Zero
The old course of the Yellow River in Yanjin. Night.
Here, reality has crumbled into a pile of shit.
Sand floats upward, withered grass appears in a state of dying and reviving, over and over again. At the center of all this chaos, a dark blue, pulsating ghostly thing is nailed in place.
Qian Yiyan stands thirty paces away, the blood on her face not yet dried. The heirloom jade pendant she carries burns against her chest with a piercing pain, and its pulsating rhythm matches that ghostly thing exactly.
Three hours—she has fought her way here from Bianjing.
At this very moment, an illusion smashes into her face.
A room with a metallic texture, red lights flashing wildly.
A man covered in blood trades blows with several half-machine, half-rotten-flesh monsters, wound for wound.
Further away, three giant spider-shaped iron creatures use blood-red beams like straws, slurping greedily at the dark blue light in the center...
She doesn’t understand those iron monsters, but she understands plunder.
Like a wolf on the grassland, locking onto the throat of a lamb.
"With blood as the guide, with soul as the bridge—"
She wipes the blood from the corner of her mouth, her voice shattered into fragments in the warped air.
Then, the jade pendant explodes.
Not shattering—more like some fundamental rule explodes.
A bridge made purely of light brutally pierces through time and space, like a slap across the face of physics.
On the Other Side of Time and Space
The ringing from the explosion still buzzes in Lu Baoyi’s skull. He struggles free from the sparking mechanical wreckage, his left arm hanging at an uncanny angle. Gu Qingya’s sword tip drips with something neither metallic nor bloody. Old Chen and Xiao Zhao are already down.
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Three "Rule Harvesters," worth enough to buy a small country, are completely destroyed.
The cost is too damn painful to look at.
"Engineer Lu! The channel... High-dimensional resonance!" Lin Wan’s voice screams distortedly through the cracked earpiece.
Lu Baoyi looks up.
And sees.
A bridge of light tears reality apart like cloth. On the other end stands the silhouette of a woman in ancient attire holding a sword, facing an unstable "gate" violently collapsing before her.
Their gazes meet for the first time within the channel of light, clashing fiercely.
No time to hesitate.
Lu Baoyi understands the resolve in her eyes and sees the dark mass of closing assassins and shamans behind her. Even worse, three "Rule Devourers"—bio-weapons created by those maniacs—are crawling out of the twisted vortex of the ruins, lunging toward him and toward that bridge.
"Qingya!" His voice rasps like sandpaper. "Protect the bridge! Clear the hostiles!"
"What about you?!"
Lu Baoyi doesn’t answer. He lunges at the nearest harvester wreckage, prying out from the charred console an energy core that’s still flashing madly—an utterly unstable thing. Its working principle, in simple terms, is called mutual destruction via rule collision.
Holding this "bomb," he charges toward the most fragile junction between the light bridge and the "gate," directly in the path of the three charging monsters.
"Qian Yiyan—"
He doesn’t know if his voice can cross through time and space, but he mouths the words fiercely into the air:
"Sur! vive!"
The bridge shatters explosively
An explosion at the rule-level swallows everything.
Intense light simultaneously washes away the modern battlefield and the Northern Song riverbank.
Yet, time seems to freeze for one second.
In the minds of all present, conscious beings across both worlds, a cold, grand, utterly emotionless voice is forcibly injected:
【Detecting extreme resonance of the 'Key'... rule collision of the 'Vessel'... intervention of unexpected variables...】
【First Trial (Survival): Pyrrhic victory.】
【Second Trial (Civilization Self-Discernment): Triggered prematurely.】
【Announcement:】
【You are now being observed.】
【You are now being assessed.】
【Before the 'Cleansing' descends, prove your worth—】
Suddenly, without warning, a full-screen, ultra-clear image forcibly pops up in every mind:
Countless worlds, shining like stars, are being neatly, silently, and irreversibly... erased from the grand canvas of the universe by an invisible eraser.
【—Or, face the end.】
The voice and the image vanish simultaneously.
On the riverbank in Yanjin, the "gate" is gone without a trace. Qian Yiyan collapses to her knees, exhausted, blood slowly seeping from her seven orifices, staring blankly ahead at the emptiness.
In the ruins on the other side, Lu Baoyi is dug out of the metallic debris by Gu Qingya like a potato, his breathing faint as a thread.
Between them lies a thousand years of time and a thousand miles of land.
And a so-called "Civilization Trial" that just played them a preview of the apocalypse.
(End of Prologue)
(And the beginning of all this lies hidden seventeen days earlier, in an unnervingly calm night in Donghai City, and within an ancient mirror in Bianjing that suddenly cracked on its own.)
