Lin Yi had been sitting in front of this telescope for six hours.
This observatory in the desert was one of the driest places on Earth, making it ideal for stargazing.
At an altitude of thirty thousand feet, there was barely a trace of moisture. The Milky Way looked like spilled grains of salt scattered across the entire sky.
3:17 a.m.
He rubbed his aching eyes and checked LIGO's gravitational-wave data for the fourth time.
The fluctuating curves on the screen were as quiet as a sleeping cat.
Ever since GW190521, the black hole merger event detected two weeks ago, the universe had given him no more surprises.
"It shouldn't be like this."
He muttered to himself, took off his glasses, and wiped the lenses with the corner of his shirt.
Twenty-seven-year-old Lin Yi was a postdoctoral researcher in a university physics department, specializing in gravitational-wave astronomy.
His advisor said he was a genius. He said he was merely a lucky gambler.
A gambler betting that, at some moment, the universe would reveal the secrets hidden within the folds of spacetime.
The coffee on the table had long since gone cold.
He rose and walked to the window, looking out at the wasteland beyond, dyed silver-white by starlight.
The telescope dome glimmered faintly beneath the moonlight, like a shell lying on the ground.
Then he saw it.
In the direction of Orion, a point of light was rapidly brightening.
At first, he thought it was a satellite, but the increase in brightness followed none of the known laws of celestial bodies. Exponential—no, power-law—no, that curve was like—
"A spacetime curvature singularity."
Lin Yi rushed toward the computer almost instinctively.
Data flooded into the sensors at an astonishing rate. The gravitational-wave detector's readings began to jump wildly, the frequency soaring from several dozen hertz, beyond the range of human hearing, into the ultrasonic region, and then—
The screen went black.
Every light in the observatory went out at the same instant.
Lin Yi froze for a second.
That was not a power outage.
He could feel it. That trembling came from someplace deeper—not from the ground, but from spacetime itself.
It was as though someone were violently pulling at an enormous sheet of cloth, twisting and warping the entire universe in the process.
Then he saw the sky.
The Milky Way was spinning.
No, it was not spinning—it was... being torn apart.
An enormous fissure stretched across the heavens, from Orion all the way to the Big Dipper, as if someone had slashed open a painting with a knife.
Something inside the rift was disappearing.
Was that a—city?
No, far larger than a city. It was—a continent?
No. Its outline kept shifting, as though it were falling from three dimensions into two, from existence into nonexistence.
Everything Lin Yi knew about physics was incapable of explaining what he saw.
Yet at that moment, an absurd thought suddenly flashed through his mind—
That was a world.
A world being swept away.
The rift began to spread.
The gravitational-wave detector's readings had surpassed every measurable range. Those were no longer "ripples." It was a tsunami, the collapse of spacetime itself.
Lin Yi did not run.
For someone who studied gravitational waves, being scared into running away by one would have been the greatest irony.
He merely turned around and looked through the glass window at that point of light as it drew nearer and grew larger, until the entire world turned white.
In his final moment, he remembered the first time his father had taken him to look at the stars, when he was six years old.
"Dad, why do stars shine?"
"Because they're burning."
"Does that hurt them?"
His father had not answered.
It was somewhat like sinking into the deep sea.
That was Lin Yi's first thought when he regained consciousness.
There was boundless darkness all around him. No up, no down, no light, no sound. He could not even feel his own body.
But I'm still thinking.
Descartes was right. I think, therefore I am.
He did not know how long passed. Perhaps a second, perhaps ten thousand years. The darkness began to recede.
He could feel his existence, his limbs, and his heart beating.
Then he felt light.
His eyelids were heavy, as if glued shut.
He used all his strength to open his eyes, and then—
A face.
An unfamiliar face looking down at him.
In 0.1 seconds, Lin Yi's brain processed the information: female, apparently in her twenties? Young and very beautiful.
Long dark-green hair, dark-green eyes, delicate features, a gentle expression. She was—smiling at him?
No.
Wait.
This was wrong.
