Chapter 1 Aching Howl

With a pained cry, the saber-toothed tiger collapsed powerlessly to the ground. Its fearsome fangs were useless in the swift and overwhelming encounter. The ancient Earth predator hadn't even realized how it was injured before its heart was instantly roasted by the plasma lance's searing blade.

Hao Ren casually flicked the lance. Even though plasma blades never stained with blood, he still felt the motion effectively boosted his cool factor. Then, he surveyed the surroundings, confirming that there were no enemies other than the short-sighted saber-toothed tiger that had suddenly jumped out. He breathed a small sigh of relief.

The primeval and savage Earth was truly dangerous everywhere. Humans at this time were far from being at the top of the food chain. Wild beasts that treated humans as food were everywhere. Although they posed no threat to Hao Ren, dispersing them was a headache.

Hao Ren looked back at a distorted rift about the width of two people suspended in mid-air. On the other side of the rift, the crumbling ice tower lay silently on the ground. The scenery of 7715 BC was trapped within the rift, completely covered in the greyish-white hue representing temporal stasis.

In fact, he didn't know exactly what year he had last arrived at during his regression. The precise year could probably only be found in the sandbox system's records. He just had an increasingly obvious intuition—as he got closer to the starting point of this twisted spacetime, this intuition became clearer. He knew he had entered the final territory. Perhaps it was here, or perhaps in the next regression, he would reach the beginning of this stripped-away river of time. This long journey would finally reach its end, which was not far off.

"Speaking of… so saber-toothed tigers survived until this period…" Hao Ren glanced at the long-fanged beast lying on the ground, shaking his head and muttering to himself, "If some archaeologists came here, they'd probably go crazy with joy…"

He wasn't really interested in saber-toothed tigers. He just had to find something to mutter about. This savage, primitive world was filled with oppression, and traveling alone was not a pleasant experience. He felt he needed to find something to divert his attention.

Leaving the spacetime rift connecting the ice tower behind, Hao Ren set off on his journey, plasma lance in hand.

He trudged through the cold wilderness, trying to find traces of primitive tribes or intelligent beings who had been active, but he found nothing until evening. This was ancient Earth. At this moment, humans were far from being as prosperous as they would be in later generations. The sparsely populated primitive humans lived in tribes scattered across a few habitable areas. Ninety percent of the desolate land was ruled by the wilderness. And the long ice age that had persisted before made it difficult for humans to expand their range of activity at will. To find human habitation in the wilderness, one could only rely on luck.

Hao Ren had known this for a long time, so he wasn't discouraged by the result. The regression journey had continued to this day, and he had faced all kinds of difficulties and obstacles. Nowadays, few setbacks could shake his resolve.

When night fell, he rested temporarily in a cave. The food in his portable space had now become a precious luxury, only to be eaten a little when he wanted to savor the "outside world". Therefore, his dinner was still hunted in the wilderness. After dinner, he used the stars to determine his current location. Although the stars of 10,000 years ago were very different from those of later generations, he had prepared for this before setting off, memorizing the star maps of various historical periods in advance. Therefore, it was easy to confirm his current location: it should be in the Nordic region.

Then he studied Vivian's handscroll, roughly judging the time node he had arrived at, and finally became more certain that he was approaching that destination.

When the sun rose, he set off again, continuing his journey in the vast wilderness.

He wasn't wandering aimlessly, but following the "guidance" in his heart. Although he wasn't used to acting based on "intuition," this invisible and intangible thing, he had to admit that as a demigod who had established a deep connection with the will of the great universe, his intuition was far more reliable than other means—including but not limited to throwing shoes and flipping coins—when lacking clues.

Moreover, after entering this spacetime, he found that his intuition had become stronger, as if there was some kind of induction in the dark, making him feel that he should move in a certain direction as soon as he opened his eyes. This traction in the dark was so clear that he could almost hear a voice in his mind calling out to him: right ahead, the person he was looking for was right ahead.

Under this guidance, he walked through the wilderness and the Gobi Desert day after day. On this cold and desolate ancient Earth, only the rising sun and the night sky accompanied him, of course, and the beasts that had gone extinct in the external spacetime.

