Tang Mo doesn’t have time to grieve or be scared.

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Weirdo and Xiao Zhao disappeared entirely, leaving nothing behind, so he has no need to organize their belongings.

Tang Mo closes the door and leaves the library.

There are still seven or eight people gathered around the Black Tower downtown. They sit on the ground blankly, not understanding what just happened, or why their companions who were just protesting have disappeared in a few short minutes. Despite everything, two sharply-dressed middle-aged men are still disassembling the white wall.

The armed police built the white plastic wall three days ago, enclosing the Black Tower to avoid letting normal citizens near.

Now, the armed police have disappeared, and so have the scientists doing research inside. These two men make a gap in the wall and walk towards the tower. Tang Mo doesn’t follow them. He glances at it from afar and continues walking.

So many scientists have researched this for half a year and still haven’t come up with any conclusions. If they can’t even understand what the Black Tower is, Tang Mo doesn’t think that he can either.

Right now, Tang Mo’s main problem is that he doesn’t have a car.

It is 8:15 am. Weirdo and Xiao Zhao disappeared at exactly eight o’clock. Like them, most other people in this city have disappeared. Without drivers, buses and subways can’t work. In addition, many people were driving when they disappeared, and now these cars have crashed into each other, blocking off most of the road.

After walking half a kilometer, Tang Mo sees an Ofo bicycle[1] on the ground. 

He takes out his phone and scans the QR code.

“As expected, it doesn’t work…”

Tang Mo furrows his eyebrows and crouches down to examine the lock structure. After observing it for two minutes, he picks up a rock and starts to smash the lock open.

The huge countershock makes his wrist hurt, but he’s much stronger than he was before, and after a couple of smashes, the steel lock breaks.

Tang Mo looks thoughtfully at the broken lock, then rides the bike home.

Forty minutes later, he enters his community and parks the bike at the front of the building.

The community is quiet. There’s no one around, and only the soft sound of leaves rustling in the breeze greets him. After getting home, Tang Mo packs a few simple things. His parents were only children, and his grandparents died when he was young. Then, when he was in college, his parents died in a car accident, and he stopped contacting his relatives after that[2].

Neither of Tang Mo’s closest college friends stayed in Suzhou. One went to Beijing, and the other went to Shanghai.

Weirdo’s daughter is in Shanghai, so he can go look for his friend as well.

Last night, Tang Mo was trapped in the library, so after getting home, he first fills up his stomach, then packs some clothes into his suitcase. But after everything is ready, there’s a more serious problem—--

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He doesn’t have a car.

It takes half an hour to go from Suzhou to Shanghai on the high-speed rail. In a car, it takes an hour[3].
The high-speed rail is definitely no longer operating. Tang Mo doesn’t want to imagine the situation on the train tracks right now. If it’s like the situation on the streets, where the drivers disappeared and the cars all crashed into each other, then on the railways, the driverless trains must also have crashed.

He needs a car.

Tang Mo goes upstairs and knocks on the landlord’s door. After three minutes of no response, he raises the crowbar he brought from home and breaks the lock.

He smells the gas as soon as he steps in.

Tang Mo’s gaze sharpens, and he quickly runs to the kitchen to turn off the stove, then opens the windows to ventilate the room.

The cutting board on the kitchen counter still has perfectly-cut vegetables on it. Clearly, the owners had been preparing a delicious breakfast before disappearing. Tang Mo rented this house[4] a year ago when he left school. The landlord is a very nice old couple living just upstairs. After retiring, the old couple often had nothing to do and would invite Tang Mo over for dinner.

Tang Mo doesn’t have a car, so he would often borrow the landlords’ car.

He takes the keys from the bottom drawer of the TV stand and checks around, leaving after confirming that there really aren’t any people in the room.

Shanghai is so close to Suzhou that driving over wouldn’t really take too much gas, but after Tang Mo gets in the car, he realizes that the landlords’ car doesn’t have much gas in it at all. The pointer is nearly at the red line, and if he tried driving to Shanghai now, he would at most only get halfway there before running out of gas.

Guess it’s time to get gas.

Tang Mo puts the keys in and turns. The moment the car starts, a piercing pain shoots through his heart, as if a huge hand had slammed down on his chest. Tang Mo’s face pales in an instant, and his heart thumps loudly, blood racing around his body at an extreme speed.

His body temperature rises at an unbelievable rate.

In one minute, his temperature becomes 40 degrees![5]

Yet a body temperature of 40 degrees does not affect Tang Mo’s brain at all. He’s impossibly conscious, clearly feeling a sharp knifelike sensation cutting at his heart. His temperature is still rising, and the pain is increasing as well.

Tang Mo punches the front passenger seat but is unable to relieve his pain.

His consciousness begins to fade as the pain becomes more intense.

Ten hours later, when Tang Mo awakens, the sky is already pitch-black. When he was unconscious, his clothes became drenched in sweat, then dried in the wind, then drenched again. This repeated for who knows how long, until his heartbeat returned to normal and the unknown pain disappeared.

Tang Mo still doesn’t look so good, but his eyes are sharp and his gaze is clear.

He touches his chest—his heartbeat has already returned to normal—then checks the rest of his body. There is nothing out of place.

