Sandbox Concept

"Early-stage stomach cancer can indeed be cured. But it has now worsened to mid-stage stomach cancer, so the chance of a cure has decreased. Still, if you continue treatment actively, there is still a possibility."

"No need. I choose to be discharged."

After more than two hours, Xu Zhi stepped out of the hospital. A period of chemotherapy had left his hair thin and falling out, his body pale and hunched. He looked terribly ill.

In the early stages of cancer, active treatment could offer a chance of recovery. Once it reached the middle stage, however, the survival rate became extremely low.

There was no point in continuing treatment.

He silently told himself.

Xu Zhi was capable enough and worked at a large foreign-owned company, but more than half of the five to six hundred thousand yuan he had saved over four or five years had already been spent. He had struggled for years, only for it all to end in nothing.

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

He had not returned to his mountain hometown for a year. His family had a self-contained orchard courtyard there.

His family had once been considered wealthy in the village. They had contracted more than a hundred mu of land behind their house to plant fruit trees.

But half a year ago, lychee prices had been too low, and too much fruit had rotted in storage. Then they had been scammed by someone who claimed to have channels to deal with the unsold stock. They paid for help, only to be cheated out of even more money. In the end, they lost nearly a million yuan, their savings wiped out completely. Half a year ago, his parents had collapsed from anger and never got back up.

Now, no one tended the orchard. The hired workers had all left, the orchard had become desolate, the trees had long since been cut down, and only weeds remained on the ground.

He unlocked the door and pushed it open, only for a cloud of dust to rush at him.

The familiar rural home of his childhood came into view. He put down his luggage in his room, planning to spend the rest of his life in his homeland and return to country living.

Rustle, rustle. Suddenly, he 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. Amid a clump of weeds, he spotted a black beetle the size of a bowl.

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

Xu Zhi reached out.

Whoosh—

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

It was the long history of the Zerg's rise. On a green planet, during a biological explosion equivalent to Earth's Cambrian era, an ancient insect species had appeared. They developed intelligence and technology. Their immense reproductive capacity and potential carried them into the stars, but when their technology reached its peak, the Zerg learned that the world they inhabited was barren and low-level.

In the end, they broke through a certain dimension and entered the incomprehensible, fantastical higher world known as the Eternal Life Realm—only to suffer an instant, crushing defeat, as though it had been inevitable.

Within the insect nest, the previous Zerg Mother Empress had left behind one final message, filled with regret:

"The evolution of life is not about becoming larger and larger. Strengthening oneself is the true path."

"We were wrong from the beginning. Evolving toward greater size was a dead end. The smaller the body, the greater its foundation for a qualitative change in energy. We lost. Whoever becomes the next Zerg Mother Empress, attack the Eternal Life Realm once more in my stead!"

Very quickly, Xu Zhi realized that he had actually taken control of this insect nest. From the Zerg memories he had received, this immensely aggressive, magnificent race possessed only one racial ability.

"Ultra-High Speed Cell Division?"

The Zerg's ability allowed their race to shorten its lifespan and accelerate the rate of biological cell division within a short period of time, causing their kind to be like flower buds—born, blooming, growing, withering, and dying in an instant.

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

As long as the Mother Nest produced cells—spores—and deployed them onto a barren planet, then activated Ultra-High Speed Cell Division, those cells would multiply madly in less than a few years, evolving into brand-new species and becoming part of the Mother Nest's forces.

"This race has limitless possibilities."

At that thought, Xu Zhi's heart could not remain calm.

The long illness and the torment of chemotherapy had left Xu Zhi physically and mentally exhausted. He had even begun to wonder what the point of his boring life had been. Yet now, before death, he had suddenly found something that intrigued him.

The evolution and progression of life.

"The previous Zerg Mother Empress deployed spores onto barren planets, allowing countless races to reproduce and evolve, building world after world. I don't have planets, but couldn't I use this ability to make a small Evolution Sandbox in my family's orchard for fun?"

"With this Zerg Mother Nest, this war fortress, I can completely build mountains, oceans, rivers, and an ultra-miniature sandbox in this orchard, 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 cultivate countless races, perhaps I can find a way to cure my cancer from that civilized world?"

Xu Zhi became excited. Was this what they called a fortuitous encounter?

Cancer was incurable by modern medicine. This might be his final hope of survival.

"I need to build a sandbox quickly. I need to buy farming tools!" In the farmyard of his old home, Xu Zhi dug out a dust-covered three-wheeled bicycle from a corner. Panting like a balding old man, his chemotherapy-drained body struggled as he pedaled toward the town outside.

Then, he spent thirty to forty thousand yuan from his savings and hauled back a pile of farm-clearing equipment and tools. Once back in the courtyard, he happily began arranging everything.

He did not have a planet. He only had an orchard of more than a hundred mu on which to build a Sandbox World. After hiring another group of workers to clear away the weeds and wild trees, turning the orchard into a flat stretch of earth, he picked up a hoe himself. Like a farmer digging pits, he casually shaped miniature earthen mountains, freshwater rivers, caves, and all kinds of barren sandbox terrain.

He then took out the high-temperature burner he had bought and scorched the entire sandbox inch by inch, clearing away any potential plants and animals so that existing Earth life would not affect the spores' evolution into new species. Microorganisms, however, did not need to be dealt with—and would be difficult to deal with anyway. They would be devoured by Zerg genes and evolve into new Earth species.

"The origin of species is the ocean. I need to build a vast ocean—seawater."

There had originally been a small fishpond in the orchard, built by his parents. After thinking it over, he spent a large sum to hire several workers to help him expand it further, digging soil, filling it with water, creating an artificial shallow pond, and pouring in purchased salt to turn it into an ocean according to seawater salinity ratios.

However, a thorny problem arose.

This was not a huge round planet. It was a square, flat sandbox of a hundred mu. The structure of this land resembled that of ancient myths: a round sky above a square earth.

"Land from mythology?"

Xu Zhi's health was far worse than before. It took him a strenuous week to prepare the entire hundred-mu sandbox in the orchard.

That morning, he controlled the Insect Nest Sub-Brain and began producing vast numbers of the Zerg's initial single-celled evolutionary organisms: spores. They were injected into the central ocean of the sandbox he had created.

Evolution began.

He gave the Mother Nest an order:

"Accelerate cell division: ten thousand times!"

According to the Zerg's unit of measurement, one fold equaled one year.

Accelerated ten thousand times, a single day for these single-celled organisms would amount to a long ten thousand years. But whether new species could be born, whether the small courtyard sandbox could recreate Earth's Cambrian explosion, remained unknown.

On the first day of Spore Deployment, the crystal-clear central ocean showed no changes at all.

On the second day, the entire sandbox remained silent and still.

The third day.

The fourth day.

Finally, on the fifth day, single-celled organisms in the central ocean he had designed began evolving into some planktonic lifeforms, and the water visibly turned murky.

A hundred mu was large for planting rice seedlings and vegetables, but quite ordinary for an orchard. In the countryside, people often contracted entire mountains, planting fruit trees across hundreds of mu of land.