pjbooks Chapter 571 The Second Life
Chapter 571 The Second Life
Xu Si left, but he did not leave Earth.
Instead, he found a place to test his ideas about small worlds, which he hadn't had a chance to try yet.
He had previously gained some insight at the underwater hub: the small world needed to abandon its preconceived notions and develop on its own.
Now he finally has time to give it a try.
Xu Si did not go far; he landed on the edge of a river valley three hundred kilometers away from the City of Fire.
That was a hilly area surrounded by farmland before the apocalypse, but now it is unrecognizable.
The terraced fields can still be vaguely seen on the rough, gravelly hills. Wild grasses, about half a foot tall, grow sparsely on the slopes on both sides, their leaves tender green and bright, imbued with the vitality of the World Tree.
He sat cross-legged on a relatively flat boulder in the middle of the riverbed. Nirvana was not beside him; only star power flowed slowly under his skin.
"Sword Eleven, keep an eye on the surroundings for me," he called out in his mind.
"Yes, sir."
Xu Si closed his eyes, his consciousness sinking into the slowly operating little world within his body.
The cracks in the edges have been mostly filled by the laws of life and matter. The dark orange and light green patterns intertwine, like a map that has been reassembled. Although there are still some small gaps that have not been completely healed, the overall stability is far greater than before.
"Next..." he muttered to himself.
He reached out and waved away the virtual sun and moon that appeared in the small world.
"How will it evolve if I don't intervene?"
He gazed silently at the planet, which was now completely different.
Instead of falling into darkness as he had imagined, he was enveloped in an orange-green light.
This color gave Xu Si the feeling of being in the underworld.
It's not that it's bad, it's just that it's somewhat different from Xu Si's perception.
Without the cycle of the sun and moon, that eerie feeling instantly arises.
However, to Xu Si's surprise, the only life form on this planet, "Nightmare," emerged from underground, something that had never happened before.
Previously, as the sun and moon revolved, nightmares would only emerge at night to spy on the world.
But now, this environment seems extremely suitable for the survival of this new life form, Nightmare.
This was an unexpected discovery, though I don't know what use it is.
He quietly "watched" the planet that had turned a dim, yellowish-green, like an amber soaked in a time-stagnant liquid, possessing both the dampness of the deep underground and the chill of an ancient tomb.
The nightmare emerged from the soil, crawling slowly along the surface. The pale green glow on its body formed a winding line in the dim light, like the only living thing on this desolate planet.
"This little guy seems a bit lonely!"
However, it seemed quite comfortable, its crawling posture was much more relaxed than before, and it even stopped occasionally, pressing its flat head to the ground, as if listening to some sound from deep within the earth.
Xu Si directly withdrew all intervention measures, leaving everything to the laws of nature to evolve on their own.
He didn't know what changes this would bring, but he knew that the little world before him seemed to be on the right track.
What does it matter if there's no sun?
What does it matter if there's no moon?
Even if it eventually evolves into the Three-Body Problem, Xu Si feels it's acceptable.
Xu Si's perception was like an invisible moonlight, gently enveloping the small planet within his body that was evolving on its own.
A dim, yellowish-green hue permeated the entire space. There was no sunrise or sunset, only a constant, lingering twilight that seeped from every crack in the planet's surface, intertwining with the pale green glow on the nightmare, forming a flowing, almost liquid halo in the void.
After crawling on the ground for a while, the nightmare stopped in a low-lying valley.
Its flat body moved around, stopping and starting, as if it were sensing its home.
Until it found a suitable place, its body began to slowly sink into the soil, like a fish returning to its nest, silently sinking into the depths of that dim yellow earth.
Xu Si's brows twitched slightly.
He could sense that the nightmare wasn't simply something to hide from.
"...Interesting," Xu Si muttered to himself.
He seems to be looking for a nest to reproduce, so the current living environment is the most suitable for him.
Xu Si actually wanted to ask about the reproduction method of the Dream of Spring clan, to see if he could provide some assistance.
But after thinking about it, I decided against it. On the one hand, the Nightmare of today is no longer the Nightmare of the past; it is now a completely new race.
On the other hand, he had just been thinking that it would be better not to interfere and let things take their natural course.
He never imagined that withdrawing the intervention would have such a significant impact on life on the local population.
Xu Si's senses did not detach from the small world within his body.
He sat cross-legged on the giant rock in the middle of the valley like a stone statue forgotten by time, his body motionless. He deliberately isolated himself from the breath of the World Tree and the tremors of the earth veins. His entire consciousness was like a calm ancient well, reflecting the planet shrouded in twilight within his body.
After the nightmare sank into the ground, it made no further noise, but Xu Si could feel its presence slowly spreading, settling, and taking root deep in the soil, like a seed sucking the pulse of the earth in the darkness, waiting for some unknown opportunity to break through the soil.
He had thought he would be watching quietly like this for a long time.
But after an unknown amount of time, an extremely faint thought separated from his body.
It's like cell division, like a ripe melon falling from the vine, or like biological childbirth.
Before his senses could even catch up, a second life was born in his little world.
Having learned from his first experience, Xu Si's perception wasn't so strange this time.
"...It actually came into being." Xu Si murmured to himself.
He did not interfere, did not inject any power of law, and did not even cast much attention in that direction.
He simply withdrew his intervention, allowing the planet where the sun and moon revolved to evolve on its own—and then, the second life appeared silently.
Was the nightmare too powerful, or was my decision too brilliant?
Xu Si couldn't help but check the status of the two nightmares.
The newborn creature looks almost exactly like Nightmare—a flat head, a body glowing with a pale green light, and crawling on the ground in the same way.
What surprised Xu Si even more was that he had the ability to act independently since birth, seemingly without an infancy, and showed no closeness to the nightmare that gave birth to him.
There was even a hint of hostility.
After he was born, once he was able to move freely, he crawled out of the ground and then went far away to find a home that suited him.
This behavior pattern is truly a nightmare.