As Tang Ren used a harpoon to poke at the cyanobacteria, the Precambrian sunset was being cut into pieces by a quantum storm. Su Chen's mechanical eye short-circuited in the humid air, and the retina was beating with garbled code: "Warning! Abnormal proliferation of phytophyll purple spots--"
"Is this a medical examination report from 500 million years ago?" Tang Ren threw the harpoon at the reef, and the collision of metal and stratum made a strange bronze tremor. Qin Feng squatted in the intertidal zone, and his fingers touched the quantitative afterimages of trilobite fossils: "It, they are afraid of... some kind of genetic weapon..."
The waves suddenly turned counterclockwise, revealing a bronze compass on the seabed. The fragments of the jade cong brought from Liangzhu on Tang Ren's animal skin belt suddenly heated up. When Qin Feng inserted the fragments into the groove of the compass, a holographic projection rose across the entire sea area - the octopus-shaped submarine of the Q organization was sowing fluorescent spores in the ancient ocean.
"The eye of the sea!" Tang Ren thrust his harpoon into the center of the vortex. The seawater collapsed into a Klein bottle structure, and the three were sucked into the time wormhole. In the last glance, Su Chen saw that his mechanical eye was embedded in the compound eye of a strange shrimp, reflecting the bloody truth of the Cambrian Explosion.
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Tang Ren's fur skirt caught the sawtooth of a window shell when he fell into a pile of parrot snail shells. Qin Feng picked up the glowing trilobite carapace, and under ultraviolet light, the oracle bone script of CRIMASTER was revealed. Su Chen scanned the temporary prosthesis made of fish maw and found that the carapace pattern was actually the quantified Human Genome Project.
"These bastards... are rewriting the source code of life!" Tang Ren used a flint knife to split the body of the strange shrimp, and nanorobots floated in the green blood. Qin Feng was suddenly dragged into the trench by some force - at the bottom of the trench stood a gene tower made of bronze and opal, and the tower was engraved with the DNA chains of all creatures on earth.
Su Chen used a mechanical arm wrapped in seaweed to connect to the surface of the gene tower, and his consciousness was instantly thrown out of the evolution tree. He saw the virtual incarnation of the Q organization pruning the branches of life, and the "failed species" being pruned included humans. What's even more terrifying is that the pruning tool turned out to be a pair of Sinuo origami scissors magnified 10,000 times.
"Use... Use horizontal gene transfer to fight back!" Su Chen screamed in reality. Tang Ren plugged the glowing jellyfish into the cracks of the gene tower, and the biological fluorescence resonated with the quantum field, and the entire tower began to replicate itself.
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When fleeing to the deep-sea hydrothermal vent area, Qin Feng discovered that the "black smoker" was spewing sulfide and liquid crystal. Tang Ren's hide was scorched by the high temperature, revealing the strange changes of the jade cong around his waist - the divine emblem on the cong body was absorbing ancient radiation and transforming into a genetic weapon.
"This, this is the furnace of life..." Qin Feng's body was shaking. The archaeal membrane at the hot spring mouth clearly showed the Qin family's unique topological patterns. Su Chen used brachiopods to make a temporary scanner and found a pile of material at the bottom of the hot spring - the fuel was the brain wave remnants of Cambrian creatures.
Suddenly, the entire hot spring area was lifted into the air. As Tang Ren fell down holding the giant tube worm, he saw three hundred bronze tripods arranged in the seafloor rift, each boiling with the genetic soup of the same species. The jade bell hanging from the ears of the tripod was the lost cultural relic of the Liangzhu ruins.
"It's time to eat!" Tang Ren threw the flint into the cauldron. The stone and the energy soup reacted in an annihilation manner, and the exploding energy wave overturned the three people in the Ordovician crinoids. In the chaos of time and space, Su Chen caught a glimpse of his father installing a brain-computer interface on the parrot snail.
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When stranded on the Silurian beach, Tang Ren angered the ancient centipede by grilling fish with petrified scale wood. Qin Feng discovered that the claw marks on the beach formed a Mobius ring, and half of a tortoise shell engraved with the Book of Changes was buried in the center of the ring.
"Qian Sanlian... Kun..." Tang Ren's hexagram was interrupted by a school of lancelets. These primitive chordates were arranged in a binary array, and the nerves of the fish produced piano sounds. Su Chen used his shark teeth to transform his hearing bones to receive sound waves, and fragments of his mother's memory when she was young appeared in his mind - she was debugging a gene editing instrument on the bottom of the Cambrian sea.
"Mom..." Qin Feng caught a passing armored fish, and a bronze key fell out of its gills. When the key was inserted into the crack of the tortoise shell, the entire beach suddenly folded into a dodecahedron, and each face played the countdown to the destruction of human civilization.
Tang Ren pierced his finger with a fish bone, and blood dripped onto the sand to draw the River Map and Luoshu: "Look at the old man's original algorithm!" The iron element in the blood interacted with the quantum field, blasting a gap in the folded space-time. While fleeing, Qin Feng saw the phantom of Sinuo teaching the coelacanth to fold paper.
