Survival/Apocalypse12 min read
“Keep your hands off my sister” — I survived a plague, a plow, and a scarred soldier
ButterPicks13 views
“Move!” I shouted, but the room still spun.
The last thing I remember in the hospital was a patient biting a nurse's neck. Then teeth. Then cold blood on my hands. Then a robot voice counting down.
“You are dead,” it said. “System link engaged.”
Then I smelled dirt.
“Where am I?” I whispered.
“You're in 1973, Lena Feng,” the voice replied. “Binding complete. Countdown to global event: 24 hours.”
I opened my eyes to two wild horses and a plank with teeth.
“Jump!” someone shouted from the middle of a crowd of dirt faces.
“Hold on!” I yelled. My hands had dug into the ropes so long my fingers shook. The plow scraped the earth and my heart tried to leap out of my throat. People shouted. A skinny man tied a rope to a post and stood in the road like a wall.
“What are you doing?” I asked when the plow finally slowed and the horses slid to a halt.
“Stop fighting with your life, girl,” the man said. He was all callused hands and calm eyes. “You could have died.”
“My name is Lena,” I said. “Where is the hospital? I was—”
“You were here, with us.” A boy of maybe sixteen grabbed me down and nearly crushed me. “You scared half the village.”
“Who are you?” I asked, dizzy.
He spat a little to the side. “Eldon. And your folks sold you off, didn’t they?”
My heart dropped. The memories that had slid into me when I woke were not mine. I had been a modern OB-GYN in a city hospital. I knew surgery lights and epidurals. I did not know how to sew a dress or keep a pig alive.
The system pinged against my skin.
“Host detected. System: Doomsaver. Warning: primary host lost. New host binding complete. Time to catastrophic event: 24:00:00.”
“Say what?” I said out loud. I heard my voice like a stranger.
“You okay?” Eldon asked, frowning. He had a bad shoulder and wore a patched coat. He was the brother they told me was hurt by my mistakes.
“I— I think so.” I touched my neck. The bite mark was gone. My throat ached with a memory of someone else’s death.
“Come home, Lena,” a woman said, moving through the crowd and slapping my shoulder with a flat hand. “Stop standing there like the city fool.”
She was my foster mother in this life. Her palm stung. I wanted to scream. Instead I heard a new voice in my head.
System: Host health restored 80% by Life Fruit. Space module unlocked. Seed pack added. Main quest: Kill one living attacker today. Sub-quests: Plant crops; find Isatis root. Complete main to delay the event by 24 hours.
I almost laughed. I was a doctor. “Kill?” I whispered to no one.
“You okay, girl?” Eldon asked again.
“I’m fine,” I lied. “I just need to rest.”
They took me home. The hovel smelled of smoke and cabbage. I ate a small bowl of porridge and the old woman watched me like a hawk.
“You look pale,” Eldon muttered. “Finish your food.”
I sat with the bowl and thought of the hospital bed and the woman who had bitten through muscle. I imagined the system's cold voice. It offered me survival and a farm plot in a world with no internet and no antibiotics.
“Why me?” I asked the empty room.
A green mark pulsed on my wrist. The system answered in that same flat tone.
System: Host chosen at random. Host skills: Medicine level good. Bonus: Space module with seed bank. Warning: Time to event decreases if main task fails. Death equals permanent loss.
Panic stung my throat. I was an emergency doctor. I could sew wounds and suture vessels. But I had never faced wolves or wild tigers or whole cities on fire. I had never been a bride promised to a man I had never seen.
“They said I’ll marry into the Zhao family,” I told Eldon later as we walked. “Who is Zhao?”
“You mean Rafael?” Eldon said. “Tall. Scar on his face. Came home from the war. Quiet. Keeps to himself. They say he is a good worker. Your folks said yes so they can buy a wife for my cousin.”
“Perfect,” I said dryly. “A scarred soldier. My future husband.”
We walked into the yard and a dozen villagers gawked. My name here carried shame. The old woman’s voice kept shaping my life like clay.
That night the system offered me a small field inside my space. It had one Life Fruit I could spend. It also gave me a tiny book of medicinal recipes—something called “midwifing formula,” and a prompt.
System: Complete main task by killing an attacking being. Or delay apocalypse by one day.
I lay awake. I wanted to refuse. But the clock ticked in my head. I had to survive. I had to make a life that would let me live through the coming thing.
The next dawn I climbed the sun-warmed ridge. The village sent people into the hills to forage. I took the smallest tools I could find.
