A Lifetime of Stories: Drowning in a Sea of People

After I got out of prison, I saw and experienced so much suffering in the world. In those desperate years, as the "Shadow Disease" ran rampant and civilization teetered on the brink of collapse, "I" was just a young man scraping by, hanging around pool halls and acting as a go-between at the labor market. Then I met her. Separated by a screen, we built a fragile intimacy through jokes and tentative advances, warming each other in a cold reality. I witnessed the deep love between Xiaoyu, a deaf and mute girl, and Chen Mo, a silent young man, a love paid for with their lives, wordless yet deafening. And as I struggled to survive, I came to understand the complicated feelings between A Jing and me amid the desperation of famine, from a humble transaction to standing by each other through thick and thin. By chance, I discovered and protected a faint hope. Carrying this last spark through fallen cities, I delivered it to a research institution that might be able to save the world. Then I understood that individual names and accomplishments would eventually be swallowed by the tide. Spring would come at last, and the world would slowly recover. After loss and gain, betrayal and steadfast devotion, what we ordinary people, as tenacious as weeds growing in the cracks, protected beneath the dome of the apocalypse was no more than a light lit for the people we loved, and the humble yet steadfast belief that we must "keep living, and live well." This is a story about love and sacrifice, despair and hope, and how the humble can create miracles of life beneath the dome of the end times.