Chapter 2

Yin Shen felt himself fly out of his body, slowly drifting towards the sky.

He looked down at the building, the city, the continent.

Even.

The Earth.

He flew higher and higher, drifting above the orbit, suddenly noticing rapid changes happening on Earth.

In the blink of an eye, the cities were gone, even the traces of human existence were gone.

The continental plates were moving, and green plants gradually covered everything.

Yin Shen immediately understood what was happening.

"Time is accelerating, what I perceive in an instant might be tens of thousands or even millions of years."

"I don't know if it's flowing backward or forward. If it's forward, does it mean that humans have all been extinct?"

He looked towards the universe and was then pulled or thrown into the vast, boundless universe, disappearing from Earth.

Eternal silence enveloped him.

He saw countless stars being born and extinguished, saw galaxies rapidly collapsing.

He had never imagined such a magnificent spectacle, one that could make a person change their beliefs, finding their life and everything they pursued to be so laughable, even feeling terrified by the futility of their existence.

Do our lives, as insignificant as ants, have any meaning at all?

Is the birth of life, the origin of civilization, and the grandeur of technology really as great as humans claim?

Human life, the history of the human race, even the entire Earth.

Yin Shen could only describe it with a phrase he had once heard.

"We are dust!"

The human race and civilization are like a fleeting light that suddenly appears in a corner of the universe.

Gone in a blink, with no meaning.

No attention, no care, and no change.

We originate, we are born, we shine as brightly as we can, and we will ultimately and irreversibly fade away.

Disappearing in a insignificant island in the corner of the universe, vanishing in an instant that is but a blink in the universe.

Yin Shen's mind was struck, and seeing such a magnificent spectacle, his dark and brief life seemed to finally have a glimmer of light.

He transformed into a beam of light, heading towards the depths of the universe.

Time was flowing backward, and he was traveling in a way that transcended time and space, heading towards the origin of everything.

It seemed that at the source of time, there was a powerful gravitational force pulling him towards the beginning of everything.

Finally.

The stars were extinguished, the universe became one.

Everything disappeared.

He had reached the end.

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"Where am I?"

Yin Shen asked himself.

In this place, even darkness did not exist. Even Yin Shen felt that he himself had disappeared, leaving only a consciousness floating in endless void.

This was a place without space, without time, without anything.

He could only answer himself, as he might be the first life form to reach here, and the only existence in this place.

"Have I been thrown outside the universe, or have I entered an unknown dimension?"

He could not shout, he could not sense any existence.

He suddenly felt fear, and the words of his friend echoed in his ears.

"That place might be another universe, the source of time, another dimension, or something unknown that humans cannot imagine."

"It might be a place where nothing exists, like a prison, and your soul will be trapped there for ten million years, one hundred million years."

"Until..."

"Eternity."

In an instant, he was extremely terrified.

But just as this thought appeared, he suddenly saw a light in front of him.

He heard the sound of the sea and the tides, a sound that felt incredibly clear and warm.

He even felt bubbles rising from beside him and floating upwards.

Sizzle, splash, bubble.

This sound moved him.

Before his eyes, the sea appeared, and the seabed covered with gravel.

He saw a trilobite, no bigger than a finger, crawling through the gravel, and a noodle-like worm entangled in the seawater.

The trilobite named Redlichia and the tiny, almost imperceptible unknown worm.

He recalled his friend's words and realized what had happened.

"Anchor point!"

"The anchor points on Earth have appeared, allowing me to observe Earth."

"They are my eyes, my anchor and coordinates in the vast sea."

He did not expect that the trilobite fossil given to him by his friend would re-anchor him to Earth, pulling him out of eternal darkness and the bottomless abyss.

But he guessed that the other party did not expect that the fossil contained not only a trilobite but also a worm from a distant era.

He reached out to the trilobite named Redlichia.

He broke free from the prison and returned to the universe.

His consciousness was pulled back to Earth, from the unknown place beyond the universe and above time.

Anchored at a time point in the vast universe, on an unremarkable planet in a remote star domain.

This was a shallow sea, with sunlight shining down from above.

The seabed was full of various ancient algae and fern plants, with large areas of sea plants that looked like tulips gently swaying in the waves.

There were also cactus-like sponges, with sharp spines extending from their outer walls.

The snails were embedded in the sand, and he saw large areas of trilobites crawling on the gravel.

Yin Shen walked step by step along the seabed, feeling lost and confused, sensing the abnormality here.

This should be Earth, but it could not be the Earth he was familiar with.

He finally walked out of the shallow sea and stood on the land.

A barren land, an empty continent.

Yin Shen looked at the Earth of millions of years ago, at the clear sky and the sun, with himself being the only human existence in the world.

"What is this?"

"The ancient Earth?"

He stood on the shore, and behind him, the sea rose in huge waves, bursting with a loud noise.

"Boom~"

The worm, accompanying Yin Shen's appearance, underwent a mutation.

It devoured gravel, seaweed, and seawater, rapidly expanding into a giant creature dozens of meters tall.

Whether plants or animals, they were all fused into it, becoming part of it.

Its back grew a large shell, and its body sprouted spines. Tentacles emerged from the shell.

Flesh split open, and green eyes opened, looking in all directions.

This was a terrifying deformed monster, a dominant creature in terms of size in this era.

As Yin Shen's gaze fell upon it, the giant creature crouched on the ground, not daring to move, as if it had lost all sense of self.

Then, a trilobite in the shallow sea slowly grew larger and crawled out.

As it emerged from the water, it continued to change.

It grew a human-like torso, limbs, and a head.

It transformed into a human-shaped creature covered in black armor, with a trilobite-patterned helmet tightly enclosing its head.

This creature slowly walked up to the shore, looking at Yin Shen with admiration, step by step approaching him.

Yin Shen could feel its emotions and touched the helmet on its head.

He heard the oldest life form on Earth, uttering the first word, the first syllable on this planet.

"God!"