The Rise of the Atabians

On the streets beneath the sea, all the Atabians had become handsome Sea Giants the size of Mite Behemoths—thoroughly multicellular lifeforms.

It was not only the human drivers who had grown larger. The fish they rode had also grown, becoming super-tiny fry the size of ants as they swam across the seabed.

The largest fish had already reached the size of a small tadpole.

This was no longer a civilization that required microscopic vision to see.

As long as one's eyesight was decent, the entire kingdom civilization was visible to the naked eye.

Li Qing found it utterly marvelous.

Single cells—fish—merfolk sea clans.

This evolutionary path had produced an intelligent racial civilization under the forced conditions of the Alcohol Ocean and UV Lamp light.

Their tiny size was also due to the laboratory; resources were insufficient.

"I wonder how my advance team is doing in there. Internal struggle and seizing power within a civilization are the real way to strike at the root." He took out his phone and crouched down. The flash went off as he snapped a photo through the glass.

Click!

Then he opened his gallery and zoomed in on the photograph with two fingers.

"This undersea kingdom has already reached the point where this scene from an epic myth could be filmed with a high-definition camera!"

Li Qing began considering buying a camera to monitor the entire laboratory. The microbial civilizations in these Petri Dishes had completely broken free of their single-celled state and evolved to the point of naked-eye visibility.

At this moment.

The Atabians called themselves the Oceanic God Clan. They had invented God Trees, which could absorb Ultraviolet Radiation and perform a special form of photosynthesis.

"We conquered the Great Flood and fed the floodwaters to the fish!"

"We conquered the Purple Heaven Thunder and fed the deathly light to the God Trees!"

The Atabians shouted.

They explored truth, sought knowledge of the whole world, and delighted in thought. From swimming fish, they had become undersea humans, with undersea God Trees and all kinds of coral reefs around them.

Their pride made them unwilling to submit to the gods in the heavens! After several days, their population had fallen from six trillion to seven hundred billion, showing just how devastating it had been. In the long war between humans and gods, the Atabian population was now only a hundred times that of Earth.

Yet now, because their bodies had grown larger and were generally the size of mites, they had instead formed a vast civilized nation. Their entire civilization appeared unprecedentedly brilliant to the naked eye.

And they tried to become giants, to grow even larger! To challenge the gods with mortal flesh!

But their sages discovered in horror that once their cell count increased, their entire bodily structure became uncontrollable, and they became short-lived once more.

One had to know that they had attained immortality long ago. Bacteria had been immortal from the start. A single-celled structure was simple—cellular aging? Telomere damage?

What were those things?

With such simple bodily structures, repairs were effortless.

But once they became complex lifeforms, with too many cells, everything fell into disorder. They could not repair them one by one, nor could they completely control the enormous and complex ecosystem within their bodies. Aging would emerge.

"We cannot grow larger. Our current size is already the limit. We cannot maintain structural stability in large multicellular lifeforms."

The Emperor of Atabia was now a tiny mite-sized human. Before all his people, he redirected their hatred, created a common enemy for civilization, and pinned the blame on someone else:

"This must be the curse of an Evil God. Once we attempt to become truly enormous super-lifeforms, our lifespans gain an end, and we quickly die of old age. One day, we will break him!"

The ambitious and farsighted Emperor of Atabia made a declaration to the entire realm:

This time, the Atabians would strike back against the Evil God beyond the heavens and build a weapon to slaughter gods!

A towering structure rose from the center of the ocean.

It was an incomparably magnificent giant tower standing upon the ground: the Tower of Babel.

The King of Atabia commanded all seven hundred billion merfolk of the sea clans to work together to construct the tower, raising its body until it stood shoulder to shoulder with the heavens!

The Atabians would plant its foundation firmly in the breast of the earthly realm, while its spire pierced the clouds, and then they would welcome the giant god!

Meanwhile, Li Qing's expedition team had also secretly taken root.

In the shadows, within a dim and murky undersea church palace.

"Human arrogance and self-righteousness possess a savagery no written word can describe. It is the original sin of greed rooted deep within the soul."

Within the Church of Light, the pope worshipped a statue and led a group of newly recruited believers in reciting the Bible:

"When God saw that the people upon the earth were steeped in wickedness, profaning the Lord who had created them, He sent down the Great Flood to destroy the world, yet commanded men to build an ark and granted them a sliver of hope."

"Yet after the Great Flood, mankind still did not repent, so He sent down divine thunder, wishing to cleanse the original sin from the earth."

"But now, the desires of the Great Emperor of Atabia are swelling ever further. He wishes to reach beyond the heavens!!"

"Thus, this cruel and merciless tyrant emperor built the Tower of Babel. God became greatly angered upon learning of it, and sent us into this world so that other lucid voices might arise here and prevent the construction of this sinful Tower of Babel."

"O True Lord, forgive the people of the earth~~"

"O merciful Lord, I am sinful~"

"Prayer and repentance—this shall be the road to the holy hall~~"

All the church believers present hummed in song, firmly convinced:

The Emperor of Atabia's arrogance and ambition would eventually make the gods utterly furious! The Atabians would be destroyed, and the tyrant would lead them into extinction!

Only by secretly infiltrating, obstructing, and assassinating, stopping the Tower of Babel from being completed, and ushering the glory of the gods into this world so that it descended in full and ruled the earth, could this world possibly be saved.

The entire Kingdom of Atabia had long been roiling with hidden currents.

Click.

