Once We Lived in Nanjing

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The exact time of the nuclear explosion was at 9:19:58 PM.

Probably no one could get a more precise number than this. Ban Xia lay sideways against the wall on the floor of the underground parking lot, holding Grandpa Huang in her arms while pinching a pocket watch, counting down the seconds one by one.

Grandpa Huang behaved well, sleeping in her arms without stirring.

Since 7 PM, Ban Xia had entered a protective state. She had maintained this position for over three hours. Ban Xia was very nervous; the nuclear bomb could explode at any second, but the plan did not specify that it would definitely detonate tonight. It could be this evening, or the next, or even the day after tomorrow. Deep down, she held onto a bit of hopeful expectation.

With each passing second, Ban Xia told herself, "It will explode the next second."

Until 9:19:58 PM, right after the second hand of the pocket watch tick-tocked to its end, at the blink of an eye, the ground shook.

Miss Qiu detonated it.

Ban Xia found it hard to imagine such a colossal force, silently rolling up from underneath, as if about to turn over the earth itself. She instinctively closed her eyes, listening to the surrounding sounds with her ears, but in the next instant, all the sounds disappeared from the air. The girl's eardrums ached, with the pain drilling into her brain via her ear canal, causing a severe ringing that weakened her hearing.

A 0.1-second silence was followed by a deafening explosion that strong tinnitus could not suppress. It felt like the columns supporting the sky had collapsed, and the sky was turning over.

At this moment, if someone daringly stood on the rooftop of Meihua Villa and looked westward, they could see a magnesium lamp-like intense flash of light flicker in the air, followed by a tiny purple sun rising between the towering buildings. It took only 0.01 microseconds for its volume to expand from zero to a diameter of 300 meters. A violent chain reaction quickly formed a spherical domain within an extremely short time. Within the domain was the strongest force mankind could harness, and everything engulfed by that intense light would evaporate from this world.

This was the first second after the nuclear explosion.

In the second second, a strong tremor spread from the ground towards the entire Nanjing City and within the next three seconds, destroyed all buildings within a one-kilometer radius of the blast center. By the third second, the supersonic shockwave had reached Zijin Mountain. The moment the nuclear bomb was detonated, it produced temperatures of millions of degrees Celsius, instantly inflating the air ten thousand times and sweeping irresistibly across all directions—this was the boundary visible to the human eye. Water vapor in the air condensed under tremendous pressure, like a white wall being pushed over.

In the fourth second, the sun collapsed, turning into a hot, silent fireball, while sweeping up fierce winds and a massive amount of dust and debris. There was intense convection in the air; it drew in cold air from the ground, heated it up into high-temperature jets that surged into the sky; the mud, dust, and smoke covered the ground like water flow. The flow turned into whirlpools, twisting and rising, forming towering columns of smoke that reached into the clouds.

By the fifteenth second, the earth-shattering noise finally arrived, but by then, you had already witnessed, from afar, the spectacle of the world's end.

Ban Xia crouched in the underground parking lot, detached from everything outside.

The commotion of the nuclear explosion was brief, which was somewhat surprising to her—Bai Yang had described nuclear weapons as so terrifying, she thought it would result in heaven and earth shattering, but in less than a minute, Ban Xia heard no more sounds. Meihua Villa was five kilometers away from the blast center; aside from light, sound and tremors, nothing could reach here.

She had to hide here for at least another two hours.

The current time was 9:25 PM.

At 11:30 PM, return to the surface, grab her equipment and supplies, and head straight to Nanli or South University of Technology, then come back a week later.

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The exact time of the nuclear explosion was 9:19:57.476081537419008 seconds plus 198247008538540874521457 Planck time units.

This was the data obtained by Swordman.

At that node, the energy in the air began to climb, reaching a hundred million times its original level within a long 0.047 seconds.

This was unusual.

This suggested that a star was about to be born here.

It believed that such an event was impossible in this conservation-abiding universe, yet no one could say for sure, not the mother machine, not even the mother machine's mother machine, for after all, the universe, while following the law of conservation, also adored imperfection, embraced change, and had a stronger love for uncertainty than other universes, having witnessed the birth and demise of tens of thousands of stars in the extremely brief last ten billion years, with the cycles of life and death of those stars being so rapid that it couldn't keep up.

In the following lengthy 0.047 seconds, Swordman thought slowly.

Sadly, it failed to come up with an answer; it wasn't designed for this task. As an agricultural machine, it wasn't adept at solving problems; this issue could only be pondered by the mother machine, which held all the wisdom of the seven billion people on this planet, while the mother machine's mother machine possessed the collective wisdom of seven trillion civilizations, and it was said that above the mother machine's mother machine, there was still another mother machine.

Thus, it passed the question on to the mother machine.

Despite not having high hopes, it still wished that the mother machine could provide an answer.

A star, another grand creation alongside intelligence, is the neural cell of the universe. A hundred billion neural cells form bundles of nerve fibers, and trillions of bundles make up blocks and cortical layers. All blocks and cortical layers form an entity in higher dimensions, and the sparkling flickering of the millions of stars signifies that the universe is actively thinking. Undoubtedly, it is pondering—an issue on a timescale that transcends all ends, a profound question that probes the depth of everything.

Swordman watched the birth of the star.

It remained preoccupied with the bird's nest hanging on the tall building, the herds of wild buffalo and horse deer on the streets; tirelessly it had shuttled back and forth, nesting for the small animals, rescuing them from ditches, attempting to impart knowledge to them—all of this would end in 0.047 seconds.

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At eleven-thirty that evening, Ban Xia walked out of the underground parking garage.

She was startled for a moment.

Ban Xia stood in the residential area, with the breeze blowing after the nuclear explosion carrying heat and the smell of something scorched. Her raincoat and hat fluttered in the wind.

Red was the dominant color of the world; the clouds were blood red; the skyscrapers were blood red; the trees and flowers were blood red, too. The sky was bright, even though it was nearing midnight, the light was as bright as it would be at four or five in the afternoon—was this also caused by the nuclear explosion?

Ban Xia faced westward, the direction of the nuclear explosion, but suddenly realized that light was coming from the east, illuminating half of her face.

The surroundings grew brighter and brighter, as if the Sun had absurdly popped up at eleven-thirty at night.

The girl turned her head in shock, and she saw a red sun rising from the east.