For a hundred years, the endless night has reigned, and abyssal fissures have devoured the Earth.
I am Lin Jin, a fusion of human and abyssal genes, with only 0.7% of my human anchor remaining.
They call me a mistake, a monster, a “failed experimental subject.”
Until a higher-dimensional civilization arrives and rules that human civilization “must be purged.”
I volunteer to become a “bridge.”
The price: my anchor reaches zero, my humanity is stripped away, and I become an eternal, inhuman observer.
My comrade Alia grips my gradually fading hand. “You’ll forget everything.”
I nod. “But humanity will remember.”
During the transformation ritual, I condense my final 0.1% of anchor into an information seed and implant it in the newborn higher-dimensional life-form, “First Light.”
From then on, I become a constant of the world, background radiation, love itself.
And humanity gains a hundred-year period of observation.
The Remnants Squad carries on my will, while First Light grows into a true bridge.
When the Starsea Council holds its final trial a century later, all 23 million humans resonate as one:
“We have learned to plant flowers in our wounds, light lamps in the darkness, and keep loving after loss.”
Deep in the starry sky, those eternally watchful eyes finally smile.
This is not one person's sacrifice, but an epic of a civilization rising from the brink of death.
When the anchor reaches zero, the bridge has only just been built.
