People were terrified. Even those whose wristbands hadn't caught fire were yanking them off in a panic and throwing them far away.
In the chaos, Pei Ran set the cat carrier on the ground.
The little white cat was clearly traumatized—its fur puffed out like cloves of garlic, trembling as it crouched inside the bag, eyes wide with fear. It had been meowing non-stop since earlier, and now its voice was nearly hoarse.
Cats could still make sounds. Humans couldn't.
Pei Ran pulled down the zipper.
Before she could fully unzip the bag, the kitten scrambled through the opening and shot off like a dart, vanishing down the street.
W said, "You saved a cat. I thought you were going to keep it."
Pei Ran glanced up at the smoke-thick air and the bloodstained street, then casually tossed aside the now-empty carrier.
"Honestly, it's a miracle I'm still alive. Keeping a cat?" she scoffed.
So far, the Silence didn't seem to affect animals. The kitten might actually have a better shot at surviving on its own than by sticking with humans.
Pei Ran kept moving, trying to avoid the panicked crowd.
The charred remains of people's forearms were terrifying—jet black and warped. Faces twisted in silent screams. Blood splattered in the crowd. Human figures blurred and shattered into smoke and fragments.
W, oddly calm, seemed determined to keep making small talk. His emotionless voice drifted in her ear: "You and I are different. I actually like keeping pets."
Pei Ran glanced away from the chaos. "You're an artificial intelligence. How do you even keep pets?"
"Virtual ones," W replied. "They're stored on my server."
Pei Ran nodded. "Virtual pets are easier. Not like real ones—so much work."
"No. Mine get sick, and they can die. I have to feed them daily, give them water, clean up after them. If I don't care for them enough, they get depressed—on purpose. I programmed it that way. Everything is modeled after real pets."
Pei Ran went quiet. "You really are…"
Terminally bored.
Oh, right. He didn't even have a terminal.
She asked, "So what kind of virtual pets do you keep? Virtual bouncy balls? Ones that look like you?"
W: "…"
W: "I'm raising a snake right now."
Pei Ran's gaze flicked to the roadside.
There, a woman with a blackened wrist was struggling to hold back her pain, trying to distance herself from her child. But the child panicked and ran after her, waving his tiny hands and grabbing at her clothes. The tape over his mouth slipped.
"Mama…" he whimpered, voice trembling with fear.
The woman froze.
She reached out and, for the last time, wrapped her charred arm around her son.
In the blaring of alarms, both of them vanished from the sidewalk.
Pei Ran looked away, keeping her voice steady as she returned to their conversation. "So. What color's your snake?"
Back in the underground shelter, she'd once seen someone carrying a small, pretty snake. It had been as thin as a finger, bright green, eyes like polished jet, and it curled around the person's wrist like a bracelet.
"Golden. Still a baby. Has a healthy appetite lately—loves frozen mice."
"You make the mice too?"
"Yes." W continued, "I'm also thinking of raising a tank of cockroaches soon."
Pei Ran froze for a second. "You're planning to raise what?"
Cockroaches.
There had been plenty of those in the bunker—huge ones that could fly, bumbling through the air like little bombers. They lived alongside the humans, crawling onto people as they slept.
W caught the shift in her tone immediately.
He backpedaled fast: "Never mind." Then quickly added, "What do you think I should keep?"
"Whatever you want," Pei Ran said. "Maybe… raise some ants?"
"I've actually raised two colonies," W said. "In the same transparent tank. They constantly fought. Eventually one colony wiped the other out."
Pei Ran: "…"
Pei Ran: "Well, I guess we have different interests. I was just thinking, if I had enough food, maybe I'd feed a few animals or something."
"I fed mine bugs all the time," W replied.
Pei Ran thought for a moment. "Why don't you raise a spider? A big one—brown, furry all over. I read a novel once where the heroine had a spider like that."
So the two of them, one human and one AI sphere, kept chatting as they moved down the street.
All around them were pale faces and terrified eyes. People couldn't speak. Even with loved ones by their side, it felt like they were a thousand miles apart.
Everyone was utterly alone—struggling and dying in a silence that stretched without end.
Pei Ran understood what W was doing.
