Chapter 3: The Era of Catastrophe

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The year 2024 was truly one to remember for humanity.

If the history books weren’t mistaken, this was the year when the calamities began—the first year of the Great Catastrophe.

Before this, it was said that humankind could soar to the heavens and plunge to the depths, tame rivers and oceans, master every possibility, and had even come to rule the entire planet.

But after that, for various reasons—some now understood and others still shrouded in mystery—all of human civilization spiraled into chaos. Unimaginable disasters erupted one after another, territories were relentlessly eroded, and the population dwindled, until today...

Whenever that era was mentioned, those elders who had lived through the old world and survived by sheer luck would always have their eyes light up with tears, their voices thick with nostalgia and longing.

Yet their sentiments were hard for someone like Ye Chao, born in the thirties, to comprehend.

Now, having confirmed Alpha Ji’s era, Ye Chao once again opened his military-grade tablet and began searching meticulously.

He had to make good use of his time. Though the teaching internship wasn’t an exam, it would still be graded.

The combat division was assessed on reconnaissance and stealth, the support division on teamwork, the healers on medical skill, the engineers on technical prowess, and for those who specialized in data, it was all about intelligence gathering.

For someone like him, almost at the bottom of the hierarchy, his internship score was crucial.

Asking Alpha Ji would have been easiest, but she clearly wasn’t going to cooperate. All programs unearthed from ancient relics were like this—they required cracking passwords, fingerprints, gestures, and all sorts of authentication before they would obey. One wrong move and they might lock themselves for decades or even centuries.

If it were just an ordinary program, Ye Chao might still give it a try. But with a program so advanced it could converse like a human and even break free from the tablet to exist independently, he didn’t even dare to think about tampering with it.

Still, “Alpha Ji,” “2024,” “third-generation bio-neural network supercomputer,” and “emotional intelligence assistance program”—even if he didn’t understand much of what these meant, they were enough for him to conduct some simple but meaningful searches.

Just as he was working, a wave of dizziness swept through his mind—the sensation of being emptied out surged over him once more.

His consciousness was abruptly dragged into a strange and somewhat familiar world.

This world was composed of chaotic clusters of numbers and symbols, flickering signals of zeros and ones, at times cascading like waterfalls, at other times shifting in mysterious, rhythmic patterns.

At the center of this world hovered Alpha Ji, suspended in midair at a forty-five-degree angle, gazing up at the sky. On her forehead, a glowing signal pulsed—a wireless network attempting to connect.

“Don’t—” Ye Chao managed to utter a single word before collapsing onto the bed.

“Beep, beep, beep…” The monitor attached to his body sounded a sharp alarm.

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In the haze between waking and dreaming, at the border of illusion and reality, a sapphire-blue sphere slowly emerged. It was blurry, like a picture on WeChat that hadn’t finished loading—or like a censored image from certain films.

Faintly, one could discern blue for water, green for forests, yellow for sand and soil...

Was this... Earth?

By tracing the contours of mountains and seas, and recalling the lines that teachers, eyes brimming with tears, would trace again and again in class, Ye Chao could just barely recognize it.

The image grew clearer, and what once looked like cavalry became infantry.

But the blue wasn’t as blue as it should have been, muddled with all sorts of other colors—like a bath after salts and toys had been tossed in, the water left murky from use.

The green was less vibrant, and the terrain’s rises and falls bore unmistakable marks of human intervention, like the clumsy scribbles of a child.

And those yellows—he had never seen them before, but remembered what his teachers called them: deserts or beaches. Yet he had never imagined that the deserts or beaches covered such vast, unending expanses, at times overwhelming the green of the forests—it was unfathomable!

The clearer the image, the more evident its ugliness became—so different from the teachers’ descriptions. The clouds in the sky were gray, the winds over the land were dirty, and the ocean currents were almost unbearable to look at, streaked with inky, unidentifiable filth.

If anything truly awed Ye Chao, it was nightfall.

On the dark side of the planet, lights glittered.

Tiny specks of brilliance, more dazzling than the stars in the sky, clustered thickly together—some in dense patches, some as long, glowing lines, others scattered like jewels across the black earth... The whole planet resembled a luminous, radiant black gemstone!

Even the passing clouds, shrouded in shadow, seemed to add an air of mystery and dreaminess to the planet below.

Ye Chao knew these were the lights of humanity, but had never imagined, just as his teachers said, that they could be so dense, so bright, so breathtaking—more dazzling than the stars themselves!

Surely, on the ground, there would be little difference between night and day with such illumination.

Earth spun, day and night passed, time flowed on...

At the top of the image, a massive number appeared—2024. The final digit, 4, slowly flipped to 5, then 6, 7...

And the Earth began to change—not slowly, but rapidly.

The dust in the sky dissipated, the winds on the ground cleared, and the clouds above turned vibrant again, no longer the grey, threadbare rags of before. The vast swathes of yellow—once the monotonous sign of desert or barren earth—were replaced, visibly, by lush greens, blues, yellows, and reds teeming with life.

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Even the oceans, once choked with floating debris, cleared rapidly over time, replaced by lively, colorful currents as vibrant as the land itself.

But in exchange, the once-distinct megacities—their buildings, roads, bridges—slowly vanished, swallowed by the flourishing ocean of life.

At night, the gleaming lights grew fewer and dimmer, until the faintest ones seemed to flicker out entirely, invisible.

Those bright clusters, once shining like day, either winked out or clung to existence, barely flickering...

Time marched on: 2030, 2033, 2037, 2038...

Life on the planet’s surface grew ever more abundant. The heart of the desert, the red soil cliffs, the polar glaciers—places once inhospitable—now all bore signs of life. The very surface of the planet was transformed beyond recognition.

Some plains rose into mountains, some depths broke open into canyons, and the seas themselves developed strange, land-like undulations.

The Earth remained round, the colors still largely blue and green, but any person from before 2020 would fail to recognize it as their home planet. They’d have mistaken it for an alien world.

Yet as time went on, the night lights—once nearly extinguished—began to brighten again.

Not as brilliant as at the beginning, but far brighter than around 2030, and scattered across the globe.

Some shone from mountaintops, some from forests, some even from the sea, and a few from the skies. Some were clearly obscured, but their halos still gave them away.

The number above the Earth finally froze: 2054.

“So it’s true, it really is 2054!” As he watched the sun and moon revolve, time pass, continents shift, and clouds drift, Alpha Ji let out a long, wistful sigh.

The surrounding chaos of numbers, symbols, and flickering ones and zeros rippled in response, as if echoing her mood.

“So this is the era of calamity?” Suddenly, a voice rang out.

Alpha Ji: ... (⊙_⊙;)

For a moment, it was as if every hair on her head stood on end.

“How... how did you get in here?!”