(There are too many mysteries. Why can I travel through time? And why did I end up in the future... Anyway, the first thing is to find a way to keep this body alive, then go back to Chongqing in Z Country and take a look!)

William Clark was thinking about his long-term plans for the future, but right now he had to face the challenge of going outside. In a city and region filled with gangs, drug dealers, robbers, and frequent shootings, stepping out the door was no less than entering a battlefield for William Clark!

He pressed himself against the door, listening to the sounds outside. Only after confirming for at least several minutes did he carefully open the door and slowly slip out.

Outside the apartment door was a dilapidated hallway, with wooden floors that creaked underfoot. The corridor was dimly lit, with a single lamp on each floor, and these bulbs were the oldest kind of yellow lights. Whether due to age or disrepair, many of the lights on the floors flickered constantly.

Seeing all this, William Clark felt a chill in his heart. This old apartment looked exactly like the setting of those cursed horror movies.

But now he was starving and couldn't care about any of that. Taking advantage of the empty hallway, he quickly ran toward the exit on the first floor of the apartment.

Just as William Clark reached the main entrance of the building, he suddenly had the inexplicable feeling that someone was watching him from behind—a tingling sensation on the back of his neck. He instinctively turned to look, only to see that the hallway behind him was pitch black. Starting from the fourth floor where he had come down, every floor's lights had gone out. Except for the light shining in from outside behind William Clark, all he could see was deep, endless darkness, like the entrance to hell.

William Clark was trembling all over. He couldn't see through the darkness, but he kept feeling that something—or perhaps not even a person—was watching him from within it!

Driven by the instinct to survive, William Clark started running out of the apartment. The overwhelming terror of the unknown left his mind blank, and he even screamed involuntarily. But just as he was about to step out of the building,

and rush into the sunlight, a flowerpot suddenly fell straight down from above the apartment, landing squarely on William Clark's head.

With a crisp crack, William Clark's head was immediately covered in blood, and he was knocked to the ground. The intense dizziness nearly made him pass out on the spot.

But perhaps because he had once been hit by a car and become a vegetative patient, William Clark had developed some resistance to dizziness. Or maybe it was the overwhelming terror behind him that drove him on. In any case, he didn't lose consciousness right away. Instead, he lay on the ground, inching his way toward the sunlight outside the apartment with his fingers.

From the corner of his eye, William Clark could glimpse the inside of the apartment. In a daze, he seemed to see the darkness surging toward him. At that moment, the darkness inside the apartment seemed to turn into some kind of liquid, rapidly spreading in his direction.

He must not let that darkness touch him!

William Clark instinctively knew this. If he were touched by that darkness, he might suffer a fate a thousand times more terrifying than death or becoming a vegetable!

Summoning his last bit of strength, William Clark crawled toward the sunlight, moving with his fingers. Even though there was less than half a meter left, William Clark crawled so hard that his fingernails flipped back, leaving a bloody mess. Finally, when the darkness behind him was less than a meter away, his head reached into the sunlight. In that instant, he felt a warm sensation spreading from the top of his head through his body. The goosebumps vanished, and the icy feeling from deep inside disappeared.

(I'm alive...)

Just as William Clark finally breathed a sigh of relief, a window on the apartment building above suddenly opened. A pair of hands covered in lumps tossed out a broken TV, which crashed straight down onto William Clark's head. With a loud bang, William Clark's head was completely smashed.

Then... William Clark found himself looking at his own smashed corpse from a strange perspective, as if he were floating five or six meters above, gazing down from midair. William Clark thought he should feel fear,

terror, anger, excitement, and so on, but right now he felt nothing at all—not even the ability to think. William Clark sensed that the "I" that was his very existence was dissipating...

Then, in the next second—or perhaps with no sense of time at all—William Clark was suddenly yanked "downward" by a vast, overwhelming force!

William Clark saw a gigantic spiral spectacle, like a tornado or a typhoon. From a higher perspective, he saw it all, and at the core of this massive spiral storm was the Earth. He was swept into the spiral storm—dark, chaotic, and mysterious—pulled downward, falling from above for an unknown distance.

Then William Clark saw the earth below: an endless expanse of black and gray. In the far distance were things even larger than the stars, though he couldn't see them clearly. Below him, he was falling toward a burning, shattered New York City...

At that moment, William Clark suddenly understood.

He was dead.

This was the world after human death!

(The End of This Chapter)

Chapter Two: The World After Death

Does there really exist an underworld after death, a true hell or heaven?

Is there really a world of the dead?

This has been the eternal riddle since humans first began to think.