Chapter One
I, Huang shing, sit in the interstellar vessel, speeding through space at a velocity no human has ever known.
Today, I tell myself,
I will make that leap.
Today, I will be free from the shadow of always falling behind.
I will be the first—I will take humanity to a new frontier.
Tears well up in my eyes as I speak to myself. The screen in front of me blinks: five minutes to impact. My heartbeat quickens as flashes of my life race by.
I was born in the 1930s, the first in my family to see beyond the horizons. We were a nomadic tribe, wandering, never settling, but I longed to follow my country. I wanted to fight for my nation. Yet, because of my frail body, I was cast aside.
Instead, I turned to my greatest passion: science. I became a scientist for my country. For reasons I never fully understood, I never wielded a weapon in war.
But I made breakthroughs—pioneering intercontinental missiles, developing the technology to communicate at the speed of light,I gave humanity its first outer-space object, a beacon that reached beyond the Earth's atmosphere.
I reflected on this discovery as I thought, but it was my last great breakthrough—the one that finally gave me peace.
After that, I believed the burden of advancing humanity lay with my students.
I dedicated myself fully to teaching, shaping the future for the next generation.
I taught for ten years, until one student surpassed me. His name was Kaush, notorious for his chaotic, radical ideas—ideas I once thought impossible, ideas I never dreamed would come to life in my own time.
I joined him at a celebration party, marking his discovery of a new form of computing.
Kaush sat at the main table, while everyone else had gone home. I arrived late, and he smiled at me, saying, "I knew you'd be late, sir—come, have a piece of cake."
He was beaming, and I felt a joy I'd never known—that someone from my class had gone beyond me.
I walked over to Kaush and laughed, telling him, "You were the student I never expected to surpass me.
I never imagined you'd invent something so wild—so timeless. What did you name it? Quantum computing. It was the wildest dream—and you made it real.
That day, we were both immersed in nostalgia, and I experienced one of the happiest moments I had in a long time.
We drifted from topic to topic until Kaush said to me, "Sir, before my discovery, I truly believed that atoms had ninety percent empty space between them.
Everyone thought it was empty, just a void, but I believed something more. New discoveries are showing that a substance called antimatter might fill that space.
Matter is only a tiny percentage of the universe. I believe antimatter is simply the light we can't see. As humans, we only perceive 0.3 percent of all light. We see just seven colors—those of the rainbow—but there are millions more beyond.
Our eyes weren't built to see them. So, our world is just a narrow band of light. But now, it might be possible—there could be a matter beyond what we detect.
Our world, as we know it, might just be a sliver, and antimatter could be the spectrum of light we simply can't see. It's possible—right here, right now—that we are talking, and in another spectrum, others just like us sit and speak, in a world we can't perceive. Why can't it be possible?
As I watched the years pass, the effects of aging began to weigh on me. By 2030, I crossed my one hundredth year, and I knew my time was short.
I began preparing myself for that final embrace with death.
But one of my students, a biologist, came to me with a medicine he believed could extend life. He had tested it on red dogs and other animals, and his results were promising—yet the government refused to let him test it on humans.
The day before, he came to me in tears. "The greatest hurdle for a scientist," he sobbed, "is the restrictions imposed by society. This is why we only make discoveries in 2030.
If those barriers didn't exist, I believe the greatest minds could have made these discoveries a thousand years ago, and we would be a civilization a thousand years more advanced."
I saw the pain in his eyes. I knew it would not be easy to gain permission—this was a medicine tied to a 90 percent mortality rate in trials. But I asked him to inject me.
He was horrified,
but I pleaded, "I am going to die anyway. At least let me be useful to science, to my students."
He cried, because he was just like me—a frail dreamer, overlooked by every other professor.
Biology was never my field,
but I saw him working tirelessly.
I remember a rainy day when, while his peers splashed in puddles, he sat in the corner scribbling notes. I invited him to join my classes. In my class, he felt seen, and I encouraged him throughout his life. But now, he wasn't ready to take that step—to inject me.
I told him, "How can the government believe in you if you don't believe in your own medicine? I was the first to carry my missile to the my home,believed it would not explode before reaching its destination and launched it from my home. So you must believe in your medicine, too."
