Sandbox Conception

"Stomach cancer in its early stages is indeed curable, but it has now progressed to the middle stage. The probability of a cure has decreased, though you may still have a chance if you continue with aggressive treatment."

"No need. I choose to be discharged."

After spending over two hours on the process, Xu Zhi stepped out of the hospital. The chemotherapy had left his hair thin and falling out, his posture pale and hunched, his entire being in a state of extreme frailty.

In the early stages of cancer, active treatment offers a possibility of recovery, but once it enters the middle stage, the survival rate is extremely low.

There was no longer any point in treatment.

He muttered to himself.

Xu Zhi was quite capable, working at a large foreign enterprise, but the five or six hundred thousand in savings he had accumulated over four or five years had been mostly depleted. After years of rushing about, he had ended up with nothing.

He bought a high-speed rail ticket, dragged his suitcase, and returned to his hometown in the countryside of Tongcheng.

He hadn't returned to his mountain home in a year; the family property included an independent orchard and courtyard.

His family had once been considered wealthy in the village, having contracted over a hundred acres behind their yard to plant fruit trees.

But half a year ago, the market price for lychee had plummeted, causing a massive surplus to rot. They had also been swindled by someone who claimed to have channels to resolve the backlog; after paying for help, they were cheated out of even more money. This led to a total loss of nearly a million, leaving them penniless. His parents had been so enraged that they collapsed half a year ago and never got back up.

Now, the orchard was untended, the hired workers had all left, the grove had become desolate, the trees had long been cut down, and the ground was covered in nothing but weeds.

He unlocked the door and pushed it open, greeted by a cloud of dust.

The familiar sights of his childhood farm life came into view. He set his luggage down in the room, intending to spend the rest of his days in his homeland, returning to a rural life.

Rustle, rustle. He suddenly heard a strange sound.

"Who's there? It sounds like something is moving in the yard." He stood up and walked into the empty orchard courtyard. Amidst a pile of weeds, he saw a black beetle the size of a bowl.

"So black. What kind of insect is this?"

Xu Zhi reached out.

Whoosh—

In an instant, his consciousness was sucked into the beetle's black shell, pulled into the history of a vast race.

It was the long, rising history of the Zerg, beginning with a biological explosion on a green planet equivalent to Earth's Cambrian era. An ancient insect species emerged. They developed their own intelligence and advanced technology. Their immense reproductive capacity and potential led them to the stars, but when their technology reached its peak, the Zerg realized they lived in a barren, low-level world.

Eventually, they broke through a certain dimension and entered a higher, unfathomable fantasy world—the Eternal Life Realm—only to be instantly crushed, losing as if it were a foregone conclusion.

Within the nest, the previous generation's Zerg Mother Empress left behind a final message, filled with regret:

"Biological evolution is not about becoming larger to be stronger; true strength lies within."

"We were wrong from the start. Evolving to be larger is a dead end. The smaller the body, the more it possesses the foundation for qualitative energy changes. We have failed. Whoever becomes the next Zerg Mother Empress, strike at the Eternal Life Realm for me once more!"

Soon, Xu Zhi discovered that he had taken control of this nest. From the Zerg memories he had acquired, this great, highly aggressive race possessed only one racial ability.

"Ultra-High Speed Cell Division?"

The Zerg's ability allowed their race to shorten their lifespans in a short period, accelerating the rate of biological cell division, making their race bloom, grow, wither, and die in an instant, like a flower.

In his memories, the Zerg Mother Nest was a war fortress.

As long as the Mother Nest produced cells—spores—and cast them onto a barren planet, activating "Ultra-High Speed Cell Division," within a few years, those cells would reproduce wildly, evolving into entirely new species and becoming part of the Mother Nest's army.

"This race has infinite possibilities."

Thinking of this, Xu Zhi's heart grew restless.

Long-term illness and the torture of chemotherapy had left Xu Zhi feeling exhausted in body and mind, even causing him to doubt the purpose of his boring life. Now, facing death, he suddenly found something to be curious about.

The evolution and progression of life.

"The previous Zerg Mother Empress cast spores onto barren planets, breeding and evolving countless races, building world after world. I don't have a planet, but I can use this ability to create a small evolution sandbox in my family's orchard to play with?"

"Possessing this Zerg Mother Nest, this war fortress, I can completely establish mountains, oceans, and rivers in this orchard, creating an ultra-small sandbox, allowing countless Zerg spores and single-celled organisms to evolve into countless species within it."

"It feels like a sandbox game—Minecraft. And, if I can create a world, evolve a civilization, and countless races, perhaps I can find a way to cure my cancer from this civilized world?"

Xu Zhi grew excited: This must be a stroke of fortune?

Cancer was incurable in the modern age; this might be his last hope for survival.

"I need to build a sandbox quickly. I have to go buy farming tools!" In his old home's garden, Xu Zhi dug out a dusty, three-wheeled bicycle from the corner. Panting like a bald old man, his body hollowed out by chemotherapy, he pedaled laboriously toward the town outside.

He then spent three or four thousand of his savings to haul back a pile of orchard maintenance equipment and instruments. Returning to the courtyard, he began to set things up with full joy.

He didn't have a planet, only a hundred-acre orchard to build his sandbox world. He had a group of workers help clear the weeds and trees from the orchard, turning it into a flat patch of dirt. Then, he picked up a hoe himself, like a farmer digging a pit, shaping ultra-small soil mountains, freshwater rivers, caves, and various barren sandbox terrains.

He took out the high-temperature sprayer he had bought and scorched the entire sandbox inch by inch, clearing away potential plants and animals to prevent existing Earth life from affecting the evolution of the spores. He didn't need to worry about microorganisms—it was hard to do so anyway—as they would be devoured by the Zerg genes and evolve into new Earth species.

"The origin of species is the ocean. I must build a huge ocean, seawater."

In the orchard, his parents had originally built a small fish pond. After thinking it over, he spent a large sum to hire a few workers to help expand the pond, digging soil and filling it with water to create an artificial shallow pond, pouring in the salt he had bought to create an ocean according to the salinity ratio.

However, a thorny problem arose.

This was not a huge, spherical planet, but a hundred-acre square flat sandbox. The structure of this land was the terrain structure of ancient myths: the sky is round, the earth is square.

"Land from mythology?"

Xu Zhi's body was not what it used to be. It took him a week of difficult work to prepare the massive hundred-acre sandbox in the orchard.

That morning, he finally controlled the Insect Nest Sub-Brain and began to produce a large number of initial evolutionary single cells belonging to the Zerg: spores, which were injected into the central ocean of the sandbox he had shaped.

Evolution had begun.

He issued an order to the Hive:

"Accelerate cell division: ten thousand times!"

According to the Zerg unit of measurement, one fold was equivalent to one year.

At ten thousand times the speed, one day of evolution for these single-celled organisms was equivalent to ten thousand long years. Whether this could give birth to new species and recreate the Cambrian explosion of Earth within the small courtyard sandbox remained to be seen.

On the first day of Spore Deployment, the crystal-clear central ocean showed no changes; there was absolutely nothing.

On the second day, the entire sandbox remained silent.

The third day.

The fourth day.

Finally, on the fifth day, the central ocean he had designed saw its single-celled organisms begin to evolve into plankton, and the water began to turn visibly murky.

For a field used to plant rice seedlings or vegetables, one hundred mu was quite large, but for an orchard, it was fairly standard; in the countryside, it was common for people to lease an entire mountain or several hundred mu of land to grow fruit trees.