Genesis

On this far-from-ordinary afternoon, under the effects of the Evolution Sandbox, the buildings Lin Tuo had selected silently shifted across this vast, barren land.

Even the people within them noticed nothing unusual.

Not until the satellite positioning went off and a familiar city appeared at the end of the road.

"Uh..."

"What the hell... How did we end up over here? This highway can't possibly be here..."

The convoy gradually came to a stop. The entire film crew jumped out of their vehicles and gathered beneath the blazing sun. Most of them still looked utterly bewildered, having no idea what had happened.

They questioned one another in a muddled frenzy, and before long, everyone learned that they had somehow emerged from the uninhabited desert and arrived in the northern part of the Takk Desert.

"No, we definitely didn't take a wrong turn! It's this road! This desert highway as a whole has shifted more than a hundred kilometers north!" an assistant director said, staring wide-eyed at his phone in disbelief.

He was immediately met with a wave of doubt.

After all, the claim was simply too absurd.

Yet in the very next second, everyone suddenly felt the surroundings turn cool... More precisely, an enormous shadow had blanketed them in the blink of an eye. It seemed that something had blocked out the sun.

"Ah! Look over there!" one of the lead actors suddenly pointed south and shouted.

Everyone hurriedly turned to look. Then, the previously chaotic crowd fell deathly silent in an instant!

Before their eyes, an unimaginably massive shadowy wall slowly emerged from the distorted air. The wall was likely hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of meters tall, stretching endlessly from east to west.

Under everyone's gaze, it turned from an illusion into solid matter in just a few breaths.

As though it had split the world in two.

If one were to pull the view high enough, one would see—

At that very moment, an incomparably huge, irregular, pitch-black, lightless "cover," like a gigantic bowl, had enveloped the entire Takk Desert, nearly three hundred thousand square kilometers of land!

Li Mountain, Martial Arts Hall, inside the dilapidated Old House.

Lin Tuo stood beside the Sandbox, quietly watching a somewhat dim, translucent cover seal it away. He realized that this was the so-called "Isolation Shield."

It was also the shell of the "Sandbox" in Creation Mode.

According to the information in his mind, he knew that this Isolation Shield was incomparably sturdy. With Earth's current Civilization, it could neither be broken nor detected.

Though it appeared translucent within the Sandbox, in reality, it was impossible to cross or peer through for both the life within the Sandbox and the humans outside it.

As for the desert highway and several important engineering structures he had marked, along with their personnel, they had all been safely transferred outside the Sandbox by the power of the Evolution Sandbox.

"I'm afraid the satellites have already noticed something strange. Before long, news that the entire desert has been isolated will spread..." Lin Tuo subconsciously glanced at the phone set aside nearby.

After hesitating for a moment, he walked over and switched it to silent mode.

While he was doing this, changes were also taking place throughout the Sandbox. An imperceptible force silently swept across the vast desert.

It purged the microbial environment.

The plants withered within a few breaths.

Lin Tuo was not surprised. He knew this was part of the "disinfection" process.

Sandbox No.1 has been constructed. The current environment is unsuitable for evolving Civilization. Please provide the necessary foundational materials...

A large amount of information flooded into his mind once again. After sorting through it, Lin Tuo roughly understood that the desert environment was too monotonous and needed to be enriched by him.

At the very least, he had to provide basic soil and water.

Though the desert also contained such materials, Lin Tuo's assistance could save a great deal of evolution time.

"Mm... First, I need to clear away all this sand." Lin Tuo murmured softly. Then he walked out, turned toward the storage room, and dug out an iron shovel and a small cart.

After parking the cart at the entrance, Lin Tuo carried the shovel into the room, took a deep breath, and scooped up a sand dune.

From the information provided by the Evolution Sandbox, he knew that during Creation, his movements would not affect the area outside the Sandbox.

In other words, even if he dug down with all his strength, he did not need to worry about causing an earthquake.

The "Isolation Shield" did not merely exist on the surface. It completely separated the Tucker Desert from Earth in every direction.

"Up."

As Lin Tuo raised the shovel.

The Tucker Desert region.

Above the three hundred thousand square kilometers of isolated land, the air twisted slightly. Then, an iron shovel that blotted out the sky and covered the earth appeared!

The shovel fell mercilessly, effortlessly scooping up a sand dune weighing hundreds of billions of tons and lifting it into the sky.

Once it reached a certain height, it suddenly vanished along with the gigantic shovel.

Only a horrifying crater remained in the desert.

"Whoosh."

Pouring the shovelful of sand into the cart, Lin Tuo curiously reached out and touched it, discovering that the "sand" was as tiny as dust.

"It looks like there's a size conversion mechanism within this Sandbox. Ordinary objects entering from outside are enlarged.

"And normal-sized grains of sand become dust-like once they are removed from the Sandbox."

Lin Tuo withdrew his hand, a thoughtful look in his eyes.

It felt... utterly miraculous.

