"Kang--" "Boom--"
Black clouds were swept by the wind, and electric silver snakes were intertwined in the mad ink of the sea. The swirling cumulonimbus was layered together, covering all the sunlight like a dome.
On the decaying hills, countless serpents writhed, crawled, and clumped together. Their bodies were covered with blood-red magic lines, without eyes, and as if by instinct, or consistently in a particular direction, they moved.
"Yeah, hahaha!" Under the whirlpool of the thunderstorm package, suspended a glamorous female monster. She wore a charming and delicate face, studded with languishing eyes like amethysts. A pair of black tear strains were drawn down the white cheeks. There was also a round purple eye between the eyebrows. Her angulus oris slightly upturned, but the expression was like a sadness, joy, and even deep despair. Around the pair of gem-red devil horns were her light, silky blue tresses divided into five bundles, the ends of which were transformed into dragon heads, breathing different colors. The golden silk woven dress covered her curvaceous figure, fluttering around the seductive scented shoulders and collarbones, the fingertips wearing glittering gold claws, and the dreamlike transparent light wing back behind rumbling with the rhythm of the breath. Connected to the fistful small waist, was a serpent body of nearly 100 meters long, with blue back and white belly, and decorated with a golden pattern, coiling in the air, enchanting, swaying with the wind and thunder, and filled with undoubtedly horrible power. At this time, her hands were highly lifted, the left hand holding a blue-hilt silver ax, and the laughter of sadness echoing in the air.
"My dear retinues, unleash your anger, and devour these pathetic souls!" Driven by the monster in the air, the serpentine creatures on the ground rushed toward Sapiens Homo, making a hoarse squeak.
Seeing the scene in front of him, Sapiens did not feel fear, nor angry, only the sorrow, heartbreaking sorrow. But he couldn't speak, nor move. He could only watch the serpentine creatures approaching.
Suddenly, a tall figure blocked Sapiens' front. "Let me do it."
Sapiens nodded silently. It was a valiant purple long-haired man, with a left-handed gilt mirror steel star shield, a right-handed purple shining spiral spear, a light armor with radiant brilliance, and a tabard behind him tossed by the wind.
"Miss Idries, Chairman Homo has long been too affectionate to crack you down, but you, still show no repentance!" The man angered, heavily smashed the shield. A gap was cracked out the ground, and the breaking waves rushed toward the serpentine creatures, hitting, chopping, and rushing them away. "Your obsession will only kill yourself. Stop it, Idries! Cherish your practition of so many years. Repent now, and the Chairman will guarantee your safety against all objections."
"Repent? Hehe, everything in these years only proved one thing: I was born with such nature, instinctively so. How can there be any possibility to change?" Idries smiled like a sorrow, staring at the man, "Maybe, my birth was a mistake at the beginning. But since I came to this world, I have to work hard to live according to my nature. Dream yourself rather than wanting to deceive me to get caught!" With the fanning of the light wing, her serpent body, full of sense of strength, violently stirred the wind, and as if relying on the ether in the void, elegantly and rapidly serpentuated to the purple-haired man. "If you can, kill me ah!!" Each of the five dragon heads spurted different colors of breaths smashing like meteors. The man in danger firmly inserted the shield on the ground. Facing the spectacular falling-star breaths, the plain-looking small shield stood still, bearing waves of earth-shattering shocks.
Sapiens looked at the man in front of him and only felt a deep wave of grief.
When Idries came to the front, it seemed that the indestructible shield was finally bombarded to nearly collapsing by the breaths. "Oh!" Idries screamed, and the left hand waved the ax and threw it with the thunder. The two sides were disparate in size - the man was actually not even as large as Idries' palm. Once chopped, there would be hardly any pieces left.
"Bang!" Fell the ax that seemed to have opened up the world, shaking the mountains. The bursting shock wave, was it not Sapiens' dodge in advance, would have cut him off.
