On the day he was diagnosed with ALS, Chen Mo returned to his hometown in southern Zhejiang.
In the woodshed of the ancestral home, there is a pit three feet square. There are mountains, water, and fish smaller than sesame seeds in the pit.
He stared at it for a day, and a hundred years passed in the world inside.
He sowed a handful of grain, and a civilization learned to cultivate it.
He drew a circle, and a girl knelt down and called him "Tian."
He thought he was a lonely creator, until one day, a line of words appeared on the edge of the sand table:
"The third civilization has reached the critical point. Are you going to start recruiting observers?"
What he didn't know was that there were 599 other "sandboxes" like him.
Three feet above, there is a god.
Three feet away, there are bigger eyes.
