The Birth of Fish

Li Qing had spared no effort in destroying the civilization. After all, ultraviolet radiation and alcohol were currently the most conventional and convenient sterilization methods available. Other methods were either too expensive, too complicated to prepare within a few days, or too likely to attract the FBI's attention. He was Asian, after all.

How much alcohol had he sprayed this time?

The alcohol tank on his back had been completely emptied.

If his body had not become stronger, he would have been exhausted long ago from carrying such a huge pressurized tank around and spraying disinfectant inside.

Ah, life was not easy. Li Qing sighed.

The entire room had been thoroughly vaporized, enough to send them into the Vaporized Death Era. And even if they endured it, a one-centimeter-thick Alcohol Ocean had formed across the ground.

From this day onward, those Single Cells could forget about living on land.

It was all a Dead Sea!

The environment had grown harsh.

Moreover, this Dead Sea kept evaporating, forever shrouded in mist.

How could that possibly fail to kill them?

But Li Qing was a cautious man. He intended to keep asking friends around and get a large UV Lamp. When doing things, one could not dawdle like an old woman; villains could not die from talking too much.

He would not even give them a chance to catch their breath. This was all about thrills—wave after wave, killing them right at the gates of the Novice Village!

Wanted to develop?

They were dreaming.

"Hello, it's me. Right, the UV Lamp will be ready soon, yes? Make sure it's powerful enough—the kind that can scorch skin."

"No, I'm not trying to kill anyone. You've watched too much Conan."

As he walked out of the house, he continued on the phone. "Yeah, yeah, I've already quit my job. Once I'm done with this, I'll go back home."

The Kingdom of Atabia.

The Evil God beyond the world had suddenly and viciously unleashed a Great Flood, catching the entire civilization off guard and instantly wiping out more than seventy percent of its people.

Under the terrifying pressure of despair, even the kingdom's greatest engineer—the King of Atabia—could only lead a group of elites in fleeing atop flagellated mounts.

"What is that?"

During their escape, they discovered that the Mite Behemoths had not fled. They actually possessed resistance to the corrosive acid rain.

In this savage world where behemoths roamed freely, the Atabians were not at the top of the food chain.

Mites were among the savage behemoths that the Kingdom of Atabia had yet to conquer.

Like Tyrannosaurus Rex, they were enormous carnivores at the pinnacle of the food chain. A single one could destroy an entire city.

"As expected of a behemoth—the flood cannot kill it!"

Countless ministers were astonished.

The creature moved slowly through the alcoholic flood, leisurely and at ease. They watched with endless envy. Perhaps only such a behemoth could withstand the death flood that annihilated all things.

In truth, bacteria were single-celled lifeforms, while mites, no matter how small, were animals. Like spiders, they belonged to the arachnids. As multicellular organisms, their resistance to alcohol naturally far surpassed that of these thin-skinned bacteria.

"I have an idea."

The King of Atabia spoke.

"Since these behemoths can resist the death flood, I will study their skin structure and give us a layer of clothing to wear in the deadly acid rain!"

This king, a symbol of wisdom and great civilization, was an intelligent single-celled lifeform, and he had glimpsed a path to survival.

They had already researched most of the Mite Behemoths' DNA code. At this moment, he began absorbing skin fragments of mite genes, attempting to alter their skin.

Thus, their cell membranes began changing. From transparent, jelly-like humanoid flagellated bacteria, they transformed into humanoid creatures wearing clothes, becoming even more human-like.

The bacterial Single Cells, each with flagellated limbs, began to gain a rudimentary ability to resist alcohol infiltration.

Yet they still could not completely withstand the penetration of large amounts of alcohol—for example, being submerged in it.

They could defend against it, but only a little.

After all, alcohol was bacteria's nemesis. How could it possibly be a joke?

"If we cannot withstand it ourselves, then we will build a house."

Very quickly, they began modifying the skins of unintelligent wild bacteria scattered everywhere, turning each one into a square brick and piling them into a shelter.

This was their only chance of surviving the flood.

At this moment, as he watched the ministers pile up the single-celled house, the Emperor of Atabia thought to himself: if they stacked them one by one like this, when would the shelter ever be finished?

There was simply not enough time!

Though they had taken refuge on high ground, misty water was spreading everywhere. It would soon cool and sink, fully forming seawater and drowning them as well.

Under the oppression of death, he suddenly thought of a new possibility.

What if the Single Cells built it themselves?

What if the single-celled bacterial wall bricks transcribed themselves, reproduced more cells on their own, and built the brick walls themselves into a house?

He began modifying them again.

He had been researching this subject all along, but had never succeeded. Yet under the immense pressure of death, the Emperor of Atabia quickly succeeded.

Splash, splash.

Within the vast flood.

Square cellular bricks piled themselves up, becoming a huge multicellular shelter.

But the shelter gradually began to sway in the wind and rain, liable at any moment to be submerged and collapse into the colossal flood.

"Not enough, still not enough!"

Atabia shouted excitedly, his voice filled with pain. "It must be completely enclosed! This shelter must be a sealed cavity, isolated from the seawater outside!"

"And this shelter cannot remain sunk on the seabed forever. It would be wonderful if it could swim through the world-ending waters. Flagella! I can build flagella on it and try making it glide along the ocean floor!"

As the seawater completely engulfed them, flagella began to appear upon the multicellular house.

Gradually, the flood was about to arrive in full.

Not enough.

Still not enough!

The shelter's framework was too fragile. These chunks of flesh were falling apart; they could not endure this natural disaster. It had to be reinforced.

Then what supported the enormous fleshly structures of those gigantic Mite Behemoths and kept them from collapsing?

A skeleton.

Those Mite Behemoths had exoskeletons.

