Luo Yan's last customer of the night liked their noodles exactly the way Luo Yan secretly hated making them.
Not spicy, not bold, not loud. Just… precise. Clear broth, a single curl of scallion, two slices of chicken cut so thin they turned translucent at the edges, and a soft-boiled egg whose yolk had to be a specific shade of gold—too runny and they complained it was "raw," too set and they complained it was "chalky."
Luo Yan plated it anyway. He always did. He didn't love the order, but he loved the part where a mess became a finished bowl, steaming and complete, like the world still believed in normal endings.
"Table six," his coworker called.
Luo Yan slid the bowl onto the pass and wiped his hands on a towel that had long since stopped being white. His fingers smelled like ginger and dish soap, that stubborn mix of sharp and clean that followed him home even after he scrubbed too hard.
The kitchen was near-closing quiet. Fans still hummed. Pots cooled with tiny ticking sounds. Outside the back door, the alley's neon reflected in puddles like broken candy.
"Chef Luo," the manager said, poking his head in, "you good to do inventory before you go?"
Luo Yan nodded without thinking. "Yeah."
Inventory was comfort. Inventory was order. Inventory didn't scream at you or make you choose between two wrong answers. He lined up labels, checked dates, moved the oldest stock forward with the same calm ritual he'd been doing since he was nineteen and broke and living in a rented room that smelled like other people's cooking.
He wasn't ambitious. Not in the grand, story-worthy way.
He just wanted a stable life with enough money to eat well, sleep well, and have time to be bored sometimes. Bored was underrated. Bored meant you weren't running.
His phone buzzed on the prep counter.
He glanced at it: a message from his friend Chen Wen.
Chen Wen: you HAVE to read this new webnovel
Chen Wen: apocalypse + BL
Chen Wen: protagonist is a general and everyone is simping
Luo Yan snorted quietly. Chen Wen's taste was chaos in human form. If Chen Wen said "you have to read," it usually meant there would be heartbreak, screaming, and at least one plot twist designed to ruin your week.
Another buzz. A link.
Luo Yan dried his hands and tapped it, more out of curiosity than desire.
The page loaded slow, as if even the internet was tired.
Title: Storm at Day Zero
The first line was blunt: "At 11:47 p.m., the world fell asleep."
Luo Yan's eyebrows rose. He leaned his hip against the counter and kept reading.
The chapter moved fast. Too fast. People collapsing mid-step, dropping in supermarkets, on buses, at their desks. A global sleep wave. Then waking into a split world: some ordinary, some awakened with elemental powers, and too many rising with cloudy eyes and mouths that opened for flesh.
The protagonist was introduced with the kind of effortless competence Luo Yan always resented in fiction. A young general named Lan Huan, cold and efficient, born into a military family that controlled the capital's main base. He woke first. He took command. He did not hesitate.
It was well-written. Not in the indulgent poetic way, but in the sharp, clean way that made your heart race without permission.
Luo Yan's fingers tightened around the phone.
He read the paragraph where someone got bitten at the base gate because they tried to help a friend too slowly. He read the paragraph where the local military set up an emergency city base with containers and floodlights, and the first rule of the new world was enforced with gun barrels and shouting.
He read about zombies dropping "core crystals," and how people ignored them at first because survival didn't leave room for curiosity.
Luo Yan's stomach tightened like he'd swallowed ice water.
He had a familiar reaction to stress stories: his body believed them. His skin prickled. His breath got shallow. His brain started planning useless escape routes for problems that didn't exist.
He locked his phone.
"No," he muttered to himself, half amused and half annoyed. "Absolutely not. I'm not doing this before bed."
He tossed the phone face down on the counter like it was a bug. He finished inventory. He wiped every surface twice. He turned off the stove, the lights, the fans. The kitchen went from a hot noisy world into a quiet, dark box.
Outside, the city was normal.
Normal people laughed outside a convenience store. A couple argued at a crosswalk. A delivery bike cut through traffic like it had a personal grudge against red lights. Overhead, a plane crossed the sky in a slow white line.
Luo Yan walked home with his hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched against the cold. He had the strange urge to look up at every person's eyes, as if he could tell who would wake up wrong tomorrow.
He showered. He ate a leftover bun standing at the counter because sitting felt like surrender. He brushed his teeth. He got into bed.
His phone lay on the nightstand, silent now, the webnovel link still open if he wanted to punish himself.
He didn't.
He turned onto his side, closed his eyes, and told himself to sleep. Tomorrow would be another shift, another set of bowls, another small life.
The world agreed.
It went very, very quiet.
Not the quiet of nighttime.
The quiet of something huge pressing down gently, like a palm on a child's head.
Luo Yan's thoughts slowed. His limbs felt heavy. For a second he tried to move and couldn't, and a cold panic flared—sleep paralysis—
Then the panic faded too.
His last coherent thought was ridiculous.
So that's how it starts.
And then he fell asleep.
The first thing he noticed when he woke was the smell.
Rain and gasoline. Hot metal cooling. Something rotten underneath, like meat left too long in a sealed bag.
He opened his eyes.
