The centrifuge hummed like a metallic heartbeat in the sterile silence of Laboratory B-2. Liu Tianmai adjusted his wire-rimmed glasses and peered at the sample tubes, watching genetic material separate into distinct layers—each band representing months of painstaking research into extremophile bacteria adaptation.
Sunday mornings were perfect for uninterrupted work. No chattering graduate students, no professors breathing down his neck about thesis deadlines, no maintenance staff clanging equipment down the hallways. Just him, his experiments, and the endless pursuit of understanding how life adapted to impossible conditions.
Tardigrades, he mused, pipetting a solution with practiced precision. Water bears that can survive the vacuum of space, temperatures near absolute zero, and radiation levels that would liquify human tissue. His current project focused on isolating the genetic mechanisms behind such resilience—work that his advisor dismissed as "impractical" but that Tianmai found endlessly fascinating.
Through the lab's floor-to-ceiling windows, sunlight streamed across the university campus. Students lounged on the quad's emerald grass, some tossing frisbees while others spread checkered blankets for impromptu picnics. A couple laughed as they fed ducks by the manmade pond, and yellow butterflies danced between flowering crabapple trees. The scene painted itself in warm pastels—the kind of peaceful Sunday that most people treasured.
Tianmai found such serenity... tedious.
He had always been a litte different. While other children played video games or watched cartoons, he devoured science fiction novels and research papers on scientific theory. While his classmates worried about pop quizzes and social media drama, he lost himself in fantasies about alien worlds, gene hacking, and the endless possibilities of all organisms.
His friends called it obsessive. His therapist—back when his parents forced him to attend sessions—labeled it "escapism." Tianmai preferred to think of it as intellectual curiosity about life's infinite potential.
After all, reality was often far stranger than fiction. Tardigrades could survive in space, certain bacteria thrived in boiling acid, some organisms could regenerate entire limbs. Why shouldn't the universe hold even greater wonders?
The centrifuge completed its cycle with a soft chime. Tianmai was reaching for the samples when the world lurched sideways.
Not physically—the lab equipment remained perfectly stable, the beakers and petri dishes undisturbed on their shelves. But something fundamental had shifted, like reality itself had stuttered and resumed at a slightly different frequency.
The rumble started low, a bass note that seemed to emanate from the earth's core. It built slowly, methodically, until the very air vibrated with its intensity. Tianmai's samples rattled in their holders. The fluorescent lights flickered once, twice, then stabilized.
Outside, the peaceful campus scene transformed into chaos. Students bolted upright from their picnic blankets, heads swiveling skyward. The couple by the pond stumbled backwards, pointing at something above. Even the butterflies seemed agitated, their erratic flight patterns suddenly frenzied.
Tianmai stepped closer to the window, following their collective gaze.
The sky was wrong.
What had been clear blue moments before now rippled with unnatural darkness, as if storm clouds were forming from nothing. But these weren't ordinary clouds—they moved with purpose, swirling inward toward a central point directly above the campus.
And then it appeared.
A smile.
Massive beyond comprehension, stretching across the entire visible sky like a crack in reality itself. Lips that seemed carved from shadow and starlight, revealing teeth—oh, those teeth. Jagged, overlapping, each one the size of a skyscraper. Some pointed inward like stalactites, others jutted at impossible angles, creating a maw that suggested not mere hunger but an absolute, cosmic appetite.
The smile was wrong in every conceivable way. Too wide, too knowing, too gleeful about secrets that mortal minds weren't meant to comprehend. It was the expression of something that found infinite amusement in the suffering and struggles of lesser beings.
When it spoke, the voice didn't come through the air—it carved itself directly into every living mind, bypassing ears entirely. The words arrived not as sound but as inevitable truth, translated perfectly regardless of language or species.
"GREETINGS, LITTLE SPARKS OF CONSCIOUSNESS."
The voice carried the weight of eons, each syllable resonating through bone and soul. On the campus below, students collapsed to their knees, some vomiting, others screaming. A few simply fainted, their minds unable to process the alien presence pressing against their thoughts.
Tianmai remained standing, though his knuckles whitened as he gripped the window frame.
Fascinating.
"ONE OF MY KIN HAS MADE A WISH, AND THE COSMIC ORDER FINDS IT... AMUSING. YOUR LITTLE INDIVIDUAL WORLDS HAVE GROWN STAGNANT, PREDICTABLE. TIME FOR SOME REORGANIZATION."
The smile somehow managed to widen further, revealing deeper layers of teeth that seemed to extend infinitely inward.
