Screeeee—!

The ground trembled, cracks webbed across the barren land like the veins of a dying beast.

Far off at the poles, thin sheets of ice began to bloom, earth's first winter sighing into existence.

The sun, once hidden behind poisonous clouds, flickered brighter for a moment, casting pale light over a man's still form lying across the jagged rock.

Wang Xiao's eye lids stirred.

A faint pulse of pressure escaped his body, like a beast waking from hibernation

The entire primordial coastline seemed to tremble the moment his eyes opened, reflecting a world that no longer belonged to modern time.

The sky above, hues of purple and green, no trace of blue.

A prehistoric atmosphere.

"…Thrown back through time?" His voice was low, unsure, bewildered yet calm. He sat up slowly, inspecting his surroundings… then froze.

"Mn?"

A sudden, soft impact landed behind him.

Fwump.

Wang Xiao's body tilted forward slightly from the gentle collision, and he sighed knowingly.

"...Yanyan, have you been practicing just to sneak attack on me?"

A lazy smirk played on his lips.

From behind him, two snow-pale arms wrapped around his waist.

A scent followed, dark, sweet, intoxicating. The kind of fragrance that should only exist under moonlight, soaked in lust and mystery. Yet here it was, shamelessly invading the morning.

"Haaa...!"

A voice purred against his back.

"Dad… why are you looking at your body like that?" Her breath was warm, and playful. "Do you think I'm the kind of woman who'd harm you in your sleep?"

Her voice was velvet and smoke, teasing, dangerous, but threaded with affection.

Wang Xiao glanced down at himself.

His clothes were gone.

Every last piece.

Only his own skin met the wind.

"…You undressed me again."

His tone was dry.

He turned to meet the woman behind him, Mei Yanyu, Amelia's ever-mischievous daughter.

Her body barely hid behind a few strips of black cloth, and even that seemed accidental. Hair like cascading obsidian flowed over her shoulders, and her crimson eyes curved like crescent moons.

Her face pressed into his back, soft breasts pressing shamelessly against him, her thighs locking lightly around his.

She rarely showed herself to the world.

Even this, just being half-covered, was a kind of performance meant only for him.

"I was worried," she whispered, rubbing her cheek against his spine. "You slept for so long… I thought time itself swallowed you."

She moved around him, arms still locked, and pressed her forehead against his chest.

"I checked your breath three times… And I might have… touched you a little…"

Wang Xiao raised a brow.

"A little?"

Yanyan grinned.

"Just enough to check your health. Nothing a proper daughter wouldn't do."

Her fingers were already wandering again, tracing lazy patterns down his abdomen... lower…until they drifted dangerously near territory no daughter should be touching.

Wang Xiao's hand shot out, catching her wrist just in time.

His lips twitched.

He didn't know whether to laugh… or scold.

Out of all his daughters, this one, has absolutely no shame.

He sighed inwardly.

Yanyan blinked innocently, her crimson eyes glinting. "Mm? But Father, I was only doing my filial duty… making sure you still function properly~"

She leaned in again, her breath teasing against his collarbone.

Wang Xiao exhaled, exasperated. "You're getting more outrageous by the day."

Yanyan tilted her head, her bare legs folding to one side as she glanced around.

"…By the way, where exactly are we?"

Her voice was casual, as if they hadn't just crash-landed into the Archean Era like broken stars.

She paused, then frowned. "I was guarding you... then the next thing I remember is being flung across like a rag doll."

Wang Xiao's expression darkened.

He rubbed the bridge of his nose, his voice low. "I was investigating future distortions in your Aunt Jiarong's timeline. I finally traced the anomaly that severed her causality chain."

Yanyan blinked. "Oh... I saw some of that. The ripple through her thread, right?"

He nodded stiffly.

"…Then I tried to remove the threat-"He paused, his jaw clenched "and ended up killing myself."

Silence.

Yanyan's face twitched.

"…You what?"

Wang Xiao sighed. "Yes. Apparently, I was the anomaly."

She stared blankly.

Then slowly, a smile crept across her face.

"So, to protect Aunt Jiarong, you… assassinated yourself in the future?"

Wang Xiao didn't answer.

He didn't need to.

Yanyan grinned wider. "And then? Did you unkill yourself?"

He rolled his eyes.

Of course he did.

Otherwise, he wouldn't be sitting here naked on a dead planet with his overly-attached daughter snuggling against him.

She chuckled softly and leaned her head against his shoulder.

Most wouldn't dare act this way. But she wasn't "most."

Yanyan was… different.

Not just in personality.

In essence.

Time never truly applied to her.

When Wang Xiao was flung back to the beginning of Earth, no one else came with him. No one could. But she did.

Because time, to Yanyan, didn't exist.

Not metaphorically. Not poetically.

It simply... wasn't real to her.

She was born wrong.

Or perhaps, too right.

When Amelia gave birth to her, after Wang Xiao's battle with Maliketh, there were still remnants of antimatter shards inside his body. Shards that weren't completely purged. During a moment of carelessness, when his blood had mingled with Amelia's, some of those fragments drifted… into the unborn child.

Yanyan was unstable from the start. Her existence contradicted itself.

To save her, Wang Xiao made a decision that defied logic. He infused her with pure Dark Energy, the very thing modern science still feared and worshipped as the unknown force behind universal expansion.

What is Dark Energy?

It is not matter.

It is not dark matter.

It is not time.

It is not even "energy" in the way mortals understand it.

It is the fluid between worlds.

If you imagine the multiverse as glowing orbs floating in a vast ocean, then Dark Energy is that ocean hosting it.

It exists outside reality, and inside it simultaneously.

It is the only thing that does not obey creation or destruction.

Aether comes from it.

Matter kneels to it.

Time cannot bind it.

All forms of energy, douqi, spiritual essence, Aether, even divinity, were nothing more than refractions of a single source.

Dark Energy.

Not the dark matter that stitched together time and space, but something far more ancient.

Primordial... And unshaped.

In its raw form, it couldn't be utilised

It existed beneath concept itself, a sea before form, a breath before the first existence.

And yet…

Someone touched it.

Someone, or something, long before any universe, any cultivation, any law, reached into that nameless abyss and shaped it.

They bent the formless into form.

Crafted orbs of reality and named them universes.

Imposed direction upon time, boundaries upon space, and called it order.

Every realm, every thread of fate, every law of physics, all of it was sculpted from that impossible clay.

Wang Xiao couldn't touch the raw sea.

But he could see the waves it left behind.

There existed someone, or something, that had crafted everything.

A being outside reality, beyond existence itself.

Wang Xiao had never seen it.

He didn't know its purpose.

But he knew one thing, It was his final destination.

The one who first created dark energy,

who carved the first shape out of nothingness...

And shaped it into a cage of existence.

To him, that being was the only one worthy of the title... God... the "Architect", also his true goal and enemy.

And Yanyan, she had been infused with chaotic dark energy after Wang Xiao discovered it was the only thing capable of stabilizing her form.

She was a being that could exist inside Xianthera, where time runs five times faster, and also outside, guarding her father's true body in the eternal present.

Even now, she was the only one who followed him through the collapse.

Because to her, there was no collapse.

She simply walked forward.

Following him.

Wang Xiao, who had accidentally reversed too far, found himself cast into the depths of time, thrown back to an age before history, before gods, before thought.

But to Yanyan, it wasn't some grand temporal event.

She was simply tracing him.

Guarding him, as always, from the shadows.

She never expected to be dragged into the past.

Never realized that a single step forward would take her to the prehistoric era.

To her…

She just walked.

And he was there.

That was enough.