He abruptly tried to sit up, only to discover that his body would not obey him at all.
His limbs were limp as noodles, and his neck could not support the weight of his head. He could only wave a hand futilely like a drowning man.
That hand—
That hand was a baby's hand.
Lin Yi froze.
He stared at that hand for a full three seconds: five short little fingers, rosy skin, and fingernails as tiny as grains of rice.
He tried to make a fist. Those five fingers slowly curled, like five clumsy caterpillars.
"...?"
Lin Yi's mind went blank.
"He's awake! He's awake!"
The woman said delightedly, her voice as soft as a feather. "Ming, come quickly! The child is awake!"
Ming?
Lin Yi laboriously moved his eyes and saw a tall man approach.
The man wore a dark-blue robe. He had a composed bearing and deep eyes as he looked down at him.
"He really is awake."
The man said, with a trace of surprise in his voice, "This little fellow is tough. He was abandoned in the woods for an entire night, yet he actually survived."
Woods? Abandoned? Survived?
Lin Yi's mind began racing wildly.
Where am I?
What happened?
That gravitational wave, that rift, that disappearing world...?
"Ya Li," Yun Ming said, "are you sure you want to adopt him? Our identities are unusual, and this child's origins are unknown. What if—"
"There are no what-ifs."
The woman named Ya Li said softly, holding the baby in her arms a little tighter. "He was crying there, with no one by his side. I couldn't just ignore him."
She lowered her head and lightly touched Lin Yi's forehead with her own. Her smiling eyes curved into crescents. "Little fellow, from now on, your name will be Yun Jingheng. All right?"
Yun Jingheng?
Lin Yi—what was he supposed to call himself now?
He opened his mouth, wanting to speak, to ask where this was, to ask who that woman was, to ask what that rift had been.
But all that came from his mouth was a baby's cry.
"Waa—"
Three days later, Lin Yi finally accepted that absurd possibility.
He had transmigrated.
More precisely, he had transmigrated to a place called Douluo Continent.
It took him an entire day to recover from that realization.
Douluo Continent?
The Douluo Continent from those novels?
The Douluo Continent with martial souls, soul beasts, and soul masters?
This had to be fake, right?
He stared at the ceiling, repeatedly wondering whether he was dreaming.
But everything that had happened over the past three days—being fed milk, having his diapers changed, being carried around—told him this was no dream.
This was a reality even more absurd than a dream.
The woman who had saved him was named Ya Li, an elder of Shrek Academy's Sea God Pavilion.
The man was named Yun Ming. He was her husband and also the Pavilion Master of Shrek Academy's Sea God Pavilion.
Lin Yi... all right, Yun Jingheng had spent three days piecing this information together from their conversations.
Shrek Academy.
Yun Ming.
Ya Li.
If his memory was correct, then in Douluo Continent III: Legend of the Dragon King, those two were—
Wait.
Lin Yi suddenly thought of something.
If this was Douluo Continent, and if this was the era of Legend of the Dragon King, then—
That rift.
That disappearing world.
In the original story, the Douluo God Realm had been swept away by a spacetime turbulence.
That upheaval had affected the entire Douluo Planet. Soul beasts were driven into desperate straits, the Abyss Plane took advantage of the opening, and the curtain rose on the whole story.
And he, Lin Yi, a physicist who studied gravitational waves, had likely witnessed the moment the God Realm disappeared.
No, not merely witnessed it.
He had been swept into it.
That ripple through spacetime had brought him from Earth to this place.
Yun Jingming closed his eyes and let out a long breath.
Absurd.
Too absurd.
He remembered what he had thought three days ago: I am a physicist. I believe in objective facts. I believe in scientific laws that can be repeatedly verified.
And now?
Now he lay in the body of a baby, held by a woman named Ya Li as she fed him milk.
Outside the window, two old men were glowing all over, with nine rings following them as they flew wildly through the sky. They cursed nonstop, and occasionally crashed into each other...
Science?
Science could go to hell...
Before you continue