Cataclysm: Undead Dragons and Zero Empire

Lin Ziming transformed into a dragon.

He opened his eyes in a daze, looking at the transparent warehouse wall in front of him and the unknown metal warehouse wall behind him. He discovered that he actually had three pairs of eyes, and the whole world was clearly visible to him.

The next instant brought a surge of power, and out of the instinct to yawn, he opened his mouth and exhaled a sapphire-blue breath that pierced through the fortress base where the incubator was located, creating a dazzling spectacle in the boundless, dark starry sky.

In the time that followed, which he didn't know how many seconds later, he confirmed that he was in a space environment and had just been born from an incubator, and that his instinct upon waking up had destroyed his "egg".

He quickly adapted to his new environment, and the near-absolute zero temperature of space did not make him feel uncomfortable. He watched with curiosity as a large number of strangely shaped spaceships approached him, and then began to clear the rubble.

Lacking a frame of reference, he was unaware of how enormous his body was. The ships that appeared to be engineering units looked like a group of giant ants working in an orderly fashion in front of him.

Those leafcutter ants were very efficient. The incubator was quickly dismantled, like a fallen blade of grass. Lin Zimo kept looking at his new body throughout the process.

Although the sun in this star system appears as a dazzling point of light from here, it can still capture enough light to observe the outside world. As it keeps trying to blink, layers of nictitating membranes are gathering different information for it.

The world sometimes looks like it's seen through night vision goggles, sometimes it appears colorful, with vibrant waves swaying around the stars on the vast black screen, and sometimes the whole world looks like geometric lines intricately interwoven, like a three-dimensional ball of yarn.

His wings were two pairs of membranous wings. Upon realizing this, Lin Ziming excitedly spread his wings and soared through the vast space. This instinct for flight allowed him to taste the joy of freedom. The pleasure he once felt as a terrifying upright ape yearning for the sky was now realized as a free-roaming dragon shadow in the deep space.

He soon discovered that with a single flap of his wings, the incubator had been left behind in the background of space. Three pairs of eyes quickly locked onto his flight path in the darkness, and then with another flap of his wings, he accurately returned to the starting point.

Unaware of his terrifying acceleration, Lin Ziming's attempts to fly towards the sun caused some thermal signals he had detected in his field of vision to amplify instantly, and he quickly arrived next to some "space dust".

Those are planets captured by the sun's gravitational field. You can see buildings of all sizes orbiting the planets' satellites, and industrious "metal ants" going back and forth. Lin Ziming guessed that these ants were mining resources.

The gas giant reminded Lin Ziming of Jupiter. He sped across the planet's surface, traversing its red "eye," a gentle breeze caressing his face. The process of accelerating away from the planet's gravitational field was like leaping out of the water, drawing a graceful arc.

This feeling of freedom excited him for a while, until the call of his bloodline began to appear, and he flapped his wings and flew toward the edge of the Heng star system nebula, with a large number of frozen comets passing by.

A dragon shadow, estimated to be ten times his size, merged with Lin Ziming. From their physiological structure, it was clear that they were of the same kind. The feeling deeply rooted in his life instinct made him realize that these were his parents, and that they were "same father and same mother".

Lin Ziming flew around the giant dragon, longing to grow as large as it in the future. This worship of size is a primal instinct of life.

The dragon seemed very patient. After Lin Ziming stopped, it spat out a large mass of wriggling, silvery-gray solid matter. At the same time, its unique language entered Lin Ziming's mind, allowing him to understand that this was food fed to him by his parents.

The instinct to eat took over, and he pounced on it, devouring it. A large amount of energy emanated from his still-tender teeth, crushing the solid matter into even finer units, swallowing it whole like filtering plankton before it could return to its original form.

As if having completed its mission, the galaxy was left behind by the dragon. Lin Ziming lay on his parents' backs and felt a powerful flap of wings.

The colors of the stars seemed to freeze at that moment, as if time itself had stopped. Those seemingly eternal rays of light were stretched into lines, like a long-exposure photograph of the starry sky, rotating around a center and rushing past in Lin Ziming's eyes.

As the sun's rays shone brightly in the distance once more, a massive ring-shaped structure appeared before Lin Ziming's eyes, encircling the sun at the center of the Hengxing system. It resembled an artificially reconstructed asteroid belt, as if several planets had been dismantled to gather so much material.

As Lin Ziming curiously observed, he was guided by the mechanical tracks controlled by the "ants" to move into this sophisticated giant structure. He lived with several of his fellow ants, all of whom were much larger than him.

Clearly, there is a mutually beneficial relationship between these dragons and this advanced civilization. Lin Ziming's daily life is just like that of the lions and tigers in the zoo. He lives a carefree life between the organic food fed by the zookeeper and the occasional metal snacks. It is like a paradise in his dreams.

Sometimes his parents would leave this ring world and fly off to some unknown star system, while Lin Zimo could only oscillate between eating and sleeping, occasionally paying attention to the outside world, and silently developing his body.

Lin Ziming traveled around the world again and again, but he couldn't remember how much food he had eaten. His size hadn't changed much, which showed that dragons have very long growth cycles and often forget the passage of time.

Until one day when his parents returned to port, Lin Ziming felt a sense of crisis from his instincts. His developed sensory system keenly noticed his parents' injuries, and recently, the ships traveling to and from the outside world have been coming and going more and more frequently.

Dragon scales are their natural armor, and their rapidly regenerating tissue allows dragons to quickly return to battle after resting. In Lin Ziming's fighting instincts, battles between these giant beasts are often extremely long, and death is a difficult thing.

He sensed an uneasy atmosphere, and his compatriots were spreading increasingly tense information. Their language was extremely efficient, allowing Lin Ziming to understand the situation of the war.

This is not a grand drama of interstellar conflict, but an invasion by alien races.

The cold reality of space manifests itself in the extremely intense collisions between civilizations. Extermination is the highest form of respect for a hostile civilization. In the wisdom passed down by these "heavenly dragons," the struggle for limited resources in the universe has long since evolved this conflict into its ultimate form.

Death's broad cloak fluttered against the backdrop of the starry sky.

With his parents seriously injured again, the ripples around the RimWorld indicate that a large number of ships are extracting energy from the stars. The blockade of the "Zoo" is quietly unlocked, and Lin Zimo moves the powerful body of the Heavenly Dragon with his compatriots, pointing the direction of his flapping wings toward the depths of the boundless black curtain.

War broke out.