Time rewinds to the second day.
Nightmares swept across the globe, claiming those who delighted in the abuse of animals.
In their sleep, they were subjected to various tortures. They felt terror, they screamed, they lashed out—but they did not understand why.
They felt only a faint, lingering sense of familiarity toward these agonies.
Before dawn, a feverish wave erupted across the internet.
[Holy crap!!! I had a dream, it was beyond creepy...]
[Guys, let me tell you, I dreamed that...]
[For real? I dreamed that too...]
Posts like these flooded the platforms—the second, the third, the fourth appearing in rapid succession.
Driven by this communal surge, even those who usually kept to themselves began to post.
Conspiracy theories and suspicions cropped up everywhere, only to be promptly reported and banned.
High above, She watched it all in silence. She was waiting—waiting for the fermentation to reach its peak before descending with Her "punishment."
The sun gradually rose as the moon slowly set; a new day arrived.
Steam rose from breakfast stalls along the streets. Passersby hurried along, some in a rush, others leisurely.
On the other side of Blue Planet, the lights were bright and neon flickered; almost no one had slept.
No one expected that this ordinary "day" would mark the end of human civilization as they knew it.
She acted.
There was no warning, no delay. It was as if the world itself had "refreshed."
On a subway train, an office worker was mechanically scrolling through short videos.
Suddenly, his screen went dark without cause, then flickered violently as if overloaded by an electrical current.
It wasn't just him.
The entire carriage—including the advertising screens on the platforms and the tablets in the hands of passengers—plunged into a dead silence in the same second.
Then, a line of bone-chilling, black formal characters emerged. Accompanied by a viscous, piercing sound—like nails scraping against glass—the words slowly surfaced:
[Fate Exchange: Live Broadcast of the Abusers]
[Fate Exchange · First Batch of Names Now Active]
[Subject Dossier: No.11 Scalpel (Username)]
[Sin Assessment: Filming animal slaughter for profit]
[Judgment: Deprivation of Human Rights. Immediate transport to—The Laboratory]
The office worker tried to turn off his phone, but his fingers refused to obey. He could hear his own heart thudding violently, yet he couldn't move so much as a fingertip.
Not just him—everyone in the carriage seemed to have their souls pinned down by a high-dimensional power.
Their bodies were stiff, their blood frozen, and their throats felt blocked, unable to utter a sound. They could only watch, cold sweat pouring, as the screen switched.
In this moment, the noisy Blue Planet was hit with a pause button.
Vehicles on the streets drifted to a stop with an eerie grace; the boiling crowds fell into a deathly silence.
Billions of eyes froze like puppets, staring fixedly at the screens before them.
On the screen, the first-person perspective was extremely low. Surrounding the viewer were massive, skyscraper-like walls of transparent glass...
[ID: A-0001]
[Original Species: Human]
[Current Species: Rodent (Experimental)][Current Form: Subject No. F0407]
[Remaining Lifespan: 3 Days]
[Countdown to Broadcast Start: 00:00:59]
Suddenly, within the silent subway car, several sharp "squeaks" of terror rang out.
[First Executor—Confirmed]
[What you have given shall be personally endured by you.]
[What you have ignored shall be reenacted upon you.]
[The pain you deemed insignificant—]
[Shall become your entire world.]
The mobile screen shifted.
A room appeared.
It was clean, tidy, even respectable. An experimental log lay on the desk; data charts were pinned to the walls.
And then—
There were several small, transparent breeding boxes.
The camera zoomed in slowly, finally stopping on one of the boxes.
Inside was a fancy rat.
It was huddled in the corner, its body trembling slightly, as if instinctively terrified of something.
In that instant, the dormant comment sections exploded like a tidal wave. It seemed the power had restored everyone's ability to move.
—[What does this mean? What experiment?? Agh, does anyone actually know what's happening??]
—[So creepy! Too creepy!! What are these things? What is going on?? I thought the apocalypse was starting!!!]
—[Who else feels this?? It really feels like the end of the world here. I'm in Beaver City—every car on the street has stopped, and there's nothing but screaming!! God Bless]
—[Holy sht, I was about to perform surgery and the scalpel just stopped moving! I almost peed myself! What's scarier is the equipment in front of us all turned into this live stream!!!!!]*
—[I...]
For a moment, the "scene" became a chaotic spectacle.
Languages from every nation surged across the screen, yet a divine force automatically translated the barrage into words each person could understand.
This only fueled the urge to speak; the bullet chat refreshed at a blinding speed.
Beyond the frame.
A man's voice rang out. It was fluent Green Pheasant Country dialect, lighthearted as if discussing what to have for lunch, carrying a faint, unmistakable trace of a smile.
Bright red subtitles for the real-time translation flashed at the bottom of the screen:
"Today, let's test the pain threshold. Let's see how much these little things can actually take."
Wearing blue latex gloves, he roughly snatched up the fancy rat.
The once-agile creature felt as though it had fallen into an ice cellar.
Its body went rigid like a corpse, with only the tips of its limbs vibrating at a high frequency, betraying the primal terror in the depths of its soul.
It stared deathly into the lens—or rather, at the man behind it. Its eyes looked as if they were pleading for help, begging for one final sliver of mercy.
