"You..."
Si Chen looked behind him, his expression grave. By now, the entire affair had even gone beyond his expectations.
"Why did you already exist at this point?"
He had always thought Taichu was the other side born when he fell as a star.
But the truth before him was nothing of the sort.
He had existed all along!
Taichu stood quietly in the void, his back to the enormous star.
Most of that face, identical to Si Chen's, was hidden in lightless shadow, making his expression impossible to discern.
Faced with Si Chen's questioning, he fell briefly silent.
A moment later, he seemed to suppress some emotion:
"Are you surprised?"
He chuckled, seemingly sinking into some memory. "Lone yang cannot grow; lone yin cannot give birth. At light's utmost extreme lies darkness."
"You and I have always coexisted as one. Where there is light, there is naturally shadow."
"Sharing one source, born alongside each other-why shouldn't we be?"
But after hearing him out, Si Chen said nothing.
He simply watched Taichu for a long time, and Taichu let him watch without making a move.
Then Si Chen slowly turned his head, casting his gaze once more over this space that represented the "origin of the universe."
More questions followed one after another.
If Taichu had already existed at this point, how could he have remained entirely unaware of his existence over five billion long years?
What made Si Chen's heart lurch even more was this space itself!
A million li, ten million li, hundreds of millions upon trillions of li...
Utterly empty.
Apart from the Origin Star before him, so enormous it could not be measured, and himself and Taichu.
There was nothing around them!
No nebulae nurturing life, no orbiting planets, no dust-not even the fundamental laws that