I set out to discover a material—an advanced battery—that could hold far more charge and fill up as quickly as a diesel tank. I knew this was the only way forward—because as long as fossil fuels remained our primary energy source, we were limited. But if I could create a battery that charged quickly and held immense power, it would unlock a new era. Electricity would become simpler, more accessible. Space travel would accelerate, because a lighter, solid-state battery would enable aircraft to use energy more efficiently. I believed this would be the key to reaching the stars—taking us, finally, into the galactic future.
But it took me a whole decade to achieve it, and in my final year, I began feeling the weight of aging once again.
The world grew terrified—if I died, everyone who had taken the medicine might also perish.
The company that had grown wealthy from selling this life-extending drug feared the same.
Many powerful, influential people—on the verge of death—had taken the medicine.
If I died, it was believed, it would be their fate as well. In a desperate attempt to save me, the company—who had grown rich from my discovery—kidnapped me, seizing me without my consent to experiment on my body.
And it robbed me of the final discovery.
I was on the brink of unlocking the new material, the battery, when they abducted me from my lab.
I was ready for the final test that day—strapped to a stretcher, unheard, my voice lost. For a year, during the last year of that decade, I suffered—through experiments, unimaginable pain. And in that time, they granted me another fifty years—this time, discovering a new medicine, one that could prolong life even further.
In the end, the discovery lifted the death sentence from everyone who took the medicine after me, so I could live longer—and with me, countless others found hope.
I was granted the title of humanity's elder, the oldest living human—a title that became the heaviest burden of my life.
When I returned to my lab,
I discovered that during that lost year,
a young scientist had already made the breakthrough and shared it with the world.
They stole my discovery.
Yet, I endured.
My last hope was to give the world one final step into the future, but that opportunity was ripped from me.
I realized the greatest mistake of my life was that I never understood the human heart. I dedicated everything to science, but the human heart—its complexity—was always greater. If I had known that, I might have navigated life differently. In those last fifty years, I no longer wanted to be with those wretched creatures.
Once again,
I surrendered myself to science, hoping to live quietly in peace, so I wouldn't have to face their greed again.
But again and again, I was granted more lives—two hundred, five hundred—until I reached one thousand seven hundred years. For the world, the aging limit was three thousand, but because of my frail body, I was only half that. From that day, I lived as the oldest person on Earth—the brightest beacon.
But once that limit was discovered, life could never be extended beyond three thousand years.
It was a cap on the human body.
Yet, once that fear left, people began to explore again—centuries ahead of their time. They shifted from prolonging life to transferring the human mind into new bodies.
But all I ever wanted was to die.
I always missed that chance to discover, because someone always got there before me.
And when the age of artificial intelligence arrived,
discovery became even harder. So, I began to dream—dream of pushing humanity forward in ways no one thought possible.
Discovery, I realized, is like a tree. You go from the trunk to a branch, but some branches were overlooked—ignored as impossible.
So, I began working on the impossible once again—the theory that antimatter is simply hidden matter we can't perceive.
I built the fastest vehicle ever made.
Today, I am one thousand seven hundred years old—nothing more than an old, frugal inventor—but today, I might discover it.
Because I found a place in this vast galactic expanse—a region that vibrates differently.
I think there is something here, a shift in the frequency of space, making it possible to work with that hidden matter.
So, I travel once more, in the fastest vehicle humanity has ever built.
At the moment of impact, I activated my computers, my machines, and began calculating the nature of the material, the frequency we were approaching.
As we drew nearer,
the vibrations became clearer,
and the calculations began to yield results. I identified a material—so similar to what we know, yet so profoundly different.
I input the numbers into the machine, and it began to slow, but simultaneously, it vibrated at the same frequency.
That was the key—to blend in with this region. At the moment of impact,
I passed through the barrier—the object that held the frequency—and entered a world beyond imagination.
The air was different; the world was transformed. There, I realized I had no age limit. I discovered "mana" for the first time—a material absent from our world, the force that limits us.
It was the reason our discoveries always stalled—why the human body could only live three thousand years.
