Hao Ren listened, dumbfounded—he seemed to have been in that state rather often these past two days—to a sentence that nearly made him choke to death. At that moment, he almost couldn't believe his ears: "What... did you just say?"
"The Time-Space Administration Bureau." The silver-haired woman spoke with a beaming smile. When she kept quiet, she had a cool, distant air about her, but the moment she opened her mouth and added a smile, that aloofness melted away like ice and snow. She looked remarkably easy to talk to.
Hao Ren asked blankly, "No, I mean, what did you say in the second half?"
"Oh, the Wangba Tuozi branch office." The silver-haired woman nodded happily, admitting it without the slightest hesitation.
Hao Ren almost wanted to bash his head against something and die... Better save that for outside. Everything here looked expensive, and he might not be able to afford the damages. But he really wanted to bash his head against something and die! How had the two phrases "Time-Space Administration Bureau" and "Wangba Tuozi branch office," one lofty and one utterly down-to-earth, been forcibly crammed together? And when the white-haired girl in front of him said it, she didn't seem to find anything wrong with it at all. The expression on her face made it seem perfectly natural. Hao Ren felt the same way he would have if he'd heard the following: Old King had three children. The eldest was named Daming, the second Erming, and the third Eisenblick William Hannibal...
But the silver-haired woman's explanation was so reasonable that Hao Ren was left speechless: there really was a Wangba Tuozi nearby.
"Heh... hehehe." Hao Ren gave two stiff laughs and shifted around on the thick, cotton-soft cushion to find a more stable position. He was worried that hearing anything else shocking might send him tumbling to the floor. "The Time-Space Administration Bureau, huh... Oh, right. What did you say your name was?"
Only now did he remember that she seemed to have introduced herself earlier, but he had been too emotionally overwhelmed at the time to hear it clearly.
The silver-haired woman didn't mind in the slightest. She was even more good-natured than he'd expected. "My name is Raven 12345. You must remember that. It's very important."
"Including the numbers at the end?"
"Including the numbers—the numbers are actually the main part." The woman calling herself Raven 12345 nodded emphatically. "They keep me from being confused with the other Ravens. Any other questions?"
A whole pile of settings flashed through Hao Ren's mind in an instant: artificial humans, clones, dark forces, evil armies plotting to overthrow Earth, and so on. He had even imagined enough love and hatred for twenty thousand words of text, more than a dozen protagonists, and three different romantic configurations. It wasn't that his imagination was overly rich; he simply watched too many movies. Still, he wisely didn't ask where the other Ravens were. Based on experience, he judged that to be a taboo question—though he would later learn just how spectacularly wrong he was. He merely scratched his chin. "Raven 12345... Ah, that's a pretty creative name. Heh, hehehe. So why did you come looking for me?"
The silver-haired woman smiled faintly. "Your home should already have some strange creature living in it, right? If my calculations are correct, it's a 'Werewolf.'"
Hao Ren tensed instantly, every muscle in his body twitching. He had previously treated this as the highest of secrets and planned to guard it with his life, believing Lily's identity absolutely couldn't be exposed. It was his last futile attempt to preserve the ordinary life he knew. He hadn't expected this mysterious woman in front of him to seem fully aware of everything! But he relaxed again soon afterward. Since the mysterious person before him was also an "outsider," it was only natural that she knew some things. Hao Ren knew very well that he was still practically blind when it came to some mysterious world, so he couldn't act too shocked. Otherwise, he would put himself at a disadvantage.
Since Raven 12345 hadn't mentioned Vivian, that meant her information was a little out of date as well. Naturally, Hao Ren wasn't going to volunteer anything.
He nodded. "That's right. But that shouldn't violate any taboos, should it? Your Time-Space... Administration Bureau handles things like this?"
"There's no taboo. I'm just giving you a heads-up. More strange creatures will move into your home in the future. That will be your job." Raven 12345 dropped this bombshell as casually as if she were discussing the weather. "The organization has high hopes for you..."
"Hold on!" Hao Ren finally couldn't restrain himself and jumped to his feet. "You arranged all of this?!"
"Not at present, but we will in the future." Raven 12345 shrugged. "In any case, you've already come into contact with that 'Werewolf' named Lily. I happen to be short a helper, and you're very suitable for the job."
