Chapter 1: 1. Rebirth (1)

The scene before him was one he was intimately familiar with. Though the memory accompanying it had faded with the more than a decade that had passed, Song Rui remembered his devastation during his parent’s funeral.

Surrounded by the second and third branch of the Song family and close associates and partners of his father, Song Rui felt like an anomaly. Previously, in this same scenario in his first life, he was beyond himself with grief. On a day where the sky was clear and blue and the air warm with a summer breeze, his parents were laid to rest, and he had become an orphan. The unfairness of it all had torn at him then.

Now, he watched vacantly as their coffins were lowered. There was no melancholy to him, no grief, no tears. His eyes were empty. In the eyes of others, he appears catatonic from the loss, but Song Rui knew that was not the case. He had already mourned the loss of his parents so many years ago. He had grieved for them amongst so many others until he had become numb to it — the countless deaths that followed the end of the world. 

He didn’t know why, or how, he returned to his lost youth. There was no time for him to question it when the first thing that greeted him when he opened his eyes was not the darkness of death, but a blinding sun. 

The funeral was a long and tedious process for someone like him. He was not used to it — the quiet, the peace, the safety. It takes everything within him to not look for the nearest weapon to guard himself, to keep from scouting the area for potential danger. 

It takes a great deal of restraint on his part to remain where he was — surrounded by his uncles and their wives and children. When the funeral finally ends, the mourners come to offer their condolences. False words that bear no sincerity. It was laughable.

Song Rui does not stick around to listen to it. 

He walked back to the waiting car, momentarily forgetting he was no longer twenty-seven-year-olds when he made to enter the driver side. He didn’t have his license presently and had never expressed a desire to learn to how to drive until almost half a year from now. 

The driver looked at him curiously as Song Rui stiffly made his way into the back seat. 

“Should we wait for your uncles, Young Master?” 

“No,” Song Rui said after a pause. He did not remember his voice ever being so low and soft. “Send me home.” 

The drive back to his first home was a quiet affair. It was a novel thing for him. Song Rui had gotten so used to the sound of the dead, their low wailing growls of hunger, that not hearing it left him more on edge than naught. He cannot get used to it, this normality. He watches as the towering skyscrapers pass by and wonders why he feels nothing when all he had longed for so many years was a chance to go back to how things were. 

It was, ultimately, a question he already knew the answer to. In a little over a year, the world would end all over again and he would go through the ordeal once more. The only difference this time was that he would enter the ordeal the same as everyone else — blindsided and horrified by all the atrocities to come. 

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He had regressed in age and time, but for him, it had been ten long years since the world ended. He had changed and adapted and live by the skin of his teeth. If not for Luo Feng, he would still be in his twenty-seven-year-old boy, still be taking care of Xiao Yuan and the other kids, still be in the commune with the rest of the survivors in City A. The circumstances surrounding his death was something he had long expected to occur, if Song Rui had to be honest with himself. 

It was in the human nature to be greedy and covet what others possessed. The convivence the spiritual space had provided Song Rui, another anomaly that made him a variation compared to normal people, was a burden. It was a sirens call to others. Envy is a terrible, wicked thing to witness. 

Luo Feng had proven that. 

The carefully built foundation of trust and affection crumbled in an instant. Song Rui does not remember what Luo Feng had said to him at that time. He remembered the pain, mostly. Sharp and quick. He didn’t even have a chance to ask why, to respond with anything other than a wide-eyed look when the world went black. 

“Young Master, we’ve returned,” the driver called out. 

Song Rui draws himself away from his memories to stare at the villa in front of him. His childhood home. A part of him feels a sense of nostalgia at the sight of it. The last time he saw it, it was crumbling in on itself. Years of abandonment and vandalism had left it a ghost of itself. To see it now, without its cracked and crumbling exterior and broken in windows left his throat tight with emotion. 

“You can leave,” Song Rui says to the drive as he exited. 

The middle-aged driver hesitates, perhaps wanting to discourage the newly orphaned young master from being alone, but Song Rui pays him no mind as he entered the front door. 

He falls seamlessly into an old habit of checking that the locks were bolted on the doors and windows. He stops only when he gets to the second floor, a bitter smile hanging on the corner of his mouth. There was no need for his vigilance, not now anyhow. 

His nerves remain taut and fraying at the seams as he makes his way back into his old bedroom. In spite of knowing that the danger he perceived did not yet exist, Song Rui stills finds himself searching for it. The dead, the living. It is only after he’s confirmed that he is well and truly alone that he settles enough to rest in his bed. 

As he watched the world outside his window gradually darkening, he tries to close his heart against the comfort he had unknowingly begun to feel. Song Rui knew he could not afford it, not a second time. 

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