"...Even Aeons like you were the same?"
Ruan Mei's fingertips trembled slightly, sending tiny ripples across the clear tea in her cup. She found it hard to believe.
In her understanding, Aeons were ultimate lifeforms—perfect beings that transcended biological logic.
The birth of such perfect life should, logically speaking, have been inevitable. Yet Qianyi attributed such greatness to chance, to flaws.
"The biosphere has seniority. Without those old-timers stumbling along for hundreds of millions of years and laying a solid foundation through countless failed evolutions, a 'junior' lifeform like humanity could never have been born."
Qianyi said.
"..."
Ruan Mei did not refute him immediately. Instead, she fell into a long silence.
She looked at the "dessert creatures" on the table, which were carefreely licking at rice porridge and sweets.
They were imperfect, even insignificant byproducts of her experiments in a sense. Yet at this moment, the vibrant, chaotic, even somewhat clumsy vitality they radiated felt so real.
Did these little fellows possess the qualifications to become light?
Did these little fellows possess the potential to become Aeons?
Questions she would never even have considered in the past began surfacing in her heart.
That was the miracle of "imperfection"—the most primitive possibility unleashed by those impurities in the long river of evolution that she had once regarded as things to be eliminated.
"Qianyi, can you tell me? In your homeland, in the homeland of this light, what kind of civilization did that imperfect evolution ultimately create?"
Ruan Mei looked at Qianyi again and took out a creation from a velvet cushion beside her.
It was a perfectly isosceles triangular device. Its streamlined golden shell carried an ancient, solemn metallic luster, while at its core, an azure crystal as deep as the sea pulsed faintly, as though it contained the breath