This was the life force that birthed us, but here, it was abundant.
My body, made to use the smallest life force since birth, now thrived on it.
Just by breathing this mana-filled air, I felt like an athlete on the cusp of gold. My body surged with energy, and I sensed that my age limit lifted.
Here, I could live infinitely.
My body, once bound by limits, was now a vessel of endless possibility.
But suddenly,
I was jolted awake—I realized I couldn't breathe.
The air had stopped filling my lungs,
and I frantically searched for an air mask nearby. I stumbled into a capsule, grabbed it, and filled it with air, allowing myself to breathe once more.
I realized that, in theory, I could live infinitely—but only if I could avoid death itself.
As long as I could not be killed, I could survive forever. This realization brought me back to reality. I checked my condition and realized the machine that had strapped me allowed me to vibrate at the same frequency and enter this world.
Yet, despite all my efforts, I had only built about 70 to 80 percent of the machine and only 50 percent of the vehicle was completed for this journey.
The rest—half of it—remained stranded on the other side of the barrier,
unable to pass through,
since aligning atoms to pass through was an unimaginably rare feat—one in a trillion.
It was a near-impossible alignment, and that failure left half of me behind.
I felt a dull, numbing pain—this world was full of life essence, but I still knew I had lost a great part of myself.
My body was severely damaged, but I survived—perhaps because this world was filled with mana.
Most of me stayed here, so I strapped myself into a medical pod and began searching for any planet with oxygen.
Soon, I found one—just 20 light years away. I locked into my medical pod, sealed my core machine, my intergalactic vessel, and I plunged into deep sleep, letting the journey carry me toward that distant world.
As my machine gently woke me,
I saw that I was nearing a small planet brimming with life.
I deployed my scouts—tiny drone-like vessels equipped with advanced sensors. These scouts traveled ahead of my galactic vehicle, ensuring we avoided disturbing any life or encountering powerful alien civilizations.
Each scout relayed crucial data—they were small, but filled with advanced tech, capable of listening in for kilometers.
As the scout gathered intel, it revealed a world vastly different from my own.
My home was a beacon of intelligence, technology, and passion, but this planet was dull—a medieval world trapped in stagnation.
Across the centuries of my travels, I had seen many alien cultures in their medieval phases, but this was different—this was a human world,
frozen in time for over five thousand years of history. Yet, within this stagnation,
there was a breed of humans—cultivators. They could control the elements—some flew, others conjured fire, some harnessed mana, like the heroes from comics. I named them cultivators.
As I observed them, I realized their world was a reflection of the Chi from the fictional worlds I once read about.
I delved deeper with my drones and pinpointed a cultivator—arrogant, who frequented the town to indulge in vice—drinking, fighting, harming innocents who couldn't see his power.
I followed him to the mountain where he trained.
My scout mapped everything—hundreds of disciples trained there. I took notes, but then, in a flash, my scout was destroyed—smashed by a sword flung by a cultivator of a higher realm.
I halted further scouting to avoid drawing attention, and instead, I found a secluded area near mortal villages—no cultivators in sight.
I landed, camouflaged my vessel in the forest, and called my scouts back out. For the first time, I stepped beyond my spaceship and into the world of cultivation.
At last, I discovered something that could push humanity forward.
I stepped out of my spacecraft and began to meticulously document everything I saw. I was filled with a prime of curiosity. Even a humble blade of grass beneath my feet was healthier than the food I ate back home. The herbs in this forest were equal to the superfoods I once relied on.
Here, normal mortals lived around a hundred years—which may not sound impressive at first, but when you consider this world is stuck in a medieval era—a time when people only lived 30 or 40 years—this was astonishing.
Here, humans doubled, even tripled, their lifespan without any technology—no hygiene, no special diets—just surviving in a harsh world. Yet, despite this miracle
After documenting all this, my heart began to pound faster and faster. It was inconceivable why, until I realized that I had found a new purpose. I had discovered something vast, and now I just wanted to bring this knowledge back to the world I came from, to tell people about this incredible place, this amazing discovery, and once again push humanity further into what was once thought impossible. Once more, I was filled with youthful vigor.