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Then he reaches out and grabs a book out of the air.

He took this book completely out of thin air, but Tang Mo’s face shows no sign of surprise. This is a notebook-like book with stiff yellow-beige kraft paper as the cover. When he opens the book, it’s blank inside. Tang Mo stares seriously at the blank white paper, and under his gaze, lines of text begin to appear.

[Ability: Take and Take Without Giving Money][6]
[Owner: Tang Mo]
[Type: Special]
[Function: Collects abilities]
[Notes: Everyone has a dream, to take and take without giving money! Tang Mo might look like a good person, but you can know someone’s face without knowing the heart. He’s been wanting to do this for a long time. When Tang Mo was seven, he secretly ate the neighbor's kid’s chocolate without giving money. When he was ten, he copied his deskmate’s homework without giving money. When he was fifteen, he secretly watched the first porn of his life (gay porn[7]), and still didn’t give money!

See, he just wants to take and take without giving money!]

Tang Mo: “...”

You’re mental!!!

Tang Mo almost wants to slam the book into a wall.

Fortunately, he restrains himself.

This is his ability.

When Tang Mo woke up, he already knew that he had an ability. His ability isn’t wind, fire, and lightning, nor is it super strength. It’s just a book, and it’s a book that makes people want to slap it to death.

Tang Mo keeps flipping through the book, but other than the information on the first page, there’s nothing else. He looks at it for half an hour without any results. After a while, the book shows another line of text.

[Notes: You think Tang Mo will give money? Friend, right now he’s debating whether or not to pay at the gas station!]

Tang Mo: “...”

Bam!

A book shoots out of the car window.

A minute later, a thin, good-looking young man gets out of the car expressionlessly and picks the book back up.

The book sits on the front passenger seat, and Tang Mo does not look at it as he pulls into the nearest gas station. It’s dead silent. Not a single person is here. A few gas pumps lie recklessly on the floor, and sharp-smelling diesel spills all over the ground. If he had to guess, the staff probably disappeared in the middle of pumping gas.

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Tang Mo hesitates before getting out, then takes his wallet from the backseat.

Clearly, there is no one here, but he still yells, “Anyone there?”

No response. Tang Mo walks up to a fuel dispenser. There’s already a staff member’s card in it. Every staff member at the gas station has a card with a large amount of money on it. When customers come, they use this card to pay for and help them pump gas.[8]

Tang Mo doesn’t own a car, so he doesn’t have his own gas card either. Right now, he can only use the staff member’s card to get gas.

In the quiet, empty gas station, the black-haired young man quickly fills up his tank. The dark night is always nerve-inducing. This was originally a very populous area of Suzhou’s Industrial Park District, but there’s no one here now. The only person is Tang Mo, standing under the bright lights, filling up his gas tank.

Something seems to be hiding in the surrounding darkness. Wind howls by, sharper and sharper each time.

Tang Mo puts the pump back into place. Before he leaves, his expression sours as if he’s thought of something, and he takes out two hundred-yuan bills from his wallet and places them under a rock in front of the gas dispenser.

As he’s about to get back in the car, a cold object suddenly touches his lower waist. Tang Mo freezes, still bent over.
​
“Don’t move! Take out your wallet, and hurry it up!”

Notes

[1]

Ofo is a bike-sharing company founded in Beijing. Its signature bikes are yellow, so in the original text, Tang Mo calls the bike 'a little yellow bike' as a colloquial way to refer to it. Here's the Wikipedia link, and here's a couple of youtube videos explaining how it works (one, two). Here is specifically a video analyzing the lock.

[2]	Original text was 'he and his relatives contacted each other less'.

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[3]	I googled it, and the times are correct, plus or minus half an hour (probably for traffic). With no traffic and no one at the toll booths (for driving), it's very plausible for the trip to only take an hour. Here are the links I referenced: one, two.

[4]	In China, there are very few 'houses' as we think of in America. Instead, most homes (owned or rented) are actually more like apartments. Or flats, if you're British.

[5]

40 C = 104 F The next line's original text was something like 'Tang Mo's brain is not destroyed by the fever, however' because a continuous fever of 104 F is definitely going to damage your brain. I chose to translate it a different way because the next line was 'Tang Mo can still think clearly' so I went vague with the 'brain damage' part.

[6]	There's no good way to translate 吃干抹净不给钱, but the most accurate one would be 'Eat it all, wipe it clean, and don't give money'. That's a LOT of words and doesn't really tell you what it does lol so I just said he took stuff without giving money, which is the main point.

[7]

The funny story behind this is that the original text had 钙片 (calcium tablets) to avoid censoring issues. I had no clue what this meant and I was like 'wtf does calcium tablets have to do with anything' so I went on twitter for help and my friend told me it was slang for gay porn LOL. It's a phonetic joke because 钙 = gai (fourth tone) which sounds sort of like gay.

[8]

In China, there are gas station workers who pump gas for you. Typically, they pay for however much gas you need (from their card) and then you just pay them directly. Here's a video that shows how it works. However, given that I have not been to China in quite a while and certainly have never driven or pumped gas there, take this with a grain of salt.

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