"IN SEVENTY-TWO HOURS, EVERY EARTH FROM EVERY TIMELINE WILL BECOME ONE. A SUPEREARTH, UNMARKED BY YOUR CIVILIZATIONS, RAW AND PRIMAL AND BEAUTIFUL. YOU WILL ARRIVE WITH NOTHING BUT YOUR FLESH AND WHATEVER PASSES FOR YOUR SOULS."
Across the campus, pandemonium erupted. Some students ran in random directions, as if they could somehow escape a cosmic announcement. Others pulled out phones, frantically calling loved ones. A few knelt in prayer, though to which gods they appealed seemed suddenly uncertain.
"GODS, DEVILS, MORTALS, BEASTS—ALL WILL BE DEPOSITED TOGETHER IN THIS NEW REALM. WHAT HAPPENS NEXT..."
The cosmic laughter that followed felt like ice water injected directly into the nervous system.
"WELL, THAT SHOULD PROVE ENTERTAINING."
As the voice faded, something began to materialize in front of the sun. At first, it appeared as a dark smudge, like a solar eclipse beginning. But the shape was wrong—too angular, too precise. As it solidified, the numbers became clear:
71:59:47
A countdown timer, each digit the size of a small moon, etched in absolute blackness against the sun's corona. Already, the seconds were ticking downward with inevitability.
71:59:46
71:59:45
The cosmic smile began to fade, but its final words echoed with terrifying finality:
"DO TRY TO MAKE IT INTERESTING."
As the sky returned to its normal blue—as if the entire interaction had been a collective hallucination—Tianmai stood perfectly still for a long moment. Around him, the sounds of a world in panic filtered through the lab windows: sirens, screaming, the distant crash of a vehicle accident as someone lost control upon seeing the timer.
Then, slowly, a smile spread across Liu Tianmai's face.
It wasn't the cosmic horror that had just departed—this was something smaller, more human, but no less unsettling. It was the expression of someone who had just learned that their most cherished fantasy was about to become reality.
Seventy-two hours.
His mind immediately began cataloguing priorities. First, information gathering—he needed to understand what "Superearth" implied. Climate patterns, terrain types, potential resources. Second, physical preparation—his current body was woefully inadequate for survival scenarios. Third, knowledge consolidation—which skills would translate to a pre-civilization environment?
While his fellow humans panicked about losing their comfortable lives, Tianmai felt nothing but electric anticipation. No more tedious classes, no more social obligations, no more pretending to care about the mundane concerns of people who had never imagined anything beyond their small, safe existence.
This was like every science fiction novel he'd ever read coming to life.
Gods and devils from multiple timelines. The implications made his mind race. Different evolutionary paths, alien biologies, divine anatomies that defied conventional understanding. If even a fraction of the entity's claims were true, Superearth would be a living laboratory unlike anything humanity had ever encountered.
Tianmai pulled out his phone and opened a new note document. As chaos reigned outside and the countdown timer continued its relentless descent, he began typing with rapid, methodical precision:
SUPEREARTH: OPPORTUNITY ANALYSIS
Priority One: Gather Information
- Research survival basics (clearly going to need this)
- Study mythological creatures from various cultures - potential organisms
Priority Two: Prepare for Field Research
- Basic first aid knowledge for unknown biological hazards
- Memorize plant identification principles
- Physical conditioning - can't study specimens if I'm dead
Priority Three: Scientific Opportunities
- Divine/demonic biology could revolutionize understanding of life
- Multiple timeline organisms = unprecedented genetic diversity
- Potential for discovering completely new biological systems
Around him, the lab equipment hummed with oblivious efficiency, continuing experiments that would never be completed. Outside, the timer continued its countdown, each passing second bringing them closer to a world where only the adaptable would survive.
For the first time in years, Liu Tianmai felt truly alive.
Let the others panic, he thought, already pulling up survival guides on his phone. While others grieve for their lost civilization, I'll be preparing to thrive in the new one.
The cosmic entity had promised entertainment, after all.
Tianmai intended to deliver.
After bookmarking his third basic survival guide, he paused to look once more at the timer hanging before the sun. In the distance, he could hear emergency broadcasts beginning, politicians and scientists frantically trying to make sense of an impossible situation.
71:45:23
They would spend these precious hours in denial, bargaining, desperate attempts to "solve" or "prevent" what was coming. They would waste time on grief and fear, on clinging to a world that was already lost.
But not Liu Tianmai.
He had research to do.
And exactly seventy-one hours and forty-five minutes to prepare for the greatest biological discovery opportunity in human history.
The thought sent a thrill through his spine as he opened the next article, fingers already flying across the keyboard to take notes. Outside, the world might be ending.
Inside Laboratory B-2, Liu Tianmai was just beginning to plan for the most exciting adventure of his life.