Chapter One: Escape Successful?

　　In a narrow room, dim firelight struggled weakly from a soot-blackened fireplace, barely exhaling a few breaths of warmth, yet carrying the acrid smell of low-quality charcoal.

　　Not far from the fireplace stood a short bed, less than a meter wide, upon which lay a frail youth. His face was unnaturally flushed, his brows tightly furrowed, and he muttered indistinct words, his body twitching from time to time.

　　Clearly, the youth clinging tightly to the tattered bedding on the narrow bed was enduring some unknown pain, the contortions on his face marring what was once a rather handsome appearance.

　　"Ah!" The youth suddenly sat up in bed, gasping for breath, his eyes still filled with terror. On this cold winter midnight, his forehead was actually covered in fine beads of sweat.

　　Strangely, the look of fear and tension faded from his face after only a moment, replaced by an expression of anger. His pupils, which had shrunk to pinpoints from fright, relaxed and gradually became deep and dark—in other words, his pupils dilated, and the proportion of the iris in his eyes increased.

　　Of course, these were all just surface phenomena. No one knew what the youth on the bed was thinking at this moment.

　　"Forrest Gump, stop! Stop it! Make these messy, fly-like characters, equations, and molecular structure diagrams disappear from my sight! Now!" The youth, startled awake in the middle of the night, shouted words completely out of place with his surroundings, sounding especially bizarre in the small wooden cabin on a winter night.

　　In the youth's vision, torrents of data surged before him, providing a detailed description of his current environment: disturbances in the earth's gravity, the chemical composition of the air, the material of the bedding covering him, the basic structure and strength of this body... Nothing within his perception was left out.

　　The instant flood of information made the youth instinctively abandon control of his visual organs, trying to block out the onslaught. Unfortunately, instinct is just instinct—it’s not one hundred percent effective.

　　On the surface, this data appeared in the air before his eyes, but in reality, it was directly projected into his mind, impossible to block! So he turned to roar at the culprit behind all this.

　　Immediately, the phantom data in the air vanished like mist. The youth let out a long breath, regaining control of his eyes. By the dim firelight, he turned to survey everything in the room.

　　A fireplace so dilapidated it was barely recognizable, blackened by smoke; drafty wooden plank walls; a damp earthen floor; a thin, rag-like garment hanging on the wall; a lumpy, hard, uncomfortable wooden bed; the black, barely-qualifying-as-a-blanket primitive bedding on the bed; and the sour, musty stench in the air—all of it told him just how miserable his current environment was!

　　"Forrest Gump, you’ve dumped me back into the Stone Age! Get out here, I need an explanation." The youth gritted his teeth, once again uttering inexplicable words.

　　The materials and style of the items in the room made it easy to deduce the level of social productivity—this was definitely a backward era that had not undergone an industrial revolution!

　　There was no one else in the room, but strangely, a weak voice began to sound in the youth’s mind: "James Carter, you can’t blame me for this. The spatial super-continuous equation you provided had a fatal flaw. Besides, our current situation isn’t that bad—we still have a healthy body, even if it’s a bit frail and its origins are unclear. But after surviving the chaotic virtual space, we didn’t perish. That’s something to be grateful for."

　　The youth called James Carter shouted directly, "A flaw?! How could my super-continuous equation have a flaw? Impossible! And who was it at the start who swore it would be one hundred percent safe? Who was it that concluded the equation was perfect in the pre-simulation? Was it me, James Carter?"

　　At the end, James Carter looked up and sighed, "I never thought I, James Carter, would see this day. The glory of the past is gone forever, ah ah~ sigh~"

　　After the anger in his chest subsided a little, and James Carter recovered from his manic state, he knew he couldn’t blame Forrest Gump entirely for this ordeal.

　　This inexplicable situation, the unfamiliar body, the unfamiliar yet obviously destitute living environment—anyone in the galaxy would be hard-pressed to remain calmer than James Carter. All he could do was cover his face in despair.

　　The tiny wooden cabin, with his sigh, returned to silence.

　　But a guy named Forrest Gump quickly broke the peace. Environmental data once again quietly flickered in James Carter’s vision, at first very slowly, with only a few symbols appearing now and then.

　　Clearly, this was a test.

　　James Carter remained unmoved, still covering his face in thought. If he took off his clothes, he’d look exactly like ‘The Thinker’.