"What exactly do you do?" Hao Ren frowned. He felt that Raven 12345 spoke in a rather muddled way, constantly starting to ramble for no apparent reason and taking forever to get to the point. Couldn't she just explain what the Time-Space Administration Bureau actually did?
"Us? The group referred to as 'us' is enormous." Raven 12345 rubbed her nose. "The Xiling Empire is vast, managing countless universes. It has numerous departments and a complicated division of labor; there's nothing we don't do. You can broadly think of us as gods. That'll make it easier to understand. Incidentally, we only recently completed our overall transformation into a divine race. The organization is young, but youth brings opportunity. As for the Time-Space Administration Bureau, it's a department under the empire specifically tasked with managing the various universes. It handles information transmission, guides and regulates travel between universes, improves the cohesion of worlds, and so on... At least, that's what the latest document from above says. If they change it later, that's another matter. I'm a low-level official of the Time-Space Administration Bureau, responsible for the trivial matters of this universe—like preventing certain races from doing something suicidal and bringing about the apocalypse, or planning the evolution of celestial bodies. Technically, this isn't my job. Due to certain special circumstances... I'm filling in here. As for you, I need an assistant. I have to manage matters on the scale of the entire universe, so I need proxies to handle local affairs. You've been selected. Feeling awesome yet?"
Hao Ren listened to this practically fantastical tale with his head spinning, then calmly stood up. "Thank you, but you seem like a good person. Your special-effects shows are very interesting. May I ask where the exit is?"
Raven 12345 didn't even bother looking surprised, as though she had seen similar reactions countless times before. Only after Hao Ren finished did she snap her fingers lightly. "According to the hiring requirements, newly appointed probationary examiners need to undergo a psychological evaluation. The evaluation period is fairly long. We'll begin with the most basic..."
Before Hao Ren could say anything else, he suddenly felt his entire body grow light. Then the scenery around him turned upside down!
The magnificent house vanished. Thick darkness surged toward him from every direction. Hao Ren found himself standing in a void. Then a point of light suddenly erupted within that void, sending out rays in all directions!
The first thing to appear was an indescribably searing mass of light. Its structure could not be discerned, and it had no fixed form. The light came rushing toward him with overwhelming force, then expanded into the boundless distance in the blink of an eye. Hao Ren had barely managed to blink once before it had already swollen to a scale beyond his comprehension.
Then the light dimmed. Ultra-high-level energy rapidly weakened and degraded. Primitive particles were born amid cooling and layer upon layer of decay. The aftershocks of that first flash swept across everything in the universe. The earliest primordial nebulae were born, laying the foundation for future galaxy clusters and colossal celestial structures.
Everything continued to cool. Ancient stars began forming in the densest regions of the primordial nebulae, while the nebulae themselves split apart into independent galaxy clusters. Local nuclear reactions replaced the explosive energy of the Big Bang, and all things in existence entered a gentler age of order. As cooling continued, the primordial stars rapidly burned through their fuel, casting out the heavy elements they had accumulated over the years in one explosion after another. These heavy elements were the first highly stable matter to appear after the "first flash." They flew along paths marked by the fading light of the stars, colliding, merging, and being captured by newly born young stars.
The first star systems were born.
Matter grew ever more diffuse. The restless galaxies released vast amounts of energy and consumed huge quantities of matter before finally settling down. The complexity of the universe began to increase. Stars evolved, and life proliferated. Hao Ren felt that his vision had already transcended the limits of human understanding. He stood at an almost omniscient vantage point, observing the entire universe, and thus immediately spotted the target he had been desperately searching for: near a young star, a blue planet was being covered in green...
Then the scene froze, and a line of text drifted across his field of vision: Genesis Recording Expert Trial Version. Please recharge to continue using.
The surroundings receded like a receding tide. Hao Ren found himself sitting once again in the magnificent room, his clothes soaked through with sweat. The woman calling herself Raven 12345 watched him with a beaming smile. "That was the record of your universe's evolution to the present day. Of course, certain sections of the timeline were adjusted to make it easier for you to watch. I didn't record it myself; it was a snapshot directly extracted from the universe's underlying information. So you essentially experienced a creation myth firsthand. How did it feel?"
Before you continue