With a pained cry, the saber-toothed tiger fell powerlessly to the ground. Its fearsome fangs did not have any effect in this swift and crushing encounter. The predator from ancient Earth did not even understand how it was hurt, and its heart was instantly roasted by the plasma spear.
Hao Ren swung the spear casually. Even though the plasma spear was never stained with blood, he still felt that this action could effectively increase his coolness. He then looked around and confirmed that there were no enemies other than the blind saber-toothed tiger in front of him. He breathed a sigh of relief.
The primitive Earth was really dangerous. Humans were still far from reaching the top of the food chain, and wild beasts were everywhere. While they were not a threat to Hao Ren, getting rid of them was really a headache.
Hao Ren looked back and saw a distorted rift about the width of two people floating in the air. On the other side of the rift, the crumbling ice spire quietly fell to the ground. The scenery of 7715 BC was imprisoned in the rift, and it had been completely covered by the greyish-white color that represented the stagnation of time and space.
In fact, he did not know how many years he had traveled back in time. The precise year could only be found in the records of the sandbox system. He just had an intuition that was getting more and more obvious. As he got closer to the starting point of the space-time distortion, the intuition became clearer and clearer. He knew that he had stepped into the final realm. Perhaps it was here, or perhaps in the next backtracking, he would reach the beginning of this long river of time that had been separated from him. This long journey would finally reach its end, and that was not far away.
"So, the saber-toothed tiger has lived until now?" Hao Ren glanced at the saber-toothed beast on the ground, shook his head and muttered to himself, "If a few archaeologists came here, they would probably go crazy with joy …"
He was not really interested in the Saber-toothed Tiger, but he had to find something to talk about. This wild and primitive world was full of depression, and traveling alone was not a pleasant experience. He felt that he needed to find something to distract himself from his thoughts.
Leaving the space-time rift connected to the ice spire behind, Hao Ren carried the plasma spear and set out on his journey.
He trekked in the cold wilderness, trying to find traces of primitive tribes or intelligent creatures, but he found nothing until evening. This was the ancient Earth, and humans were not as prosperous as they were in the future. The sparsely populated primitive humans lived in a few habitable areas in the form of tribes. Ninety percent of the desolate land was ruled by the wilderness, and the ice age that lasted for a long time made it difficult for humans to expand their range of activities. To find people in the wilderness, they could only rely on luck.
Hao Ren had known this for a long time, so he was not discouraged by the result. He had faced all kinds of difficulties and obstacles in his journey back in time. Now, few setbacks could shake his will.
When night fell, he rested in the cave. The food in his Dimensional Pocket had become a precious luxury. He would only eat a little when he wanted to savor the "outside world". So his dinner was still the game he hunted in the wilderness. After dinner, he used the starry sky to determine his current location. Although the starry sky of 10,000 years ago was very different from the future, he had prepared for this long before he set off. He had memorized the starry sky images of various periods in history, so it was easy for him to determine his current location: it should be in Northern Europe.
After that, he studied Vivian's notes and roughly estimated the time of his arrival, and finally confirmed that he was close to his destination.
When the sun rose, he resumed his journey and continued to move forward in the vast wilderness.
He wasn't wandering aimlessly. Instead, he was following the "guidance" in the depths of his heart. Although he was not used to relying on "intuition" that could not be seen or touched, he had to admit that as a demigod who had established a deep connection with the Will of the Universe, his intuition was far more reliable in the absence of clues than other means, including but not limited to throwing shoes and flipping coins.
After entering this space and time, he found that his intuition had become stronger, as if there was some kind of feeling in the dark. When he opened his eyes, he felt that he should go in a certain direction. This kind of guidance was so clear that he could almost hear a voice in his mind calling out to him, "Just ahead, the person he is looking for is just ahead."
With this guidance, he walked day after day in the wilderness and the Gobi Desert. On this cold and desolate ancient Earth, only the sun rose every day and the stars fell every night to accompany him. Of course, there were also the beasts that had gone extinct in the external space and time.
