First Light of a New Age

Chapter 166: New Life for Earth in the New World

Second Civilization Zone, Southwestern Part of the Continent, Earth Region, Asia, East Asia, People's State of Xinhua, Beijing.

4th Year of God, Monday, 2nd Week, 9th Month of John.

In the capital city of still-functioning Beijing, the Great People’s Hall rose like a monument against a skyline forever altered with drones and the clicking of cameras flashing on and capturing the moment for history.

Across every household still connected to electricity, across field shelters stitched together from military tents and salvaged materials, across underground bunkers and rusting refugee barges drifting along poisoned rivers, the world watched.

Every surviving eye turned toward the face of the woman now standing at the center of the broadcast.

President Bai Xue Ji stood calmly before the nation with the flag of the People's State of Xinhua behind her. Her expression was unreadable yet firm with her dark eyes sharp as razors and calm as glassy still water. The silence in the room was heavy, waiting to be broken.

She stared into the lenses of a dozen cameras and millions of viewers as she prepared to address her nation through televised broadcasts, calmly explaining the extent of the catastrophe and declaring it one of the greatest existential threats humanity had ever faced.

She didn’t try to soften the blow, she spoke only with clarity and the weight of terrible truth.

"It has been one month and three days since the World Collision," she said. "Since Earth... our Earth... collided with an unfamiliar and dangerous new world, a world unknown to us filled with magic, monsters, and catastrophic forces that struck without warning. The devastation that followed was so immense that even our most hardened soldiers and our brightest minds were left speechless in the aftermath."

There was no attempt at poetic flourish or illusion of control. Her words were direct like a scalpel to the delusions of normalcy.

"The event struck at midnight, on the first day of this year, January 1st, 2002. A date that, from this day, will mark the moment of our known reality ended. As the hour turned, the sky shattered like glass across the continents, whole countries were dislodged and thrown into a violent new world we aren't familiar with."

She paused for a moment, allowing the weight of those memories to settle.

"In just a few days, chaos consumed the entirety of human civilization. Over five hundred million lives were lost within the first week, not just to natural disasters, but to creatures we cannot yet name and phenomena we cannot yet explain. By the end of the month, that number had climbed to over seven hundred million. Entire countries were annihilated… some were erased by the sheer force of the collision and others were overrun by the Magic Beast Tides, tsunamis of mutated animals and fantastical monsters drawn to our civilization like moths to flame. And many simply vanished and were reduced to magical ash with no remains to bury."

Images rolled across the screen behind her to show a time-lapse of several city skylines being crushed under a floating mountain, a swarm of flying wyverns tearing through shattered airspace over London, and a satellite feed showing Thailand being encased in a magical thunderstorm for seventy-two hours straight.

Each image is more surreal and apocalyptic than the last.

She continued without faltering. "The very air is now rich with an unfamiliar energy and still largely incomprehensible to our scientists, and the sudden exposure to this raw energy overwhelmed our planet's biosphere, mutating animals into unrecognizable predators, and among our own people… millions disappeared with no warning or explanation and any trace."