"Uh..."
Lin Yi suddenly opened his eyes.
The veins on his forehead bulged, his vision was blurry, and every nerve in his body seemed to be screaming.
As a Star Vortex-level powerhouse, his tenacious will allowed him to suppress the physiological pain, but the violent shock originating from the return of his Soul Origin still caused him intense discomfort.
"Wheeze... wheeze..."
Lin Yi gasped for breath.
After a while, as his soul gradually adapted, his vision began to clear.
The first thing he saw was a ceiling painted with somewhat faded beige paint.
A single incandescent bulb hung forlornly in the center.
Outside the window, the bright sunlight unique to a summer afternoon streamed through the gaps in curtains printed with tiny pale-blue flowers, casting brilliant patches of light across the floor.
The cicadas cried out louder and louder, their noise grating on the ears.
This left Lin Yi momentarily dazed.
"I... wasn't I dead...?"
He instinctively tried to mobilize his source energy.
Yet the moment the thought arose, his body was completely empty.
Lin Yi's heart sank.
Then he took a deep breath and slowly surveyed the familiar yet strange surroundings.
Next, Lin Yi silently got to his feet and slowly walked toward the full-length mirror in the corner.
Reflected in the mirror was a slightly youthful face.
"I... this..."
Looking at his own younger self in the mirror, Lin Yi was momentarily lost in a daze.
"I... came back to life?"
The more one knew, the more one understood awe.
When Blue Star Civilization passed the Civilization Advancement Assessment and entered the ranks of Interstellar Civilization, Lin Yi had been one of the few Star Core-level individuals it possessed. He thus obtained the qualifications to become an outer member of the Galactic Mercenary Alliance and joined the still-weak "Relyat" Mercenary Group.
After over six thousand years of tempering through blood and fire, he had arduously advanced to the ninth rank of the Star Core level. Under the guidance and care of Commander Relina, who had already broken through to the Star Domain level, he had fortuitously advanced to the Star Vortex level.
However, while he was traveling to Zi Chen Star, the capital of the Purple Gold Star Union, which held jurisdiction over Blue Star, to undergo an on-site level assessment and apply to elevate Blue Star from the lowly status of a "Resource Star" to an "Administrative Star" capable of developing normally...
He had merely happened to witness the Ziles Family of the Purple Gold Star Union hunting a Rare Grade exotic beast, the "Casro Horned Beast," and had consequently been crushed to death by one of their Star Domain-level elders as easily as an ant.
Lin Yi still clearly remembered that powerless despair.
His supposedly mighty body had been erased at the level of every fundamental particle composing matter, silently crumbling away.
And his consciousness had been like a guttering candle in the wind, gently extinguished by an irresistible force of rules.
But at the instant Lin Yi thought he could only sink into the abyss of death with his despair and unwillingness, he suddenly felt an immense, irresistible force. It was like a giant hand extended by the universe itself, seizing his Soul Origin, which was about to scatter, from the brink of annihilation.
Immediately afterward, he seemed to have been forcibly stuffed into a fragile, shoddy vessel. The awakening of every cell was accompanied by tearing protests.
Only then did Lin Yi realize that he had come back to life.
He had returned to... a place both familiar and strange.
Lin Yi lowered his head and looked at his hands.
They were the hands of a teenager, with long fingers and healthy-colored skin.
There were no marks left by years of wielding weapons, only faint calluses from holding a pen.
After remaining silent for a moment, Lin Yi slowly raised his head and once again examined his surroundings carefully.
The cramped room held a single bed against the wall. A somewhat peeling old desk was cluttered with books and examination papers, while a basketball with its surface partly worn away lay in the corner.
Several outdated posters of sports stars were pasted on the wall, along with a glass photo frame containing a picture of a family of three.
Lin Yi's gaze remained fixed on the photograph.
It showed his parents, much younger than in his distant memories, and a slightly youthful-looking boy wearing a high school uniform.
Lin Yi remained silent for a long while before slowly exhaling a long breath of stale air.
Then he slowly walked to the window and yanked open the curtains.
Blinding sunlight poured in at once, making him squint.
Several old residential buildings enclosed a small courtyard, where several luxuriant Chinese parasol trees had been planted.
A few somewhat worn bicycles and electric scooters were parked beneath the shade. Several children in tank tops and shorts chased one another past the building below, leaving behind strings of carefree laughter.
Of course, there was also the extremely annoying fluff from the parasol trees.
In the distance was the city's uneven skyline, with several newly built high-rises reflecting the gleam of their glass curtain walls in the sunlight.
There were no enormous construction excavators roaring endlessly, no gray-yellow smog blanketing the sky above Blue Star, and certainly no extraction pumps thrusting down from the orbital ring, one after another, into the foundational material of Blue Star's crust...
Everything overlapped with that distant, blurry summer afternoon buried deep in his memories.
The powerful Soul Origin of a Star Vortex-level powerhouse was like a furnace thrown into boiling fire.
Countless scenes blurred by the washing of endless time surged forth like a flood breaking through a dam.
Lin Yi now knew exactly where he was.
This was Blue Star seven thousand years ago...
It was... his home.
Lin Yi slowly took two steps back and leaned his back against the wall.
The cold touch seeped through his thin T-shirt, but it could not suppress the thoughts churning within him.
