The instant the pillar of light rose from beneath her feet, Qiyu heard the heartbeat of the entire Federation.
It wasn't a metaphor. Maya synchronized the test results to every consciousness channel online—and three hundred seventy thousand people simultaneously felt the hot, churning thing in her chest. Pride, excitement, a touch of disbelief, and a current of electricity surging up from the base of her spine.
“Adventurer certification confirmed. Pass.”
Maya's voice held no warmth, but Qiyu had listened to it for eighteen years. She had long since learned to distinguish, within those audio readings precise to eight decimal places, an incredibly faint trace of—satisfaction.
She stood in the center of the testing grounds, the pillar of light stretching her shadow long. Her data floated across the observation walls around her: reaction speed, environmental adaptability, independent decision-making score, emotional stability under pressure. Every category glowed blue, indicating a pass.
She drew a deep breath and suppressed the urge to shout.
An adventurer. She had known since the start of her foundational education at age three that this was the path she wanted. The Federation's four major professions—adventurer, scientist, soldier, and elite civilian—had never left her in any doubt. Unknown planets, unknown realms, unknown technology—anything without an answer made her heart race.
Maya said the weighting of “curiosity” in her personality model was abnormally high, so high that it nearly covered up fear.
Qiyu considered that a compliment.
The mission came sooner than she expected.
On the third day after passing the test, she received a consciousness push from Maya: the mega-wormhole's maiden-voyage exploration required an adventurer to accompany the team.
The mega-wormhole. Those three words had been discussed throughout the Federation for a long time. Previous wormhole technology could transport only a small number of people and limited supplies through space, like dripping water into another star system through a syringe. But the Federation's territory was too vast. The distances between star systems were measured in light-years. If a top-tier civilization suddenly launched an attack, by the time reinforcements crossed a conventional wormhole and arrived, the battlefield might contain nothing but wreckage.
So the Federation needed an expressway. A passage that could instantly deploy vast numbers of troops, supplies, and even entire mobile bases to any corner of any star system.
The mega-wormhole was that expressway.
But new technology meant the unknown, and the unknown meant danger. No matter how perfect the theoretical models were, someone still had to walk through it personally and confirm that the other side was safe.
That was why adventurers existed.
Qiyu didn't hesitate. She even felt that Maya choosing her was only natural—her emotional stability under pressure was the highest in this class.
Before departure, she packed her equipment. The other adventurers in her cohort were desperate to cram their spatial rings until they bulged, desperate to move their entire homes inside. When Qiyu watched them stuff a third wilderness-survival module into their rings, she genuinely felt tired just looking at them.
There were only two things in her spatial ring.
A door. Because she was a woman, staying neat and clean was the bare minimum no matter where she went. Take the door out and stick it to any wall, and walking through it led to a hundred-square-meter fully automated living space, complete with voice-controlled air conditioning, lights, shower water, and everything else. Once she entered, the door would automatically disappear, and without her biometric signature, no one could open it.
A replicator cube. It could replicate anything she could imagine, like a 3D printer—weapons, vehicles, cells, organs, you name it. The raw material was a rare material adventurers had discovered in a mysterious starfield, whose greatest feature was infinite regeneration.
Door plus replicator cube. Those two things covered everything. Why carry so much other junk?
The exploration fleet consisted of twelve light reconnaissance ships, each carrying three adventurers and a basic AI support system. Qiyu was assigned to the Seventh Ship, in the middle of the formation.
The wormhole entrance lay at the outer edge of the Federation's home star system. From a distance, it looked like a black pearl pressed flat, its edges glowing with a ghostly blue halo. It was nearly four hundred times larger than a conventional wormhole—large enough for an entire fleet to pass through at once.
“All ships, attention. Countdown to wormhole entry.”
Qiyu sat in her seat, the safety harness digging into her shoulders. She watched the enormous black pearl on the observation screen draw closer and closer, and her heartbeat began to accelerate. It wasn't fear. It was anticipation. She wanted to know what they would see when they passed through.
The countdown reached zero.
The instant the fleet vanished into the wormhole, all light disappeared.
Her vision was taken from her for roughly two seconds. Then she saw the inside of the wormhole—not a tunnel, as she had imagined, but an endless expanse of flowing light. It was as if someone had twisted all the starlight in the universe into a river, and she was being carried forward in its current.
It was so beautiful she forgot to breathe.
Then the alarms sounded.
It wasn't one ship's alarm. Every ship's alarm went off at once. The AI support system's voice shifted from calm to a frequency she had never heard before—
“Wormhole structural anomaly. Signs of a large-scale collapse detected. All ships, immediately—”
It didn't finish.
