I’m Trapped in a Cube - Chapter 58

“The primordial cell-is it this bubble person?”

Mo Ling was stunned by Liang Zhi’s words.

“I always thought those little cubes were the primordial cell, but I never imagined the primordial cell was you.” Liang Zhi stared wide-eyed at the bubble person, marveling.

After a moment, Mo Ling sorted out his thoughts.

The egg itself was the primordial cell!

Liang Zhi’s face was bitter. “You’ve been deceiving me for so long.”

Was he communicating with the primordial cell? Mo Ling could hardly believe it.

But what happened next shocked him even more.

The bubble person slowly descended from the air, walking steadily to stand before Liang Zhi.

The bubble vibrated slightly, and sound emerged.

It was a voice with the resonance of flowing water, completely unlike a human’s, ethereal and clear.

“So many times, and you finally see it.”

Liang Zhi looked hopeless, full of despair. “So what if I see it now?”

The bubble person stood there like a statue, voice calm: “You made quite a stir this time.”

“I killed a lot of people. That’s not what I wanted. That was a price that shouldn’t have been paid.”

“No, it’s part of the price,” the bubble person replied. “And this is the last time. Haven’t you already gotten what you wanted?”

Liang Zhi paused, then looked at the egg beside the bubble person, suddenly realizing something, his eyes wide.

“I didn’t trick you, did I? Didn’t you get what you wanted?” the bubble person said. “Now for the final step. This time, I’ll let you keep your memories.”

Then the bubble person reached out a hand.

Liang Zhi sighed and reached out as well.

Their hands clasped.

Then the bubble person’s water membrane slowly spread over Liang Zhi.

The acceleration phenomenon in the area suddenly appeared on Liang Zhi’s body; he began to age.

Gradually, he could no longer support his body, collapsing forward.

The bubble person held his hand, letting him lean on its shoulder.

Then it embraced him, letting him die slowly in its arms.

His flesh rotted, his bones turned to dust.

The Druid’s Spine inside Liang Zhi, without any other bones to support it, fell to the ground.

It became one of the countless spines in the nest.

Not long after, a child walked out from behind the egg, slowly approaching the bubble person, growing as he walked.

When he reached the bubble person, his growth stopped instantly.

It was Liang Zhi.

His bare back still showed the exposed Druid’s Spine.

He touched his cheek, checked his body, then put on his clothes.

The bubble person looked at him and said calmly, “Our game is over. Now it’s the game between your two kinds of life.”

With that, it floated upward again, drifting toward the egg.

Liang Zhi’s face was complicated. He looked at the bubble person in the air, as if wanting to speak, but when he reached out, he said nothing.

The bubble person touched the egg, the water membrane merged, and it slowly melted back into the egg, returning to its original bubble form.

Then the bubble in the egg changed, becoming a perfect sphere.

Only now did Mo Ling realize-the egg now looked exactly like the cells he knew.

The transparent shell was the cell membrane.

The clear liquid inside was cytoplasm.

And the spherical bubble was the nucleus.

The shape of a cell, revealed unmistakably.

All of Mo Ling’s last doubts vanished.

The primordial cell really existed.

The thing above the nest could no longer be called a strange egg-it was the primordial cell’s true form.

Huge and fantastical.

After the bubble’s transformation, the primordial cell began to wriggle, rising up from the Druid’s Spine nest.

Like a single-celled organism drifting in the sea, it slowly floated upward.

Drifting with the current.

The air was like waves, rocking the primordial cell back and forth.

The whole acceleration zone shifted as the cell moved.

The primordial cell twisted, approaching the top of the temple, then passed straight through the wall, flying out into the world.

This wondrous primordial cell vanished before everyone’s eyes.

The acceleration zone soon disappeared too, the lush plants fading as if they’d never existed.

Only the empty temple remained.

Mo Ling was stunned.

The primordial cell was such a terrifying thing.

Other cells had taken the path of multicellularity; it alone had kept the shape of a cell.

Other cells evolved division, winning by numbers; evolved differentiation, winning by diversity.

But the primordial cell just grew larger, walking further and further down the path of individual evolution, opening a road utterly incomprehensible.

It even possessed self-awareness in some unimaginable form.

And such a powerful ability to accelerate evolution.

A completely different evolutionary path!

The soldiers below were dumbfounded.

The sheep-headed person, after the primordial cell vanished, lifted its frame and leapt onto a temple pillar.

It then used its chainsaw to cut an opening and climbed out through the top of the temple.

……

After a moment of silence, Captain Su looked at Liang Zhi, a little helpless. “I think I understand you a bit now.”

But Liang Zhi shook his head, denying it. “Now I don’t understand myself.”

“You’d better explain what happened,” Captain Su said seriously.

“Let me rest a bit first.” He seemed to have a headache, looking exhausted, and sat down heavily on the pile of spines.

After a while, Liang Zhi began to recount his story again.

“What I said before wasn’t quite right.”

He looked at the countless spines on the ground, his face complicated.

“These spines-they should all be mine.”

……

The real story is this.

It began with that routine exploration.

That time, near the Great Hollow Tree, Liang Zhi found a strange egg full of transparent liquid, with an acceleration zone around it.

But at the time, he just thought the acceleration zone was odd and didn’t sense any danger, so he walked right in.

Yet as a Theseus Cell lifeform, he was unaffected.

Instead, the egg transformed into the bubble person and communicated with him.

He didn’t know it was the primordial cell then-he just thought it was a relic, because the bubble person named a price:

“You play a game with me, and I’ll grant you one wish. Any wish.”

The bubble person’s decisive attitude made Liang Zhi even more certain it was a relic.

A relic that could grant any wish…

Driven by a strange attraction and desire, he told the bubble person the wish he’d held in his heart for so long.

It was the pursuit of his entire life.

“My wish is-to find the primordial cell.”