The air was filled with a pungent smell of sulfur, and crimson sparks flickered in and out of the smoke, a mix of dark green and yellowish-brown, leaving blisters if they landed on one's skin.
Vast amounts of fluffy volcanic ash, like dirty feathers, covered the entire world; even the sun's radiance was obscured by it, turning dim and 황색, pouring in mottled, viscous streaks onto the huge, shadowy, constantly rolling independent cloud masses.
Hot updrafts surged from beneath the Floating Island's foundation into the high sky, and sharp hurricanes tore at the Island's base, emitting shrill cries; the small Floating Island drifted precariously like a tiny boat, seemingly ready to capsize at any moment, while fluffy dust and flickering sparks ascended with the wind, resembling an inverted, flowing waterfall or a slowly flowing river of stars hidden in the universe's darkest corners.
It was bizarre and terrifying, yet inexplicably grand and beautiful.
If anyone were drifting alone in such an environment, who would have the leisure to admire the scenery? Any person would become anxious or even collapse.
Li Cang took out a cigarette, poked it into a spark, and took two drags.
"Click, click."
By luck, the cigarette actually lit!
"Damn it... Is this something a human would do?"
It had only been three days, but it felt as long as three years.
Li Cang had even started talking to himself; at this rate, having a fluent, cheerful conversation with himself wouldn't be very difficult.
Loneliness, fear, and the threat of death are never the most terrifying things; the most terrifying thing will forcefully devour you after three days of starvation.
The flood-like hunger made Li Cang's movements incredibly fast—
However, he didn't need to be this starved, but that brought up another issue: you simply couldn't know how absurd things a person would do when desperately hungry.
A few hours ago, after eating everything edible, and adhering to the principle that 'even a mosquito's leg is still meat,' he weighed his options for a long time, then crunched through a whole pack of digestive tablets.
They were sweet and sour, quite tasty; why didn't the old man in the next bed stock up on more boxes of such good stuff?
Now,
Li Cang felt he could eat a whole ox raw.
What's drinking poison to quench thirst?
When I'm starving, I even dare to eat digestive tablets!
Ahem...
Unfortunately, this 16x16m irregularly shaped Floating Island had visibly limited search value.
Before it shattered, it must have been some remote Wild Island; a few sporadic wild shepherd's purse plants looked sickly in the approximately 40℃ temperature and severely abnormal air composition, but the wild roses nearby seemed vibrant, their clusters of leaves, covered in grayish-white fluffy dust, surprisingly held dozens of pinkish-white small flowers.
Wild rose flowers, stems, roots, leaves, and fruits can all be used as medicine or food, with high levels of protein, crude fiber, carotene, niacin, and vitamins; they are sweet and cool, relieve heat and dampness, stop dysentery, regulate qi, suppress vomiting, and treat mouth sores, making them perfect for this damn weather—it's worth noting that crushed wild roses can even treat external bleeding.
This was good stuff.
Li Cang used a broken piece of wood to dig up the entire wild rose, leaving a fist-sized clump of protective soil, and the rotten plastic bag hanging on the wild rose branches was just enough to hold a handful of shepherd's purse.
He tied the plastic bag to his waist, ignoring the prickling thorns of the wild rose, bundled it onto his back with a belt, scanned around, and seeing there was truly nothing left to scavenge, he decisively left.
Following the pitch-black cloth rope made from torn bedsheets, Li Cang quickly climbed back to where he started, retrieving the cloth rope with a hooked rebar at its end.
Deprived of the rope's connection, the scavenged "Wild Island" drifted away, slowly disappearing into the thick smoke and dust.
Li Cang's own Floating Island was significantly smaller than the Wild Island he had just scavenged, only 8x8 in size, shaped like a peach.
The Floating Island floated suspended in the vast smoky sky, its surface flat and its base conical, resembling the immortal mountains described in ancient texts, quite mysterious.
But the overall environment here was far from any immortal mountain; temperatures often exceeded 40 degrees, the entire world outside the Floating Island was a grayish-yellow, with hot, foul winds blowing, thick sulfurous smoke lingering, and at an immeasurable depth below the Island, there was another layer of "surface," where crisscrossing rivers of lava could be vaguely seen flowing freely, and rolling smoke columns as thick as mountains surged directly into the sky.
Li Cang used a broken piece of iron, sharpened into a jagged "small knife," to trim the wild rose's slender branches to reduce its canopy, planting it in a pre-dug hole in the ground.
Logically, in such a harsh environment, and with the Floating Island being so small, it should quickly dry out and crack like chestnuts in a charcoal fire.
But the truth was, the Floating Island's soil always maintained a relatively low temperature, cool and moist, seemingly protected by an unreasonable rule that would make countless scientific giants and experts turn over in their graves.
After burying the soil, Li Cang, with a pained expression, tilted a water bucket made from a large trash can and poured some water into it.
The water was collected when it rained the day before yesterday—
Unbelievably, it actually rained in such an environment.
The rainwater was yellowish, and one could directly taste a suspicious sourness just by putting it in their mouth; drinking a mouthful would probably put half the periodic table into one's stomach.
