"Early-stage stomach cancer still offers a chance for a cure. But now that it's entered the middle stage, your odds have dropped. Still, with aggressive treatment, there's hope."
"No, thank you. I'd like to be discharged."
It took Xu Zhi more than two hours to leave the hospital. Months of chemotherapy had left his hair sparse, his skin pale, and his body frail and hunched. He looked like a man hollowed out.
In the early stages of cancer, there's still a fighting chance—but once it progresses, survival becomes little more than a statistic.
There was no point continuing treatment.
He murmured the thought to himself.
Xu Zhi had been capable once—a reliable employee at a large foreign firm. But the five or six hundred thousand yuan he'd saved over the years had almost all been spent. Years of hard work had vanished into nothing.
He bought a high-speed train ticket, dragged his suitcase behind him, and returned to his hometown—Dongcheng, a quiet rural village surrounded by mountains.
It had been a year since he last came home. His family's estate stood alone—a small courtyard with an adjoining orchard. They used to be among the better-off families in the village, leasing over a hundred acres of land behind their home to grow fruit trees.
But six months ago, the lychee market collapsed. The price fell so low that most of the fruit rotted in storage. A scammer who claimed to have "connections" promised to help them sell the surplus—and disappeared with their money instead. They lost nearly a million yuan, and the blow sent his parents into illness they never recovered from.
Now, the orchard was abandoned. The workers had long since left. The trees had been cut down. Weeds ruled where fruit once grew.
Xu Zhi unlocked the door. Dust swirled up to greet him.
The familiar countryside of his childhood appeared before him once more. He set his luggage down and decided he would live out his remaining days here—quietly, in the place where his life began.
Rustle… rustle…
A faint sound reached his ears.
"Who's there?" He frowned. "Something in the courtyard?"
He stepped outside. In the overgrown weeds, he spotted a black beetle—the size of a bowl.
"So dark... what kind of insect is that?"
Xu Zhi reached toward it.
Whoosh—
In an instant, his consciousness was pulled into the beetle's glossy black shell. A torrent of images flooded his mind—the long, glorious history of a race.
A history of the Zerg.
They had arisen during a biological explosion on a green planet, akin to Earth's Cambrian era—an ancient insectoid race that developed intelligence, technology, and an almost limitless capacity for reproduction. They reached for the stars, conquering worlds, until they realized their universe was barren and small.
They broke through dimensions and entered a higher realm—the World of Longevity—only to be annihilated almost instantly. It was as if fate itself had decreed their defeat.
In their hive, the dying Hive Mother left a message filled with bitter regret:
"Evolution isn't about growing larger. True strength lies within.We went astray from the start—size is not the path to power.The smaller the form, the greater the potential for qualitative change.We failed.To whoever becomes the next Hive Mother—go back, and conquer the World of Longevity for me!"
When Xu Zhi awoke, he realized he had inherited the Zerg Hive itself.
From the memories, he understood that this ancient, warlike species had only one racial ability.
"Super-speed cell division."
It allowed them to burn their lifespans, forcing rapid cell division—accelerating evolution at an impossible rate. In moments, an entire species could be born, flourish, and die out, like flowers blooming and withering in fast-forward.
The Zerg Hive was a fortress of war.
When the Hive Mother released spores onto a barren world, they would spread across it like wildfire, transforming cells into new lifeforms. Within years, entire species evolved—all part of the Hive's collective army.
"This race... has infinite potential," Xu Zhi thought, his heart stirring for the first time in months.
After months of illness and chemotherapy, he had felt numb to life itself. But now—at death's edge—something in him awakened.
The urge to create. The spark of evolution.
"The last Hive Mother seeded countless worlds," he mused. "I don't have a planet... but maybe I could build a small evolutionary sandbox—right here, in my orchard?"
"If I use the Hive as a base, I can shape mountains, rivers, and oceans in miniature—let spores evolve freely within. A sandbox world... my own My World."
He laughed, a sound half-crazed, half-alive.
"If I can create a world—nurture civilizations and countless species—maybe… just maybe, they'll find a way to cure me."
Hope flickered where despair had ruled. Cancer—beyond saving by modern medicine—might meet its match in this strange, living experiment.
"I need to start building right away," he muttered. "Tools, soil, water… everything."
He dragged out an old tricycle from the shed. Pale and sweating, body trembling from exhaustion, he pedaled toward the nearest town.
He spent the last of his savings—thirty or forty thousand yuan—on farm tools, instruments, and equipment, hauling them home with a grin that hadn't touched his face in months.
He didn't have a planet, but he had a hundred-acre orchard—enough to build his world.
He hired a few workers to clear the weeds and trees. When the land was bare, he took up a hoe himself, sculpting hills, carving riverbeds, digging caves—building a miniature landscape by hand.
Then, using a high-temperature sprayer, he scorched the soil inch by inch, erasing all traces of existing life—so no earthly organisms would interfere with the evolution of his spores.
Microbes, of course, were too small to remove—but that was fine. The Zerg genes would consume and reshape them into something new.
"Life begins in the ocean. I'll need a sea," he said.
The old fish pond his parents had built still sat in the orchard. Xu Zhi expanded it with hired help, deepening the basin and filling it with water. Then he poured in salt—carefully matching the concentration of seawater.
But one challenge remained: his world wasn't a planet. It was a flat square, a hundred acres wide. The heavens were round, the earth square—just like in ancient myths.
"A world like the old legends…" he murmured.
It took him a week to finish construction, his frail body pushed to its limit. At last, he stood over his creation—a barren sandbox ready for life.
That morning, he connected to the Zerg Hive's sub-brain and began producing spores: the seed of evolution. He injected them into the central ocean.
"Cell division acceleration—ten thousandfold."
According to the Hive's measurement, one unit meant one year of natural evolution. Ten thousandfold acceleration meant that every day in his sandbox equaled ten thousand years.
Would new species emerge? Could he replicate Earth's Cambrian explosion—here, in his own backyard?
On the first day, the waters remained still.
On the second, nothing changed.
On the third, the fourth…
Finally, on the fifth day, the pond began to cloud. Microscopic life bloomed—single-celled organisms evolving into plankton.
The sandbox had begun to live.
For a rice field, a hundred acres was vast. But for an orchard—or for a world—it was just enough.