Nurturing Humanity

Chapter 16

The Third Mass Extinction

The great flood was like a grand white waterfall that splashed down from the top of a ten-thousand-foot vault of heaven, flooding the mountains, rivers, and earth as the current rushed over them.

“What terrifying might!”

“Within a fleeting moment, a great flood that destroyed the world descended.”

On the deck of the ark, countless merchants, nobles, paupers, and slaves gasped in shock.

They had been identified as the kindest batch of people who knew how to make peace and maintain harmony. When God sent down a great flood to cleanse the earth of sin, the people who were barbaric, tyrannical, sinful, and insolent would all be drowned in the flood.

This was the day when the Great Flood destroyed the world. It was known as the day of Armageddon. The last glimmer of hope of the Sumerian civilization, Utnapishtim and the remaining Sumerians who were following his lead, boarded the one and only Noah’s Ark to escape the Great Flood.

In an unoccupied corner of the Ark, the historian who had been entrusted with the responsibility of recording the history of the Sumerian civilization paused for a moment. With a quill in his hand, he was a very pitiable sight as he sat slumped on the deck, still feeling immersed in the shadow of God.

“Our world, where the sky is round and the earth is square; our world, which is created by God, who only took seven days to create it. What great power this is…”

Akkad’s hand was trembling as tears clouded his aged eyes.

He started to sort out his own train of thought and silently filled in the details on how God had created the world in seven days. Then picking up his pen, he wrote the following account on the seven days where God created the world as the ending of ‘The Genesis’, the epic poem of the Sumerian Civilization:

The first day, God said, “Let there be light.”

So, there was light. God separated light from darkness. He called the light Day and the darkness Night.

On the second day, God said, “Let there be air in the midst of water to separate the flow of water into different directions.”

And so, there was Heaven.

On the third day, God said, “Let the waters under the heavens converge into one place so that the dry land can appear.”

And thus, the waters and dry land were separated. God called the dry land a continent and the place where all waters converge an ocean.

On the fourth day, God said, “Let there be bodies of light in the sky to divide day and night.”

Therefore, there was an alternating cycle of sun and moon. This world that comprised of heaven and earth revolved in a cycle of fifty years of Day and fifty years of Night.

On the fifth day…

On the sixth day…

On the seventh day, all within the heavens and earth were complete. This was the day God rested and also the day where he blessed the first six days of creation.

In the years that followed, people took the conjectures of this historian as gospel. It was as if during the time of the Great Flood, God, the creator of all things in the world, had really appeared before the mortals and personally explained to them how he created the world in seven days.

But how could God possibly stoop so low as to give the humble human beings such a detailed account of how he created the world?

But the people were more than willing to believe the story that was recorded in ‘The Genesis’, the one that recounted how God created the world in seven days.

In the story, God rested on the seventh day of creation, and people called this legendary day a day of rest, a holy day and thus, it became a custom of this land that the people would also choose to rest on this day.

…

Boom!

A great flood fell from the sky.

Buildings were demolished and washed away, crumbling like fortresses built out of wooden blocks. All traces of the Sumerian civilization were washed into the ocean.

Xu Zhi kept the water spraying for a while to ensure that nothing was left behind before he stopped the high-pressure water jet. Silently, he turned off the switch and put the water jet away. He then placed it on a wooden shelf in the shed.

There could now be a fresh start.

The bugapes’ endless killings and over-reproduction had almost caused the sandbox to collapse. Now the entire sandbox, with only a pair of each species left behind, would see the restoration of the former ecosystem sooner or later.

Hopefully, after the experience this time around, they would be more prudent in the future and would not become overly brutal and barbaric. Ideally, they would be mindful of over-reproducing as well.

At Xu Zhi’s side, the Nest mind spoke up. “Even if you didn’t destroy them,” it said, “they would have self-destructed sooner or later. They would have devoured and exterminated all the other species, and eventually head towards self-annihilation. And when that happened, the sandbox would have lost everything. It’s better to act now and usher in new life early.”

Xu Zhi let out a long sigh and said, “I’m not as vulnerable as you think. There’s no need to comfort me. I’m just feeling a little bad about it.

The Nest mind continued, “Just as the Insecta Queen breeds to produce countless lives and races, you, as a great creator, should be used to the rise and extinction of countless races. There’s no need to sigh over them.”

The veins in Xu Zhi’s head popped out as he grew increasingly annoyed. “I’m a man, not an Insecta Queen,” he corrected the Nest Mind.

“Needless to say, they are all spores that you bred…” The Insecta Nest mind was just about to defend its own point of view.

Xu Zhi immediately interrupted it. “Stop!! Anyway, proper birth control for the bugapes is very important.” Sitting on the chair in front of the entrance to the yard, he silently nibbled on the fruit that he had just peeled and ate one mouthful at a time. “I will go into town tomorrow and buy two pounds of fruit. With gastric cancer, I have to be kinder to my stomach.”

He picked up the black notebook that he had not used for a while and recorded something in it.

“This is the age of the great beasts. I was originally going to call this era the Behemoth Period, corresponding to the Age of the Dinosaurs during the Cretaceous Period, which was full of giant-sized animals and wild beasts. But since the Sumerians have recorded this in The Genesis, then I might as well… Let’s just call this era ‘The Genesis’.”

“For the era on Earth, a parallel comparison was the “mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous Period”, where a meteorite fell from the sky and destroyed the dinosaurs.”

“And here, it was Heaven sending down a great flood to destroy all great beasts and bugapes. In my evolutionary history, this would be called “the Mass Extinction at the end of the Genesis period.”

Xu Zhi organized his thoughts and turned to the fourth page, which was after the pages on the Dark Cambrian Period, the Light Cambrian Period, and the Cenozoic Era. On this page, he wrote the name of the fourth era, ‘The Genesis’, but merely summarized this historical period in a few words.

[The Genesis saw the emergence of the first intelligent species. The intelligent ape race developed its own tribe, city-state, and civilization. They drove out the giant beasts and became the overlord of this era. But they were cruel and violent, and the heavens tolerated their behavior no longer, thus sending down the Great Flood that destroyed all living things. This marked the start of the third mass extinction, and its eruption wiped out ninety-nine percent of all creatures.]

…

After recording the third mass extinction event, Xu Zhi went to bed.

The next morning, when he got up to wash his face and brush his teeth, he felt frightening, churning energy spreading all over his body. He was in shock. He hurriedly stopped what he was doing and started to study his body structure.

“This power is…”

Xu Zhi looked at himself in the mirror.

He had, for no apparent reason, grown taller by a few centimeters and now stood at a height of one meter eighty-three. His face had become more angular, making him look gentler and more handsome, and giving him an air of elegance and depth.

His physique was robust and sturdy. It was actually similar to the perfect physique of a Greek sculpture. He had to body of a model. But when he put on clothes, he did not bear the kind of imposing vigor similar to that of a muscular man.

“Muscular when my clothes are off, yet slim when my clothes are on.”

Xu Zhi felt that his physique, with his entire body full of sleek muscles, was now comparable to that of the perfect Hero King, the epic hero.

It was too perfect.

“Is this the power that I gained from the third mass extinction? This is a much greater increase than the last two times… It gives me the feeling that I am now comparable to some top athletes.”

Xu Zhi clenched his fists. He felt as if he was brimming with explosive power and could not help but whisper, “My physical fitness has improved so much, so much!”