Chapter 604 - 1: Return
At the beginning of the challenge, Chen Zhou felt as if he were in a dream.
In that chaotic dreamscape, he involuntarily revealed his innermost thoughts and, after hearing "approval granted," he awoke on the beach of a strange world.
Perhaps this is how ordinary people feel during their first "reality show" experience: beginning in a daze, equipped with only scant information and not much wilderness survival expertise, they find themselves unprepared and stranded on a desolate island, starting anew.
But as it ended, Chen Zhou’s senses became extraordinarily sharp, able to perceive even the tremor of each hair.
The sensation of traversing through time and space wasn’t pleasant—
When the time reached precisely 4 PM on December 12, 1687, standing in the center of the sandy ground, he felt struck and shattered by an immense, indescribable energy beam, evaporating into countless fragments.
His consciousness blurred for a moment, and just as his life was about to extinguish, he saw a familiar, wide, and brightly lit white room.
Unlike the scene 28 years ago when the challenge began, this time the room not only contained strange machines but was also crowded with a group of blue humanoid creatures.
Their bodies were made of small blue blocks that changed constantly, sharing no human features aside from a general resemblance to primates.
This time Chen Zhou felt no urge to speak; he simply stood in the room, absorbing the emotionless gazes of the humanoid beings as if time and space had frozen.
Although there was no verbal exchange and no way to discern their thoughts from their eyes or behavior, Chen Zhou sensed that these creatures were intensely discussing him.
If he had to choose a description, he’d say he felt like an "animal star" inside the transparent glass walls of a zoo, being observed by visitors.
The observation lasted only a moment.
Immediately afterward, the room warped and poured into a void like sand from the top of an hourglass, and darkness swallowed everything.
...
The feelings of weightlessness and dizziness once again invaded Chen Zhou’s body, a searing pain as if his whole being were torn apart and forcibly recombined assaulted his nerves.
He struggled to open his eyes, trying vigorously.
Yet he couldn’t; every inch of his skin felt weighed down by a thousand pounds, robbing him of control over his own body, even reducing his brain to a muddled, unfeeling state.
"Damn it, why didn’t the Space-Time Administration Bureau say we’d suffer like this after the challenge ended? Are they trying to paralyze me?"
Finally gathering his thoughts, Chen Zhou cursed inwardly.
He went through cycles of trying and failing repeatedly.
Undergoing this prolonged sleep paralysis, unable to gauge time, he struggled for who knows how long before exhaustion forced him into sleep.
Upon waking again, he finally regained that familiar sense of control over his body and eagerly attempted to open his eyes and get out of bed.
But even this normally simple action turned into a daunting challenge for Chen Zhou now.
Compared with the haze before his sleep, he could distinctly feel at this moment that he was forcefully integrating into a body that wasn’t quite his.
The old, aging flesh he once had was completely obliterated in that massive energy beam, and this body, both familiar and foreign, seemed a bit different from before the challenge started.
Adapting to the body required time, but even more troubling for Chen Zhou was accepting the memories—
Memories from his modern life before the challenge had long faded during the lengthy challenge, and now, returning to modern times, those memories were surprisingly still stored vividly in this body’s brain.
Suddenly absorbing 25 years of information, coupled with 28 years of island memories, felt like two forces fiercely battling in his mind, turning his brain into mush.
...
Though confused, after some sorting, Chen Zhou still remembered that before the challenge, he was working at a cement factory.
The cement factory was located on the edge of their town, with investors coming from the south—
This type of heavily polluting factory is never built in economically developed areas; northern regions have more lenient environmental regulations and cheaper labor, which reduces not only workers’ wage costs but also conveniently cuts some benefits, making it almost like Heaven for investors.
The factory had its own dining hall and dormitories, with a bathhouse next to the dormitory building.
However, most workers were locals with houses in town, so few resided in the dormitory, allowing Chen Zhou to have a single room.
The big boss of the cement factory resided in Yunnan with frequent annual visits only once or twice a year for inspections; currently, the top manager lived at the factory.
As an engineer responsible for overseeing and maintaining machines, Chen Zhou had frequent dealings with the management at the factory.
The dismantling, transmission alignment, and hydraulic lubrication maintenance of rotary kilns and ball mills, as well as motor inspections, usually involved him.
Although the seasoned workers could solve problems, they were close to retirement and not as vigorous as before.
He was the only young engineer and the only one residing in the dormitory, reachable by phone at any time. Consequently, whenever machinery failed or cement quality fluctuated, the first thought that popped into management’s minds was him.
Compared to this demanding workload, the salary remaining after paying social security fees was a modest over 4000, appearing much less to someone who had worked in a large factory before.
If it weren’t for the pandemic, causing the shutdown of large southern factories where he worked and his family’s frequent worrying calls urging his safety, urging him to return to let go of this job in his hometown.