On a life-bearing planet of the Empire, a young man awoke from sleep. A discrepancy in his memories left him bewildered.
At that moment, he had two sets of memories in his mind. One was of the iron-blooded Empire, of his own life there—of being plunged into misery and suffering, of being utterly alienated by the world in both body and spirit, reduced to expendable fuel driving the world forward. It was like hell.
The other was of highly developed productive forces that had freed everyone from arduous labor. Basic welfare alone was enough to let people live well. Even after meeting their material needs, they still had ample personal resources for all kinds of entertainment. So long as one was not extravagantly indulgent but merely lived normally, the money left over each year was enough for an ordinary person to take three long-distance interstellar journeys...
Without a doubt, that was true paradise—a paradise belonging to humanity.
More importantly, the environment around him told him that he was not in the hellish Empire at this moment, but in paradise.
For the people of this Empire, such a living environment had simply always existed. While enjoying it, they did not feel it was especially precious. But now that he possessed another set of memories, he felt that everything before his eyes was incomparably precious.
As for the reason behind this discrepancy in memories, it was simply that once the numbers became large enough, even among the same species, some unusual lifeforms would always be born. Though they looked the same as their kind, whether in bodily structure or spiritual structure, they differed enormously from their peers.
Zhao Cheng had used fire to alter time and change the worldline, yet there was still one lucky person who, through a fortunate coincidence, had