Chapter 2

Beyond the half‑collapsed roof, above the gaping rift in the gray sky that could be seen far too easily, she saw a gigantic fireball hurtling toward her at a speed that left no time to think.
Through Xiang Changge’s gray‑brown pupils, one could clearly see that behind that rapidly enlarging fireball came more and denser fireballs.
Like a rainstorm, a meteor shower of flaming rocks began to fall densely from the sky.
In an instant, one deafening boom after another rang out. The precarious ruin of a building and the few stray zombies wandering nearby all turned to ash along with the billowing dust.
“Ding‑dong.”
“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard Air China flight SM2352 from Bribatol to City A. The estimated flight time of this flight is eleven and a half hours. We expect to arrive at 14:30 this afternoon. Our plane is about to take off. Please sit down and fasten your seat belts…”
A strange voice sounded in her ears. Just as Xiang Changge regained consciousness, she warily made no sound.
She even restrained her body’s instinctive reactions, not opening her eyes at the first moment and letting others realize that she was awake.
She simply forced down the dizzy, throbbing discomfort in her head and listened intently to the faint sounds around her.
Under the roar of what sounded like some large piece of machinery or weaponry, there were many people talking—some in Chinese, some in English, some in other “bird languages” Xiang Changge couldn’t understand.
They all seemed to be in a very relaxed state, with not a trace of urgency or oppression in their voices.
The temperature around her also seemed very comfortable—not the scorching forty‑to‑fifty‑degree heat, nor the bone‑piercing cold of minus thirty‑odd degrees during the great freeze.
In her nose there was no stench of rotten corpses, no sour stink from unwashed human bodies that hadn’t been cleaned in a long time—only many light, varied scents of perfume.
Perfume?
How long had it been since she’d smelled something like that?
Unable to help herself, Xiang Changge drew in a greedy, deep breath.
Ah, what a fresh scent, what wonderful air.
Wait. Crap.
Right after she took that deep breath, Xiang Changge’s body went rigid, and her whole being snapped into a hair‑trigger state of alert.
If someone were watching her from the side, the instant her breathing pattern changed just now, they definitely would have noticed.
If so, in her current situation—where she had no idea what was going on—she would no longer be able to stay on the defensive, unmoving while the enemy remained still, and calmly observe first.
But…
Hadn’t she just been hit by a fireball in that ruined house? The sensation of her body being instantaneously melted by the high temperature had barely even registered before she lost consciousness.
By rights, she ought to be as dead as dead could be. So how was it that now…
Huh, could she be on the road to heaven?
Otherwise, how could there be so many people around her, in such a comfortable environment that it made one want to fall asleep?
Right, right—times had changed. When people died nowadays, they didn’t go down to the underworld; they went up to heaven instead.
With that thought, Xiang Changge couldn’t wait to open her eyes and see what this so‑called legendary heaven actually looked like.
The instant she lifted her eyelids to greet the light, she clearly heard a jubilant electronic voice ring out in her mind.
“Konijiwa, host‑chan! Watashi am the Plot Rewrite System‑chan. You can call me System‑tongtong. Welcome to ‘99 Tragic Loves, the CEO’s Love Nowhere to Hide 2.0 (Rewrite Version)’.”
“…?”
In that split second, Xiang Changge was stunned into a daze, shocked by both the scene before her eyes and the voice in her head.
1. Flight SM8802352 (Short‑for ‘Love to Sleep’) is about to depart. Dear reader babies, don’t forget to bookmark and water this flight to fuel us up. [doge holding a rose]
2. Next up will be my new book, “After I Deleted the Night‑Market Stall Owner, She Added Me Back Again,” about being trapped in the swamp of midnight urban desires and having no choice but to eat through the night. If you like it, remember to bookmark in advance so you know the moment it opens.
3. My latest completed works—“Married Then In Love,” about a flash marriage and having no choice but to learn new positions with your new wife every night; “Miss Evil Dragon and the Mute Little Chef,” about conquering a black‑scaled, white‑bellied dragon in a Western‑fantasy world with gourmet food; as well as system‑transmigration stories in a similar vein like “Romance Allergy,” “Being a Pipe‑Dream Master in a Tragedy Novel”—and many, many more finished novels you can binge without waiting for updates, are all in my author space. You’re all welcome to come have a taste. [doge holding a rose]
So this…was what heaven looked like?
Although, counting it up, she was only twenty‑seven this year, Xiang Changge still felt as if she had already lived two lives.
In her first life, she lived in a peaceful and beautiful modern society filled everywhere with traces of civilization.
Though she had been a baby abandoned in a trash can the moment she was born, she had met Grandpa Xiang Xingchang.
Under his care, and with the company of the senior brothers and sisters at the martial arts school, she had studied and grown up step by step.
And just when she graduated from university, ready to inherit her grandfather’s martial arts school and carry it forward, her first life ended without warning.
The apocalypse descended, and society plunged into chaos.
As one familiar person after another left her, “living each day like a year” ceased to be just a simple four‑character phrase and instead became Xiang Changge’s reality.