Smoke suffused, leaving a fathomless graben. The purple-haired man was half-squatting on one shore, breathing heavily, with all the bloody marks by the debris. The shield had already gone, and it seemed that it was at the last moment that the man escaped his life. However, he was not unarmed, having a lingering fear after the narrow escape; instead, he handed up his spear that was shining and growing larger and larger in the wind: "Unrepentant!" With his roar, the spear's cold sharpness broke the clouds, revealed the sunlight, illuminated one side of the world, and then cast by the man extremely charged, to Idries' chest: "Then die! Orphegel Climacus!"
It was when Idries just picked up her ax, in the temporary shortage of power, that she looked up to see that sharp edge of speed faster than lightning, killing towards her vulnerable chest. "Ya, ah!!" Really feeling the threat to her life, Idries instantly turned pale, screamed in horror, and hurriedly reached out her right hand, trying to intercept the shining light. Her cold and sharp claws, which should have been a deadly killer that can easily crush a man into pieces, in this case, however, was a little bit too late to save her life.
"Punch!" The gorgeous golden ribbon was easily torn by the spear, and the golden light fiercely penetrated the chest of Idries. "Eh ah ah ah!" Idries screamed.
At the same time, Sapiens half-squatted on the ground, heart-wrenchingly painful, as if it was his chest to be ruptured. However, the pain did not come from the flesh, but from the sorrow that had been raging before that, and suddenly broke out. His teeth squeaked, and the tears that had long been endured finally broke out.
"Cough..." Idries unstoppably bleed from the mouth, slowly lowered her head and looked at the bleeding hole in the chest. In the chest, she could still see the only half-remaining warm heart, tremoring, struggling, and bleeding. "How could it be... this way..." Idries was full of unwillingness to believe, twitching, and reaching for her chest, vainly preventing the bloodshed. And on the cheek gradually losing its blood, rolled down the glittering tears. The light wing that had lost its vitality faded down, unable to drive the gigantic body to float in the air. The well-fed serpent body became a heavy burden. "Boom!" Idries fell heavily against the ground and coughed up blood. Snakes' vitality is very tenacious. Even if her heart was fatally damaged, her body function could be maintained for quite some time. But now it could only increase Idries' desperation and pain before death. Her snake body was stimulated by severe pain, madly twisting, twitching, rubbing, and tangling on the ground, but also gradually weakening due to the depletion of blood. She supported herself with her left hand upon the ax and struggled to erect her human body, and the right hand muffled the chest that was still losing blood. She took a heavy and disorder gasp, and the bloody silver teeth bit themselves. Bleak purple eyes widely opening, she groaned: "No... don't... I don't want to die..."
The purple-haired man had already retrieved the spear, the tip of which had been twisted. Obviously, it had not been able to withstand the violent force and was scrapped. However, he did not mean to send the last hit, as Idries' heart was broken, and destined to die. Clearly, it was such a painful experience of dying, but Idries did not want a snappy ending; instead, she seemed to have something to say, so he waited silently. If necessary, he naturally had another weapon to cut off her head quickly and relieve her pain.
Sapiens kneeled in front of Idries, tears dry. Her physical strength continued to weaken, and finally could not support her human body, which then crashed into the ground, and her gasp was getting harder and harder. Sapiens came silently to her face, bearing her gaze of grievances without hatred. "Anything else, just talk to the Chairman." The purple-haired man shook his head and sighed.
"Sapiens... Sapiens... You're so..." words not finished, Idries exhaled her last breath and never sucked back. Sapiens gently closed her amethysts, turned back from looking at Idries, and gestured to the purple-haired man.
The purple-haired man pulled out a sharp blade and pierced the boundary between the human body and the serpent body from the central axis of the abdomen. He walked along the central axis all the way, cutting the belly of the serpent, and there was still warmness left in the body. When got somewhere, he stopped the blade's tip and looked at Sapiens: "Found it, it's still here."