After doing all this, he briefly washed the wild shepherd's purse, put it in a rusty tin can, and cooked it in the charcoal embers.
After peeling off the dark brown outer skin of the trimmed wild rose branches, tender, light green stems were revealed.
Li Cang unhesitatingly threw them into his mouth and began to chew, his expression even showing a hint of greed.
They were tender, with a fresh, slightly numbing, unripe taste.
Chewing for a long time, it was a bit like low-quality chewing gum.
The taste wasn't bad!
For Li Cang, who hadn't had a proper meal in days and whose mouth felt bland, this stuff was no less than ambrosia.
Except it was a bit scratchy on the throat, no other problems.
Struggling to swallow it, Li Cang couldn't help but curse,
"Damn it."
Lu Xun once said that when God closes a door, he often welds the windows shut for you too.
Is there anything more messed up than closing your eyes in the ICU, opening them, and finding out it's the end of the world?
Facts proved, there was.
Because Li Cang had just paid the down payment for a large flat before being hospitalized.
And this Floating Island belonging to him was, before it shattered, the Salt River Second Hospital Building B, First Floor Intensive Care Unit, which Li Cang had rented for several months; the Hospital building, boasted to be 9-degree earthquake resistant, now only had a corner of ruins left.
He used salvaged rebar and wood to put a roof over the L-shaped broken wall for shelter; between the L-corner, there remained less than 2 square meters of tiled floor higher than the surrounding ground, and the surrounding ground seemed to have been scraped away, revealing dark greenish-black soil, directly opposite which stood an apple tree as thick as an adult's thigh.
This tree had once been lush, but now only half its canopy remained, twisted and sickly, with a few withered flower buds on it, and it was unknown if it could still bear fruit.
The wild rose was planted about a meter next to the apple tree, where it should get a little shade during the hottest part of the day.
The heavy rain two days ago saved Li Cang and the apple tree; otherwise, Li Cang wouldn't even have grass roots to gnaw on, let alone the strength to climb across the rope to scavenge supplies from the drifting Wild Island.
There was still more than half a bucket of water, enough to drink for over three days if rationed; the problem now was the lack of food, the wild rose branches were said to be nutritious, but clearly couldn't provide enough calories.
There was so little that even if he dug up and ate everything he had just planted, it wouldn't last two meals.
Li Cang waved his hand, and the ground before him suddenly emitted specks of green light, from almost imperceptible to wisps, growing more numerous and brighter, gradually converging into a vortex.
The vortex flickered twice, and a dark green, crystal-like coin jumped out of it, hovering in the air about a foot above the vortex.
The misty light bands, like an aurora, emanating from the crystal coin finally projected a three-foot square virtual interface in front of Li Cang, which began to play the most realistic "cutscene" ever:
In intermittent news footage, cities instantly overturned into bottomless abysses, mountains collapsed and the earth split, lava flowed freely, mushroom clouds mixed with lightning shot into the sky, tsunamis tens or even hundreds of meters high accompanied by hurricanes—
"At 4:56 AM on May 29, 2026, the Earth's six major plates, including the Pacific Plate, Eurasian Plate, African Plate, American Plate, Indo-Australian Plate, and Antarctic Plate, as well as over 20 minor plates, began to move away from each other and rapidly split at a speed of approximately 0.9 meters per second. This speed is 5,000 to 75,000,000 times the normal plate drift speed..."
"...Our mother planet, upon which we depend for survival, is disintegrating... Intense and frequent earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic activities are occurring at the edges of the major plates... No related casualty data is available yet."
"Relevant departments are urging the public to seek shelter in nearby earthquake-resistant structures. All regions are actively engaging in self-rescue and preparing to accommodate evacuated residents from coastal cities. The National Major Natural Disaster Emergency Plan is being implemented. Specifics will be based on local actual conditions."
Not only were there visuals, but there was even sound.
If one hadn't witnessed it with their own eyes, it would be hard to imagine that this was the last emergency news broadcast before the disaster, projected by a damn coin.
The scene shifted to outer space, with the view directly facing the blue jewel of the solar system.
Boom~
The Earth exploded.
But it didn't completely explode.
A perfectly good living planet suddenly expanded dozens of times, its plates shattered, turning into countless dust-like fragments.
Immediately after, an incredibly massive humanoid light figure swept out from the shattered planet, stood on "Jupiter's" planetary ring, gazed back deeply for a few moments, and then vanished.
Survivors on Floating Islands worldwide were just like their mother planet—
Their minds had collapsed!
What was this?
Was our mother planet an egg?
And what the heck hatched out of it? I didn't even see clearly!
Please, whatever big baby you are, please be sure to take us with you to conquer the stars and the sea!
What happened to the saying, "when one person attains enlightenment, even his chickens and dogs ascend to heaven"?
Technically speaking, we are all children from the same mother planet!
The cutscene ended, without any further explanation, the screen returned to calm, displaying a mysterious script never seen before and impossible to describe in words,
【Floating Island Affiliation: Li Cang (Cang)】
【Floating Island Area: 8.03 * 8.56】
【Wish】
【Communication】
The meaning of the text automatically appeared in his mind.