Another translation of a short story. This time, it’s pretty depressing, but it’s interesting. Please read the content warning!
Title: 地球上的最后一个人类 The Last Man on Earth
Author: 吕天逸 Lu Tianyi
Summary: After the end of the world, the last man on Earth sat in his house. Suddenly, he heard a knock on the door.
Content warnings:
Suicide, depression
After the passing of Judgement Day, the last person on Earth sat in his home. He suddenly heard a knock on the door.
When the world was still as it was, he’d heard of this type of scene, but he never expected it to happen to him. Holding in his terror, he walked to the door with trepidation. He didn’t dare open it, and he could only place his ear on the door.
“I curse you with an eternal life.”
This statement sounded from outside the door.
It was the voice of a person. He opened the door in excitement, but discovered that there was no one there.
A smothered hope is far more agonizing than a hope having never existed.
He stared blankly for a moment before going back inside. He soon decided to kill himself.
He found the ruins of a tall building, making an effort to strenuously crawl up the decrepit stairs to the roof, then closed his eyes and jumped.
He fell heavily to the ground, but it didn’t hurt at all. He believed that he had died in that split second, but he soon discovered that, not only was he still living, he didn’t have a scratch on him.
That voice wasn’t a hallucination.
For the last person on Earth to receive an eternal life, this was no different from a curse.
He first went insane, trying out every method to kill himself. Afterwards, he scoured the Earth’s remains for anything to divert himself from the loneliness: scraps of paper with writing, a small, refined copper mirror, repair tools. When he was lucky, he could find the remnants of some books.
Then, he did nothing at all. He stared fixedly at the sky in deep thought. In the end, he forgot that he was even living.
Little by little, just as the deep, blue sea turns into mulberry fields, the ruins turned into dust.
Little by little, the Earth once again produced living organisms besides him. They multiplied and evolved.
Little by little, the Earth produced intelligent beings. They were neither like monkeys nor like humans.
This was some hundreds of millions of years later.
He saw those intelligent creatures, little by little, growing smarter, and, little by little, dominating the Earth.
He saw those intelligent creatures develop civilization, technology, and science, wielding their intelligence to shape the world.
He saw those intelligent creatures walk the same old path as humanity, destroying nature, manufacturing weapons capable of destroying the world.
Along with the worsening environmental damage and increasing resource scarcity, those intelligent creatures started to fight each other like bed bugs.
They utilized weapons of mass destruction to obliterate each other, the Earth once again blanketed in a hellish sea of fire.
This was some thousands of years later.
Judgement Day had arrived once more.
Meaning, he would have to remain in the silence for another some hundreds of millions of years.
He started an arduous search for survivors in the destruction. He decided to open a dialogue with them, teaching them everything he had learned during his long life. He wanted to befriend them, to support each other in mutual reciprocation on the ruins of the Earth.
At last, he found the last of those intelligent creatures on Earth. He knocked on its door.
In that moment, he suddenly felt tired, a deep exhaustion that penetrated down to his bone marrow. Those tempestuous eons swept through him like a raging current, scouring him clean from the inside out.
“I curse you with an eternal life.” In a curious occurrence, this is what he said.
With these words spoken, he felt at ease.
He turned into a fine dust, passing on the wind.
He was cursing himself? Thus the cycle continues