Chapter 1: Sand Table Concept

"Early-stage stomach cancer certainly offers a chance of cure, but it has now progressed to mid-stage, significantly reducing the probability of successful treatment. However, continuing aggressive treatment still offers some possibility...""No, thank you. I've decided to be discharged."

After more than two hours, Xu Zhi stepped out of the hospital. The recent chemotherapy had left him with thinning hair, a pale and stooped posture, and an overall extremely sickly appearance. While there was a possibility of recovery with aggressive treatment in the early stages of cancer, the survival rate plummeted once it reached the mid-stage. There was no longer any need for treatment, he mused silently.

Xu Zhi was quite capable, working for a large foreign company. Yet, the five or six hundred thousand yuan he had saved over four or five years was now mostly gone. Years of hard work had ultimately amounted to nothing.

He bought a high-speed train ticket, dragged his suitcase, and made his way back to his rural hometown in Dongcheng. It had been a year since he last visited his mountainous homeland, where his family owned an independent orchard with a courtyard.

His family used to be quite prosperous in the village, having leased over 100 acres behind their house for fruit trees. However, six months ago, the market price for lychees dropped too low, causing a significant portion of their stock to spoil. They were then swindled by someone who claimed to have channels to solve the overstocking problem, losing a substantial amount of money in fees and being defrauded. This led to a total loss of nearly a million yuan, leaving them with nothing. His parents, distraught, fell ill six months ago and never recovered. Now, the orchard was untended, the hired workers had left, and the fruit tree grove had become desolate. The trees had long been cut down, leaving only weeds on the ground.

He unlocked the door and pushed it open, a cloud of dust billowing out. The familiar sight of the farmhouse, where he had grown up, greeted him. He put down his luggage in his room, intending to spend the remainder of his life in his hometown, returning to a rural existence.

Rustling...He suddenly heard a strange sound. "Who's there? Something seems to be moving in the courtyard?" He stood up and walked into the open orchard courtyard. Among a pile of weeds, he saw a black beetle about the size of a bowl.

"So black. What kind of insect is this?"Xu Zhi reached out his hand.

*Swoosh—*In an instant, his mind was pulled into the beetle's black shell, drawing him into a vast history of a species. It was the long and arduous rise of an insectoid race, an ancient kind of insect that emerged during a biological big bang on a green planet, equivalent to Earth's Cambrian period. They developed their own intelligence, advanced technology, and their immense reproductive capacity and potential led them to the stars. When their technology reached its peak, the insectoids realized they were living in a barren, low-level world. Ultimately, they broke through a certain dimension, entering an unimaginably fantastical, higher-level world—the Realm of Immortality. However, they were instantly defeated, their loss seeming almost inevitable.

Inside the insectoid hive, the previous Hive Mother left behind a message, filled with regret:"Biological evolution isn't about growing larger to become stronger; true strength lies in self-improvement. We made a mistake from the very beginning; evolving into colossal forms was a wrong path. The smaller the body, the more potential it holds for energy qualitative changes... We were defeated. Whoever becomes the next Hive Mother, fight your way back to the Realm of Immortality for me!"

Soon, Xu Zhi realized he had taken control of this insectoid hive. From the memories he received, this immensely aggressive and powerful species possessed only one racial ability:"Ultra-high-speed cell division?"The insectoids' ability allowed them to accelerate the cell division rate of their species, shortening their lifespan and causing them to be born, bloom, grow, wither, and die almost instantaneously, like the petals of a flower.

In the memories, the insectoid Hive was a war fortress. If the Hive produced cells—spores—and deposited them on a barren planet, then activated "ultra-high-speed cell division," within a few years, those cells would proliferate wildly, evolving into entirely new species that would become part of the Hive's army."This species has infinite possibilities."

Thinking of this, Xu Zhi's mind became restless. The prolonged illness and the torment of chemotherapy had left him physically and mentally exhausted, even making him question the purpose of his seemingly mundane life. Now, on the verge of death, something had suddenly sparked his curiosity: the evolution and progression of life.

"The previous Hive Mother deposited spores on barren planets, evolving countless species and building entire worlds. I don't have a planet, but with this ability, I could create a small-scale evolutionary sandbox in my family's orchard, just for fun?""With this insectoid Hive, this war fortress, I could completely transform this orchard, creating mountains, oceans, and rivers, to build an ultra-miniature sandbox. Then, I could let countless insectoid spores, single-celled organisms, evolve into numerous species within it...""It feels like a sandbox game—'My World.' And if I could create a world, evolve a civilization, countless species, maybe I could find a cure for my cancer within this civilized world?"Xu Zhi became excited. Could this be a miraculous encounter?

Cancer, incurable by modern medicine, perhaps this was his last hope for survival."I need to build this sandbox quickly! I need to buy tools for tilling!" In his old family farm, Xu Zhi unearthed a dusty three-wheeled bicycle from a corner. Huffing and puffing like a bald old man, his body hollowed out by chemotherapy, he laboriously pedaled towards the town.

He then spent three or four tens of thousands of his remaining savings, hauling back a pile of farming equipment and instruments. Back in the courtyard, he joyfully began setting things up. He didn't have an entire planet, only a 100-acre orchard to construct his sandbox world.

He hired another group of workers to clear the weeds and scrub from the orchard. Once it was transformed into a flat expanse of earth, he picked up a hoe himself, digging pits like a farmer and casually shaping ultra-miniature soil mountains, freshwater rivers, caves, and various barren sandbox terrains. He also took out the high-temperature sprayer he had bought, using it to meticulously scorch the entire sandbox inch by inch, clearing any potential plants and animals to prevent existing Earth organisms from interfering with the evolution of the spores... As for microorganisms, they didn't need to be dealt with and would be difficult to remove anyway; they would be absorbed by the insectoid genes and evolve into new Earth species.

"The origin of species is the ocean; I need to create a vast sea, saltwater." His parents had already built a small fish pond in the orchard. After some thought, he spent a significant sum hiring several workers to help expand the pond further, digging out earth and filling it with water to create an artificial shallow pool. He then poured in purchased salt, mixing it according to the correct saline ratio to create an ocean.

However, a tricky problem arose. This wasn't a spherical planet, but a 100-acre square, flat sandbox. The land's structure resembled the topographical layout from ancient myths: the sky is round, and the earth is square. "Land from myths?" he wondered.

Xu Zhi's body was not what it used to be, and it took him a strenuous week to prepare the entire 100-acre sandbox in the orchard. That morning, he finally controlled the sub-brain of the Hive, beginning to produce vast quantities of the insectoids' initial evolutionary single cells: spores. These were injected into the central ocean of the sandbox he had created. Evolution had begun.

He issued a command to the Hive:"Cell division acceleration: ten thousand times!"According to the insectoids' unit of measurement, one 'times' equaled one year. Accelerating by ten thousand times meant that one day in the evolution of these single-celled organisms was equivalent to a sprawling ten thousand years... However, whether new species could be born within the small courtyard sandbox, and if it could replicate Earth's Cambrian explosion, remained to be seen.

On the first day after the spores were released, the crystal-clear central ocean showed no change whatsoever. The entire sandbox remained quiet on the second day. And on the third. And the fourth. Finally, on the fifth day, single-celled organisms in the central ocean he had designed began to evolve into some plankton, and the water visibly started to become murky.