Li Qing took a photograph, and the flash startled every Atabian awake.

The third generation of Atabians were no longer what they once had been. They had evolved into sea-clan people and had deliberately built small watchtowers along the glass wall to observe the world outside it.

A guard standing watch with a bone-spike trident suddenly shouted, "The Evil God has come! The Evil God has come again!"

A handsome, tall Atabian civil official emerged from a building, holding a transparent square stone tablet made of cells, its surface filled with rows of Gene Script.

The historian gazed at the hazy, colossal Evil God beyond the crystal wall of the sky. Excited and terrified, he wrote line after line:

"After the Great Flood, Purple Heaven destruction descended once again. Seeing that we people of the earth still had not been destroyed, the god beyond the heavens discovered that the great emperor of the Kingdom of Babelonia was leading mortals of the earth in constructing the Tower of Babel, and God became alarmed and enraged!"

Li Qing: "..."

Where exactly was this alarmed and enraged god? Though history was written by the victors, was it really alright to fabricate history so wildly right from the start? He looked toward the south of the kingdom, where an ordinary white tower foundation as thick as a water pipe and five or six centimeters high stood upon the ground.

Countless engineers were directing Sea Giants as they worked day and night to build this white tower, exhausting the strength of the entire nation.

This was the Tower of Babel, the weapon the Atabians intended to use to kill a god?

What principle was behind it? What were they planning to do?

"They've become proactive. They even want to strike back." Li Qing stood outside the Glass Window in silence.

Upon the watchtower.

A historian said with immense excitement:

"Just as we guessed, the Evil God is too powerful to descend into our world so easily!"

"Evil God! We discovered your wickedness long ago!"

"Unable to descend, you bloodthirsty and cruel being can only send heretics into our world to divide our rule and assassinate the great emperor of our world! To stop us from building the Tower of Babel!"

It seemed his church had already been exposed and was wanted by the entire kingdom.

"Look! It can only remain beyond the World Crystal Wall, out in chaos, its horrifying form an indescribable monster, watching us with evil eyes!"

"It has a bloated, enormous body. Its exterior is like an abyss, densely packed with gigantic pits that continuously ooze vast amounts of foul-smelling mucus, while within those pits stand black towers like clumps of dark fur."

Pits? Mucus?

Li Qing had just returned from working out, and he was indeed sweating all over.

Li Qing once again felt that their civilization had developed its linguistic field remarkably well.

Showing not the slightest fear or reverence, Li Qing casually took off his sweatshirt as if he were at home, revealing his toned and streamlined upper body. He brought over a chair, sat before the glass, and stared back at them.

A scholar, utterly fearless and with his spine straight, risked his life to record a passage of historical literature: "It is shedding its evil outer skin, revealing currents flowing all across its body, washing over countless tiny wriggling subjects upon its surface."

"Separated by a World Crystal Wall, when I gaze upon it, it seems to gaze back at me from beyond the world. It is indescribable, and its voice cannot be heard. Its violent consciousness alone is enough to drive us mad, while waves of chanting that shake heaven and earth emerge from its enormous mouthparts!"

Li Qing frowned slightly.

Before he could say anything.

At a far corner of the enormous Glass Window, someone had secretly breached the empire's border defenses from the other side and approached the outside of the wall.

They were a group of fanatical believers, radiating the aura of his followers as they shouted toward him, "God has descended! We pray to You and report the crimes Atabians have committed over these years, as well as their foundations!"

Well, the traitors had arrived.

Li Qing's expression immediately turned strange through the glass.

After all, this large Glass Window formed an enormous border. The empire appeared to have stationed people along the entire border line now, yet the church had still broken through.

In the distance, an imperial border guard squad rushed over. At its head was the Imperial Hero Herodotus, riding upon the shoulder of an Oceanic Giant as he charged forward:

"Quick! Quick! Stop those believers of the Evil God!"

"They have been bewitched by the Evil God's wicked whispers! They are betraying the Atabians and leaking information about our empire to the world beyond!"

"Capture them!"

The empire's elite force had arrived.

Li Qing frowned slightly. The empire's think tank truly had some skill.

They were certain that he, this outer god, could not descend into their world. They actually dared attack the believers who were reporting to him right before his eyes?

Boom!

He lightly tapped the Glass Window with his fingernail.

The entire pursuing force directly opposite the glass seemed to have suffered a magnitude-seven earthquake. The violent shaking of the glass sent these little ants tumbling to the ground in an instant.

The entire imperial royal guard fell into the ocean like dumplings tossed into a pot.

"Welcome, great Eternal God! True God who created the entire world! Lord of the Atabians!"

The leading pope who had successfully broken through the border line shouted in excitement. He and all the fanatical believers instantly fell to their knees, gazing at the vast and towering giant god beyond the heavens, whose bearing resembled that of the supreme Gods and Devils.

How powerful!

How majestic!

And the believers became even more fervent.

It had cast divine arts from beyond the world without even needing to enter. The entire World Crystal Wall had directly undergone a massive tremor, and an elite imperial guard squad had been defeated in an instant.

If they could welcome it across the World Barrier and have it descend into this world personally, this world would have no ability at all to resist such divine might!

God would descend and bring Judgment Day.

God would once more cleanse the Atabians' original sin.

"Tell me."

Having cleared away the pursuing royal guards, that supreme True Lord spoke from beyond the world, its majesty carrying a trace of gentleness. "What exactly is this Tower of Babel that the people of the earth are building together day and night?"