Mammoths and saber-toothed tigers were not common. This was Earth after the end of the ice age. The climate had gradually warmed up, and the changes in the living environment had led to the end of many ice age species, including mammoths and saber-toothed tigers. Although they would still live on this planet for hundreds or even thousands of years, the decline of the population was an obvious fact. The magnificent scene of primitive people hunting mammoths would end with the arrival of the warm season, but the following "Age of the Gods" would disrupt the planet's original development trajectory.
When the sun rose for the twelfth time, Hao Ren left the desolate wilderness and entered a lush grassland that grew as the climate warmed. He found a small stone age tribe on the edge of the grassland. The tribe's people treated Hao Ren as a god and treated him warmly. However, they knew nothing about Vivian or any other gods.
On the twentieth day, Hao Ren had crossed the grassland and entered a mountainous area. Along the way, he did not see any clues that could be a settlement of the otherworldlings. For example, broken landing pods, detection antennas fixed with stones, purification circles set up near water sources and swamps. He often saw these things during his previous backtracking, and he even saw many of them during his previous backtracking. They were evidence of the otherworldlings' survival in the wilderness after landing on Earth. They could be seen everywhere in the hundreds of years since the beginning of the Mythological Era.
After all, even the glorious Olympian gods had to dig out the first stone in the wilderness to build their homes.
There was only one explanation for not finding these traces. He had arrived at an earlier point in time, even before the otherworldlings arrived on Earth!
At first, Hao Ren was shocked because he felt that it was illogical. He was traveling through Vivian's memory world. In theory, the earliest time he could reach was limited to the time when Vivian first arrived on Earth. But soon, he vaguely guessed the reason.
This world was not only made up of Vivian's memory, or rather, Vivian's memory was not the main "component" of this world. The main part of this world was actually built by the Sovereign Hub's sandbox system. The sandbox used information deduction and reorganization to create a near-real Earth, and this mirrored Earth was no different from the original.
Vivian's memory only provided a series of road signs and key scenes in this mirrored Earth. Rather than saying that these memories were the entire backtracking journey, it was more accurate to say that these memories only provided a navigation function.
Hao Ren finally stopped at the top of a high mountain and set up a small camp on the flat ground on the top of the mountain.
He knew where the problem was. He had "dived" too deep into the river of history and memory, even to a place that Vivian did not know. Here, Vivian's memory was completely distorted, and the sandbox system could not use this memory to accurately locate her. Here, no one knew when the historical convergence of The Plane of Dreams and the Surface World happened. Even Vivian's subconscious did not have any relevant records.
The sandbox system could only send him to a place as close as possible.
Now, it seemed that he had arrived a little too early.
Hao Ren sat on a boulder at the top of the mountain, deep in thought as he looked at the green mountains and plains in the distance. He was trying to guess how early he was — a few months, a few years, or maybe a few decades. He could not tell the exact year from the starry sky and the surrounding vegetation, but at least from the scenery along the way, he could roughly deduce that the ice age had ended, and the glaciers were receding from all the warm areas. Humans who had survived the cold winter had begun to reproduce, and the various large prey that had weakened due to not adapting to the environment after the end of the ice age were providing valuable food for these primitive people.
Vivian's earliest memory started from the scene of the glaciers receding.
So, he should not be too early. All he had to do now was to wait.
On the 106th day, Hao Ren ended the last round of exploration of the surrounding environment. The intuition that originated from his soul was still strong, driving him back to his camp at the top of the mountain. He sat cross-legged on the boulder and stabbed the plasma spear into the pile of rubble beside him.
He cast a divine spell on himself that he rarely used, then closed his eyes and began to wait quietly.
He did not know how much time had passed, because time did not mean much to him. The sun rose and set, the stars swirled in the night sky, and the cold wind blew through the hills day after day, occasionally bringing along some plant seeds. These seeds took root and germinated around him, and then withered and died …
His mind entered a state of "stillness". He clearly perceived everything that was happening around him, but it was as if he was dead.
Finally, one day, he suddenly opened his eyes and looked sharply into the distance.
The sky above the plains rolled up, and the clouds were torn apart. A large continuous, bouncing light and shadow appeared in the blue sky like an upside-down ocean.
It was time.
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