When Wei Si opened his eyes, the first thing he felt was not light, but weight. A sticky, omnipresent weight pressed on his chest, eyelids, and even the base of his tongue. The air was as stagnant as a solid, and every breath was like swallowing roughened gypsum powder, with strong sulfur and some deeper, indescribable sweet smell of corruption stuck deep in the throat.
He coughed twice, the sound sounding hollow and terrifying in the dead silence of the room. My lungs were burning and aching.
There is no daylight outside the window.
There is only a squirming, infinite stretch of gray. It was not a cloud, not a fog, but more like some living, slowly sinking entity that swallowed up all light, color, and sound. The visibility was horribly low, and one could barely make out the outline of the building opposite that was riddled with holes, like the remains of a giant beast stranded in the mortar, being digested and decomposed bit by bit.
Everlasting night. The sun has never really shown its face since the chain of supervolcanic eruptions that tore apart the earth's crust not long ago. Time has lost its meaning, leaving only this eternal, suffocating gray.
Wei Si sat up, his movements a little slow due to lack of energy. The room was filled with thick ash, and every movement brought up a small cloud of dust that billowed slowly in the dull air. The furniture, the floor, even the bed on which he lay, were covered with an even, despairing gray-white blanket.
