Chapter 1: The Land of Nowhere
Summer on Crete always carried an almost brutish intensity.
The sunlight, like molten gold, spilled onto the loess slopes of the Akrotiri archaeological site, making the temporarily erected canvas tents scorching hot.
Lin Yun crouched in front of the workbench, sweat trickling down his jawline, which he hastily wiped away with his cuff before it reached his collarbone.
His cuff was already stained verdigris from copper rust; rubbing against his skin, it looked like an imprint of some ancient totem.
"Fragment 47, discontinuity in ornamentation, traces of secondary forging on the edge."
He softly reported his observations into the voice recorder clipped to his chest, while his pen quickly sketched the fragment's outline in his notebook.
It was a palm-sized bronze plaque fragment, its surface covered in a layer of dark green basic copper carbonate rust. When lightly brushed with a soft brush, fine powder would rustle down, carrying a faint metallic, oxidized scent.
Lin Yun's fingers hovered above the fragment, not touching it directly.
Archaeological site regulations required wearing double-layered gloves—latex gloves tightly against the skin, and wear-resistant nitrile gloves on the outside—but he always felt that through two barriers, he couldn't truly "perceive" the artifact's temperature.
For three months, he had been dealing with these bronze fragments daily, from initial excitement to later numbness, and now to an inexplicable palpitation, as if these metals, dormant for thousands of years, were quietly transmitting some message to him.
As a graduate student in the history department of a key university on Earth, Lin Yun's research focused on the evolution of greek mythology, particularly on the collation and interpretation of Orphism fragments.
His advisor often said he "got lost in old papers," and his classmates laughed at him for "researching myths as history," but only Lin Yunknew that what he was obsessed with was never the endlessly reinterpreted textual symbols, but rather humanity's eternal quest for the order of the Universe, hidden behind different versions of myths.
Just like the bronze plaque fragment in his hand at this moment, those intertwined spiral patterns reminded him of the description in Orphismprayers: "Time like a serpent, head and tail connected, devouring the past, nurturing the future."
This similarity made his heart race—if these patterns were indeed related to Orphism, it would completely rewrite academic understanding of the sect's origin.
"Xiao Lin, come take a look at this." Professor Elena's voice came from the other end of the canvas tent, with the characteristic rolled 'r' sound of Greek.
This Athens University archaeology professor, nearing sixty, was the head of the joint archaeological project on Crete and Lin Yun's doctoral supervisor.
She always wore a faded khaki vest, her silver hair tied back with a bone hairpin. When bending over to examine artifacts, her reading glasses would slide down to the tip of her nose, revealing a pair of blue eyes sparkling with investigative light.
Lin Yun put down the fragment he was holding and, as he stood up, his knees made a slight "click"—three consecutive months of working in a squatting position had made his joints feel like rusty hinges.
He hurried past long tables laden with pottery shards, bone tools, and stone artifacts, and saw Elena kneeling before a newly reassembled bronze plaque, holding a magnifying glass as if examining a rare treasure.
That bronze plaque was much larger than the fragments Lin Yun had cleaned, roughly half the size of a tabletop. Although there were still a dozen gaps along the edges, the main body already showed complete ornamentation.
Countless spiral patterns converged from the plaque's edges towards its center, forming a closed loop about five centimeters in diameter at the very middle. Inside the loop was an indistinct symbol.
Even stranger, these spirals were not evenly distributed; some were as tight as a clock spring, others as sprawling as the Milky Way's spiral arms, as if narrating different speeds of time.
"The carbon-14 dating results are out."
Elena looked up, her eyes behind the lenses astonishingly bright.
"The laboratory's age range is 3800 BCE to 3750 BCE, at least two millennia earlier than we expected—this predates the rise of the Minoan Civilization, and even predates the establishment of the First Dynasty of ancient Egypt."
Lin Yun's breath hitched abruptly.
3800 BCE was the period of transition from the Neolithic Age to the Bronze Age. On the European continent, humans had just mastered the smelting technology of copper-tin alloys. To cast a bronze plaque with such complex ornamentation was a miracle in itself.
