58 Minutes 21 Seconds

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

"Scared to death?" Seeing the Primordial Elephant collapse in his palm, Lin Tuo immediately had that thought. It was only after reading the log's description that he let out a sigh of relief.

"So timid..." Lin Tuo murmured softly, picking up the magnifying glass beside him to carefully examine the ancient creature.

Yet he found nothing unusual. Instead, something else caught his attention even more.

"It seems I can pass directly through the Isolation Shield and take matter and living beings from the Sandbox. And after passing through the Evolution Sandbox's spatial passage, their size shrinks proportionally..."

It was not as if he had never realized this before.

After all, that "Avatar" was still inside his body.

"Because this Primordial Elephant is unique, there's no logical conflict involved. It's entirely different from my Avatar... Mm, this is an important discovery."

As Lin Tuo pondered, a thought suddenly came to him:

If he placed his Avatar inside the Sandbox and transferred his consciousness to it, wouldn't that mean he could appear anywhere within the Sandbox?

But after hesitating for a moment, he did not immediately try it.

After some thought, he returned the unconscious Primordial Elephant to the Sandbox. Then, watching it jolt awake and stagger away in flight, a faint smile curled on his lips.

"Let them keep evolving for now. I wonder whether Primitive Humans can appear today." Shaking his head, Lin Tuo turned to the Virtual Panel and switched the Sandbox to "Observation Mode."

Inside the Old House, light and shadow shifted. The Wild Land shattered, replaced by a bustling modern city.

A Yangcheng City reduced countless times in size appeared before Lin Tuo.

At that moment, beneath the morning glow, the entire city was slowly waking up.

Sunlight slanted down, and towering buildings cast a chaotic tangle of shadows.

On the city roads, large numbers of cars were already moving in orderly streams.

"So this is the gap between civilizations." Comparing it to the primitive continent in Creation Mode, Lin Tuo could not help sighing. Then he glanced at the "Current environmental Aether concentration."

The prompt read "Low," followed by an upward arrow, likely indicating an "increasing state." Yet hardly any Azure White Qi could be seen with the naked eye.

"As expected, Aether won't recover that quickly." Lin Tuo sighed softly, then pulled himself together and walked toward the location of Li Mountain within the Sandbox.

But his gaze swept past it, landing on another mountain at the Sandbox's edge.

It was a peak even steeper and more perilous than Li Mountain.

It was also part of the Taihe Mountain Range, but farther from Yangcheng City's urban district. More than half its area already lay outside the Sandbox.

He spread open his right hand. With a thought, a miniature "Lin Tuo" appeared in his palm.

Avatar!

Yes. After careful consideration, Lin Tuo intended to use his Avatar for an experiment.

From yesterday's observations, he had discovered that the Avatar was almost entirely identical to his main body in every sense.

To be precise, it had originally been himself within the Sandbox's space.

By switching sensations, he had already confirmed that the strength he gained through digesting Aether also existed within the Avatar at the same time.

The two bodies possessed exactly the same strength. They shared those several dozen points of Aether and were no different apart from their disparity in size.

Even eating, drinking, relieving themselves, and sleeping were shared.

For example, if Lin Tuo's main body ate a meal, the Avatar would not feel hungry. Conversely, after the Avatar ate food, his main body would also feel full...

"Not even a trace of respect for the conservation of energy."

But considering the Evolution Sandbox's peculiar nature, whether anything was conserved did not seem to be the point.

What Lin Tuo cared about was that if this was the case, he seemed to be able to use the Avatar to "temper his body" and digest Aether.

No sooner thought than done. Lin Tuo immediately placed the Avatar into the Sandbox, setting it at the foot of that steep, treacherous peak in the Taihe Mountain Range. Then he withdrew his hand and switched his consciousness.

His vision blurred.

Beneath a desolate mountain, life suddenly shone in the eyes of Lin Tuo, who had previously been as motionless as a puppet.

He moved his body and looked around. Not far away, he saw broad swathes of green across the abandoned mountain.

To the east, the sun had just leaped above the horizon. The air was still fairly cool, and in the distance, vast sheets of thin mist coiled through the endless Taihe Mountain Range.

"This is the place." Lin Tuo identified the direction, then gathered his breath. His figure flickered, moving with astonishing speed like a startled swan, as he raced toward a certain spot.

Before long, a mountain path paved with bluish stone appeared before him.

Calling it a "path" was generous. It was really just a narrow trail—or rather, a series of steps—at an extremely steep angle, extending straight toward the mountaintop like a Heavenly Ladder.

Lin Tuo did not know its origins. He only remembered that his grandfather had brought him here as a child and told him that this "Heavenly Ladder" had a history of several hundred years. It had once connected to a temple, but that temple had collapsed long ago.

Because the terrain was so dangerous, no one was willing to climb it.

Later, it had fallen completely into ruin.

And this was the place Lin Tuo had chosen to temper his body.

