That unusual afternoon, under the influence of the Evolution Sand Table, the buildings selected by Lin Tuo quietly shifted across the vast and barren land.
Even the people within them failed to notice anything amiss.
It wasn't until satellite positioning began to deviate, and a familiar city suddenly appeared at the end of the road, that the anomaly became clear.
"Wha—"
"Impossible… How did we end up here? This highway shouldn't be anywhere near this place…"
One by one, the vehicles came to a halt. Members of the film crew stepped out into the blazing sun, gathering together, most still utterly confused about what had just happened.
Their chatter soon spread the realization: somehow, they had inexplicably left the desert wilderness and arrived at the northern edge of the Taklamakan Desert.
"No, we didn't go the wrong way! It's the road! This entire desert highway has shifted more than a hundred kilometers north!" a deputy director shouted, gripping his phone in disbelief.
He was met with skepticism—his claim too absurd to accept.
But the next moment, everyone felt the air grow cooler… More precisely, a massive shadow swept over them in an instant, as though something had blotted out the sun.
"Look over there!" one of the lead actors cried, pointing southward.
Everyone turned their heads. And then, silence fell.
Before their stunned eyes, from the distorted air emerged an immense wall of shadow. Hundreds—perhaps even thousands—of meters high, it stretched endlessly east and west.
Within mere breaths, the shadow solidified into real, tangible substance.
It was as if the world itself had been split in two.
From a sufficiently high vantage point, one could see it clearly: at that very moment, a vast, irregular, impenetrable black dome, like an inverted bowl, enclosed the entire Taklamakan Desert—over 300,000 square kilometers sealed inside.
Mount Li, in the dilapidated old martial hall.
Lin Tuo stood beside the sand table, quietly watching as a dark, semi-transparent dome enclosed the miniature world within. He realized this was the so-called Isolation Barrier—the outer shell of the creation mode.
From the information flowing through his mind, he knew this barrier was unimaginably strong. With Earth's current level of civilization, it was unbreakable and undetectable.
Though semi-transparent within the sand table, to both the beings inside and humans outside, it was utterly insurmountable.
As for the desert highway and key infrastructure he had marked earlier, the Evolution Sand Table had safely transferred them outside the isolated domain.
"Satellites have probably already picked this up. News of the desert being cut off will spread soon enough…" Lin Tuo thought, glancing at his phone.
After a moment of hesitation, he switched it to silent.
Meanwhile, within the sand table, subtle changes were taking place. A faint, unseen power swept across the vast desert.
The microbial environment was purged.
Plants withered within moments.
Lin Tuo wasn't surprised. This was simply the "disinfection" phase.
[Sandbox No. 1 constructed. Current environment unsuitable for civilization evolution. Please provide essential base materials…]
Information once again surged into his mind: the desert environment was too barren; he needed to enrich it.
At the very least, he had to supply soil and water.
While such materials did exist in the desert, providing them manually would greatly reduce the time required for evolution.
"First, I'll have to clear out all this sand," Lin Tuo muttered. He went into the storage room, retrieved a shovel and a wheelbarrow, and returned to the hall.
Parking the cart by the door, he gripped the shovel, took a deep breath, and dug into a dune.
According to the knowledge from the sand table, his actions wouldn't affect the real world.
The Isolation Barrier didn't just seal the surface; it fully separated the entire Taklamakan Desert from Earth.
"Rise."
As he lifted the shovel—
Over the Taklamakan Desert, within the barrier.
The air twisted, and a colossal shovel materialized, blotting out the sky!
It descended without mercy, scooping up a dune weighing trillions of tons, and lifted it effortlessly into the heavens.
At a certain height, both the dune and the enormous shovel vanished.
In the desert below, only a gaping crater remained.
Back in the martial hall, sand cascaded into the wheelbarrow. Lin Tuo reached out, rubbing the fine grains—they were as delicate as dust.
"It seems there's a size-conversion mechanism. Ordinary objects placed inside the sand table are scaled up. And real-world materials, when extracted, shrink down to particles."
He withdrew his hand, deep in thought.
It felt… miraculous.
Shaking his head, he continued. After a few more trips, he had completely cleared the sand table of its desert sands, dumping them in the martial hall's backyard.
Once the Taklamakan was stripped clean, he moved on to soil and rock.
"The more complex the base material, the easier the evolution," he murmured. Then he began hauling soil from the back mountain into the sand table.
The hall's backyard, though overgrown and neglected, had rich soil.
During the transfers, Lin Tuo noticed that any micro-organisms in the soil died upon entering the barrier, leaving the earth slightly altered in color.
It took several trips before he had covered the sand table's surface.
Next, he drew water from the well, pouring it into the miniature world.
After a pause, he added several discarded metal scraps.
"That should be enough," he said, wiping sweat from his brow.
[Base materials provided. Ready to initiate project?]
The prompt appeared.
"Begin."
The sand table shone briefly, as if transforming. Seconds later, calm returned.
Inside, however, changes had begun.
Above the sand table, a swirling nebula appeared—its attempt to mirror the cosmos.
A sun. A moon.
"Really? A moon too?" Lin Tuo muttered. After all, this wasn't a planet—merely a flat world.
But clearly, the Evolution Sand Table modeled everything after Earth's parameters.
Which meant, the sandbox world now had its own independent ecology.
Looking closer at the land, he saw the coarse earth refined into dust, rising into mountains and hills.
The water gathered into oceans and lakes.
At last, the world had a primitive shape.
[Sandbox No. 1 activated. Evolution running…]
A change appeared on Lin Tuo's retinal interface.
Alongside "Creation Mode" and the "Return" button, new information appeared:
"Current Ether Concentration: None."
This was a detector for Ether levels within the sandbox world.
Another icon appeared—a toolbox.
Opening it revealed only two functions:
Isolation Barrier (currently active).
Time Flow.
The latter offered two options: Dynamic Adjustment and Sync with Reality.
Dynamic meant the sandbox would auto-adjust its internal time based on processing power and environment.
At first, when the sandbox was simple, time would rush forward—an hour outside could mean hundreds of millions of years within.
As complexity increased, the ratio would shrink. Eventually, an hour outside might equal only centuries—or less—inside.
Lin Tuo understood: the more complex the sandbox, the greater the computational demand. To keep up, time flow had to slow.
The manual "Sync" option let him lock it at a 1:1 ratio.
"Convenient," he thought with a smile.
The rest of the interface was a blank panel.
"Big empty space like that… poor design," he muttered as a designer.
But then, words began to click into existence:
[Run Log:]
[On this day, the world's evolution began. It was an irregular land, silent and barren. Its surface held only chaotic earth, sand, water, and trace metals. Yet, the foundation of life had been laid.]
[One hundred million years passed. No change.]
[Two hundred million years passed. Still the same.]
…
[At the fifth hundred millionth year, a ripple stirred within the dead oceans.]
(End of Chapter)