The Rust-Colored Dawn of the Sixth Epoch tore open the sky screen two thousand years earlier than the prophecy foretold.
As the scarlet wasteland swallowed seventy percent of Blue Star's land, Zhou Yin saw a tear in time in the shadows of a ventilation shaft beneath the alloy domes of the Ark City Chain: numbers flickered across a titanium alloy fragment, flowing backward. He could see the golden veins of source particles and hear whispers from deep within the evolving ranks of the ghouls, yet he could not see his own fate as an "echo of time."
Leopard Haiyu had been ravaged by the ghoul virus, yet evolved in reverse. Blood-red patterns crawled across his left eye. Was his "absolute adaptability" a gift from the gods, or a curse that would drag humanity into an even deeper abyss? As the seed of evolution grew hot in his chest, he had to make a choice harder than death: become humanity's savior or a monster.
Song Hao's stellar trajectory calculator always pointed toward the heart of the wasteland. The fragment engraved with an hourglass gear was connected not only to the epoch logs Zhou Jie had left behind, but also to the secret of the Cross-Epoch Alliance. The Mandate of Heaven tablets from the Second Epoch, the resonance of the Nine Tripods from the Fourth Epoch, and the quantum immortality device from the Fifth Epoch were all waiting to be awakened.
Meanwhile, Bo Luoyu's second heart throbbed in the darkness. This ambitious man, implanted with a "traitor's core," was weaving a web from the genes of alien beasts. He believed evolution meant making humanity trample over ghoul bones and become the new gods.
When the Netherlord's whispers pierced the barriers of time and space, when the Shadow Attendants' bone spurs cut through the Ark City's power grid, and when the nine heads of the alien beast roared at the edge of the wasteland, Zhou Yin finally understood: the so-called cycle of epochs was nothing more than a breeding experiment conducted by a higher civilization.