The relief after finishing the Gaokao, the delight of receiving his admission notice from Qingteng University, his parents' happy yet nagging worries about tuition and living expenses...
And also, that piece of...
His hand instinctively moved toward his chest.
His fingertips touched a hard outline beneath the fabric.
Lin Yi's heart jolted.
He abruptly lowered his head, his fingers trembling slightly as they hooked it out.
It was a jade pendant slightly larger than a coin. It was a deep blue-green color, incredibly warm and understated, like a frozen galaxy.
The jade itself was not translucent. Instead, it possessed a weighty sense of sedimentation, as though it had gathered unfathomably distant ages. A dark-red cord passed through it, and it hung quietly against his chest.
The Family Heirloom Jade!
The Soul Origin of a Star Vortex-level powerhouse, tempered and refined through endless years, instantly activated. Like the most precise instrument, it began rapidly searching and locating.
The River of Time spanning seven thousand years, along with countless long memories of battles and wandering, compressed into a bolt of lightning that tore through space-time and precisely anchored itself to this moment.
"This jade..."
Lin Yi murmured inwardly. He remembered now. It was today that he received the Qingteng University admission notice he had long awaited.
And it was also today that his mother, Zhou Jinghua, personally handed him this heirloom jade of the Lin Family.
At this moment, his mother had given him the Ancient Jade and was preparing to go out, while he had just hung the pendant around his neck and was about to take an afternoon nap.
At first, Lin Yi had not noticed anything special about the jade.
It was only later, after he reached the Star Core level and gained much greater control over his body, that he discovered it could make his thoughts circulate just a tiny bit faster than usual. It offered negligible yet real assistance when it came to studying and understanding complex matters.
At the time, Lin Yi had not taken it seriously, believing it was merely an ordinary treasure.
Until once, when he encountered a powerful enemy and suffered serious injuries, he was startled to discover that even his protective battle armor had been torn apart, while this Ancient Jade remained completely unharmed.
After that, Lin Yi had tried all kinds of methods to investigate its secrets, and had even attempted to destroy it.
The result was naturally failure across the board. The jade was unbelievably sturdy.
Lin Yi knew that this had to be an extraordinarily precious treasure and did not dare show it to others lightly.
Yet he had exhausted every method at his disposal without uncovering its purpose.
As time passed, he could only regard it as a strange relic whose purpose was unknown, a reminder of his homeland. He wore it close to his body at all times, hoping that one day fate would arrive and he would discover its use.
But now, he, who should have been directly annihilated by the Rule Domain power of a Ziles Family elder, had inexplicably been reborn seven thousand years in the past.
Lin Yi had a clear understanding of himself. Given the enormous population of the Human Race across the stars, there were already many Star Domain-level individuals, let alone mere Star Vortex-level ones. Why would he be able to return from death?
Moreover, the point in time to which he had returned was precisely the moment after he put on the Ancient Jade.
As he thought, his fingertips habitually rubbed the Ancient Jade.
This was a habit Lin Yi had developed over many years.
Whenever he needed to comprehend the rules of the universe or encountered a problem that required solitary contemplation, he would rub the Ancient Jade.
It was partly because of its ability to slightly enhance his comprehension, but even more because it made him feel that he had not drifted too far from home.
But in the next instant, a sudden change occurred.
The Ancient Jade in his palm, which had accompanied him through endless years and was indestructible, trembled slightly without warning.
Immediately afterward, an extremely faint cracking sound rang out.
"Crack..."
The sound was so soft it seemed like an illusion.
Lin Yi's expression darkened slightly. He opened his palm and focused his gaze on it.
A hair-thin crack was silently spreading across the surface of the deep blue-green Ancient Jade.
This was not an ordinary physical fracture. It was more like some structure within the jade, one that had endured an unknown span of time, had finally reached its limit at this moment.
The crack spread at an astonishing speed. In the blink of an eye, it covered the entire Ancient Jade like a web.
The next moment...
Poof!
A barely audible muffled sound.
Under Lin Yi's solemn gaze, the Ancient Jade, which even his full strength had been unable to damage in the slightest, silently turned into a small pile of incredibly fine blue-green powder in his open palm.
The powder was fine as dust and shimmered with a restrained, profound light, as though it contained fragments of stars.
The old dark-red cord also snapped inch by inch and scattered apart.
The entire process happened so quickly and so completely that Lin Yi's palm had not even had time to sense the slightest change in temperature before the Ancient Jade, which had existed for an unknown number of years, had completely turned to ashes.
Only a small pile of powder, carrying a strange chill, remained in his palm.
Then even the powder slowly vanished, as though the Ancient Jade had never existed.
Time seemed to freeze at this moment.
Lin Yi remained stunned for a moment before sighing inwardly.
"Was it you... who saved me and brought me back...?"
He lowered his head and looked at his now-empty hands. After remaining silent for several seconds, he suddenly raised his head.
His gaze pierced through the wall, as though he wanted to look toward some distant place.
In the end, Lin Yi's gaze settled on the old electronic alarm clock in the corner of the desk.
Its LCD screen glowed faintly.
[July 16, 2027, Friday, 13:27]
"This point in time..."
Lin Yi silently compared it with his memories for a moment, his expression solemn.
"Seven days!"
"Only seven days remain before the Civilization Advancement Assessment that will decide our fate..."
Before you continue