Chapter Seven: The Great Collapse

The coordination and allocation speed within the war zone was swift. At the base command center, Old Ji had just finished a handover meeting when aluminum alloy plates for the production framework were loaded onto trucks in Chongqing and sent over. They were unloaded at the base entrance, then transferred onto trailers and transported deep into the tunnel via railway. The clanging sound echoed as the hoist passed underneath the carriage, where Shang Lu and Chen Yu were seated.

Shang Lu yawned repeatedly.

“I damn well got called out to work before dawn, hauling scorched scrap metal in the no-man’s land beyond the defense line. How come you’ve been able to sleep until now?”

“Chief Engineer, you’re the leader, you know? The capable ones just have to work harder. That’s how leadership is,” Chen Yu said, pulling a tea egg from his pocket and handing it to Shang Lu. “I’m just a small staff officer—show up on time, slack off when I can.”

“I’m not a leader at all. I still have to find time at noon to submit materials to the Political Department’s cadre section, smooth over relationships, get a pile of signatures. Damn it,” Shang Lu said, peeling the tea egg with a sullen expression. “So many tasks on my first day—I’m here to lie low, I just want to watch fireworks.”

“What fireworks?”

“The big fireworks when the city’s razed to the ground,” Shang Lu said. “Like the Great Collapse.”

“I want to see that too. If I’m still alive then, I’ll watch with you,” Chen Yu said, pulling out another tea egg. “And I’ll give you a tea egg.”

“Where the hell do you get so many tea eggs?”

“Saved them just for you,” Chen Yu said. “Didn’t you skip breakfast?”

On Shang Lu’s first official day at work, Old Ji bestowed upon him a prestigious white safety helmet. It was said to be a legendary piece of equipment—once worn, one must remain untouched by the worldly passions and desires.

Chen Yu warned him not to wander around the base wearing that helmet. It would scare the lower ranks, making him look like a patrol officer.

Shang Lu said he thought it made him look like a construction site supervisor.

As the technical specialist assigned by the Academy of Sciences to Unit 151, Shang Lu was the handpicked deputy and successor to the base’s chief engineer, Old Ji. Everyone believed Shang Lu had boundless prospects. At the very least, the normal operation of the giant machinery would depend on his skills; he would be one of Unit 151’s core members. In a grander sense, he was a crucial pillar safeguarding all humanity—millions of lives depended on him. Yet Shang Lu himself hardly understood how he, a mere automation graduate from the Academy of Sciences, had suddenly become such an important figure.

A certain famous person once said that one’s fate depends both on personal struggle and the course of history. But when Shang Lu thought about it, he hadn’t even started to work hard before history’s tide had already thrust him into the eye of the storm. This was more than history’s course—it was a turbulent sea of chaos.

Though he said so, Shang Lu glanced around his workspace and thought: surviving until tomorrow was already uncertain. Before he even started, Old Ji had warned him, “No matter what happens, when the alarm sounds, run like hell. Don’t worry about anything else. Property is public, but your life is your own.” In such a work environment, what future was there to talk about? Shang Lu envied Chen Yu, who spent his downtime loafing around the command’s operations office and resting in the dorm after work. No matter what disaster struck in the tunnel storage, it wouldn’t touch him.

But what about him?

He had to take care of a granddaughter fifty meters tall, with four arms, covered in high-voltage electricity, high-temperature steam, and intense radiation.

“Did you find anything when you went to help move the trace materials this morning?” Chen Yu asked.

“The only thing we learned is that the Lighthouse Angel is unbeatable—a laser cannon at 4,000 degrees Celsius,” Shang Lu said. “The Type 09 infantry fighting vehicle gets sliced like cake. I don’t think any existing human material could withstand that. It can cut through a Type 09 like a cucumber, so naturally, it could slice through the giant machine like a cucumber too. Have you ever encountered an enemy this tough before?”

Chen Yu leaned back in his plastic seat, legs stretched out, eyes flickering.

“There have been tougher ones. Since Unit 151 went operational nearly four years ago, we’ve observed seventeen Angels, wiped out nine.” Chen Yu spoke slowly. “The ones I remember as particularly tricky are the No. 037 Diamond Angel, No. 041 Wave Angel, and No. 046 Snow Angel. The last one had a set of reverse thermodynamic rules, forcing time to run backward on a microscopic scale within a very narrow area. Everyone was powerless against such an unimaginable, almost miraculous ability. In the end, it just left on its own.”

“But these aren’t the toughest. Looking at all 92 Angels observed throughout human history, the most formidable ones are often those who are ruthless and say little,” Chen Yu continued. “For example, the most famous and widely known: No. 001.”

No. 001, the Seraph Angel.

The Seraph Angel was the origin of the term “Angel,” which later became a general name for all high-dimensional arrivals, because it was the first high-dimensional entity observed worldwide. It appeared on January 3, 2009, at 8:44 a.m., hovering over the region near the Great Lakes, at 85.8° west longitude and 41.3° north latitude.

It remained stable for a total of 37 hours and 24 minutes—the shortest stable existence of any Angel to date.

Its appearance quickly drew attention and caused a sensation because it was very close to Chicago, America’s third-largest city. Within hours, millions witnessed it. It looked like a giant eyeball shrouded in a halo, suspended 50 meters above the ground, rotating every 36 minutes, with a diameter over 30 meters. It caused visible spatial distortion and emitted tremendous noise. Clearly, it was no ordinary Earth creature.

Christians thought its shape resembled the Seraphim described in the Bible. In a Christian culture like America, the nickname “Seraph Angel” quickly spread.

Looking back now, the nickname was well-earned. Just 37 hours after appearing, the Seraph Angel revealed its miracle to the world.

As humanity debated how to study the unknown entity, it unleashed the brilliance of over ten million suns.

It converted almost 100% of its mass into energy at an incredible efficiency. Estimates later showed 12,000 tons of matter fully transformed into energy within 0.47 seconds. Such a violent explosion was rare even in the universe, like a divine super cannon detonated on Earth, nearly sinking the North American continent. Earth’s life survived that night purely by luck; over 99% of the energy was released into the fourth dimension, with only a tiny fraction spilling into our world. Even so, the blast’s power equaled 300 billion tons of TNT, roughly 1.2×10^21 joules—comparable to an impact by a 1.4-kilometer-diameter asteroid. The most powerful weapon humans ever created was the Tsar Bomba, and this explosion was like detonating six thousand Tsar Bombas simultaneously.

The blast sped up Earth's rotation by seven seconds, cooled global temperatures by 3.5 degrees Celsius, and left a 300-square-kilometer crater three kilometers deep in North America, with a 60-kilometer-wide blast zone, killing 1.7 billion people.

This event later became known as the Great Collapse.

That was true ruthlessness without a word wasted.