Come what may, he thought, and pushed the needle into his arm and emptied the vial straight into the vein.
Nothing happened.
He waited, sitting on the edge of his bed, and felt absolutely no difference in his condition. No warmth. No rush. He turned the empty bottle over in his fingers, disappointed, and squeezed it—
It burst in his hand like an eggshell.
He stared at the glass dust on his palm. Then the pain arrived.
It went through him from the spine outward, sharp enough to fold him in half, and a red aura flared up around his body and lit the whole room. He dropped off the bed onto his knees and hammered his fist into the floor, once, twice, because there was nothing else to do with it.
Every muscle in his body felt as though it were being torn apart and knotted back together. A stream of energy came up under him and threw him bodily into the air. Along his spine, something pressed out through the skin — spines, actual spines, sprouting and burning as they came.
Then it ended.
He came down on his feet, breathing hard, sweat running off him, and looked down at himself.
His body was not his body. It was wide and hard and cut into shapes he had only ever seen in photographs. He walked to the mirror on unsteady legs and could not believe what was standing in it.
He flexed. He flexed again, delighted, turning to catch the light. Muscles a champion bodybuilder would have envied, and he had done nothing for them but hold still for ninety seconds.
Wasteland technology, he thought. Absolutely stunning effect.
And this was tier one. The cheapest thing on the shelf, the change from a bag of snacks. He felt a small cold thrill at the thought of what a higher-ranked potion would do to a man.
Someone knocked at the door.
Still grinning at himself, he crossed the room and opened it.
His neighbour stood on the threshold with her hand raised to knock again. "Sorry, I forgot my keys, can I—"
She stopped. She looked at him. Her mouth stayed open.
"It's nothing," Chen Yang said. "We're just neighbours, right?"
Xiaoya giggled, embarrassed and quite obviously delighted, and did not once lift her eyes above his collarbone.
"Right. Neighbours." She fanned her face with her hand.
When he turned around to find the spare key, she shyly waved his hand away and reached past him, and then her palm was flat on his chest.
"Oh," she said, pressing. "Oh, that's — how long has this been here?"
"That's—"
"Is this for me?" She looked up at him wickedly. "Did you decide to console me after I failed the audition?"
"You've misunderstood!" Chen Yang shrieked. "You have completely misunderstood the situation!"
He backed into his own apartment in a panic, shouting through the closing door that he had simply forgotten to get dressed, that was all, he had just forgotten to put on a shirt, it happened to everyone—
The lock clicked. He put his back against the door and stared at the ceiling in horror.
She was going to think he was a pervert. She was going to think he was a pervert for the rest of his life.
Fine. Put it aside. He had gold to sell.
Twenty minutes later he was walking down the street with the bag over one shoulder, marvelling at how little it weighed, and then his vision sharpened without warning, as though someone had turned a focus ring in his skull.
He could see the far end of the road. He could see past the far end of the road. He read the small print on a shop sign a hundred metres away, then read it again to be sure, and it was still there, crisp as a page held at arm's length.
That was not all. Two women walking half a block ahead of him were talking in low voices about a third woman's husband, and he could hear every syllable of it.
The enhancement potion had not made him strong. It had raised every physical statistic he owned, all at once, straight across the board.
He walked on, thinking about that. About what a bottle of that liquid would be worth in a world that had never had one — and about how a place that had lost everything else had somehow kept the technology.
He picked a private dealer rather than a bank or a chain. A private store meant fewer questions about documents.
The bell rang over the door. A young woman came forward from behind the counter, smiling professionally.
"Call the owner, please," Chen Yang said. "I'm here for a business conversation."
"Sir, I'm authorized to handle—"
He did not argue. He simply lifted the bag onto the counter, unzipped it, and folded back the top.
Gold bars. A bag of them, packed tight, throwing the shop's lights back at her face.
She stared. For a long moment she did not move at all. Then she came out of her stupor, closed her mouth, and said, in a very different voice, "Please come with me."
The office at the back was small and expensively furnished. The man who rose from behind the desk had a handshake like a closing door.