He leaned closer to the plaque, smelling a mixture of earth, copper rust, and preservative.
There was also a hint of a "vibrant" scent, as if this wasn't an artifact, but a life that had just awakened from slumber.
"Professor, look at the closed loop in the center." Lin Yun pointed to the symbol at the very center of the plaque. "Doesn't this pattern resemble the 'Eye of Time' in Orphism texts?"
Elena followed his gaze, her brows gradually furrowing: "The earliest written documents of Orphism can only be traced back to the 6th century BCE, more than three thousand years later than this plaque. Even if the patterns are similar, it might just be a coincidence—spiral patterns are very common in early civilizations; Mesopotamia cylinder seals also have similar designs."
She paused, gently sweeping a soft brush over the plaque's edge: "But you've reminded me, there are a few extremely shallow scratches here that I've never understood."
Lin Yun took the magnifying glass Elena offered, adjusting the focus to the corrosion layer on the plaque's edge.
Under the mottled green rust, there were indeed several scratches made by a sharp tool, so shallow they were almost flush with the copper surface, clearly carved after the plaque had been cast.
He scrutinized them for a moment, and his heart suddenly felt as if clutched by an invisible hand.
Those marks were not random scratches, but a set of hieroglyphs whose combined pronunciation was exactly the same as "Chronos," which he had repeatedly transcribed in the Orphism fragments... Chronos, in the Orphism system, is the Incarnation of time, known as the "Eternal Beginning, Foundation of All Things."
According to existing fragments, Chronos is the most primordial deity. He created the all-encompassing cosmic egg, from which the hermaphroditic god Phanes was born, and Phanes then begat other deities, eventually forming a complete pantheon.
However, this creation narrative is completely different from Hesiod's account in the Theogony.
Hesiod believed that the primordial deity was chaos, followed by the birth of Gaia, Tartarus, and Eros. This is the most widely known creation version in greek mythology and is regarded as "orthodox" by academics.
"Was the primordial god Chronos or chaos?"
This question had troubled Lin Yun for two full years and was the core proposition of his doctoral dissertation.
He had found countless clues in the literature but had never been able to reach a definitive conclusion—like walking in a maze, whenever he saw a glimmer of an exit, turning a corner led to new forks.
And now, this 5,800-year-old bronze plaque seemed to be showing him another door to the maze.
Lin Yun's fingers trembled slightly with excitement. He had forgotten that the fingertips of his outer gloves had long since worn through from days of work, revealing the latex gloves beneath.
When he reached out again to touch the scratches, a hangnail on the edge of his fingernail caught on the texture of the latex glove, instantly tearing a tiny opening, and the sharp hangnail directly cut the skin on his fingertip.
A drop of blood seeped from the wound, spreading into a dark red dot on the inside of the latex glove.
Lin Yun instinctively recoiled, wanting to find a tissue to wipe it, but found that the drop of blood had already passed through the tear in the glove and fallen onto the closed loop at the center of the bronze plaque.
Then, the drop of blood, instead of congealing as expected, was instantly absorbed by the bronze plaque like water into a sponge.
Immediately after, the closed loop began to emit a faint red glow, as if a flame had been ignited inside the bronze artifact.
The red light quickly spread to the surrounding spiral patterns. Those previously static lines seemed to come alive, beginning to rotate at a visible speed, spreading outwards from the center, forming an ever-expanding vortex.
"Step back!"
Elena's startled cry was drowned out by a deep hum.
Lin Yun felt a powerful suction emanating from the vortex, as if it wanted to strip his Soul from his body.
He tried to grab the edge of the workbench to steady himself, but found his limbs as heavy as lead, and could only watch helplessly as the rotating spirals spun faster and faster, finally transforming into a white light that pierced through heaven and earth.
The second before the white light swallowed his vision, Lin Yun saw Elena being desperately held back by several team members, her blue eyes filled with terror and incomprehension.
He also saw the sky outside the canvas tent instantly darken, the previously intense sunlight obscured by some invisible force, the Mediterranean Sea breeze stopped blowing, and even the air seemed to solidify at this moment