At three in the morning, Su Mian was the only person left in the laboratory. On the computer screen, the final set of experimental data had just finished verification. Rubbing her sore eyes, she moved the cursor back to the top of the spreadsheet, preparing to check it once more.
She had lived this kind of life for many years. The teachers and the director at the orphanage had treated her well, but the resources that could be allocated to each child were ultimately limited. A new piece of clothing, a grant quota, or even an opportunity to continue her studies were all things she had to fight for herself. And so, Su Mian began to study desperately, working her way from the orphanage all the way into a key high school, and then into Shuimu University, becoming a doctoral student with a bright future in the eyes of others. Hard work had gradually become her survival instinct; even when she no longer had to worry about where her next meal would come from, she remained accustomed to filling every moment of her time.
She also knew she should rest, but the data before her still needed organizing, and tomorrow's presentation was not fully prepared. Su Mian reached out for the water cup at the edge of the desk, but her vision suddenly blurred. Her fingertips brushed past the rim, failing to grasp it. In the next moment, her body lost all support, the light on the computer screen tilted, and every sound drifted away.
When her consciousness resurfaced, only darkness surrounded her. Su Mian's thoughts were sluggish; she vaguely remembered having unfinished business, but the moment those thoughts arose, they scattered into the haze. She could not feel her hands or feet, nor could she discern where she was, only perceiving a heavy, warm power quietly enveloping her.
That power carried the scent of damp earth and vegetation, so profound it seemed endless. Occasionally, faint tremors came from afar, yet before they could reach her, they were blocked outside. Su Mian subconsciously moved closer to that warmth, and somewhere deep within her consciousness that had long been taut gradually relaxed with the motion.
She had never felt anything like this before. An inexplicable sense of peace welled up within her, as if returning to a mother's womb. The exhaustion accumulated for far too long finally surged forward, and Su Mian did not continue to fight it, letting her consciousness sink back into that warm darkness.
In the outside world that she could not yet perceive, the vast earth remained covered by the sky. This world was still in the most ancient era of the gods, where Uranus, God of the Sky, held dominion over the heavens and pinned his wife Gaia firmly beneath the celestial dome.
Gaia had once conceived the sky, mountains, and sea on her own, serving as the Earth Mother upon whom all living things depended to grow. From the three concepts born of the earth came three male gods: Uranus, God of the Sky; Ourea, God of the Mountains; and Pontus, God of the Sea.
Among her three powerful offspring, Uranus, God of the Sky, was chosen by the world to be the first Divine King, and he took Earth Mother Gaia as his Divine Queen.
At first, Gaia was still immersed in the beautiful illusion of love. Yet once she truly united with Uranus, the successive births of the twelve Titans drained a tremendous amount of divine power from her body. Before that power could be fully restored, new conceptions and the relentless oppression of the sky fell upon her once more.
What angered her even more was Uranus's brutality toward their children. The twelve Titans likewise lived under the tyranny of their father. Uranus demanded absolute obedience; even the slightest hesitation toward his commands would invite the oppressive might of the sky. If anyone attempted to resist, he would strike them down mercilessly with divine power, never stopping even when his children's divine bodies were injured. He wanted these increasingly powerful deities to remember that under the rule of the sky, they had no right to defy their father.
After the Titans, Gaia conceived the Cyclopes and the Hekatonkheires. The single eye upon the Cyclopes' foreheads, and the dense mass of heads and arms on the shoulders of the Hekatonkheires—such grotesque appearances filled the Sky Father with even greater revulsion. Furthermore, the power inherent in those monsters' colossal frames made him fearful. Unable to tolerate the earth giving birth to beings that might threaten him, he used the pretext that these children possessed no divinity and were unworthy of being called gods to forcefully imprison them deep within the earth, forbidding them from ever seeing the light of day again.
Gaia could feel the tremors from her imprisoned children's struggles and hear their ceaseless cries of anguish beneath the rock strata. When the injured Titans returned to her side, she would channel her unrecovered divine power to soothe their wounds. She had given birth to these children, yet Uranus forced her to use her own body as a prison cage for them, while she watched with her own eyes as her other offspring suffered under their father's oppression. Every time she tended to her children's wounds, her wrath toward Uranus deepened.
Such days had persisted for far too long. Gaia's power had never managed to recover, yet her wrath toward Uranus had never dissipated. She remembered what kind of power she had once possessed, and she knew clearly who had originally given birth to the very sky that now weighed down upon the earth.
Her encounter with Aether occurred during a rare slumber of Uranus. The heavy celestial dome loosened slightly, and a wisp of clear, ethereal divine power drifted down from beyond the high heavens to reach the earth. That ancient God of the Upper Sky possessed an aura completely different from Uranus; his approach brought no new constraints upon Gaia, but instead allowed her to finally stretch and breathe freely.
Gaia welcomed this sensation. She permitted Aether to draw near and actively reciprocated his intimacy. Outside of her long, suffocating marriage, these brief trysts allowed her to feel once more that her body and will still belonged to her.
Later, a new divine core began to coalesce within her womb. Compared to her earlier powerful and vigorous children, this child was far too quiet. Their divine power was extraordinarily faint, gathering at an exceedingly slow pace, as if lacking even the drive to sustain their own growth.
Gaia soon recognized the divinity within.
Sloth, indolence, inaction...
These powers could not easily shake mountains and the sky as the Titans did, yet this was still a life taking shape. She gathered her divine power around the divine core, carefully masking its aura so that the unformed core would not be exposed to the gaze of the sky.
Uranus could not even tolerate his own children, so he naturally would never permit the existence of a divine child fathered by Aether. Gaia knew that once discovered by him, the child in her womb would likely not even have the chance to be born.
And she had no intention of enduring it any longer. Every cry of agony echoing from the depths of the earth reminded her of how many children were waiting to see the light again. Gaia began secretly searching for an opportunity, gathering strength to bring an end to the sky's oppression. But before taking real action, she needed to safely settle the child in her womb.
Taking advantage of Uranus falling into a deep sleep, Gaia reined in her divine radiance and entered the Underworld along a fissure deep within the earth. The murky rock strata parted slowly before her, as the scent of damp vegetation briefly seeped into this realm of perpetual silence with her arrival.
Vines and slender leaves cascaded through her long hair, their buds mostly closed tight, and the divine luster upon the hem of her skirt was dimmer than usual. Nevertheless, she kept her head held high, her back straight as she walked. The shadowy figures wandering along the way receded into the depths of the rock walls upon sensing that ancient divinity; none dared approach.
One of Gaia's hands remained protectively over her abdomen. Whenever she passed through a narrow fissure, she would first gather her divine power there, waiting until the outside aura settled before moving forward again. Her movements carried a near-instinctive caution, like a mother beast guarding her cub, ready at any moment to bare her fangs at approaching danger even in her exhaustion.
Deep within the Underworld, the domain of Night slowly unfolded. Countless faint starlights hung suspended in the night, neither arranged like those in the sky nor shifting their positions with Gaia's arrival. She halted at the border of the domain, raising her eyes to gaze into the profound darkness ahead.
"Nyx," Gaia spoke, her voice not loud, yet it shook the silence of the Underworld's deepest depths.
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