After hesitating, he took off his shirt and wrapped it around his neck, covering his head and face. It was almost impossible to encounter anyone here, but it was better to conceal himself just in case.

Then he stepped forward, reached out, and gripped a Stone Tablet. It had long since fallen into disrepair, its writing blurred beyond recognition.

"Up!" Lin Tuo drew in a soft breath, and the Aether within him trembled.

His transformed body usually did not look particularly remarkable, but at this moment, sleek lines of muscle swelled. He effortlessly hoisted the Stone Tablet and carried it on his back.

Then Lin Tuo bent his knees slightly and, in this manner, began leaping up the Heavenly Ladder at a steady pace.

Meanwhile.

What Lin Tuo did not notice was that a private car had already stopped beside a distant road.

Two girls in their twenties got out of the car.

The one in front wore a sun hat and was staring wide-eyed at the Taihe Mountain Range, seemingly searching for something.

"Are we really doing this... You must have seen wrong. How could someone possibly fly down from the sky?"

The other girl leaned against the car door, arms folded helplessly as she looked at her companion.

But the first girl spoke with complete seriousness:

"I really didn't see wrong! Just now, I glanced out the car window and saw a figure falling from the sky... Ah, anyway, just trust me."

Seeing her companion's unconvinced expression, the girl did not explain further. She merely took out her phone, opened the camera, zoomed in... and examined the enlarged image.

"Fine, fine, I believe you... Anyway, I can't understand this world anymore. Yesterday they said the whole country had been covered by a desert, and today you're talking about Superman... Who knows what's going on..."

"Ah! Found him! Look!" While she was complaining, the first girl suddenly cried out in delight. She held up her phone, looking thrilled.

The other girl froze for a moment, then curiously leaned closer.

Then she saw, through the phone's camera, a figure carrying an enormous Stone Tablet on his back, rapidly ascending a flight of stone steps like a Heavenly Ladder.

"Holy crap! There really is a Superman?!"

Though the distance was great and the image was blurry, they could still make out the general scene.

The figure in the video was Lin Tuo, tempering his body beneath the Stone Tablet.

Every rise and fall of his seemed to follow some hidden rhythm, carrying a peculiar beauty. Not a trace of exhaustion showed on him. Although this did not prove that he had "fallen from the sky," this sight alone was far beyond anything an ordinary person could accomplish.

In their eyes, only a superhuman could do such a thing.

"Record it! Film it! Hurry!"

At the urging, the first girl finally snapped out of it and immediately activated the recording function.

Neither of them spoke again, simply watching intently.

"That Stone Tablet is so huge... and the mountain path is that steep. He should stop soon, right...?"

"Probably."

"How high do you think he can make it?"

Beside the road, the two girls filmed intently while chatting, guessing how long Lin Tuo could hold out.

However.

Five minutes passed...

Ten minutes passed...

Twenty minutes...

Forty minutes...

The numbers on the recording screen continued to climb. The two girls had no choice but to stop filming by hand and instead set the phone on the car roof with a stand.

The expressions on their faces shifted from initial curiosity and shock to horror, and then... blank stupor.

Only when Lin Tuo disappeared over the mountaintop did they finally come back to their senses and stop recording.

"Fifty-eight minutes and twenty-one seconds!"

Seeing the video's total duration, the two girls exchanged glances, both finding it impossible to believe.

Leaping steadily without stopping for an entire hour over such terrain would have been unimaginable even without carrying anything heavy!

"...I-I kind of believe you now," the second girl said in a daze, forcing a bitter smile. "That person... No, I suspect he isn't even human!"

"It really feels like the world is about to change." The girl who had been filming put away her phone, her expression complicated.

Yesterday, the mysterious Black Box had shaken the world. Today, a "nonhuman" had appeared... It all seemed to foreshadow something.

"Hey, what are you doing?"

"I'm uploading the video online." The girl in the sun hat operated her phone as she answered her companion seriously, her eyes shining. "I think we may have witnessed history!"

"Whew, I finally made it up." Lin Tuo casually tossed the Stone Tablet aside, braced his hands on his knees, and panted in great gulps. His body was covered in sweat, and even his hair was drenched.

"How much Aether do I have left?"

Host's current Aether value: 93 points

The Evolution Sandbox immediately gave its answer in his mind.

"It was 98 points last time, which means I digested 5 points just now," Lin Tuo calculated silently. "My strength seems to have increased a little more. Mm, it looks like my body-tempering plan works. As long as I keep at it, I can slowly digest all this Aether and raise my life to a higher level."

But neither was he blindly optimistic.

"The initial absorption efficiency must be high. The further I advance, the greater the difficulty will inevitably become. Looks like there really is no such good thing as growing stronger while lying down."

Shaking his head with a smile, Lin Tuo pulled off his shirt and wiped away his sweat.

Then he glanced at the sun, which had already risen, and tried to switch his consciousness. At the same time, some strange spiritual intuition drew his gaze unconsciously toward the road far below in the distance. He muttered:

"Why do I feel like someone's watching me..."