Sapiens wiped the tears and limped to the front. At the serpent belly that had just been cut open, there was residual blood in the wound, and, stimulated by the pain of muscle splitting, the abdominal soft flesh that had not yet died was still instinctively creeping, secreting only a little bit of mucus, as if wanting to take their master back from the hands of death. Inside the abdomen, quietly lay a woman, curled up, wearing dark gray tresses, naked with thick body fluid, covered by soft flesh on the inner wall of the serpent's belly, and a pair of breasts swinging with creeping the soft flesh. The belly wall soft flesh did not seem to be a digestive organ, but more like protecting her. Sapiens shuddered and gasped, gently picking up the woman. The body fluid was also not the gastric juice digesting food, but just purely moisturizing mucus, which seemed not surprising to Sapiens and the purple-haired man. "Fortunately, Chairman, she's still alive." The purple-haired man smiled. Sapiens held the woman, who was taller than him, with his ear on her chest. After hearing the slow but firm beat, his breath got slightly flatter.
"Punch--" "Cough..." A pain suddenly tore his chest - this time not by sorrow, but a real physical one. Sapiens looked at the woman in his arms in anger, only to see her arm piercing through his chest, and the warm blood splashing on her Idries-like pretty face. The pair of eyes of long eyelashes slowly opened - amethysts precisely the same as those of Idries. With a happy-or-sad look, opening her cherry lip, the woman softly said: "I'm sorry... goodbye..."
With everything going black, Sapiens lost consciousness.
After a long sleep of, maybe only milliseconds, or thousands of years, Sapiens woke up, sinking in the water around him. He was suspended in the water, which was too deep to see the bottom or top, without any fish, shrimp, or seaweed - just pure water. Curiously, Sapiens did not feel asphyxia in the water, because he felt like not breathing at all. People who don't breathe, of course, will never drown. But without breathing, it means, "I, am dead?"
Recalling the fading dream, Sapiens felt it a bit inexplicable. He should be traveling to the county seat to take the college entrance examination on a school bus, from the run-down mountain village to Harvard, to MIT, and to the peak of his life. However, in the mountainous backcountry roads, the school bus was hit by heavy rain and mudslides and crashed off the cliff. The candidates on the same bus were no exception. In fact, this mountain had been reforested and rehabilitated, and such a catastrophic disaster shouldn't have occurred, were it not the also rare rainstorm those days, unfortunately. Sapiens thought that probably it was because he had been possessed by God of Learning since born and had such a nice life that the god had to slap him to death. Sapiens stunned when hitting a certain place on the bus, and then did the strange dream described before. He did not know any of the characters in the dream at all, and those griefs were inexplicable as if he was simply sympathetic to the character with whom he was attached. Since he could dream, Sapiens thought he had survived, until finding that he had no breathing and seemed to be really dead.
"Here is the world after death?" Sapiens looked around. The education he had always accepted said that there are no ghosts in the world, no souls in human beings, and nothing left after death. However, it seemed that some sayings about spirits may not be unreasonable. It was just a question of how those deceased people were passing messages to living ones. Psychics? Sorceresses? Sapiens woolgathered.
"What's above the water?" As soon as the idea occurred to Sapiens, he naturally began to rise, so fast that he quickly reached the surface. There was nothing odd above, except the thick fog everywhere around. Sapiens's body was as light as nothing and flew up into the fog. "What's above the fog?" As soon as the idea occurred to Sapiens, he began to rise quickly again. Soon he rose out of the fog and finally saw the sky.
