I Am Extraordinary Alone

"Preparing for the 298th reboot." Lin Yan stood beside the White King with a laptop in hand, the large tangle of wires resembling dreadlocks, connecting to the special helmet on the White King's head.

After nine years, the two foundations had merged into one, setting aside their initial differences, because in the end, as long as they could create a stable world, whether it was to live in it or use it as a foundation to research ways to slay gods, both were feasible.

However, time flies like a white steed flitting past a crack; nine years have passed, and the people around Lin Yan have grown old. More than a dozen elderly researchers succumbed to time and died in this apocalypse. Professor Li Xianping and Mike have also reached their seventies, but only Lin Yan, under the influence of the White King's power, not only did not age but slowly returned to the appearance of a 27 or 28-year-old.

After the first few elderly researchers died, Lin Yan began pondering ways to prolong their lives. After all, in this world, there are no more people available, and each member of the team is extremely important, especially Mike and Li Xianping. Their wisdom and skills are irreplaceable.

However, this trait of eternal youth seems to be something only Lin Yan can possess and cannot be shared with others. So, to prevent them from being affected by time, Lin Yan sent some of the elderly researchers into the Illusion Dream Core for research in a time-stasis environment.

In that space, they don't need to eat or drink, nor do they age. But because they don't have the freedom to come and go, Lin Yan needs to go in periodically; otherwise, if they stay in too long, they might easily develop psychological problems.

The world reboot plan had been underway for some time, but progress was very slow. After nine years, nearly 300 experiments were conducted, mainly due to insufficient electricity and the White King not enjoying staying in a perpetual slumber, which made the experimental progress uninspiring.

The current White King still only had half a body because no matter what, the lower half could not be reattached. Initially, Lin Yan was overly optimistic about the situation.

She originally thought that an alien species with magical powers like the White King would have some peculiar self-healing abilities, but it turned out she was thinking too much.

Surviving after being severed was a miracle in itself — how could one hope to reattach the lower half?

Thus, the severed lower half was placed in the Illusion Dream Core as experimental material for the researchers.

They also tried constructing simulated worlds in the Illusion Dream Core, but it proved unviable because there wasn't enough energy in there. This glitch-like maneuver declared bankruptcy.

As human civilization collapsed, many power facilities shut down. They had to cautiously transfer, quickly moving to new locations under Lin Yan's superability after exhausting the energy from a region's wind power station to find new power plants.

Solar power and wind power were their primary targets because these power plants required relatively less personnel maintenance and external force, making them comparatively well-preserved, while the hydroelectric and thermal power plants were either destroyed or their dams shattered, rendering them unusable.

Even if they could be used, thermal power required coal burning, and Lin Yan's team lacked the capability to operate such a power plant.

In the first 297 reboots, they created 120 meaningful worlds and a bunch of half-abandoned ones.

The reasons for abandoning these worlds were varied. Half were due to the White King suddenly waking up, causing the world to collapse. As for the rest, in all of Lin Yan and Mike's set conditions, these worlds couldn't develop into modern industrial and technological civilizations.

Setting conditions for these worlds to face challenges similar to Divine Power Tianyang and then thinking out strategies to deal with them was a good idea. But executing it was much harder than Lin Yan imagined — it wasn't simply inputting numbers, clicking a button, and standing back with arms crossed, waiting.

After over a hundred reboots, Lin Yan and Mike had figured out a golden rule: the constructed world mustn't start from modern times.

Human civilization developed to the digital information age, starting from the industrial revolution era, taking a mere 100 years or so.

But these hundred-plus years' achievements were built on more than 5000 years of human civilization accumulation. All the good and bad filled with meaning for humanity.

Without feudal imperial rule, the range of human civilization wouldn't have become so expansive; without ignorance and religion, people wouldn't be gathered together. Everything had to be eaten bite by bite, all ten buns matter — one couldn't eat just the tenth one.

Mike's previous worlds were fragmented, encompassing a few major cities, trade, politics, and technology functioning but based on a text interface. Now, the worlds they created were incredibly microscopic, down to a pebble on the street, representing a world of over 6 billion people.

So when the first world of the reboot plan was born, this fictional world starting directly from the modern information age couldn't last more than two years before collapsing. In the real world, that was a mere 6 seconds.

This world inherited all of human society's contradictions but not human history, leaving all issues with no reference, having to err from the start. The conflicts and contradictions of the information age brewed a conflict the world couldn't bear, leading to a nuclear war soon after, before superpower elements could even manifest, dooming the world itself.

Given this, Lin Yan kept rewinding time, but human civilization would always inadvertently lead to its own downfall for various reasons. Eventually, after several dozen failures, Lin Yan concluded that simulation could only start from the Stone Age, allowing them to experience a complete social progress and step-by-step development to today's level.

Even so, human civilization is so fragile that it could be wiped out inadvertently by natural disasters and external forces. Sometimes, it could be stuck in the feudal religious era for millennia, forcing a manual reboot... Making Lin Yan question whether humanity's advancement to today wasn't just a fluke? Perhaps civilization wouldn't always persist, and technological advancement and thought liberation weren't destined developments.

But as soon as she thought about it, Lin Yan would quickly dispel the thought from her mind. Right now, they were on the brink of human extinction, and acknowledging that thought was akin to acknowledging the disaster brought by Divine Power Tianyang. Humanity was destined for ruin; they created evil fruits, then got backfired, and just happened that evil fruit was him.