Doomsday Countdown: I Hand Out Government Jobs in the Apocalypse

At the moment the blood moon hung in the sky, Lin Shen, an Organization Department clerk, was working overtime over mountains of files. A scream from outside shattered the calm: pedestrians’ skin cracked into ashen scales, while a twisted creature slammed spiderweb fractures into the glass facade of an office tower. The instant his fingertips touched the ancestral bronze seal, a cold mechanical voice exploded in his mind: “Staffing System activated. Seventy-three eligible survivors detected.” He discovered that he could “appoint” survivors to official positions. A surgeon received a “Medical Appointment,” and green light appeared in their palm, able to stitch up mutated wounds. A veteran activated a “Combat Appointment,” and his muscles surged with enough strength to tear through steel plates. A middle-school teacher unlocked an “Education Appointment,” and their voice could soothe uncontrollable panic. But this was not the beginning of salvation. As Lin Shen used “Administrative Appointments” to designate safe zones and “Infrastructure Appointments” to build fortifications, one faction after another came seeking the System. Clad in white robes, the Final Arbiter used “Divine Authority Appointments” to manipulate the masses. The city-state alliance entrenched in the ruins built a bloody order by seizing people with appointments. Even stranger, those with appointments began suffering memory lapses. Some claimed they had seen a mirror-image city; others glimpsed countdown code on the System interface. When the patterns on the bronze seal matched the inscriptions on an ancient bronze cauldron in the museum, Lin Shen finally realized the truth: the appointments he was issuing were not grants of the right to survive, but anchor points holding two worlds in balance.