The First Red Ball

"Evolution."

Green text appeared on the color CRT television screen, its edges filled with irregular jagged square pixels. The old, blurry image quality was dizzying to look at.

It was incomparable not only to the holographic projections and immersive virtual reality images common on Earth in the mid-twenty-first century, but even to the 4K, 8K, and other high-resolution LCD displays of more than a decade ago.

It was an era even more backward than the time when Earthling Li Heng had been born, roughly equivalent to the late twentieth to early twenty-first century.

On an Earth where the national system had yet to be abolished and unified into a single Human Civilization, it was common for different countries to possess different levels of technology.

At the same time on Earth, humans living in primitive societies and information societies could coexist, with living standards separated by thousands of years.

Although the Earth where the dimwitted Steel Nail lived had no oligarchs like Googol Tech, its technological development and social structure were nearly identical to Earth in the mid-twenty-first century.

The Earth where Dao Venerable Jiang Hongqiu had been born was at least two eras behind his, separated by an entire generation.

From a certain perspective, Jiang Hongqiu was actually from his parents' generation.

"A girl more than twenty years older than me?"

Li Heng looked at the old color television before him and laughed inwardly.

Unfortunately, Jiang Hongqiu was not the sort of character who cared about age. Otherwise, that could have counted as one of her cute traits.

From the perspective of short-lived humans, ages like fifty or sixty brought an obvious sense of aging.

But after passing a certain threshold, reaching several hundred or several thousand years old, that sense of age faded away again.

Short-lived mortals who had