By the riverbank, flowing water murmured, endlessly washing over the stones on the streambed.
Among all those stones, one pebble stood out.
Jade-white all over and about the size of a fist, it narrowed slightly at both ends. At first glance, it somewhat resembled a handsome man raising both hands, possessing a certain lifelike charm.
Yet out in the wilderness, a stone was just a stone, worth nothing.
The villagers who frequented the stream were all busy making a living and had no time to notice the stones beneath it. Only the children playing nearby occasionally searched for stones to skip across the water.
"Oh, this stone is so pretty!"
A little yellow-haired girl excitedly picked the stone up from the streambed.
Hearing the childish voice, Chen Beiwu tried to open his eyes, only to find utter darkness before him.
"This-piece-of-junk-"
In his daze, Chen Beiwu seemed to hear a child speaking, but the voice came and went, so indistinct that he could not make out the words at all.
After a while, as the child's voice disappeared, everything fell silent again, and Chen Beiwu suddenly slipped into a half-asleep state.
In this state, he lost all six senses, unable to feel his own existence or perceive anything outside.
Time seemed to lose all meaning at that moment!
Ten years!
A hundred years!
A thousand years!
Ten thousand years!
The water gradually wore away the edges of the pebble that resembled a jade carving, changing its shape before it was buried deep underground.
Eventually, someone happened to dig it up. Piled together with other stones, it was processed into the kind of brick that only poor households used.
These bricks were not used to build houses. Instead, through a twist of circumstance, they became materials for a bridge in a