The sky was not blue, but a dark cosmic one, shining with countless stars, in the center of which hung a 256-faceted polyhedron. Sapiens did not count it, but inexplicably knew that it was 256-faceted. Each facet shone from time to time, in different colors. The polyhedron was also spinning, sometimes fast and sometimes slow. When Sapiens thought about it, he naturally approached the polyhedron. After reaching a subtle distance, Sapiens seemed to have entered a mysterious field, where the polyhedron in his eyes suddenly became great. Yes, it was great. That kind of greatness was so supreme that he could not help but weep and worship, though his physical state didn't allow that. Continue to approach. The polyhedron was like a supreme god, but it was not unapproachable; instead, it transmitted a sense of kindness to Sapiens, without losing its greatness. The closer Sapiens approached it, the more deeply he felt the awe like facing the universe, and also the kindness from the soul. These two seemingly contradictory but actually non-contradictory feelings increasingly strengthened with the approaching of Sapiens.
Sapiens came to the front of the sphere. The sphere was also anomalously huge. Each facet was of the size of Sapiens, and there were 256 such facets. As soon as Sapiens came into the inside of the sphere without any hindrance, the kindness and familiar feeling seemed as if he should be the owner here.
Inside the sphere, Sapiens saw countless threads appearing from an infinitely distant end and shooting to another. These threads are bright but mysterious, exuding the sacred atmosphere of universal axioms. "Cosmic string? Membrane?" Sapiens inexplicably generated this idea but soon threw it aside. After all, the cosmic string is just a theoretical concept, not an entity visible to the naked eye.
Suddenly, catching Sapiens out off guard, a few threads came from all directions, right targeted at Sapiens' head, but didn't cause any pain. The dark space around suddenly lighted up, showing a fancy cosmic scene.
In front of him was a substantial azure planet. Unlike the earth, this planet had two orbiting satellites, surrounded by a translucent magical yellow ward, and rapidly expanding and approaching in Sapiens' perspective, and Sapiens seemed to be driving the sphere like a meteorite to fall into the atmosphere. But the difference was that there was no heat due to air friction or something similar, and the ward was also like a phantom of no blockage at all. Sapiens understood that this was not a comet fall, but merely a shot cut. As it continued to deep in, through the clouds, Sapiens arrived at a continent. Before he could see its outline, Sapiens suddenly became tired and lost consciousness again.
...
"This is...where?" A thin, white-skinned juvenile with a bright green hair, a left bright gray-orange pupil and a right blue pupil, woke up from a coma. The nightmare seemed to have not ended, and there was still a gust of wind and rain around. He had laid in the grass of half a person tall for an unknown long time, and the whole body was buried in the mud. Now that he had woke up, his numb limb gradually recovered a little strength, so he broke free of the mud, stood up laboriously, and wandered without a destination. "Am not I dead? Where is this? On the planet?" muttering to himself, Sapiens suddenly startled: speaking needed airflow, that was, he regained his breath!
Prairie with a height of half a person surrounding, the sky covered with clouds, it was impossible to distinguish the direction. "No, I have to leave this, I don't die here!" Although not knowing the path, Sapiens, who was inexplicably alive, didn't sit here and wait, but just moved in one direction.
After dragging his tired body and not knowing how long it took, Sapiens finally came to a light gray-red hut. Now he was finally exhausted and flopped. "No one here, I'll die back again?..."
The door of the hut was on the other side, and a young man seemingly in his 20s or 30s, of green hair and dark purple eyes, wearing a black long-sleeved T-shirt and a long sword, was looking at the dismal world. Suddenly he seemed to find something, went around the house, saw Sapiens falling to the ground, and suddenly his eyes brightened: "It seems that something interesting happened." He took Sapiens into the house regardless of the mud and changed his suit to a clean blue long-sleeved T-shirt. Then he picked up a small cup of red potion and poured the liquid into the mouth of Sapiens. "This Health Potion is a great supplement condensed from the essence of the world. If you still can't wake up, it may only be that you are beyond cure."
Sure enough, after more than an hour, Sapiens gradually woke up and said to himself: "Apparently I'm destined to live. I was really saved." "Waking up so slowly, are you unfit?" An impatient voice came. Sapiens turned and saw a man looking at him. "My name is Auram Chalice, what is your name?"