Grey sky.
Wet asphalt.
A siren wailing somewhere far away, swallowed by other sounds closer and worse—screams, pounding footsteps, the wet choking growl of something that wasn't a dog.
Luo Yan pushed himself up on one elbow.
His hands came away slick. He stared for one stunned second at the dark red on his palm.
Blood.
Not his. He didn't think.
He scrambled back, heart punching his ribs, and his shoulder hit a car door hanging open. The street was chaos. Cars abandoned at wrong angles. A bus on its side like a dead whale. People running with blank faces and open mouths.
Some people weren't running.
They were standing up too slowly, too stiffly, like puppets being tugged by strings that didn't know where joints belonged.
A woman in a soaked office blouse turned her head toward Luo Yan.
Her eyes were cloudy, unfocused, but her mouth opened as if she'd smelled food.
She lunged.
Luo Yan's brain went white.
A sharp electronic chime snapped through his skull.
Ding.
SYSTEM BINDING COMPLETE.
HOST: LUO YAN
WORLD: OUTBREAK (DAY 0)
POPULATION SPLIT IN PROGRESS.
A second line appeared in his mind as if someone was typing directly onto his nerves.
PRIMARY AFFINITY: VOID (UNAWAKENED)
FUNCTION: STORAGE (LOCKED)
SUB-AUTHORITY: GOD'S WHISPER (SEALED)
Luo Yan didn't have time to process the meaning. He didn't have time to scream at reality for plagiarizing fiction.
He only had time to not die.
The woman's teeth snapped inches from his face. He flung his arm up like an idiot shield.
A dark, glassy pane flashed into existence in front of him—so thin he almost missed it, so solid it made the air feel heavy.
VOID SCREEN.
The woman slammed into it with a wet thud.
Her mouth met nothing. Her hands scraped at invisible resistance. Her body jerked back like she'd been slapped by an unseen force.
The screen shuddered, then fractured soundlessly into nothing, as if it had erased itself after doing its job.
Luo Yan stumbled backward, legs shaking.
The woman hissed and came again.
Luo Yan turned and ran.
He ran with the wild, ungraceful speed of someone who'd never done cardio in his life but suddenly found religion in the shape of survival. His shoes slipped on wet pavement. His lungs burned. His stomach tried to climb up his throat.
He darted between cars, nearly got clipped by a van that plowed through the street with a driver screaming and crying at the same time, and then almost collided with a man who was dragging his wife by the arm.
"She's asleep!" the man shouted at Luo Yan, eyes frantic. "She won't wake up!"
The woman's body was limp, head bobbing. Luo Yan saw the slackness, the faint breath, the greyish pallor.
The sleep wave.
At 11:47 p.m., the world fell asleep.
He'd read one chapter.
One.
And now he was inside it.
The man kept dragging his wife anyway, because love made people stupid and also made them refuse to leave.
A scream cut off behind Luo Yan, sharp and sudden.
Luo Yan didn't look back.
He hated himself for it, but he didn't look back.
He ran toward the floodlights in the distance, because bright light meant humans and guns and rules, and rules were better than teeth.
A voice on a loudspeaker blared through the rain.
"MOVE TO THE GATE! HANDS UP! NO BITES! NO EXCEPTIONS!"
The city military base.
It wasn't a proper base, not in the fortress sense. It was a barricaded intersection: shipping containers stacked into a wall, trucks forming lanes, soldiers with rifles and wet ponchos and tired eyes. Floodlights cut white cones through the rain.
People surged toward it like water toward a drain.
The line moved in violent jerks. Someone got pulled out and shoved aside, screaming, "I'm fine! I'm fine!" while a soldier held their arm and checked for bite marks like a butcher checking meat.
Luo Yan shoved through bodies, apologized automatically, then stopped apologizing when someone elbowed him in the throat.
He caught sight of the gate itself: two containers pulled apart like jaws, a narrow opening where soldiers filtered people through one at a time.
Above the opening, a sign had been spray-painted in black: CITY EMERGENCY BASE.
No poetry. Just survival.
A zombie lunged from the crowd, a man whose skin had gone grey and whose mouth was wet with something that had recently been a person. A soldier shot him in the head. The body dropped, twitching.
Something small rolled out of the cracked skull and clicked against the curb.
A crystal shard.
Milky-grey. Faint glow.
Luo Yan's breath caught so hard it hurt.
Core crystal.
His mind latched onto it like a starving person seeing food.
In the chapter he read, people ignored cores at first. They didn't understand. They stepped on them and lost them in puddles.
Luo Yan didn't have the luxury of ignorance.
He darted forward, snatched the core, and shoved it into his pocket so fast he almost tore fabric.
A soldier saw him. "Hey! What the hell are you doing?"
Luo Yan's mouth opened and a lie fell out because truth took too long. "I tripped."
The soldier's eyes narrowed, but another zombie slammed into the barricade and the soldier's attention snapped away.
Luo Yan moved with the crowd, heart hammering, fingers twitching for more cores even as he told himself not to be greedy. Greedy got you noticed. Noticed got you robbed.