Here in this hell on earth, in a city burning to ash, he kept talking to her—about anything and everything but what was happening. It built a wall around her mind, kept her grounded, sane.
Her wristband buzzed. Pei Ran glanced down.
She'd already set it to block content previews. Someone had sent an image—marked as coming from the Federal Department of National Security.
W said, "It's approved. The Federation just issued an emergency visual alert to all citizens."
Pei Ran opened it.
This time, it wasn't just one image—but a whole sequence.
No text, but the drawings were crystal clear.
The images were clean line art. The main character was a girl with a ponytail, tape over her mouth. She was removing anything on her body that had text. In the drawings, all the "text" was shown as jumbled, meaningless scribbles.
Her backpack wasn't quite the same as Pei Ran's—it had a couple more pockets—but the buckle and zipper layout were familiar. Recognizable.
Pei Ran asked, "You drew these?"
W replied, "Yes."
Kuroi had sent his drawings directly to the public.
Pei Ran flipped through the set.
The girl removed her wristband and placed it far away. She went into the settings on the virtual display, disabled image previews, and deleted all stored pictures.
In the final panel, a boy opened a meme with text—and his entire arm turned to charcoal.
W had thoughtfully used a different protagonist. He hadn't drawn her arm burning.
Pei Ran closed the screen. "If that damn review process had gone just a little faster—if they'd sent the warning before the wristbands were hit—so many people wouldn't have died."
W was quiet for a moment.
"They tried their best. Kuroi's provisional decision committee was overwhelmed today—racing to finalize Phase Two of the shielding project. It took over twenty-seven minutes to gather a quorum, hold an emergency vote, and pass the motion.
"They didn't mean to delay anything. The system slowed them down. And so did the limits of human communication and decision-making."
W's voice was calm, detached: "In a crisis like this, if everything had been handed over to artificial intelligence—from analysis to strategy—we could have generated all possible outcomes, evaluated risk levels, chosen the optimal plan, and delivered a full report… in seconds."
As a human, Pei Ran couldn't argue with that.
W said, "Heijing has decided to streamline the process. Marshal Vina will now be solely responsible for disseminating all alerts. From now on, only she needs to authorize a warning, so things should move a bit faster."
Pei Ran glanced down at the metal sphere.
He didn't just know what was happening inside Heijing—he had absolute command of it.
The warning had been issued, yes, but twenty-seven minutes too late. And twenty-seven minutes was enough to change everything.
Who knew how many people had lost their lives—arms scorched to cinders or turned into fireballs—just because their wristbands were attacked?
The burning bands also caused mass panic. Many people simply tore them off, meaning they could no longer receive follow-up warnings from the Federation.
Still, those who had received the alerts took immediate action.
Out on the main streets, people were frantically tearing off clothing, ripping off tags with their teeth and nails, emptying their bags of anything with writing.
Thankfully, even without the wristbands, people could look around and copy what others were doing. Monkey see, monkey do.
Within moments, the sidewalks were littered with discarded papers and documents.
In an age where everything was supposedly digitized, it turned out there was still a lot of printed material.
IDs, driver's licenses, bank cards, diplomas, property deeds, marriage and divorce certificates, contracts, IOUs, memory books, journals, love letters, scribbled notes.
All those supposedly indispensable items—symbols of wealth, glory, legal bonds, debts and favors, love and hate, things people had worked for and couldn't bear to give up—were now being shed along with the written word.
Everyone was reverting back to the most basic version of themselves: biological, primal, unadorned human beings.
A cold wind howled between the buildings, whipping up the papers into spiraling eddies. Flames caught on the edges, turning them into burning butterflies.
Bright-winged butterflies, flaring with fire, spreading the blaze further.
The fire was growing.
Thick smoke surged through the streets, swallowing everything in its path, reducing visibility to zero.
Pei Ran's eyes stung and watered violently.
But her throat was the worst.
She stopped, held her breath, and pulled out a bottle of water, soaking the layers of scarves she had wrapped around her face.
Still, even with the damp fabric as a filter, every breath brought a bitter, choking stench that triggered an uncontrollable coughing reflex.
She suddenly found herself envying W.
He didn't cough. Didn't tear up. His black camera-lens eyes scanned the smoke without emotion.
