Shepherding Humanity

"In the early stages of gastric cancer, there is indeed a good chance for you to be cured, but now that it has deteriorated to the middle stages, the possibility of recovery has been reduced, but if you continue to actively treat it, it might still be possible to…"

"No, I choose to be discharged."

After more than two hours, Xu Zhi stepped out of the hospital‘s door. A long period of chemotherapy has left him with thin, shedding hair and a pale and listless body. He was extremely sickly.

In the early stages of cancer, with active treatment, there's a good possibility of recovery, but once you reached the middle stages, the survival rate was extremely low.

There was no longer any point to continue on with the treatment.

He pondered silently.

Xu Zhi’s was quite the competent person who had been working in a large foreign company. But now, he has already spent more than half of the 500,000 to 600,000 yuans he had saved over the past four to five years. He had worked hard for several years, all for nothing. Thinking about it now, all he had to show for his efforts was being afflicted with terminal disease at a young age, and little more than 200,000 yuans left in savings.

He had never truly lived life and spent time doing what he enjoyed. It had been a most dull and tedious existence.

Dragging his suitcase behind him, he bought a high-speed rail ticket and headed back to his hometown, Dongcheng. Half a day later, he reached his old home after taking a bus to the suburbs.

The home that he had not seen for over a year was a farmhouse that came with an orchard and a spacious courtyard.

His parents had passed away early, but before that, thanks to their large family estate, they were among the upper class in their village, and the time he spent with them had been happy and peaceful. However, due to his work, he had sacrificed precious time that he should have spent with his parents, only to end like this. He could not help but find it ironic.

The orchard, left unattended, has become barren and overgrown with weeds.

Past the locked door, and the rush of dusty air, the oh so familiar farmhouse from his childhood greeted him.

He put down his luggage. He was home.

He resolved himself to embrace the simple country life and spend the rest of his days in his hometown.

"I still have water and electricity. With a little bit of tidying up, I'll be all set to move in." After cleaning the dusty room, Xu Zhi sat down on the bed, out of breath.

Kiriririri…

Suddenly, he heard a strange sound.

"Huh? What's that ringing noise out in the yard?" He stood up and walked out to the empty orchard. Among the weeds, he found a black beetle the size of a washbasin.

It was perfectly round in shape.

Its color was the purest black, like a black hole drawing in all light. Xu Zhi's gaze was drawn in by its magnetic pull.

"Such a dark color, what kind of insect is this?"

Xu Zhi reached out.

Swish–

In a flash, his mind was sucked into the beetle's black shell, and dropped into a vast ocean of memories.

This was the collective memories of an entire race. The Tyranis’ rise had stretched out over long eons. They were born on a green planet, in an evolutionary explosion similar to what happened on Earth during the Cambrian Era. This ancient insectoid race gained sentience, developed science and technology, and reached for the stars, aided by their great reproductive capabilities and innate potential. At the peak of their technological development, they learned that the world they lived on was a relatively poor and barren world.

Ultimately, they broke into a higher dimension and encountered the incredible realm of fantasy, Eternia.

They went to war against that higher realm, but were easily destroyed. The strange and extraordinary people native to Eternia hid within their tiny bodies unimaginable, world-shattering might.

Defeat was only natural.

"Such a pity."

Xu Zhi lamented. When compared to the death of a glorious civilization that had prospered for hundreds of millions of years, his impending end as a mere individual no longer felt so calamitous.

Xu Zhi laughed and held up the Tyranis Hive Mother with both hands. The great queen who had once waged war amidst the stars was now defeated and all alone. "Considering how we're both going to die, is there anything you'd like to say before passing on? My beautiful lady, please speak your last words."

Please speak my last words?

How long has it been since a living creature had dared to talk to me like that?

The dying swarm queen was a little surprised. The callow and weak creature in front of her was looking at her indifferently without fear.

She looked at Xu Zhi's calm expression and then suddenly laughed, her anger gone:

This insignificant creature is about to die, so it's only natural for it to be fearless.

In that instant, she suddenly understood that all was equal before death. At this moment, the vast gulf between their positions and respective civilizations had no meaning. There were only two pitiful souls silently waiting for the end.

It matters not whether you're an emperor or an ant. From dust you came, and to dust you will one day return.

She looked at this youth waiting to die, and a sudden thought occurred to her. She laughed heartily as if conversing with a friend, "My last words, you ask? There's so much I want to say. I have experienced far too much in my long life. I was the great Creator, I have seen the rise and fall of countless civilizations, and entire eras have been brought into being by my hands. But, to be brief…"

"On the path of evolution, bigger is not better. Seeking strength and independence is the only true path."

"From the very beginning, we had been mistaken. Becoming bigger the more we evolved led us to a dead end. The smaller your body is, the easier it is to build a stable foundation and fundamentally change the quality of your energy…"

"Our world is a poor and barren realm. I'll leave behind the path and the coordinates, become the next generation Creator, and conquer Eternia in my place!"

….

Huh?

What was she suddenly talking about?

Did this great being lose her mind before death?

"What's wrong?" Xu Zhi waited for more than ten minutes, before finally understanding what the dead Tyranis Queen had done. She had given him authority over the final Tyranis Hive which lay within her body.

He placed down a chair, hugged the basin-sized Hive Mother, and sat pensively in the courtyard. From the memories he inherited from the Tyranis, this extremely aggressive and mighty race had only one racial ability.

"Accelerated cell division?"

There's a limit to cell division; accelerating cell division greatly shortens an organism's lifespan.

The Tyranis' racial ability allowed them to be born, mature, bloom, then wither and die in a very short period of time, like a fleeting blossom.

"However, accelerating cell division is also equivalent to accelerating the evolution of the species…" Xu Zhi's breath quickened, "The birth and evolution of a species usually takes a very long time, but accelerating cell division and reproduction would greatly reduce that time span!"

How many years does it take for a species to evolve?

3.8 billion years ago on Earth, the first primitive cells were born in the primordial ocean.

An extremely long period of quiet lasting more than three billion years followed before evolution reached its peak. The Cambrian explosion only happened 500 million years ago, during which the first true life forms began to appear in the desolate and lifeless ocean.

Then followed the long Ordovician, Silurian, Jurassic, and Cretaceous eras… Earth's many epochs lasted hundreds of millions of years. Entire species rose and fell in a grand epic of extinction and rebirth. The precursors to the cavemen only appeared tens of millions of years ago.

Before mother Earth's great age, man's few million years of history is but the blink of an eye…

"But that billions-of-years long time span can be greatly shortened by the accelerated evolution of the Tyranis. They can achieve an evolutionary explosion in only a few days." Xu Zhi keenly understood the terrifying potential of the Tyranis.

In his inherited memories, the Tyranis Hive Mother was a mighty war fortress.

Place the Hive Mother on a barren world, and she’ll start producing living cells, and spread spores throughout the world. With the Tyranis’ ultra-high-speed cell division, within a few years, those cells would wildly multiply and evolve into entirely new species, producing new troops for the Tyranis swarm.

"This race has infinite possibilities."

Xu Zhi thought this while looking at his courtyard.

While the Tyranis Hive Mother could populate entire worlds thanks to the Tyranis’ ultra-fast evolution, it was impossible for Xu Zhi to do the same. But perhaps, he could start by placing Tyranis spores in the courtyard’s pond and create a physical model of the primordial ocean.

According to the hive memory of the Tyranis, the spores could spread and evolve anywhere.

"Furthermore, I can landscape the yard to create mountains, lakes, and rivers… I’ll create a miniature model of earth, and let loose countless Tyranis spores to evolve within it…"

This idea filled Xu Zhi with enthusiasm.