Another infected went down near the gate. Another core rolled free.
A woman stepped on it and didn't even realize.
Luo Yan wanted to scream.
He crouched like he was tying his shoe, scooped it up, and stood again.
Two cores.
Not much. But enough to matter if he could use them. Or trade them. Or hide them.
He didn't know the rules of cores yet. He only knew they were the currency of power.
Rain ran down his face. He wiped it away and realized his hands were still trembling.
His modern kitchen felt like a dream he'd had about safety.
The crowd surged forward.
And then the air changed.
Not the weather—though the weather was already wrong, rain too heavy for the season, wind shifting like it couldn't decide where to blow.
This was different.
This was the way a room changed when someone with authority entered it.
A voice cut through the shouting at the gate, low and controlled.
"Stop pushing."
People hesitated. Soldiers straightened.
Luo Yan turned.
A man in a wet uniform strode toward the front. He wasn't bulky. He wasn't flashy. But his posture carried command like a weapon. Rain slid off his shoulders as if it didn't have permission to cling.
His eyes were dark, sharp, and exhausted in the way only people who had already accepted hell could be.
Lightning crawled faintly along his knuckles.
Behind him, high in the clouds, a long shadow coiled like a secret.
Luo Yan's mouth went dry.
Lan Huan.
He recognized the name from the chapter. He recognized the feeling from the writing. This was the protagonist-shaped space in the world, and Lan Huan filled it like he'd been built to.
Lan Huan's gaze swept the crowd, then pinned on Luo Yan for a half second. Assessment. Not sympathy. Not kindness. A measurement.
Luo Yan felt his pocket, heavy with two small cores.
He had an edge.
He also had the worst luck in the world, because the moment the protagonist looked at him, the plot could see him too.
A scream erupted at the gate line.
A teenager fell, body going limp, eyes rolling back—sleep wave aftermath, or shock, or something worse.
The crowd surged again. Someone shoved Luo Yan hard enough that he stumbled into the lane right in front of Lan Huan.
Lan Huan's hand shot out and grabbed Luo Yan's forearm, steadying him with a grip that didn't feel like rescue.
It felt like capture.
"Can you run?" Lan Huan asked, voice clipped.
Luo Yan stared at him, rain dripping off his lashes.
He thought about lying.
He thought about being invisible.
He thought about how the world didn't allow that anymore.
"Yes," Luo Yan said, and then, because his mouth had always been too honest when he was scared, he added, "And I can help you—if you listen."
Lan Huan's eyes narrowed. "Who are you?"
Luo Yan's heart pounded so hard he could taste it.
He couldn't tell him about transmigration. That would get him quarantined at best, shot at worst.
So Luo Yan chose the safest truth.
"I know about the cores," he said quickly, keeping his voice low. "They drop from them. They matter. And people are stepping on them."
Lan Huan's gaze flicked, sharp, to Luo Yan's pocket like he could see through fabric.
"Show me," Lan Huan said.
Luo Yan hesitated for half a heartbeat.
Then he pulled out one milky shard and held it between wet fingers.
Lan Huan stared at it.
For the first time, Luo Yan saw something shift behind the commander's control—interest, edged with hunger, like a storm tasting pressure change.
Lan Huan closed his fingers around the core, not taking it, just touching.
A faint crackle of lightning jumped and died.
Lan Huan's eyes lifted back to Luo Yan. "You just arrived."
Luo Yan's throat bobbed. "Yes."
"And you already know this."
"Yes."
Lan Huan's grip on Luo Yan's arm tightened slightly, not painful, just definitive. "Then you're coming with me."
The words hit Luo Yan like a door slamming.
He should've refused. He should've run.
But in the rain, under floodlights, surrounded by screaming humans and hungry dead, Luo Yan realized something with sick clarity.
Alone, he would die.
With Lan Huan, he might die later.
And "later" was suddenly a luxury worth any price.
Luo Yan nodded once.
"Okay," he said. "But I'm not free."
Lan Huan's mouth quirked, almost a smile. "No one is."
Above them, the shadow in the clouds shifted. Thunder rolled, not from the sky's mood, but from something alive moving inside it.
Luo Yan looked up and felt his skin prickle.
The dragon.
Longyang.
He hadn't even read that part. He hadn't known.
And yet the world had decided to show him anyway.
Lan Huan followed Luo Yan's gaze, expression unreadable. "Stay close," he said, voice dropping low enough that it felt meant only for Luo Yan.
"Do not get lost in the crowd," Lan Huan added. "If you get separated, I will not waste time searching."
It sounded cruel.
It also sounded like the kind of honesty that kept people alive.
Luo Yan swallowed and nodded.
The gate line groaned forward. Soldiers shouted. Zombies slammed against barricades.
Somewhere nearby, someone's laugh turned into a sob.
And Luo Yan, a chef who'd wanted nothing but a small safe life, stepped into the protagonist's shadow with two core crystals in his pocket and a system in his bones, and understood the new rule of his world.
If you wanted to survive, you had to be useful.
And if you wanted to love, in a world like this, you had to survive first.