“Don’t go too far,” Eldon called.
“I won’t,” I said. I lied. I needed herbs. I needed to make this space work.
It was the system that saved me first. When a tiger broke cover and charged, I was five trees away and frozen. The system slapped me with choices.
System: Choose 1. Self-rescue. 2. Request aid. Penalty: -1 Affinity.
I didn’t want help. I didn’t want to owe anyone. I wanted to be free, to be the woman who stood on her own two feet. But the tiger’s eye caught me. Within seconds an arrow struck the tiger’s eye. Another arrow followed. The beast rolled and died.
A man climbed down from the trees and reached for me. He moved like a man who had spent days sleeping on wood. He smelled of smoke and iron. He lifted me off a branch with ease.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Thank you,” I said, breathless.
He didn’t smile. A long scar ran from his temple to his mouth. The scar made his face jagged like broken glass.
“I’m Rafael,” he said. “You can get down.”
“You shot the tiger.” I tried to sound grateful and small.
“We worked together,” he said. “It’s better that way.”
I had heard of Zhao family men. I had heard that this Rafael Reed had a scar and a history of anger. But here, pressed under the scent of pine sap and the blood of a tiger, his hands were steady.
“You owe me nothing,” he added as if he read my hesitation.
System: Event: Received gift from Major Figure. Reward: First Aid formula. Affinity with base leader: +1.
He gave me a small wrapped root.
“For the wound,” he said. “You can keep it.”
I wanted to kiss him for saving my life and giving me hope. I kept my mouth shut. I hooked the root into my bag and climbed down slowly.
“Why help me?” I asked as we walked.
He shrugged. “You were in trouble.”
“Will you come to my wedding?” I said, because it felt like an offer.
“No,” he replied, blunt.
I laughed. “Then how will I thank you?”
“You can help the village if you want.” He stopped and looked at me straight on. His face softened a degree I did not expect. “Come back if something moves wrong.”
The next days were a blur of tasks, of small victories that the system tallied with crisp impartiality.
“Plant seeds,” the system said. I planted potatoes and corn. I planted the Isatis root the old woman had told me was good for fevers. I put handfuls of the space’s soil into tiny rows and watched the dirt like I watched a wound heal.
“Catch an animal,” it said. I used a capture fruit—one of the strange living seeds the system gave—to make a crude trap. I caught two rabbits. I ate with Eldon. He laughed when I showed him medical notes I had memorized from my other life.
“You sound like a doctor,” he said, proud.
“I am a doctor,” I said. Then I stopped. I thought of the old woman who had slapped me. I thought of my father, who had been sold out of fear. The hurt fogged my eyes.
The system rewarded me with medicine when I completed the main. I could put a life back together with a spray of cure. I gave the new medicines to Eldon and to his father, and watched them breathe easier, the wounds knitting faster than they should. The old woman watched me with a face like stone. A neighbor whispered that the Zhaos might be the only ones who could fetch things like that from town.
That afternoon a fight exploded over my food. A town woman who didn’t know me called me names. The town's daughter, pretty and angry, snatched a piece of meat and shoved her pregnant sister. The sister fell and started to bleed.
“Call a doctor!” someone screamed.
“You are the doctor,” Rafael said flatly.
“No,” I said and stood up. “I am.”
We were crowded into the small clinic like a press of bodies. The sister moaned and tightened her fingers on my wrist.
“Drink this,” I ordered. “Now.”
“Who are you?” the girl’s husband hissed. “Why should we take orders from her?”
“Because she cares,” Rafael said. His voice cut through the room. He put his body in front of me, unasked.
“Do as she says,” he added. He moved with speed and command. I felt my first fierce gratitude. It bloomed in me like a new joint.
I gave the woman a potion from the space medicine. She stabilized. The baby lived.
“Thank you,” the girl whispered, her eyes wide and wet. “You saved my baby.”
“You will not tell lies of her now,” Rafael said to the room. “You will not say she steals or tricks. She saved my village today, even if she is the cause of trouble.”
They stared at him. His voice had weight. The town’s leader, a solid man in a pressed jacket, swallowed and said, “We are thankful.”
That night Rafael walked me to the edge of the ridge. The moon was low. He stood close enough for me to see white hairs at his temples.
“You risked a lot standing up for her,” I said. “For me.”
He looked at the village, then at me. “You should not have to. But you did not just save one life. You gave us proof. People listen to proof.”