Mammoths and saber-toothed tigers were actually not common. This was Earth after the end of the Ice Age. The climate had gradually warmed, and the change in the living environment had led many ice age species, including them, to their demise. Although they would still survive on this planet for hundreds or even thousands of years, the decline of the population was already obvious. The grand scene of primitive people hunting mammoths was about to end with the arrival of the warm season, but the following "Age of Gods" would break the planet's original development trajectory.

When the morning sun rose above the horizon for the twelfth time, Hao Ren left the desolate rocky wilderness and entered a lush prairie that had grown with the warming climate. He found a small stone tool tribe on the edge of the prairie. The residents regarded Hao Ren, who possessed divine power, as a god and treated him warmly, but they knew nothing about Vivian or any other gods.

On the twentieth day, Hao Ren had crossed the prairie and entered a mountainous area. Along the way, he had not seen any clues of alien colonial strongholds—such as broken landing capsules, detection antennas fixed with stones, or purification arrays arranged near water sources and swamps. These things could often be seen in his last regression, and even in the one before that. They were evidence of the aliens' survival in the wilderness after landing on Earth, and they were everywhere in the hundreds of years at the beginning of the mythological era.

After all, even the glorious Olympian gods started building their homes by digging the first stone in the wilderness.

The absence of these traces could only have one explanation: he had arrived at an earlier point in time, a point even before the aliens arrived on Earth!

This initially shocked Hao Ren, because he felt it didn't make sense: he was traveling in Vivian's memory world. Theoretically, the earliest time scale he could reach could only be limited to the moment Vivian first arrived on Earth. But soon he vaguely guessed the reason:

This world was not only composed of Vivian's memory, or rather Vivian's memory was not even the main "component" of this world. The main part of this world was actually built by the sandbox system in the Sovereign-level Hub. The sandbox created a nearly real Earth through information deduction and information reorganization, and everything in this mirror Earth was the same as the original.

Vivian's memory only provided a series of beacons and key scenes in this mirror Earth. Rather than saying that these memories were the entirety of the regression journey, it was better to say that these memories only provided the function of navigation.

On the top of a high mountain, Hao Ren finally stopped and set up a small camp on the flat ground at the top.

He knew what the problem was, because he had "dived" too deeply into this river of history and memory, even into places that Vivian didn't even know about. Here, Vivian's memory had become so blurred that it was completely distorted, and the sandbox system could hardly use this memory to make accurate positioning. Here, no one knew when the convergence of the Dream Plane and the Material Plane specifically occurred, and even Vivian's subconscious had no relevant records—

The sandbox system could only send him to a place as close as possible.

Now it seemed that he had arrived a little early.

Hao Ren sat on a boulder on the top of the mountain, looking at the green hills and plains in the distance, lost in thought. He was guessing how much earlier he was—a few months, or a few years, or a few decades. He couldn't determine the exact year through the stars and the surrounding vegetation, but at least he could make a rough guess from the scenery he had seen along the way: the Ice Age had ended, the glaciers were receding from all the warm regions, the humans who had survived the winter were beginning to multiply, and the various large prey that had been weakened by the environment after the end of the Ice Age were providing these primitive people with valuable sources of food.

Vivian's earliest memories began with the scene of the glaciers receding.

So he shouldn't have arrived too early. All he had to do next was wait.

On the one hundred and sixth day, Hao Ren ended his last round of exploration of the surrounding environment. The intuition from his soul was still working strongly, urging him to return to his camp on the top of the mountain, sit cross-legged on the boulder, and insert the plasma lance into the pile of rubble next to him.

He released a divine spell that he rarely used on himself, then closed his eyes and began to wait quietly.

He didn't know how much time had passed, because time had no great meaning to him. The sun rose and fell again, the stars flowed in the night sky, the cold wind blew across the hills day after day, occasionally bringing some seeds of plants. These seeds took root and sprouted beside him, and then withered and died…

His mind entered a state of "stillness." He clearly perceived everything that was happening around him, but he was as silent as if he were dead.

Finally, one day, he suddenly opened his eyes, his gaze sharply looking into the distance.

The sky on the plain curled up, the clouds were torn apart, and a vast expanse of continuous, ocean-like, upside-down, leaping light and shadow appeared above the blue sky.

The time had come.