Winter night, 2025.
Lin Xiao, a young man from the city, sat alone at a window seat in a café. Outside, the city's neon lights interwove with the faint starlight in the sky. The reflection on the cold glass showed his weary face.
He stared at his phone screen before finally sending a message, simple yet weighted with finality:
"I know your answer."
Lin Xiao set down his phone and took a sip of the coffee, which had long since gone cold. The concentrated bitterness spreading across his tongue was nothing compared to the complicated mix of emotions within him. A two-year long-distance relationship had finally reached its end.
His feelings were a battlefield: there was the bitterness and resentment of failure, a flicker of relief that it was finally over, but overriding everything was a profound sense of emptiness.
He glanced back at his phone. The chat screen had been untouched for days; not a single character of a response had come. Lin Xiao managed a self-deprecating smile, one that was colder than his coffee.
At this very moment, Lin Xiao had no idea what was about to happen to him. He was just an ordinary university student, a lover of history and science fiction, who never imagined he would one day cross time and space to stand alongside the true historical figures he idolized.
He finished the last drop of coffee, stood up, grabbed his phone, and stepped out of the café.
The sky tonight was oppressively dark, intensifying Lin Xiao's heavy fatigue. As he looked up at the brooding night, a strange, unnatural bolt of lightning suddenly tore across the heavens.
A deafening roar!
A powerful electric current instantly surged through his entire body, and all sensation was lost in a wave of blinding pain. Lin Xiao felt the world lose all mass, his consciousness wrenched away and sent hurtling, tumbling, and fast-traveling through an endless void.
The next moment, he awoke with a jolt.
He found himself standing inside an incredibly massive, cold, metallic city. Figures swarmed all around him, but they were not human—alien races stood shoulder-to-shoulder. In the air, glowing hovercrafts zipped past with a low whine.
Lin Xiao was utterly stunned. He realized with shock that he was no longer on Earth. He had been thrust into a brilliantly advanced, yet utterly foreign and dangerous civilization among the stars.