Sapiens looked at him blankly.
He secretly complained: "Is he retarded?" "You... can you understand me?"
Sapiens finally got it that he was obviously speaking another language! "Was I rushed to a foreign country by mudslides?" Sapiens was secretly scared. He pointed to himself, slowly and clearly said: "Sapiens - Homo!"
Auram also realized that Sapiens simply couldn't understand what he said, not having mental problems. He pointed to himself: "Auram - Chalice!"
The obstacle of language barrier exposed Sapiens' God of Learning - his learning speed made Auram wonder whether he pretended to be ignorant of the language. In a few hours, Sapiens can talk in a slightly jerky vocal language:
"Well, where is this?" "Of course it is in my house." "Err, I mean, where is this grassland?" "Well, you really are not local. Here is the center of the Acmella Prairie. Where're you from?" "Acmella Prairie? I've never heard of it. I'm from Haizigou Township, Xining City, Qinghai Province. Which province is this grassland in?" "You said the province? It seems that you are from some big country. But this prairie is not in the territory of any big country, so there is no such thing as a provincial saying." "Not in any country?!!" Sapiens was shocked. How long was he in the coma as the damn mudslide rushed him all the way abroad?!! Seeing Sapiens' apprehensiveness, Auram guessed, "It seems that you have been brought here inexplicably. So tell you, here is the central part of the Asterales Continent. How is it? Got a concept?" "Asterales Continent? What is this goddamn continent?! I have never heard of it. Do you know the East Asian Continent? I should be from there." "East Asia? Where is that?"
OK, done! Sapiens thought of something and collapsed. The most likely case here was - passthrough! That dream was probably not a movie, but his passthrough into another planet.
"Cough, I think I can be sure at the moment, that I am not native on this planet." Sapiens faintly said, "I am from a planet called Earth." "Isn't here the earth?" "Ah?" Sapiens' thoughts turned around, "Yeah, probably natives naturally call their own planet the earth." Auram thought a while, "Well, then you may be from Planet Ginkgoopsida or Planet Gnetopsida." "Well? What kind of planet is that? Any description?" "The Planet Ginkgoopsida is the home of the Protoss, and the Planet Gnetopsida belongs to the Asmodians. Although it is quite challenging for them to traffic with the earth, some people did accidentally arrive here. These two planets are after all satellites of the earth." "Satellite? No, it's impossible. My planet is definitely not a satellite of any other planet."
Sapiens was frustrated and lay down again: "Hey, it seems that I have traveled quite far, and probably can't return. Were my life terrible, it would be good to have a passthrough to restart. But it was when I was about to start a beautiful new life that the passthrough occurred, damn it!"
Auram doesn't know what to say. "Then, since you can't go back, you'd better get along here. What is the use of sighing?" "How am I going to get along? I don't know anything about the world."
"Well, it depends on your talents and ambitions." He explained, "First, what ambition do you have?" "Ambition? Hehe."
As a God of Learning, no one has ever asked him questions like this. In their view, ambition is used to drive the continuous advancement of underachievers and not necessary for god like him. However, this does not mean that Sapiens has never thought about this topic. "I said, I don't know anything about this world. People's ambitions can only be made according to the actual conditions; otherwise, they are unrealistic delusions. On my home planet, my ambition is to squeeze into the upper class to get money, power, and other resources, and using them to find out my pedigree, whose method is also very simple, that is, to enter prestigious universities for a PhD and then work in state organs, make significant contributions, so the power, money and contacts naturally come. But for this world, what are the rules here? I know nothing, so what ambition do you want me to have?"
Sapiens had no parents since childhood. It was not that he lost them, but never had. He had never heard of any information about parents since he remembered. He was brought up by a granny, and every time he mentioned his pedigree, she was always silent. Neighbors also said that it was since they moved in, that the woman had held him. No one else, and nothing else he knew.