In the shot, the man picked up a thin needle that glinted with a freezing light. His movements were practiced to a revolting degree.
Under the gaze of billions, the needle point pressed bit by bit toward the fancy rat's defenseless back.
Under the high-definition lens, even the tiny pores could be seen contracting in horror.
There was no mosaic, no camera work to hide the act. The metallic needle reflected a piercing white glare under the shadowless surgical lamp.
The camera pushed in to the absolute limit. Viewers could even see the minute muscle spasms as the tip snagged the fur, poised against skin as thin as a cicada's wing.
For the first time, the bullet chat went silent.
The next second, the countdown hit zero.
The screen plunged into black, then reignited.
Same room. Same position.
But—everything had changed.
The man snapped his eyes open, his heart nearly hammering through his ribcage.
He instinctively tried to roll over and sit up, only to find his limbs clamped down by cold metal rings, his back pressed against a freezing iron plate.
His field of vision had shrunk a thousandfold.
The laboratory he once knew now appeared terrifyingly colossal.
The ceiling was lost in the clouds; the tweezers beside him looked like silver dragons.
The pungent scent of disinfectant nearly tore apart his sense of smell, which was now a hundred times sharper.
Terrified, he looked down. He no longer saw human hands or feet.
Instead, he saw a pair of tiny, clawed paws covered in fine fur, and a striped, shivering rodent body.
He opened his mouth, desperate to scream for help, to yell his name as a human being.
But the sound that spilled from his throat was a lowly, shrill—
"—Squeak! Squeak-squeak—!!"
Before their screens, billions of viewers saw only the little white mouse twitching frantically on the iron plate, its tiny paws clawing futilely at the air, looking remarkably "lively."
Then, a whisper as vast as thunder rolled from the edge of the sky, vibrating in the eardrums of every listener:
"I had well-nigh forgotten that thou understandest not the tongues of all living things. Yet it mattereth not; I shall aid thee to hear their lamentations with thine own ears.—"
The next second—
All the "squeaks" were instantly twisted and restructured in people's minds, transforming into the shrill, distorted screams of a man:
"Stop! I am human! I am Sato! Help!! Ah!!!"
The agonizing male voice exploded directly in the minds of billions.
The bullet chat went into a frenzy.
—[Holy sht!!! I can understand what it means now!]*
—[Me too...]
—[Did you guys just hear a voice right in your ear?!]
—[Ah?! You heard it too? I thought I was hallucinating!!!]
—[So this is retribution? Divine karma???]
Inside the frame, "it" tried to speak. But what came out was a terrified—
"Squeak!!"
Outside the frame, the sound of footsteps echoed.
The camera panned.
On the screen, "Sato" stood before a mirror, looking at himself in disbelief.
"He" reached out, clumsily feeling that warm skin.
"His" fingers trembled as they traced that face—a face so plain it was almost mediocre, yet a face that had been the final nightmare for countless animals, the mask of the Grim Reaper.
However, the look in "his" eyes as he stared into the mirror held more than just the ecstasy of a narrow escape; it held an extreme, wild vigilance.
Suddenly, "he" seemed to catch a tiny sound.
His whole body jerked; his shoulders bunched high, and his head snapped around at a bizarre angle impossible for a human, staring fixedly into a dark corner of the lab.
Then, as if realizing something, "he" slowly exhaled.
But his right hand instinctively curled against his chest, his forefinger twitching as if scratching at non-existent fur in the air.
"He" looked up at the mirror again, his hands moving over his body in disbelief, touching everywhere, refusing to let even a single inch of that face go.
"His" fingers brushed against the skin with an awkward clumsiness, as if this human pelt were some priceless, exquisite garment he had never dared to wear before.
Now, the owner of this face was weeping. These were not tears of terror, but the raw ecstasy of a survivor.
"I lived... I survived..."
"He" murmured in a low, raspy voice that carried a jagged, tearing quality.
"He" moved slowly, pressing that mediocre face toward the mirror until his nose almost brushed the cold glass, taking a deep breath of his own scent.
"Haha... I'm free, sob... I'm free..." "He" was laughing and crying at once, like a madman.
When "he" spoke, the voice was still unnatural but clear. It had the cadence of someone who had just learned to speak—hoarse, with every word dripping with blood and tears.
"I'm free... free. No pain... Hahaha, it doesn't hurt anywhere, Hahaha—it's so good, so good... this body... it doesn't hurt. The broken bones are gone, the scorched fur is gone... Is this what it feels like to be human?"
"Thank you, Great Beast God... Thank you, Great Beast God... sob—"
"He" clumsily opened and closed his lips, his voice sounding like a broken bellows, yet carrying a holy, divine piety:
"Thank you, Great Beast God... So being human really means you can't feel that needle plunging into your spinal cord anymore..."
Before the words had even faded, "he" turned his head to look at the tiny fancy rat huddled into a ball on the lab table.
The former numbness in his eyes was gone, replaced by a bottomless, chilling indifference—the coldness of a survivor.
Beyond the screens, billions of viewers fell into a collective silence.
It was clear now: this "Fate Exchange" didn't just swap bodies; it traded places in Hell.