Chapter 1: Seven-Day Countdown to the Apocalypse
“Ugh…”
Lin Yi suddenly opened his eyes.
Veins bulged on his forehead, his vision blurred, and every nerve in his body seemed to be screaming.
As a Star-Vortex level powerhouse, his willpower was strong enough to suppress physical pain—but the violent shock from the return of his soul’s origin still caused intense discomfort.
“Huff… huff…”
Lin Yi gasped heavily for air.
After a moment, as his soul gradually adjusted, his vision began to clear.
What came into view was a ceiling painted in a slightly worn off-white color.
A lone incandescent light bulb hung in the center.
Outside the window, the bright summer afternoon sunlight poured through gaps in the light-blue floral curtains, casting bright patches on the floor.
The chirping of cicadas rose and fell in waves, loud and irritating.
Lin Yi was momentarily stunned.
“I… didn’t I die?”
He subconsciously tried to activate source energy.
But the moment he did, he felt nothing inside his body—completely empty.
Lin Yi’s heart sank.
He took a deep breath and slowly looked around the familiar yet unfamiliar room.
Then he stood up in silence and walked toward the floor-length mirror in the corner.
The mirror reflected a slightly youthful face.
“This…”
Looking at his younger self in the mirror, Lin Yi felt a brief daze.
“Did I… come back to life?”
The more one knows, the deeper one understands awe.
As one of the few Star Core-level beings from Earth civilization who passed the civilization advancement exam and entered the interstellar era, Lin Yi had obtained eligibility to become an outer member of the Universe Mercenary Alliance. He joined the then relatively weak “Reylia Mercenary Group.”
After more than six thousand years of blood and fire tempering, he eventually reached Star Core Level 9. With the guidance of the group’s captain, Lailina, who had already reached Star Domain level, he barely broke through into Star-Vortex level.
However, while heading to the capital of the Purple Gold Star Alliance—Zichen Star—to undergo a physical rank certification and apply for Earth’s upgrade from a humble “resource planet” to a normal “administrative planet,”
he accidentally witnessed the Purple Les family of the Purple Gold Star Alliance hunting a rare beast, the “Kassro Horned Beast.”
As a result, he was casually crushed to death by a Star Domain-level elder, as easily as stepping on an ant.
Lin Yi still clearly remembered that overwhelming sense of despair.
His supposedly powerful body was erased at the level of fundamental particles, silently disintegrating.
And his consciousness, like a candle in the wind, was extinguished by an irresistible force of law.
Just as he thought he would sink forever into oblivion filled with unwillingness and despair…
a vast, unstoppable force suddenly descended, like a hand reaching from the universe itself, forcefully grabbing his collapsing soul origin from the brink of annihilation.
Immediately after, he felt as if he was forcibly stuffed into a fragile, inferior vessel—every cell awakening accompanied by tearing pain.
Then he realized—
he had come back to life.
Back to a familiar yet strange time and place.
Lin Yi looked down at his hands.
They were youthful hands—long fingers, healthy skin tone.
No calluses from years of weapon training; only faint marks from holding a pen.
After a long silence, he slowly raised his head again and carefully observed his surroundings.
A cramped room: a single bed against the wall, an old desk with peeling paint covered in messy textbooks and exam papers, and a worn-out basketball in the corner.
On the wall were outdated sports posters, and a glass photo frame containing a family portrait.
Lin Yi’s gaze locked tightly onto the photo.
It showed his parents, much younger in his memory, and a high school boy with a slightly shy smile—himself.
He exhaled deeply after a long pause.
Then he walked to the window and pulled the curtains open.
Blinding sunlight poured in instantly, making him squint.
Outside were old residential buildings forming a small courtyard, filled with a few lush plane trees.
Beneath them were parked bicycles and electric scooters, while children in sleeveless shirts and shorts ran past laughing freely.
Of course, there were also those annoying drifting seed fluffs from the plane trees.
In the distance, the uneven city skyline stretched out, with newly built high-rise buildings reflecting sunlight from their glass facades.
There were no roaring engineering machines, no star-core energy drives piercing into Earth’s crust from orbital rings—
everything overlapped with a distant, blurred summer afternoon in his memory.
The powerful soul origin of a Star-Vortex level being now felt like it had been thrown into a boiling furnace.