They had long since deciphered the mites' gene sequences, so they naturally understood the exoskeleton gene fragments as well. Thus, they wrote these mite gene fragments into the shelter, giving it an exoskeleton.

"Success! This ark is an underwater shelter! It will preserve Atabian civilization through the Great Flood!" The King of Atabia continued modifying it within the cavity.

"No, no! Still not enough! Inside mites are all sorts of auxiliary cells, nerve pathways, and muscles to help move their enormous bodies."

The King of Atabia suddenly entered some wondrous state of enlightenment. Facing the ministers around him, these bacterial Single Cells, he said:

"You will become this shelter's nerve cells. Stay in the cockpit and control the shelter's direction of movement!"

"You will become muscle cells and control the fins and flagella outside the shelter!"

Countless Single Cells became precise gears within the shelter. All the pilots worked together with one heart and one mind to keep it from collapsing.

But was this truly an ark?

Atabia had no idea what great creation he had built.

This was clearly a fish!

Its shape resembled one of the most primitive fish, the Coelacanth, which had survived four mass extinctions and loved crawling along the ocean floor.

Under terrifying pressure, this kingdom of single-celled organisms had finally propelled the evolutionary history of its biological civilization into the next level: multicellular life.

Yes.

Together, they formed a multicellular lifeform.

The natural evolution of cells required endless, dreary ages—Survival of the Fittest, the fit surviving.

Earth had used hundreds of millions of centuries of selection and strengthening, going from primitive flagellates to multicellular animals, then chordates, then higher chordates—vertebrates—and from fish among the vertebrates to amphibians, then reptiles, from which mammals and birds diverged.

But what about these intelligent Single Cells before them?

At this moment, they completely compressed a process of natural selection and evolution that had taken billions of years, making a tremendous leap.

Primitive flagellates—fish.

Without question, they had skipped the intermediate stages, madly replacing evolution and using their own wisdom in place of nature.

This was:

Replacing Heaven's will with their own will, replacing Heaven's heart with their own heart.

These intelligent Single Cells were evolving themselves, replacing nature's evolutionary will with their own ideas. They were born creators.

Fish began to be born in this Great Flood!

And perhaps very soon, in this laboratory, the multicellular fish would crawl onto land, become insects within this laboratory, and then transform from insects into mammals and even higher lifeforms.

Evolve, evolve, evolve!

Within the tiny room of the laboratory, Single Cells endowed with wisdom were madly driving the evolutionary tree forward. No matter what creatures appeared, it would not be surprising.

But no matter what.

"Forward!"

The King of Atabia issued an order to the ministers around him:

"You are all my trusted aides, the greatest engineers. Immediately follow this method and build your own refuge vessels. Go everywhere, ferry survivors to safety, save any of our people who may still be alive!"

Atabia, civilization's greatest sage, said slowly:

"They have not all died. Some must have taken refuge on high ground. And every one of our people is a natural engineer, capable of altering genes. They may also have observed the Mite Behemoths and evolved flood-resistant traits for themselves, barely clinging to life."

"Yes!"

"Yes, King Atabia!"

"We shall sail and use the arks to save refugees everywhere!"

"You are our god, our great and only True Lord!"

The ministers nearly wept. As their civilization faced extinction, they had watched helplessly as the Great Flood swallowed every city. What helplessness, what despair—and now, what a heroic miracle stood before them.

This wondrous sanctuary moved elegantly and vibrantly through the dead, silent torrents. It was the greatest unimaginable creation in this world.

And all of this miracle came from their king—Atabia, hailed as the most gifted existence among seventeen trillion engineers.

How terrifying were his wisdom and talent?

To put it simply, perhaps several billion people on Earth could produce one Einstein. But what about a population of seventeen trillion?

With such an immense population base, one could only imagine how terrifying the construction talent of the greatest engineer—the man whose name named the kingdom—must have been.

"The king will lead us to victory after victory!"

Masses of tiny fish, each roughly the size of mites, began spreading throughout the entire ocean.

The Kingdom of Atabia changed the form of its civilization as the environment worsened!

Every intelligent engineer appeared to be piloting a shelter and taking in refugees as a city lord. In truth, these engineers did not realize that they had evolved from Single Cells into fish swimming through the Alcohol Ocean!

At this moment, the King of Atabia and his ministers had no idea that they had made a stroke destined to be written in bold colors across history. Civilization had entered the era of higher life.

From the first sprout of life beneath the waters, they were destined to set sail and begin the greatest exploration—from the humble cradle of single-celled civilization to the vast multitude of life.

At this moment, all was silent, but the future was destined to record it for eternity.

In later ages, people opened the ancient scripture of God's creation. Within the Atabian Genesis Bible was an earliest mural from the records.

It depicted a great roaring emperor building an ark amid overlapping furious waves, leading his followers to preserve civilization's spark through the Great Flood. Beside it was an inscription:

[The Outer God, without cause, vented its wrath upon all living beings. The sky split open, thunder roared and stars scattered. Death mist descended from the heavens, and gathering floods destroyed the world. Atabia, Father God of Creation, built an ark and saved the remaining people. The ark crossed the sea and lived; thus the world first had fish.]

History called it the first biological mass extinction of the Hongwu Era.

Beneath a pavilion, a tall, handsome man gazing at the star-filled night sky closed the Bible.

"Father, how did fish come to be?"

"Fish? Ah, didn't you hear what the Bible just said? The ark crossed the sea and lived; thus the world first had fish."

"That's impossible. How could the Creator Gods of ancient times have been so exaggerated? The myths in there are all lies. How could adorable little fish have turned from ships? A group of people rowed ships with all their strength to save refugees, and while rowing, the ships turned into fish? It's only a fairy tale."