Shaking his head, Lin Tuo stopped dwelling on it and hurriedly got back to work. In a few minutes, he had shoveled all the sand out of the entire Sandbox and dumped it onto the open ground in the Martial Arts Hall's rear courtyard with the cart.

Once he had cleaned out the entire Tucker Desert, Lin Tuo turned to digging up soil and stones.

"The more complex the Sandbox's foundational materials are, the lower the difficulty of evolution." Lin Tuo murmured softly, then began digging soil from Back Mountain and transferring it into the Sandbox.

The Martial Arts Hall's rear courtyard was a forest, planted with bamboo, flowers, and grass. Though it appeared withered from having gone untended for so long, the soil quality here was truly excellent.

During the transfer, Lin Tuo also discovered that when he placed the dirt from the rear courtyard into the Sandbox, the tiny organisms in the soil died the instant it passed through the Isolation Shield. Even the color of the soil changed somewhat.

The Sandbox was not small. Lin Tuo went back and forth several times before finally covering the entire Sandbox with soil.

Then, he fetched water from the well in the courtyard and poured it into the Sandbox.

After hesitating for a moment, he dug several discarded metal parts out of the storage room and tossed them into the Sandbox as well.

"This should be enough, right?"

Lin Tuo wiped away his sweat, stared at the Sandbox, and muttered.

The Sandbox now meets the basic requirements for evolution. Begin project?

The message appeared in his mind at just the right moment.

"Begin," Lin Tuo said.

Immediately afterward, the entire Sandbox was covered in a layer of radiance. Some kind of transformation seemed to be taking place within it. It lasted only a few seconds before calm returned.

Yet subtle changes had occurred inside the Sandbox.

Lin Tuo noticed that a rotating nebula had appeared above the Sandbox. It seemed to be a simulated universe modeled by the Sandbox after the outside world.

There was also a sun in that universe, along with a corresponding moon.

Is there really any need to simulate a moon? Lin Tuo could not help but complain inwardly. After all, the essence of this Sandbox world was not a planet, but a flat expanse of land.

However, the Evolution Sandbox seemed to have simulated everything entirely according to Earth's environment.

Or perhaps the entire evolution of the Sandbox had been based on Earth's parameters from the start.

"With this, the inside of the Sandbox has its own independent ecosystem." Lin Tuo turned his gaze back toward the land and noticed that it had changed as well.

The originally coarse grains of dirt had turned into countless fine particles under the Sandbox's influence, rising up to form primitive mountains and hills.

The water he had poured in had also gathered together, becoming oceans and lakes.

At least now, it looked like the rudiments of a world.

Sandbox No.1 has started. Operation in progress...

At this point, Lin Tuo also noticed that the Virtual Panel on his retina had changed.

Besides "Creation Mode" and the "Return" button in the upper left corner.

An additional line had appeared: "Current environmental Aether concentration." However, the value behind it was "None."

It should have been an inspection of the Aether within the Sandbox world.

There was also a toolbox icon.

When he opened it, there were only two functions inside.

One was the switch for the "Isolation Shield," which was currently enabled. Lin Tuo paid it no mind.

The other was "Time Flow Rate."

He could choose between "Dynamic Adjustment" and "Synchronized with External."

The meaning was simple enough.

"Dynamic Adjustment" was an ability of the Evolution Sandbox in Creation Mode. Based on the Sandbox's Computing Power and environment, it would automatically adjust the ratio between the time flow inside Sandbox No.1 and that of the outside world.

Simply put, at the beginning, when the internal environment of the Sandbox had low complexity, the ratio would be extremely high.

Perhaps one hour in reality would mean hundreds of millions of years had passed within the Sandbox.

As Civilization emerged within the Sandbox and its complexity increased, the time ratio would decrease.

One hour in reality might mean only a few hundred years, or even less, had passed within the Sandbox.

Lin Tuo knew this was because the more complex the Sandbox environment became, the greater the Computing Power required. Thus, the flow rate could only be lowered, or the Evolution Sandbox's Computing Power would be unable to sustain it.

As for "Synchronized with External," it was a manual switch. Lin Tuo could adjust the internal and external time flow rates to 1:1 whenever he wished.

That was, he could synchronize the time inside the Sandbox with reality.

"This function is pretty good. It saves a lot of trouble..." Lin Tuo smiled.

Aside from the toolbox, the large central area of the Virtual Panel was completely blank.

"Such a large empty area looks rather unbalanced." Lin Tuo could not help complaining from a Designer's perspective.

Yet in the next second, he saw text begin to appear in the blank area, click by click:

Operation Log:

On a certain year, month, day, hour, minute, and second, the evolution of the world began. At that time, this was a quiet world, irregular in shape.

There was no life on the surface. It was filled with chaotic soil, sand, stones, water, and a small amount of metal. Yet it already possessed the foundation for life to be born.

One hundred million years passed. The world did not change.

Two hundred million years passed. It remained the same.

...

When the fifth hundred million years arrived, a faint ripple appeared in the once-dead ocean.