Qiyu didn't feel a vibration. She felt space itself twisting, as if an invisible hand had wrung the section of wormhole around her like a towel. The data on the observation screen leaped wildly, then all turned red.
Collapse.
The wormhole walls began to shatter. Compressed energy erupted like a volcano. The first ship vanished before her eyes, swallowed by an energy wave without leaving even a fragment behind. Then the second. The third. Like candles blown out by the wind.
The Seventh Ship shook violently. The adventurer seated to Qiyu's left—a man who had passed the test less than a month ago—was frozen in his seat, his mouth open but unable to make a sound. His hands clung desperately to the armrests, his knuckles white, his eyes wide. It was as if his brain had already crashed and only his body remembered how to be afraid.
The one on her right had a little more experience. He was moving. But he ran in the wrong direction—toward the cockpit, shouting something as he went, probably trying to manually control the ship and escape the wormhole. But the ship was already coming apart. The cockpit's direction rang with the deafening shriek of twisting metal, and the controls were already scrap.
Qiyu's body moved before her brain did.
It wasn't that she wasn't afraid. Her heart was beating so fast she could almost hear it, and adrenaline made her fingers tremble. But her legs were already moving—unfastening the safety harness, judging the escape pod's location, choosing the shortest route. Gravity in the corridor had already gone haywire. She planted one foot on the ceiling and one on the wall, then slammed her elbow into the escape pod's door and forced it open.
Behind her came the sound of the Seventh Ship breaking apart. The shriek of metal being torn open mixed with the dull thud of energy explosions and human screams—not just from the Seventh Ship. Every ship's voices flooded the communications channel, screams, cries, pleas for help, all crammed together into one piercing mass of noise.
She fell into the escape pod and hit the launch button.
At the final moment before the hatch closed, she saw the end of the corridor. The one on the left had finally stood up. The one on the right had also turned back. Both men were running toward her.
They didn't make it.
The instant the escape pod launched, spacetime turbulence swept her away. Every direction vanished. Up, down, left, right, forward, and back all became the same thing—a roiling, tearing chaos that constantly folded in on itself and unfurled again.
The safety harness squeezed her nearly to the point of suffocation. Her consciousness peeled away piece by piece under the violent acceleration, like paper scattered by the wind.
Her final thought was: What a shame. She hadn't even seen what the other side of the wormhole looked like.
Then everything fell into darkness.
She was awakened by the sound of birds.
The realization itself was absurd. Of course there were birds on the Federation's planets, but no bird should have made such a rough sound. It was like someone rubbing sandpaper against a rusted metal pipe.
Qiyu opened her eyes.
The outer shell of the escape pod was mostly split open. Sunlight squeezed through the cracks, stabbing at her eyes and making her squint. It took her a few seconds to adjust, and then she saw the sky overhead.
Blue. A very pale blue, tinged with gray.
No. The sky in the Federation's home star system was deep purple.
She climbed out of the escape pod and stepped barefoot onto something she had never stepped on before. It was soft, wet, cool, and squeezed up between her toes. She looked down.
Mud.
Qiyu stood in a forest, surrounded by plants she couldn't name. The air carried a heavy smell, as if everything were rotting and growing at the same time. The escape pod had made a small crater, with shattered pieces of its shell scattered around the edge.
She activated the micro-terminal on her wrist. The screen lit up, but all the Federation's communications channels were dead. No Maya, no consciousness network, not a single familiar signal.
The positioning system took a long time to produce a result.
The coordinates showed that she was in the Orion Arm of the Milky Way, on an extremely ancient numbered planet—one marked in the Federation database as “the Origin World of Civilization.”
Earth.
The timestamp left her stunned for a long time.
She hadn't been thrown into another star system. She had been thrown back a thousand years.
Qiyu sat on the wreckage of the escape pod, swinging her feet back and forth, and thought seriously for about three minutes.
Then she decided—not to think about getting home for now.
It wasn't giving up. There was no point. She had no wormhole, no fleet, and no Maya. The replicator cube could make anything, even the hardware for a spacetime device—but not the source. Spacetime travel required planet-scale energy, and that was positive-emotion energy unique to Utopia, not physical energy. Even if she built an entire set of equipment here, it would only be a pile of pretty scrap metal.
She couldn't go back. At least not for now.
But she didn't panic. She sat there with mud on her feet, the pale blue sky overhead, and the rough calls of birds all around her. Then she thought—
When in Rome, do as the Romans do.
After all, this was Earth. The Origin World of Civilization. She had studied Earth's history countless times in Maya's consciousness-transmission classes as a child, then repeatedly combed through the records at the historical research institute as she grew older, because there was always one thing about the historical accounts that never made sense to her—the great figures of that era were a group of people, not one person. How could a group of people from completely different fields have somehow banded together and escaped Earth on their own? There had to be someone leading them, right?
