Chapter 1

Penny’s POVI hurled my phone onto the mattress the second the final chapter of Apocalypse Rebirth loaded. Rage sat hot and heavy in my chest, the kind that made my hands shake.I had started the novel out of boredom. I kept reading for the dumbest reason possible: the second female lead shared my name. Penelope Lang. Penny to anyone who mattered. It felt like a private joke from the universe, a tiny reason to care about a character who was clearly written to suffer.Big mistake.“Seriously?” I groaned at the ceiling. “She died like that?”I grabbed the nearest pillow and flung it across the room. It hit the wall with a pathetic thud that only fueled my irritation.Penny Lang had been pure cannon fodder. A loyal, trusting fool who possessed every advantage and still managed to throw them away for a one-sided friendship. The jade bangle alone should have been enough to guarantee her survival an interdimensional storage space the size of a warehouse, complete with a purifying spring. Pe

Last Updated : 2026-10-28

Chapter 2

Penny’s POV“Pen, you’re finally awake!” Ivy chirped, sweeping past me without waiting to be invited. “I came early because I really wanted to talk to you.”I closed the door and followed her into the living room. “Oh? What happened?” I put on my best worried-best-friend face.She clasped her hands together and let her expression turn hesitant, as if the words cost her something. “You know that jade bangle you picked up at the antique market last week? It’s really beautiful.”Here it comes.Of course it’s beautiful, I thought. That’s why I bought it.“Yeah?” I said, blank and innocent.Ivy bit her lip. She looked down, then up again, then let out a small, wounded sigh. “I talked to my grandmother last night. She says it might be part of an old family heirloom set. I know it sounds crazy, but… I was wondering if you’d let me have it?”The nerve of her. I nearly rolled my eyes so hard they would have gotten stuck.In the novel, this exact lie had worked. The old Penny had melted at the

Last Updated : 2026-10-28

Chapter 3

Penny’s POVMy space was a safe place, but I couldn’t hide in it forever. Zombies weren’t the only thing coming. In the novel, the end of the world arrived as a whole catalogue of horrors: blizzards and heat waves, tsunamis and typhoons, famine, and the one thing worse than any of them human greed.I needed a fortress, somewhere defensible. Luckily, I was already standing in one.My penthouse sat on the thirtieth and top floor of a thirty-story building on the Upper West Side, with modern security and only two units per floor. I’d bought it a year ago with the inheritance from my parents’ estate after the car accident. And my neighbor, the other occupant of the top floor, was the male lead.I’d read that part in the novel, and it had made me sigh the first time. Lucas Zane had paid the previous owner double the market price just to live across the hall from Penny Lang. He was the most powerful man in the story, and he’d moved buildings for a girl who wouldn’t even look at him.Quite t

Last Updated : 2026-10-28

Chapter 4

Penny’s POVI’d considered doing my shopping at ordinary supermarkets and making a dozen separate trips. But that would take too long and look too strange. A wholesale market was different. Restaurants and distributors bought in bulk every day, and nobody would blink at a big order.I walked into the largest grain dealer I could find and asked for the manager. I ordered two hundred pounds each of pearl rice, glutinous rice, long-grain rice, short-grain rice, black rice, and brown rice. Then I added a ton of white sugar, five hundred pounds of brown sugar, and five hundred pounds of rock sugar. After that came two thousand pounds of white salt and a thousand pounds of pink salt.Even I knew I couldn’t buy everything in absurd quantities, but this was the biggest shop in the market. Plenty of customers bought fifty tons at a time. What I was buying would last two lifetimes, and nobody here would think twice about it.I kept going. A ton each of soybeans, black beans, lentils, and yellow

Last Updated : 2026-10-28

Chapter 5

Penny’s POVWhen I opened it, a tall man stood in the hallway, his shoulders broad, his jaw sharp, his dark eyes piercing. Lucas Zane was devastatingly handsome. He wore a fitted black suit and an expression of controlled calm, every inch the cold, untouchable CEO the novel had promised.Then his gaze landed on me, and it softened.It was a look that could make any woman weak in the knees. I couldn’t help wondering how the original Penny had resisted it for so many years.“You rarely invite me over,” he said, stepping inside. “What’s wrong?”Rarely was a generous word. According to Penny’s memories, she’d avoided him like he carried a plague. I felt a pang of something close to guilt on her behalf.The novel had given me far more access to his thoughts than he knew. I remembered the chapters devoted to him, and I understood him better than I probably should have. He’d seen countless beautiful women in his career. Some had schemed against him, slipped into his hotel rooms, even thrown

Last Updated : 2026-10-28

All Chapters of Apocalypse Countdown: No longer their stepping stone : Chapter 1 - Chapter 5

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5