Prelude: A Chance Encounter 530 Million Years Ago

The Cambrian Period marked a new chapter in the evolution of life during the Phanerozoic Eon. In just a few million years, a vast array of multicellular organisms emerged, including the ancestors of nearly every animal alive today.

Among them was the [Kunming Fish]—

—it was a jawless fish, without a chin. Its skin had neither bones nor scales, and its body was shaped like a spindle.

Its torso had twenty-five muscle segments, each shaped like a [V].

The points of the [V]s on its belly faced backward, while those on its back faced forward.

—Over time, its twenty-five muscle segments evolved into thirty-three vertebrae, and it went from living in water to living on land.

It was our ancestor, the root of humankind.

More than 530 million years later, across this glittering river of time, we arrive in the western reaches of North America in 1840.

Two iron rails stretched across the Grand Canyon in Colorado. Chinese laborers' blood and flesh watered the ground as steam and forged steel gave the railroad its shape, while sweat and gold coins breathed life into it.

The scorching wind was like a drover swinging a whip, driving thick clouds northeast. It left the wasteland strewn with dust that looked like clouds or mist, which gradually turned into a deadly sandstorm during the drought at summer's end and autumn's beginning.

—And so the story begins here.

It begins with a [fish] struggling on the brink of death.

[Part ① · Lieutenant Roderick's Picnic Antics]

"Good! Hold still! Don't move! Jack Martin! My bride! Get that veil on straight!~"

The black muzzle of the gun glinted with the cold, leaden gray of a paper cartridge—its bullet waiting for the firing pin to pierce the powder.

Violence was the refrain of this untamed land. Even