History contained no record of that person. But Qiyu didn't believe it.
She was convinced there had to be a forgotten central figure, the starting point of everything. That obsession had driven her to become an adventurer. Her ultimate goal was to return to Earth and find that person with her own eyes.
Now she was really on Earth. Even if she hadn't arrived in the most graceful way.
She jumped down from the escape pod, patted the mud off her backside, and walked barefoot toward the edge of the forest.
At the forest's edge was a strip of gray, hard ground. It took her a while to realize it was called a “road.” Metal-bodied vehicles traveled along it, moving so slowly she almost laughed. Buildings stood beside the road, square and blocky, piled together from some kind of stone and concrete.
The smells in the air were even more complicated now: burning hydrocarbons, food grease, the body odor of countless humans, and a chemical scent she couldn't identify at all.
She activated her invisibility module. The micro-terminal still had enough energy to last for a while, at least enough to keep her from causing a disturbance in this primitive society. Light refracted and curved around her body's surface, and she vanished from everyone's sight.
Then she started sightseeing.
She crouched beside the road for ten minutes, studying a traffic light and trying to understand why these people needed a glowing device to tell them when they could walk. She stood outside a small food shop and watched people inside use two thin sticks to lift noodles into their mouths, finding the motion unbelievably ingenious. She followed a child for three blocks because the kid was holding a glowing tablet covered with moving little people—it took her a long time to understand that it was called a “game.”
This planet was fascinating.
Everything was bulky, slow, and inefficient, but at the same time it was filled with something she had never felt in the Federation—a chaotic vitality. Everything in the Federation was arranged in perfect order by Maya, and everyone's life ran along the track of the optimal solution. But not here. People here lived in the most primitive way possible. They made mistakes, got lost, argued, laughed loudly. Every movement carried uncertainty.
By evening, the soles of her feet had turned black. She looked down at herself—the escape pod had rolled her around, her clothes were wrinkled, her hair was a bird's nest, and her feet were covered in mud.
She needed a shower.
She found an empty alley and walked all the way to the wall at its end. Then she took the door from her spatial ring. The instant she pressed it against the wall, an extremely faint ring of light appeared around its edges, and it settled firmly into place, looking as if a door had always been there.
She pushed it open and walked inside.
The door silently disappeared behind her. The wall returned to normal without leaving a trace.
Everything familiar was inside: a hundred-square-meter space, clean and bright, with the temperature set just right. She said, “Lights,” and the lights came on. She said, “Water,” and the sound of running water came from the bathroom.
She stripped off her dirty clothes and threw them on the floor, then walked into the bathroom and stood under the hot water with her eyes closed for a long time.
She still didn't know what Earth's water tasted like, but the water she had brought with her was tasteless, and that reassured her.
After her shower, she used the replicator cube to make herself a set of clothes common on this planet—she had carefully observed them while sightseeing. A shirt, pants, and a pair of shoes. The replicator cube completed the replication within seconds according to her specifications. The material felt a little rougher than what people on Earth wore, but the appearance was nearly identical.
She used the wall as a mirror and looked herself over, then nodded in satisfaction.
Blending in with the environment: step one complete.
When she walked out of the alley again, night was almost upon them. The city lights came on, filling the streets with yellow and white points of light, completely different from the Federation's cold blue sources. They were warm and a little harsh, but she thought they were beautiful.
She entered a park, found the tallest tree, and climbed to the top in a few quick moves before sitting there and looking down over the city. The last trace of sunset stained the horizon deep orange. Chimneys in the distance released white smoke, and beyond them stretched a range of mountains.
She thought, This was where everything began.
The Federation's origin. Maya's origin. The origin of mind-to-mind communication. Everything she had taken for granted had grown out of this chaotic, primitive land full of lies and noise.
She couldn't understand it at all. But she felt that was exactly what she had come here to figure out.
She jumped from the tree and landed without making a sound. The invisibility module was functioning normally; she had confirmed it. On a planet with this level of technology, there was no equipment capable of detecting her.
She was about to continue exploring when a voice came from behind her.
“Who are you?”
A man's voice. Carrying a little caution, a little confusion, and a little of something she wasn't sure how to describe—like he was checking to make sure he wasn't going crazy.
Qiyu turned around.
A young man stood three steps away, wearing the kind of cloth clothing common on this planet and holding a plastic bag in one hand. His eyes were fixed directly on her.
Not on the place where she was standing. On her.
Qiyu tilted her head.
“How can you see me? I'm invisible.”