"Heng!"
"Wake up, hurry and wake up!"
"Sweetheart, your college entrance exams are almost here!"
"Don't be late now~"
Clear and warm, those familiar, everyday reminders, like morning sunlight, quietly echoed without warning through the core of Zhou Heng's consciousness, which was on the verge of being torn apart by an endless torrent of data, like a glimmer piercing through from an impossibly distant shore.
It was his mother's voice.
It was the voice of his mother, wearing a coarse cloth apron and still holding a spatula as she bustled back and forth between the narrow kitchen and the cramped living room.
For a living being on the brink of life and death, facing a high-dimensional Deadlock capable of grinding an entire great world to dust, entering a proper state of "Contemplation" under such extreme, life-threatening circumstances was actually an exceedingly difficult thing.
His nerves were stretched too taut. The slightest stray thought could trigger the rejection backlash of the "Sea of Stars Lord" Divine Rank rampaging outside his body, instantly smashing him to pieces.
Even someone as powerful as Zhou Heng had, for a time, felt an unprecedented, terrifying pressure as that three-second countdown ticked away in icy red digits before his retinas.
It was the instinctive trembling of life before utter catastrophe.
Yet the more this happened, the more Zhou Heng found himself thinking with increasing clarity and depth about everything in his previous life, about those memories he had thought had long since been weathered away by time during his endless campaigns.
Because, at this moment, he could finally rightfully reminisce about his parents and his forever lively, lovable little sister.
That was the absolute sanctuary he had buried in his deepest depths, which no system mechanism or Virus Variant could ever be allowed to touch.
"Big