A short but extremely muscular middle-aged man crawled out of the collapsed tunnel with his arms bare. He fell to his knees, facing the fiery sun in the sky, howled and shed tears, and the tears flowed down his rough cheeks into the beard.
Thinking of something again, he wiped away his tears with his bare arm, and spread out his clenched right hand, a beautiful gear shone with a white aura against the sun.
"Ancestor! I finally found it!"
…
The screen flashed quickly, the owner of the gear changed several times, and the holder also changed from a dwarf-like race to a human being. This time spanning is several epochs, the scenery changes rapidly, and the power of time passing can be judged only from the clothes and costumes.
…
A young woman was sitting on a mound of dirt, opposite a man with a blank face holding a cardboard box, with several dead bodies lying beside her. She swallowed, and reached out to pull out a note from the cardboard box that the man held up.
Opening the note with trembling hands, she screamed hysterically, turned and ran towards the white light door that appeared under the mound. But a bone claw suddenly drilled out of the ground and grabbed her ankle. The woman cried and was pulled in front of the expressionless man.
The body became thinner, and finally turned into a piece of paper and flew into the cardboard box. Clothes and jewelry were strewn about her, and one of the gears rolled down the slope.
As the man with no expression turned into a note and entered the cardboard box, black lines poured out from all directions, ready to destroy the world. The gear entered the white light gate at the last moment, but also stained those black lines.
The aura has since become black and white.
…
The screen flashed quickly, and the traveler accidentally picked up the gear from the ground, looked around and put it in his pocket. It is constantly traveling in the world, not only serving as a part of ordinary machinery, but also buried in the soil for a long time. But in the end, a group of benefactors discovered their true colors.
…
In the crowded basement, three men wearing glasses nervously looked at the gears suspended by a thread with a red aura.
One of them swallowed his saliva, stood on tiptoe, and dripped the liquid with black aura on the silk thread. The water droplets rolled down, passed the gears, and fell into a water bottle with green aura directly below.
The originally transparent water in the container immediately turned a dirty copper rust color.
The gray-haired man squatted down, took out an extremely old syringe, sucked part of the sperm, and then pointed the needle at himself.
…
The screen flashed quickly, this gear was used to perform the same ceremony several times, and the essence obtained through the ceremony was injected into his body by different old people many times. This seems to be a means of renewing life by changing the physical form, but the conversion speed is very slow. Eventually, just as Jenkins met the flower girl, the people who own it accidentally encounter a terrifying creature.
…
In the dark night, except for the standing man, the whole small village is full of corpses with various causes of death. Most of them had black complexions, and black blood flowed from their mouths and noses, which was a symptom of the plague.
The gear lay quietly in the withered palm of an elderly woman wearing a sacrificial robe, and there was only a red moon in the sky, illuminating all of this.
The man with black aura all over his body turned around and wanted to leave, but stopped again, tilting his head to look at the mysterious gear under the moonlight.
He smiled, and immediately, the aura of the gear turned completely black.
…
This time the span of time is even greater, and even the lonely red moon in the night sky has a new companion. The gears are circulating in the world, and finally they are found by those who are looking for them.
…
The believers holding the gear-like metal holy emblem gathered in the old church. The oldest man at the front knelt on one knee, holding a red metal box in his hand.
The box popped open automatically, and the gears in it flew out and fell into the main hall where the pulpit should have been, but now it was a deep well.
The black spiritual light became more and more intense, and in the depths of the old temple, the ancient god statue made up of countless gears faintly heard the sound of rotation.
The dull sound of metal clashing constantly echoed in the empty church.
…
The only thing that changes is the time, and the face changes again and again, but they all do the same thing - get water from the well that can infect germs.
…
It was still the same church, but compared to the previous scene, it looked a lot brighter.
It was a rainy night outside, with howling winds and torrential rain. In the dazzling light of lightning, a man in a black cloak hurriedly opened the door and broke in.
The elders and the faithful did not blame him for his rudeness, nor for the stain of the bright red carpet with the slops from his boots and the raindrops from his body.
The man lowered his head and knelt in front of the holy emblem of the Gear King. The other two who followed him carried a familiar clock, and the fourth person walking in the end held a small hammer. The thunder of the sky echoed.
The man on one knee pulled out a still beating metal heart that was a work of art from the cloak. The bronze-colored metal sheets are closed together, and the joints are covered with ancient patterns of characters. They are like thick blood vessels attached to the surface of the heart.
But these dense lines are not static. With the beating of the heart, the lines are constantly changing like flowing water, forming new content. On the surface of the shrinking heart, dense scale-like metal sheets are also opening and closing, revealing a more complex metal structure inside the heart.
It has a white aura, which exactly echoes the black aura emanating from the deep well in front of the holy emblem.
Under the watchful eyes of everyone, the heart was thrown into the well, and the holy emblem also released golden power.
The ground was vibrating, and rumbling thunder resounded through the sky and the earth. A beating heart rises from the well after another bolt of blue and white lightning flashes through the window.
bang~ bang~ bang~
It beat violently, and every time it jumped, a stream of rusty water with a black aura burst out from the joints of the metal sheets.
…
The metal heart was taken from that church, and every time his bearer stopped, it caused riots that spread throughout the city. The screens continued to flow, and a familiar city appeared in front of my eyes.
In the empty mine tunnel, discarded iron picks and decayed bones were piled up against the wall, and the mine cart was overturned beside the track.
Dozens of people in black robes knelt on one knee and formed a circle. Behind every black robe, there is a holy emblem like a gear.
The man with the metal heart raised his hands, and the heart emerged from his hands. The middle-aged shopkeeper stood with him, and a clock appeared behind him.
Someone brought a bowl, and from the lower end of the heart, a bead of copper-colored liquid dripped, dyeing the clear water in the bowl the same color. The middle-aged shopkeeper opened the long flat box with a solemn expression, and there were nine empty syringes inside.