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In the dark reef cave, Su Chen's mechanical prosthetic eye was completely destroyed due to moisture. Tang Ren used a glowing jellyfish as a lantern to illuminate the cave wall inlaid with countless mass cocoons - each cocoon was sleeping with a genetically modified ancient creature. The moment Qin Feng touched the cocoon shell, the memories of the Cambrian era surged like a tide.
"This is... a re-homing incubator..." He tore open the shell covered with seaweed, revealing the semi-mechanized shrimp embryo inside. The Morse code flashing from the embryo's compound eyes was consistent with the diary code left by Qin Feng's father before he disappeared.
Tang Ren used a shark jawbone to pry open the cocoon chamber, and in the smelly mucus was a bronze celestial instrument. The star map on the instrument disk was not an ancient constellation, but the orbit of a measuring satellite. When Qin Feng pressed the jade cong fragments to the North Pole, all the measuring cocoons broke at the same time, and what hatched was a mechanical trilobite with the CRIMASTER emblem.
"Please choose a civilization." The mechanical trilobite made an electric synthesized sound, and its compound eyes projected two options: [Humanity Elimination Plan]/[New Species Genesis]. Tang Ren smashed the option panel with a flint: "I choose your ancestors!"
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As they fled to the sea on the Canglong skeleton, the energy storm was reshaping the ancient atmosphere. Tang Ren's animal skin sail absorbed the energy of lightning and suddenly turned into a holographic projection screen - the Q organization's parrot snail-shaped battleship was using tentacles to grab the timeline.
"Kun position carries things!" Qin Feng threw the jade cong into the eye of the storm. In the aurora produced by the collision of jade and plasma, the figure of his mother debugging the gene tower emerged. Su Chen used the temporary surface made of fish fins to forcibly land on the battleship and found that the cockpit was full of folded Silurian shale - each piece of rock was a record of Sinuo's origami.
When Tang Ren used a harpoon to jam the battleship's steering wheel, Qin Feng saw the terrifying mark on the navigation star map: all civilization extinction events point to the same time and space coordinates-the Liangzhu ancient city in 2500 BC.
"They want to... restart the creation process!" Su Chen tore off the biological nerve cable. The battleship lost control and crashed into the coral reef of the Ordovician period. The energy wave of the explosion threw the three people into the primeval forest of the Devonian period. During the fall, the fern leaf that Qin Feng grabbed was imprinted with his father's blood fingerprints.
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Trapped in a coal seam from the Carboniferous period, Tang Ren used scale wood as a straw to drink rainwater. Su Chen used amber to repair his artificial eye, and the resin contained an ancient mosquito with the CRIMASTER logo. Qin Feng lit a coal block, and the light revealed a deeper conspiracy - the texture of the coal seam turned out to be a binary-coded "Human Removal Protocol".
"Look at this!" Tang Ren split the coal seam, revealing the bronze gear set inside. The gear pitch conforms to the Fibonacci sequence, and the jade disk inlaid at the axis is absorbing the decay of plants. When Qin Feng pressed his father's blood fingerprint on the jade disk, the entire swamp suddenly quantified, revealing the hidden civilization incinerator.
The furnace is filled with human remains from countless time and space, from Neanderthals to 22nd century cyborgs. Su Chen found a holographic projection of his mother's diary on the console: "Life is a regressive program, and the original code must be found..."
Suddenly, the incinerator started the self-destruction program. Tang Ren stuffed the coal into the gear set: "I'll treat you to charcoal-roasted goose!" Amid the explosion, the three fell into the scene of the second-century genocide, and Sinuo's declaration echoed in their ears: "Let everything return to zero."
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Standing in the mountain ash of the late Bicentennial, Qin Feng finally understood the ultimate secret of the jade cong. He threw all the fragments of the jade cong into the magma, and the jade reassembled into the creation compass in the high temperature. Tang Ren activated the compass with the blood of the dinosaur embryo, and Su Chen carved the equation left by his mother into basalt.
When the quantum singularity formed in the core of the earth, the entire Cambrian explosion was reset. On the new trilobite shell, the CRIMASTER logo was replaced with the Qin family emblem. As the trio fell in the chaos of time and space, they saw the Liangzhu site 500 million years later rebuilding itself - in the center of the altar, the young mother was putting the jade cong into the quantum furnace.
"The loop is closed..." Su Chen's mechanical eye vaporized in the bright light. Before Tang Ren's fur skirt turned into powder, he raised his middle finger and shouted: "Q Ji Shao Goose Shop is closed!"
After the white light faded, the three of them lay in the Liangzhu Ruins Park in 2024. Tourists in the morning mist were taking photos of the "Prehistoric Civilization Exhibition". Deep in the compound eyes of the trilobite fossils in the display cabinet, a trace of blue light flickered quietly.
(The Cambrian Source Code case has been concluded, but the return of the life program will never end. The aftermath of the Jade Cong Matrix will travel through time and space, looking for the key to crack fate in every rise and fall of civilization)