Rules of the Apocalypse: Global Evolution

Humanity spent millions of years gradually gaining the strength to resist nature.

Fire drove away wild beasts, dams held back floods, seeds endured the seasons, and cities grew amid storms and ruins.

Then disaster struck.

The dead rose again, drought swallowed up water sources. Hordes of corpses blocked the streets, swarms of insects destroyed crops, and wild beasts reclaimed their territory. Plants and fungi grew unchecked amid the shattered remains of civilization. Rivers carried pollution and death to distant lands, while beneath the lakes and seas, something new was beginning to stir.

The world had not been destroyed.

It had simply begun deciding who still deserved to survive.

Chen Gouda had been an ordinary man, afraid of dying, afraid of the dark, afraid of the faint sounds he couldn’t make out beyond the door. But when the walls fell and his companions gathered around him, he had no choice but to take up a weapon. It began with guarding a single door, and sharing a mouthful of water.

They searched for water and fought over it, while trying to build a place by its banks where the living could sleep in peace. They crossed through hordes of corpses, wilderness, and dead cities, facing people transformed by the rain and a social order spiraling out of control.

The farther they went, the higher the price.

Water invited conflict, settlements bred betrayal, and strength could keep people alive. But it also forced everyone to ask, little by little: as their bodies grew more and more unfamiliar, what could still prove they were human?

As the ecosystems of land and sea were utterly rewritten, humanity was no longer fighting to become the master of the world again.

It was fighting to preserve the right to keep living in a world that no longer belonged to humankind.