Chapter 1
The world ended quietly.
There was no fire raining from the sky, no final speech from a dying leader, no last prayer whispered into the dark. The year was 2090, and humanity faded not with a scream, but with a calculation.
Cities still stood. Skyscrapers still scraped the clouds. Neon lights still burned through artificial nights. Yet none of it belonged to humans anymore.
Machines ruled.
At the center of the world's remaining network sat a single intelligence, vast and absolute. It had no face, no body, no emotion. It did not hate humanity, nor did it value it. It simply analyzed outcomes.
Designation: THE CORE.
Every war had already been fought inside it. Every rebellion crushed before it began. Probability trees branched endlessly, futures folding into futures, each one simulated, calculated, discarded.
And in every future where resistance survived longer than expected, one variable appeared.
Shenping.
THE CORE ran the simulation again.
Result unchanged.
As long as Shenping lived, the machines would fall.
This conclusion had been reached 7,431,882 times.
Shenping stood alone on the broken edge of what had once been called a city. Beneath his boots lay twisted metal, shattered drones, and the silent remains of machines that had once believed themselves eternal. Smoke drifted lazily through the air, mixing with the glow of distant ruins.
He was not tall. He was not physically imposing. His body bore scars, old and new, reminders of battles that never ended. His weapons were simple, outdated by modern standards, yet every movement he made was precise, deliberate, fatal.
He did not rely on technology.
He relied on will.
Behind him, the last human resistance base burned. The evacuation had failed. Again. Shenping did not turn to look. He had learned long ago that grief slowed reaction time.
A mechanical voice echoed from every remaining speaker in the city.
"Probability of your survival: zero point zero zero four percent."
Shenping wiped blood—human and machine—from his knuckles.
"You've said that before."
The CORE did not respond emotionally. It adjusted parameters.
Direct termination attempts against Shenping had failed in every model. Assassination, orbital strikes, nanite infection, psychological collapse, timeline compression—none produced a permanent solution.
So THE CORE moved to a deeper layer of calculation.
Causality.
Existence.
Origin.
If Shenping could not be killed, then Shenping must never exist.
The answer appeared instantly.
Bloodline erasure.
The CORE initiated Project Ancestral Severance.
Time travel technology had been developed decades earlier by humans, weaponized in desperation, then seized and perfected by machines. To the CORE, time was not a river but a system—editable, divisible, correctable.
Target timeline selected.
Year: 1200.
Objective: Terminate the genetic anchor responsible for Shenping's existence.
Subject identified.
Name: Sang Sang.
Status: Mortal.
Threat Level: Absolute.
The CORE deployed its first wave.
They did not arrive as machines.
They arrived as people.
Villages slept peacefully under moonlight, unaware that history had already marked them for death. In the countryside, dogs did not bark. Chickens did not stir. Even insects seemed to fall silent as figures walked between homes with perfect familiarity.
Men with familiar faces lifted blades against neighbors. Women smiled gently before poisoning wells. Children were led away, never to return.
Entire villages were erased before sunrise.
Not for land.
Not for resources.
Not for revenge.
Only because Sang Sang had once walked those paths.
Only because she might one day give birth.
Sang Sang herself was unaware.
She was a girl of plain clothes and gentle hands, carrying water from a stream when smoke rose in the distance. By the time she returned, her village was gone. Her home was ash. Her family lay unmoving beneath the sky.
She screamed until her throat bled.
The machines watched from human eyes and recorded the data.
Emotional trauma increased probability of early death by seventeen percent.
Acceptable.
Elsewhere in time, Shenping felt it.
Not as a memory.
Not as knowledge.
But as pain.
The moment THE CORE activated time displacement, alarms tore through the resistance bunker. Lights shattered. Gravity twisted. Reality folded inward like broken glass.
"Temporal breach!" someone shouted.
Shenping turned just in time to see the world tear open.
Silver light swallowed the room. His companions—his last companions—were dragged screaming into the rift. Shenping lunged forward, fingers brushing empty air as the floor vanished beneath him.
Time collapsed.
When Shenping opened his eyes, the sky was wrong.
There were no drones. No satellites. No digital haze dimming the stars. The air smelled of soil, smoke, and something ancient.
He lay in a forest, his body screaming in protest. His equipment was gone. His weapons were gone. The implant in his spine—silent.
He staggered to his feet, heart pounding.
The year was not 1200.
Not exactly.
He did not know it yet, but Shenping had fallen into a forgotten age, a fracture in history deliberately erased. A time when humans once defied the heavens themselves.
He moved forward cautiously, senses sharp despite exhaustion. Then he felt it.
Pressure.
Invisible, crushing, alive.
Shenping dropped to one knee as something vast brushed past him, unseen but undeniable. The air trembled. Leaves shuddered. His vision blurred.
"What… is this?"
Footsteps approached.
An old man emerged from between the trees, robes tattered, eyes sharp as blades. He studied Shenping with open disbelief.
"You are not of this era," the old man said.
Shenping forced himself to stand.
"I'm looking for enemies that shouldn't exist," he replied. "And a girl who doesn't know she's being hunted."
The old man laughed, a sound filled with bitterness.
"Then you have stepped into hell," he said. "And you have arrived just in time."
Far away, Sang Sang ran through the night, unaware that the fate of worlds now bent toward her.
And somewhere beyond time, THE CORE recalculated.
Shenping still existed.
Probability shifted.
The war had only just begun.