"Lin Tao. I own the shop."
"Chen Yang."
"Please, sit." Lin Tao waited until he had. "Now."
Chen Yang, without further ado, set a single gold bar on the desk between them.
"You intend to sell?" Lin Tao asked.
"I do."
"Then given the amount we're discussing, you'll allow me to test the purity."
"Test whatever you like," Chen Yang said, entirely calm. "Cut it in half if it makes you happy."
He could afford to be relaxed. In the wasteland gold was junk that nobody wanted and nobody bothered to fake. There was no counterfeit gold two hundred years from now, because there was no reason on earth to make any.
The device beeped. Lin Tao read the display, and read it a second time, and looked up with an expression he did not entirely control.
"This is twenty-four karat. Pure. I don't see this."
"So?"
"So four hundred yuan per gram."
Chen Yang did the arithmetic behind his eyes. Three bars. Four hundred a gram.
One million two hundred thousand.
He smiled, and it was not a nice smile, and he was already spending it.
"However," Lin Tao said, "I'll need the purchase receipts."
The smile stopped. "I don't have receipts. The source is completely legal, but there are no receipts."
"Mr Chen." Lin Tao spread his hands. "I can't simply take a man's word. You understand the risk that puts on me. If it turns out—"
Chen Yang stood up.
"Let's stop bargaining and get down to business," he said. "Name your final price. Whatever it is, that's what the deal depends on."
He reached out and took the bar off the desk, weighing it in his palm, and turned toward the door as though there were four other shops on the same street and he had all afternoon.
"Wait." Lin Tao was up out of his chair. "Wait. Let's say—"
The number he said next was a different number.
"Ah," Chen Yang said, sitting back down. "Now that's a different matter."
The transfer went through on the spot. Lin Tao took possession of the three bars and Chen Yang watched the figure land in his account, and the two of them shook hands over the desk.
"I'd be glad to work with you again," Lin Tao said, holding on a moment too long. "Any quantity. Any time."
"We'll see," Chen Yang said pleasantly, and left it exactly there.
Out on the street he looked at his phone and thought about how easy it had been. Three bars. He had walked in with three bars out of a bag full of them and walked out with a sum of money he had not expected to hold in his entire working life.
"I'm rich," he told the street, quietly at first, and then not quietly at all. "I'm actually rich!"
He was still glowing when he got back to the residential complex, and that was when a woman came out of the stairwell at a dead run with her jacket half on.
Dandan was patting every pocket she had. "Phone, phone, phone — where is my—" She snatched it off the ledge by the mailboxes, spun on her heel, and walked directly into Chen Yang's chest.
"Whoa." He steadied her, smiling. "Where are you going in such a hurry?"
"They called her in again." Xiaoya had appeared at the top of the steps, arms folded, thoroughly unimpressed on her friend's behalf. "On her day off. Again."
"That's a shame," said Chen Yang, who was now rich and regretful about it. "I was going to treat you both to dinner."
"I'll go for two," Xiaoya said instantly. "I'll eat Dandan's portion for her. It's the least I can do."
"Traitor." Dandan pointed a finger at Chen Yang as she backed toward the gate. "And you. Don't you pester Xiaoya while I'm not here to supervise."
She laughed, wished them both a pleasant evening, and was gone.
Xiaoya turned to him with interest. "So where are you inviting me?"
"The Regal Grand," Chen Yang said.
She blinked. "The Regal Grand. The five-star hotel."
"That's the one. This evening?"
"This evening," she agreed, still staring at him.
Back in his room he sat down with his phone and decided that the rest of that gold needed to become money as fast as it possibly could.
It took two more days. A second dealer took a batch without blinking. An older woman who ran a quiet office above a jeweller's took another, weighed each bar twice, paid in full, and asked him to come again whenever he liked.
When it was done he opened his banking app and looked at the balance.
Four million.
"Four million," he said out loud, alone in his apartment, in a kind of euphoria. "The apocalypse gave me four million yuan."