basic principle, the evil in the very roots of humanity.
“At the very beginning, we ate lightning and swallowed fire. We burned down the plains and dug up the oil reservoirs, extracting the oil. When that wasn’t enough, we turned our greedy eyes to fission power… Now, even though this world is dying, we still refuse to let go.
“Perhaps the ball started rolling back when our ancestors added Neanderthals to their recipe books, and once it started, it could not stop.”
The assistant turned around to look at the man lying in the chair, but he could not see the man’s face underneath his cap. He could not tell if that man’s eyes were filled with sorrow or the familiar sarcasm and cynicism that he had grown used to in the past.
In the long silence that ensued, the sky grew darker and darker. The pure white heavens began to dim, until finally that corona behind the clouds gradually started to shrink and fade as well…
“Is the sun going out too?”
“Yep. The power of the original energy pillar is running out.”
“The storm’s starting again.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“Will it stop this time?”
“Who knows?” The president stood up slowly and put the hat back on his head. “Doesn’t matter how things change from now on. We humans can’t live here anymore… You’ve noticed that by now, right? Aside from a body full of pain and scars, there’s nothing left on this earth anymore.”
He paused and murmured softly, “This is our final dinner.”
He lit the last cigarette roll.
There was a bright spark, followed by a small column of white smoke.
On the computer screen, all the lights that represented the satellite signals slowly dimmed, replaced by one strange symbol after another. The symbols ran across the pitch-black screen like gods moving in their own void, with an air of indescribable coldness and solemnity.
The Country of Utopia, now online.
Inheritance Yard, now online.
The Governance Bureau, now online.
The Stoneaxe Association, the Bronze Hand, the Graveyard of the Lost…
Behind the black screen and their individual logos, it felt like there were countless gazes watching this final piece of land, waiting for the arrival of the last moment.
All of the guests were in place, and now they waited for the final curtain to rise.
Their eyes were fixed on that broken chessboard.
The assistant gulped nervously and looked at his watch carefully. When the hour hand and the minute hand overlapped, he raised his head as though struck by electricity and reported, “The Divine Essence Pillar is ready.”
“…Wait!”
The president suddenly frowned. He seemed to be listening to something.
It was not just the assistant. The logos on the screen seemed to turn serious as well, as though they were facing a mighty foe.
Immediately after that, the man suddenly reached out his hand and pulled up his fishing rod. He actually yanked something out of the ocean. It looked furry, like a cat, but it had a fish’s tail. All in all, it was unspeakably odd.
“Aha! I waited for two hours, but I got something in the end. Who ever said Qiandu (TN: ‘thousand degrees’, a play of Baidu lit. hundred degrees, the Chinese equivalent of Wikipedia) isn’t reliable?” The president grinned and observed his ‘catch’. “We sure are fated to meet, little thing! But it doesn’t really look like a fish. Is it really edible?”
“…”
Everyone fell silent. No one said a thing.
They did not really want to bother with him right now.
The little thing that had been fished up opened its mouth and protested for a while, stretching out its little front paws to try and scratch his face, but he stuffed it right into the fish bucket.
Once it was back in the seawater, it immediately calmed down. It flipped in the water and just floated there, too lazy to move.
“Alright, then.” The president stuffed the fishing rod and the bucket at his assistant and picked up his own chair. “Let’s pack up and go.”
He reached out his hand and picked the white rook off the chessboard.
With that, the last lights seemed to go out.
The sun hanging high in the arch of the sky disappeared without a trace.
The entire world was plunged into darkness.
After the lights went out, they could not hear the howling of any breeze either, because other than themselves, everything had come to a sudden stop. It was as though time had frozen over.
The first to leave was the universe, because a long and slender appeared from nowhere and took away the black queen. Utopia had taken away the very essence of the stars, and so the initial darkness faded, the countless stars had vanished, and all that remained was the meaningless void.
Immediately after that, what remained of the ocean left as well. Inheritance Yard removed the proof of its existence, and the black bishop disappeared into nothing. Be it the sky-high tsunamis or the boiling red sea, all the living water in this world rapidly declined and collapsed, until all that remained was the pitch-black sea bed.
Next, the white bishop faded away like an illusion. The Governance Bureau turned off the light of glory, so everything fell silent, and the screeching crust fell quiet. The lava spewing from the cracks quickly solidified and lost all its heat…
By now, Asia, Europe, Africa, South America, North America, the vicious oceans, the cold or hot whirlwinds, and even the sky… Everything was being destroyed, slowly and steadily.
All that remained was the low wail of the world falling apart.
Like the strings on an instrument snapping one after the other, in the end, only the empty echoes were left.
In this enormous yet lonely apocalypse, the old Gaea, Earth VIII, met its end.
After the last cigarette went out, all that remained of the dying and broken world was a husk of its former self and the final unclosed door next to the president.
“The fourteenth abandoned Eden and Promised Land, huh…”
The president looked at the empty chessboard in front of him and took a bouquet of pure white flowers from his pocket. The flowers came out of nowhere, and there was even still dew on the petals.
Like tears, they dripped onto the crack in the chessboard.
“Thank you for your refuge and tolerance over the past three hundred years and more. It was really hard on you.”
He took off his hat and bid a gentle farewell to everything here.
“—One day, let us meet again in another hell.”
…
Finally, the door closed.
In the eternal darkness and silence, the now-meaningless space shrank in on itself, pulling whatever rays of light remained into a pointless redshift. As the four elemental forces collapsed, the chessboard and the flowers disappeared into the void.
The destruction of Earth No. 8 was now complete.
At the very last second, a ray of minuscule light appeared above the chessboard, drawing the queen’s pure white visage amidst the flower’s tears. Like a meteor, it then shot into the distance.
The old world had died once again, just as it did countless times in the past.
After that, the new world arrived.
Life went on as usual.
…
Those were the records remaining from ninety years ago, the last shadow of the glory days.
Since then, such heights had never again been achieved.