“Do you trust me?” I asked.
He made a small noise like a rough breath. “I trust you to be honest.”
I laughed, a short surprised sound. “That sounds like a low bar.”
He shook his head. “It is enough.”
Days turned into weeks. The system's clock ticked each day and each time I completed the main task, the countdown rolled back by twenty-four hours. Food, small victories, favors—all counted. I learned to use the space to keep meat fresh. I learned to seed and water. I learned to trade with a man named Garrison Stein who ran a small supply outpost in the next town.
“You have good goods,” Garrison said when I brought him a sack of dried herbs and a cured rabbit. He was blunt and kind. “If you bring me good goods, I will protect your name.”
“You mean you'll tell people we didn't steal public grain?” I asked.
“If you keep helping the sick, I will keep delivering your items.”
It felt like a barter. It felt like building a fence around a life. Every time I brought a harvest or a medicine recipe to Garrison, the system ticked and advanced our survival.
Rafael stayed near me. He was not soft, but he was steady. Sometimes we rode the same cart to town. Sometimes he sat in silence as I bargained. Once, in the dark, he put a rough hand on the small of my back while I slept and shifted me closer.
“I didn’t know I could sleep like this before,” I whispered to him once.
“You did not,” he said.
There were nights we argued. I fought the village's rules. I fought Eldon’s urge to give everything away to placate our neighbors. I fought the old woman's claim that I should go meekly and be sold. I learned to use both my surgical hands and my sharp tongue.
“Don’t be small to them,” Rafael told me once, after a meeting with the town’s odd magistrate. “Not if you can help it.”
“I don’t want to be their enemy,” I said.
“You don’t have to be,” he said. “Just be yourself.”
That was rare praise. I held it like medicine.
Months passed and each day the system brightened the space. I learned to cultivate orchids and to extract medicine from rare roots. The community began to look to us for help. The old woman stopped slapping me. She started asking for tinctures.
“You have changed,” Eldon said one night as we cut wood. “You stand taller.”
“I had to,” I said. “The system is not forgiving.”
We built a small clinic. Rafael helped move stones and held beams steady while I patched the shingles. People came with broken ribs and fever and bites and left with better chances.
“I want to try for a child,” Rafael said one evening as we sat on the clinic steps and watched the sunset turn the fields to gold.
My heart leaped and dropped. “You—” I stopped. “Now? After everything?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “But I want children. I want a life that is not about shortages.”
“You are asking me?” I said. The system thrummed into my ears and offered a “child-giving recipe.” It had a name like “birthing secret.”
“Maybe,” he said. “If you will do it with me.”
I looked at his scar, at the hands that had caught me, at the voice that had steadied people in the hospital. I thought of all the mornings I had woken with the cold taste of fear in my mouth and how he had been there.
“Yes,” I said. “But not because you asked. Because I want to.”
He laughed, a sound like a bad wind easing. He kissed my forehead.
The system gave me a reward: a seed of rare plant that could boost fertility. It felt like a joke. Then the old woman handed me two coins she had been hiding for years and said, “Buy yourself something.”
“You are my family,” I told her.
She looked at me like I had grown teeth. “You are the one who does not lie to these people. Keep them.”
One day a crisis came. A disease spread through the neighboring town like a grey wave. Mothers doubled over. Children coughed blood. The town leader visited and begged me by name: “Lena, please. Help us.”
I rode with Rafael to the town. We packed the space with every tincture we had and our system showed a new main quest: Save thirty people in one week. The reward was permanent delay.
“My hands are tired,” I told Rafael one night.
“We will not sleep much,” he said. “All hands are needed.”
We worked and the system tabulated our saves. People who weeks ago would have been turned away were now ambulatory. We stabilized thirty-two. The town leader stood before us with tears.
“You have saved us,” he said. “Name your price.”
“Keep your roads open,” I said. “Tell your people not to hoard grain from others. Teach them medicine.”
He agreed. He changed.
And with that, the system chimed louder than usual.
System: Main quest complete. Global event delayed permanently. New status: Safe sector initiated.
I laughed until I cried. Rafael laughed with me. Eldon hugged me. The old woman cried into her apron and then made us tea.
“You did it,” Rafael said softly, his rough face wet.
“No,” I corrected. “We did it.”
The system pulsed one last time and offered a final prompt.
System: Final: The Event will occur. Choose: A. Endure and survive with your Safe Sector. B. Try to reset the whole world. Risk: High. Reward: World saved or lost.
