Time flowed on, vast and surging.
3.5 billion years ago.
Primitive oceans, primitive proteins, primitive life.
In the blink of an eye, from the Hadean Eon to the Archean Eon, from the Proterozoic Eon to the Phanerozoic Eon.
The Sinian, Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous, Permian, Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous.
Earthquakes, tsunamis, torrential rains, raging winds—one natural disaster after another, one extinction after another. Mountains rose, oceans split apart, and biological species spiraled from monotony to prosperity, from prosperity to decline, from decline to revival.
Biological structures went from simple to complex, from primitive to advanced, from chaos to order, from solitary existence to communal living. The power of groups gradually became the mainstream of the biological world.
In every era, new overlords emerged, each leading the age for hundreds of millions of years.
Or perhaps not hundreds of millions of years.
Because as time passed, the pace of biological evolution and the replacement of overlords kept accelerating. Every new overlord could always conquer the world in less time than its predecessor.
Even that shortening was often measured in hundreds of millions of years, or at the very least tens of millions. The Paleocene, Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene—every generation had been like this.
But by the Pliocene, a great transformation occurred.
A kind of ape stood upright.
Australopithecus, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Homo sapiens—the evolution of this life-form became faster and faster. Every seemingly insignificant change brought incomparably terrifying results.
Not physically weak, possessed of extraordinary endurance, able to sweat and dissipate heat, equipped with trichromatic vision and social structures—this creature was practically a hexagonal warrior of nature. Most crucially, this species poured an enormous number of upgrade points into intelligence.
Stones became stone tools.
Roars became language.
Instead of carving everything into genes, they began cramming everything into their brains. And