In the apocalypse, dying was as easy as breathing.
Living on, instead, became a painful, arduous, and distant luxury.
After drifting through five years of the apocalypse, Xiang Changge had killed more people and zombies than a fishmonger had killed fish.
Every person who still had their wits about them and died before her told her the same extravagant wish at the moment of their death—whether in words or with their eyes.
—I want so badly to live a good life.
And so, even when she was the only one left, even when the future was shrouded in fog, even when she knew that ahead of her there was only a headless bridge waiting, Xiang Changge still struggled to live on.
She thought: I just want to see what will happen to me tomorrow.
And the answer to that question would only be known the day after tomorrow.
In this way, she numbly lived through one day after another. Until today, when, like a final flare of light before death, she suddenly saw such a scene—familiar yet strange.
People. So many living, breathing people.
Men and women, old and young; everyone was there.
They sat in their own seats in an orderly fashion—some with heads bent over their phones, some with headphones on watching shows on their tablets, some reading magazines, some looking around curiously…
The in‑flight broadcast began its second repetition. The soft, pleasant female voice was like a faint Buddhist chant drifting down from the sky. To Xiang Changge, it felt utterly unreal.
But perhaps this sense of unreality existed only for her.
Xiang Changge saw that the people sitting in the cabin with her showed no strange expressions at all. Calm and at ease, they simply did their own things, passing the time without even sparing a glance at their surroundings.
In the apocalypse, if someone relaxed their guard even a little and failed to pay attention to their environment, the next second they would end up either as food in a zombie’s mouth or a “delivery package” for other humans.
But here, for these people, this moment was just an ordinary slice of an ordinary, peaceful day.
No different from usual.
Outside the window, the sky was blue and the clouds were white, the sun was shining bright, and on the ground in the distance, airport ground crew bustled about.
Humanity and society were functioning in an orderly way, as if the apocalypse had never started—or had never come at all.
For a moment, Xiang Changge almost believed that those five hellish years had just been a dream.
Now she had simply awakened. She was still Xiang Changge, a girl who had just graduated, full of joy on her journey home aboard a plane to her hometown.
Her grandfather, the senior brothers and sisters at the martial arts school, the little girl next door who loved spicy sticks, the warm‑hearted auntie who sold steamed buns at the town entrance…everyone was still alive.
Only the electronic voice in her head—crackling now and then like bad reception—shattered her fantasy.
“Moshi moshi? Hello? Bonjour? Host, can you hear my sweet voice?”
“If you can hear me, please respond. Over!”
Xiang Changge: “…”
She could hear it, but she very much wanted to pretend she couldn’t.
What on earth was this thing, and why was it so noisy?
Instinctively, Xiang Changge’s mind produced the classic three questions: Who am I, where am I, and what’s going on?
“Uwaaah!”
Her thoughts had barely formed when that so‑called system let out a shrill screech, like some wanderer who had finally found their destined master after a lifetime at sea.
“Host, we’re finally connected!”
“You have no idea how hard System‑tongtong has worked to connect to you! It was so! very! hard!”
“Do you know how much energy and effort it took for System‑tongtong to piece you together out of that pile of ashes, dear host? It was terrifying. Such a bloody scene—this was my first time seeing anything like it.”
“Fortunately, we’ve now arrived smoothly at the mission plane.”
Xiang Changge remembered clearly that she had not spoken just now, yet that voice in her head seemed to have heard her thoughts and chattered away all on its own.
She looked around. She was currently in a middle seat in the cabin, with people in front of her, behind her, and across the aisle, though the window seat beside her was still empty.
The passenger closest to her, across the aisle, looked like a student; he had his head bent over his phone and showed no unusual expression, seemingly not hearing the mechanical voice with its faint electrical crackle at all.
Xiang Changge raised a hand and gently pressed her temples.
Could that voice really be inside her head, audible only to her?
She stayed on guard, not responding right away.
But even if she didn’t speak, the self‑proclaimed plot‑rewrite system didn’t stop talking.
It coughed twice in a very human way, as if clearing its throat, and as if using the gesture to draw attention to itself and announce that what it was about to say next was very important business.
“All right, 8802, I know you can hear me. Humans have an old saying: ‘The hardest person to wake is the one who’s pretending to sleep.’ System‑tongtong thinks we can add another line after that now.”
“The hardest person to wake is the one pretending to sleep, and the hardest person to get a response from is the one pretending not to hear. But that’s okay. System‑tongtong is experienced—there isn’t any kind of host I haven’t seen. Parentheses, pushes up glasses, parentheses end.”
Xiang Changge: “…”
Why did it feel like this thing wasn’t very smart?
“I’m sure you’ve sensed it by now—you’re System‑tongtong’s eight thousand eight hundred and second host. As long as you follow my lead and work hard, anything you want will be yours.”
“All right, next System‑tongtong will introduce this plane of existence and what you’re supposed to do here.”
“…blablabla yada‑yada‑yada…”
The system’s “briefing” went on and on. It talked until the plane had taken off, climbed into the sky, and flown smoothly for half an hour, and it still hadn’t finished.