Li Boya is middle-aged. He has spent nearly half his life farming in the village, and now that he is forty, he had hoped to live out the rest of his days in peace. Or rather, he thought his life would simply go on like this. He has a small plot of land where he grows vegetables, and every year, when they are ripe, he rides his little three-wheeled cart into town to sell them. Then last year, he watched Goudanzi, his childhood deskmate, make a fortune selling cabbages. So this year, Li Boya decided to go all in and plant cabbages on every inch of his land, dreaming of making a killing come autumn. At last, the cabbages were ready for harvest. Li Boya worked nonstop for two days, hauling them all back to his own storeroom for fear the frost might ruin them. He weighed them by the basketful. “Hmm, three tons. Not bad.” That night, Li Boya happily drank half a jin of liquor and ate the pork feast his neighbor Wu Laoer had brought over. Then he drifted off to sleep, pleased as could be. In his dreams, he was already selling the cabbages and buying his wife an iPhone 88. The next morning, before Li Boya had even woken up, his wife called him out of bed. Half-asleep, he heard Liu Junxue shouting, “Lao Li, Lao Li, wake up! It’s the end of the world!”
What? The end of the world? Li Boya snapped awake. Outside, all he could see was a murky gray sky and endless yellow sand. Could it be… the world really had ended? ...