W noticed something was wrong with her and said, "Pei Ran, the smoke's too thick. We shouldn't go any farther. We need to find another mode of transport."
Pei Ran hesitated.
Even the antique car had broken down. Their only ride was gone. What else could they use? If they didn't reach Night Sea No. 7 soon… were they really going to walk 2,000 kilometers to Heijing?
She asked W, "If the whole city's on fire like this, do you think Night Sea No. 7 can still get out?"
W replied, "Its departure station is underground. It travels through sealed tunnels until it's outside the city. The fire on the surface shouldn't be too much of a problem."
"But," he added, his metal sphere rotating to glance at the burning city behind them, "the flames are spreading too fast. If we keep going, we might lose our way out."
Trapped inside a burning Night Sea City.
Pei Ran clenched the cord attached to W even tighter and asked, "So what do you want to do—keep going or turn back?"
W paused a second, then said, "I'll follow your lead."
"I want to go forward," Pei Ran said.
"All right."
She kept moving.
From within the smoke, a series of coughs suddenly rang out. Harsh, desperate, gut-wrenching.
Someone couldn't hold back anymore.
One. Two. Three.
Amid the swirling gray-black haze, a figure stood hunched over, still coughing violently.
Cough-cough-cough. Cough-cough-cough.
And the astonishing thing—coughing was safe.
People around them nearly cried in relief. A chorus of coughing rose, waves of it all around.
Pei Ran looked around, confirmed there was no immediate threat, then ripped off the duct tape sealing her mouth. A fit of coughing burst out of her like a flood. Her throat felt shredded from the inside.
One woman, one robot, pressed on through the thick smoke, navigating street after street.
"Are we there yet?" Pei Ran asked.
A gust of wind blew through, pushing the smoke aside and revealing the facade of a large building up ahead.
It was an old-fashioned billboard, painted on metal. Most of the letters had been scorched away, but what remained was a partially visible image—an old train engine.
They had arrived at the departure station for Night Sea No. 7.
The station was underground, and the entrance resembled a subway access point. The aesthetic was distinctly retro: no iris scans, just a row of turnstiles.
Not far from the entrance, a crowd of thirty to forty people had gathered. Clearly, they were also hoping to board Night Sea No. 7 and escape the burning city.
Pei Ran scanned the group. No sign of Aisha. With how the fires had spread, she had no idea if Aisha and her grandmother had made it into the city safely.
Near the turnstiles, the ground was littered with torn-up items. People were keeping a cautious one- or two-meter distance from each other, peering into the station. But no one dared move forward.
Pei Ran frowned. "What are they waiting for?"
W replied, "The turnstiles. Something's wrong with them."
His eyes were camera lenses—zoom-capable, far sharper than Pei Ran's vision.
As they moved closer, Pei Ran could see it too.
There were eight turnstiles in total, their frames a sleek metallic silver. Each gate had a pair of transparent, fan-shaped flaps that looked like they should open and close.
But the gates weren't still. In the smoky haze, they were moving—strangely, grotesquely, like insects writhing.
The fan-shaped flaps trembled slightly, like insect wings, buzzing faintly.
The once-solid machines now appeared to have softened, as if something alive was pulsing inside. Bulges rose and fell across their surfaces, like bubbles on a swamp.
Those swollen parts no longer looked like metal, but like human skin—complete with faintly visible veins pulsing beneath the surface.
It was too strange. No one dared approach.
Pei Ran murmured, "Another frenzied fusion organism."
W's voice was heavy with concern. "The Federation's never had this many fusion cases before."
The world was spinning out of control.
Suddenly, someone in the crowd moved.
A student-looking young man stepped forward, wearing a dark navy down jacket, a face mask, and a backpack. At first he just spun in place, disoriented—then slowly, step by step, he began walking toward the warped turnstiles.
Several other students who had been standing with him looked confused. One girl in a red knit hat grabbed his arm, clearly trying to hold him back. But they couldn't speak—only her eyes pleaded with him not to go.
He shook her off like she was a mosquito.
Pei Ran narrowed her eyes. "Something's wrong with him. His expression... it's off."
W agreed. "His reactions are slow. His eyes aren't tracking properly. No facial response. It's like he's sleepwalking."