I sat with that choice for a long time. The system had given me power. I could hoard it. I could try to reset the whole world and risk lives. Or I could build a strong safe place where the people I knew would live.
“Do you want to change the whole world?” Rafael asked.
“If I could—” I began.
“You cannot hold the whole world in your hands, Lena,” he said. “You can build a home and teach others how to build homes. That keeps everyone alive longer.”
I thought of the first woman I met in the hospital who had been bitten. I thought of my old city life, my colleagues, my empty apartment. I thought of the boy who had saved me from the plow and of the scarred soldier who had shot the tiger.
I chose B for a long time, just to test the boundary. But I could hear Eldon laugh behind me and the old woman call me “doctor.” My hands were steady enough to sew and to teach but not to remake the planet. I chose A.
The system sighed—or I imagined it did.
System: Safe Sector sealed. All residents within the sector will be sustained by space module for indefinite period. New reward: Community leader title. Permanent: your community's survival improved +∞.
The system dimmed, its voice finally gentle.
“You have done well, Lena Feng. You used knowledge, compassion, and force when needed. This is how leaders are made.”
I put my hands in Rafael’s and looked at our small fields, at the clinic with its new roof, at the children running with a pup. The scar on Rafael’s face caught the sun and made him look both a soldier and a man softened by time.
“Will you still call me ugly?” he asked, teasing his old self.
I hit him lightly in the arm. “Only when you leave the last slice of bread.”
He grinned. “Deal.”
We married under a crooked oak with Eldon laughing too loud and the old woman wiping her tears. Rafael gave me a watch wrapped in oilcloth—a practical thing—and I gave him medicine and a promise.
“Let’s have one,” Rafael murmured when guests had gone and the moon rose full like a clean coin.
“Just one?” I asked.
“Just one to start. We’ll see.”
I felt the life swell in me months later, a small, stubborn thing that changed the shape of my world. I picked seeds and I stitched small clothes. Rafael learned to braid and to hush the way a father does. Eldon became the village’s carpenter. The old woman planted a small herb garden and smoked less.
Years later, a child with my dark eyes and Rafael’s square jaw ran across the field and climbed onto the same wooden frame that had once been a plow. He pointed at the horizon.
“Will we ever have to leave?” he asked, small hands gripping the wood.
Rafael sat beside me on the porch. He put an arm around my shoulders. “If we have to, we leave as a family,” he said.
“I thought,” I said, looking at the child, “I would miss the city. I thought the world would end in smoke. But I have a clinic and a field and a man who scares me and steadies me in the same breath.”
Rafael kissed my temple and smelled of wood smoke and foxfire. “You saved more than the day,” he said. “You saved us.”
I laughed because it was true and because laughter is medicine too.
The system never returned with a countdown. The space stayed, supplying seed and cure. We built a wall and a school and a list of rules: share, help, teach. We learned to trust and to test. On nights when the world felt like another place, I sat with the watch Rafael gave me and remembered the hospital lights and the bite and the cold blood. I did not hate the memory. It had carved the path I had walked.
My ending was not a single act. It was many small things: a child’s first cry, the day Eldon cut the roof straight for the first time, the old woman sitting quietly with a cup of tea and a smile I had seen once, years ago. It was the tender slap Rafael gave me when I bragged that I could stitch a wound faster than him.
“You’re still bossy,” he said, mock stern.
“You started it,” I replied. “You shot a tiger for me.”
He bowed his head. “I would shoot a million of them.”
“Good,” I said. “Because I am going to teach our son to count things correctly.”
He laughed and pulled me close as the child climbed up and asked for a story. I told him the truth about the world: it is heavy and sharp, but it can be softened with small hands and medicines and courage.
At dusk I walked to the edge of our field. The green house stood like a small bright house among the dark tilled rows. The system’s space hummed under the earth, working and growing. I touched the soil and felt the pulse of life.
“Thank you,” I whispered to a voice that was part machine and part mercy.
The system’s last words had been simple.
System: You chose life. You made a home. That will do.
I smiled. I had wanted to finish the tasks. I had wanted to survive endless days. I had not expected to find love.
“Rafael,” I said, starting back to the house, “come tell our son about the plow.”
He took my hand and we walked home. The boy ran ahead and laughed and the night held us like a clean bandage.
We had saved the day. We had saved each other. We had found a life that would not be counted by the clock anymore.
The End
— Thank you for reading —