Countless faded memories surged back like a flood breaking its dam.
At this moment, Lin Yi clearly understood where he was.
This was Earth seven thousand years ago.
This… was his home.
He slowly stepped back until his back rested against the wall.
The cold sensation seeped through his thin T-shirt, but it could not suppress the surging emotions within him.
The relief after finishing the college entrance exam, the joy of receiving admission to Qingteng University, the parents’ mixed happiness and worries about tuition and living expenses…
and also—
that piece of…
His hand subconsciously moved toward his chest.
Under his clothes, his fingers touched something hard.
Lin Yi’s heart suddenly jolted.
He lowered his head abruptly and tremblingly pulled it out.
It was a jade pendant slightly larger than a coin, deep green and extremely warm in texture, like a frozen galaxy.
The jade was not transparent; instead, it carried a heavy, ancient sense of condensation, as if it contained immeasurable time.
It was strung on a dark red cord and hung quietly at his chest.
A family heirloom jade!
The soul of a Star-Vortex powerhouse instantly activated, rapidly scanning through vast memories spanning thousands of years.
A bolt of lightning-like insight cut through the long river of time, precisely anchoring this moment.
“This jade…”
Lin Yi murmured. He remembered—it was today that he received his long-awaited admission letter from Qingteng University.
And it was also today that his mother, Zhou Jinghua, personally gave him this ancestral jade.
At this moment, after handing him the jade, his mother had gone out, and he had just placed it around his neck before taking a nap.
At first, he hadn’t noticed anything special about it.
Until later, after reaching Star Core level and gaining finer control over his body, he discovered it slightly improved his thinking speed—barely perceptible, but real, helping with learning and understanding complex matters.
He had not paid much attention to it then.
Only after suffering severe injuries in a later battle did he realize—even his protective battle armor had been torn apart, yet this jade remained completely unharmed.
He tried every method to study it, even attempting to destroy it.
All failed.
The jade was impossibly indestructible.
Lin Yi understood it must be an extremely precious artifact, and he never dared reveal it.
Yet despite all his efforts, he never discovered its true purpose.
Over time, he treated it as a mysterious relic—an heirloom from his homeland—and kept it close, hoping fate would one day reveal its secret.
But now—
he who should have been annihilated by the Purple Les elder had instead been reborn seven thousand years in the past.
Lin Yi knew clearly: with the vastness of interstellar humanity, even Star-Vortex level beings were countless. Why would he be special enough to be reborn?
And even more—
he returned exactly at the moment he first received this jade.
As he thought, his fingers instinctively rubbed the jade.
A habit formed over many years.
But suddenly—
a change occurred.
The jade in his palm trembled slightly.
A faint crack sound emerged.
“Crack.”
So soft it almost seemed like an illusion.
Lin Yi’s expression darkened slightly. He opened his palm and looked closely.
A hairline crack had silently appeared on the deep green jade surface.
This was not ordinary physical damage—it was more like some internal structure that had endured countless ages had finally reached its limit.
The crack spread faster than imaginable. In an instant, it became a web covering the entire jade.
The next moment—
poof!
A soft muffled sound.
Under Lin Yi’s gaze, the jade that even he could not damage despite all his strength quietly turned into a handful of fine green powder in his palm.
The powder was as fine as dust, glowing faintly with a deep inner light, as if containing fragments of stars.
The dark red cord also snapped into pieces and scattered.
The entire process happened so quickly, so completely, that Lin Yi’s hand didn’t even feel a change in temperature before the jade had already turned to ash.
Only a small pile of strange, cold powder remained in his palm.
Then even the powder gradually vanished, as if it had never existed at all.
Time seemed to freeze.
After a moment of silence, Lin Yi sighed inwardly.
“So it was you… that saved me, and brought me back?”
He lowered his head, looking at his empty hands, silent for several seconds.
Then he suddenly raised his head.
His gaze pierced through the wall, as if looking toward some distant direction.
Finally, his eyes settled on the old electronic alarm clock in the corner of the desk.
The LCD screen glowed faintly:
[2027-07-16, Friday, 13:27]
“At this point in time…”
Lin Yi reviewed his memories.
His expression turned serious.
“Seven days.”
“Only seven days remain until the civilization advancement exam that determines our fate.”
(End of Chapter 1)
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