Milky Way Galaxy, Earth.
Space trembled slightly, then rippled as the hazy projection of a river enveloped the boundless starry sky.
Boom! Clang! Whoosh!
A towering figure over ten thousand kilometers tall strode barefoot along the river, holding a massive stone staff covered in mottled scars. His lake-sized eyes gazed into the distance.
"This... is Earth?"
The Chaos City Lord stood in the starry sky, gazing at the blue planet before him.
He stood right there, yet seemed not to belong to this spacetime. Neither the various detection instruments throughout the Solar System nor King Cang Yi on Earth noticed him at all.
"Rise!"
The Chaos City Lord slowly extended his enormous palm, and a strange, invisible ripple instantly enveloped the entire Solar System.
Then, within the enveloped region of spacetime, time began rapidly reversing. Everything raced backward.
Scene after scene flashed by in reverse. Everything seemed illusory, yet nothing appeared abnormal. Soon, he had traced back a thousand years, ten thousand years, and finally to the beginning of Earth's timeline.
There was nothing abnormal at all.
"That's not right!"
The Chaos City Lord's expression suddenly grew grave. He clearly remembered the records stating that Yang Zheng was an orphan adopted by his parents. Yet why did everything seem normal in the spacetime he had retraced?
"Again!"
Time reversed once more.
This time, the Chaos City Lord focused his perspective on Yang Zheng. The scenes quickly reached Yang Zheng's childhood, rewinding to when Wang Jiu brought the roughly three-year-old Yang Zheng back to the Canglan Residential Area.
Boom!
The entire scene froze instantly.
Everything-the planets' orbits, the movement of particles, the flow of thought, the passage of time-came to a complete halt. Then the entire stretch of retraced spacetime silently collapsed.
"The spacetime rewind... collapsed?"
The illusory spacetime he had