Adam went to China alone.
He did not bring Remus.
He did not bring Zakiti.
He did not bring Cain or Abel.
He didn’t even tell anyone he intended to stay gone for a while.
For once, he wanted to travel.
A century had passed since he had last seen China.
He remembered arriving during the early Zhou period, fascinated by a culture that felt different from Babylon and Egypt, different in its relationship with ancestors, family, kingship, and the dead.
He had spent years learning, then followed the pull toward K’un-Lun and eventually left the region behind.
Now he wanted to see what had happened.
He arrived in the lands he remembered and immediately began noticing differences.
Settlements had grown.
Fields that had once been smaller had expanded.
Roads had shifted.
Buildings had been rebuilt.
Children played in places where he remembered adults standing generations earlier.
Adam walked through the countryside for several days without telling anyone who he was.
He found himself smiling more than he expected.
Humanity was still here.
That was what mattered to him.
He saw people carrying heavier loads than their ancestors could have managed.
Farmers recovered from injuries that would once have crippled them.
Children fell, scraped themselves, got back up, and kept playing.
The changes he had introduced so long ago had continued spreading through the generations.
He never expected anyone to recognize the source.
He did not need them to.
Adam simply liked seeing the result.
One evening, he sat beside a field and watched a family working until sunset.
He remembered another family who had worked the same land a century earlier.
They were gone.
Their children were gone too.
But the land remained.
Adam looked over the field.
“At least you kept it.”
He stayed in China for a while, revisiting places he had seen before and occasionally finding that he could no longer recognize them.
Some settlements had changed so much that only the shape of the surrounding land reminded him that he had been there before.
That was part of why he traveled alone.
He did not want anyone else telling him what a place had become.
He wanted to discover it himself.
Eventually he continued west.
He returned to Egypt.
The contrast was immediate.
Adam remembered the Egypt of his younger centuries.
He remembered learning among them, being called Ittasal, the Bearer of Progress, and watching his knowledge spread through the country.
He remembered the greed that had grown around what he knew.
He remembered the jealousy that had eventually helped lead Egypt into war with the Hittites.
Now he walked through places where those memories were ancient history.
He listened to people speak stories that were no longer quite right.
Some remembered Ittasal as a great teacher.
Others remembered him as a priest.
Some claimed he had been a god.
Adam heard one old storyteller describe him as a wandering spirit who had appeared during the reign of a king whose name Adam knew belonged to someone born decades after he had left.
Adam quietly moved on.
“Close enough,” he muttered.
He did not correct them.
He did not feel the need to.
Egypt had changed.
So had Babylon.
Adam returned there afterward. Find the original chapter at g.com.
Babylon was perhaps the strangest place to revisit because it was where so much of his life had begun.
He knew the streets that were still there and remembered streets that no longer existed.
He found himself stopping in places simply because he remembered sitting there with someone hundreds of years ago.
A market stall had replaced one of the houses he remembered.
A family lived there now.
Adam stood across the street for a while.
He did not know whether the people living there had any connection to the people he remembered.
Probably not.
Then again, humanity was always connected somehow.
Adam eventually left.
He had come expecting the journey to make him nostalgic.
Instead, it was making him aware of something else.
Everything changed.
Everything except him.
He had always known that.
But knowing it from the beginning of his life was different from seeing it repeatedly.
He kept moving.
Eventually, he decided to return to the place that had perhaps mattered most during his early centuries.
Avalon.
He remembered it vividly.
Two hundred and fifty years of his life had been spent there.
He remembered the streets.
The buildings, the Inhuman families, the training grounds and the laboratories.
The places where he had taught people how to control their powers.
He remembered Agon.
He remembered Aran, their children, and the years he had spent watching their family grow.
He remembered standing beside them as their lives slowly moved forward while his own remained unchanged.
Of all the places Adam had known in his early centuries, Avalon had been the first that truly felt like something he had helped build.
When Adam finally reached the region where Avalon should have been, he stopped.
There was nothing.
Not an empty city.
Not even abandoned ruins.
Just wilderness.
Adam frowned.
He knew this place.
He had walked these lands countless times.
He stood there for a moment, then searched the area again, moving farther from where he thought the city’s entrance should have been.
Still nothing.
He began looking for the kinds of signs that most people would never notice: the remains of old roads, buried foundations, fragments of metal, anything that might suggest the city had simply been moved or hidden somewhere nearby.
He found nothing at first.
That was what bothered him.
Avalon had always been hidden from the outside world.
The Inhumans had taken great care to conceal their capital, and Adam knew there had been systems, defenses, and mechanisms specifically designed to prevent outsiders from finding it.
If he could not see the city, there was a chance it was still there.
So he searched more carefully.
Eventually, he found something.
Then another trace.
Then another.
Adam followed them farther into the wilderness until he began finding evidence of structures that had once stood there.
The remains were faint, buried, and scattered, but they were unmistakably artificial.
His expression slowly changed.
This was not a city that had been abandoned.
This was what remained after a city had been destroyed.
Adam searched deeper, following the traces of the place he had once known better than almost anywhere else in the world.
He uncovered the remains of one of the outer structures, then another, and then another.
Avalon had not simply disappeared.
It had been destroyed.
Adam stood silently among the remains.
For two hundred and fifty years, Avalon had been his home.
He had defended it from threats both within and beyond its walls.
He had trained its people, helped them understand their powers, and strengthened their bodies so they could survive the abilities they had been born with.
He had watched Agon grow from a young prince into a king.
He had watched Aran grow from a frightened child into a woman.
He had watched the two of them build a family and a life together.
Eventually, Adam had left.
Not because Avalon had failed him, but because he could no longer bear to remain there and watch another generation of people he loved grow old and die while he remained unchanged.
He had convinced himself that Avalon would continue without him.
He had believed that the city, with everything he had helped build, would survive.
Now he was standing over its remains.
Adam slowly walked through what had once been the outskirts of the capital.
The farther he went, the more familiar things became, and that was what hurt the most.
He recognized a section of wall he had once helped repair, a building where he had taught young Inhumans to control their abilities, and the remains of a structure that had once housed medical equipment.
He stopped beside one of the ruined buildings and placed his hand against the broken stone.
For a long time, he said nothing.
Then, quietly, he spoke.
“I was supposed to protect you.”
There was no answer.
Adam looked across the ruins.
He knew the thought wasn’t fair.
He had protected them.
He had spent two hundred and fifty years doing exactly that.
While he had been there, he had done everything he could.
But that didn’t stop the thoughts from coming.
Maybe if he had stayed.
Maybe if he had never left.
Adam stood there for a while longer, surrounded by the remains of the place he had once called home.
The thoughts came one after another, even though Adam knew none of them could change what had happened.
He kept walking.
Eventually, he found something that stopped him completely.
A piece of an old structure.
Just part of a place he remembered from Agon’s reign.
Adam touched it.
For a moment he could almost remember the city as it had been.
Agon arguing with him.
Aran laughing at something Adam had said.
Children running through the streets.
People he had known living ordinary lives.
It all existed in his memory.
But nowhere else.
Adam sat down among the ruins.
He stayed there for a long time.
China had reminded him that humanity could survive him.
Egypt had reminded him that civilizations changed beyond recognition.
Babylon had reminded him where he had begun.
Avalon reminded him that even something he had personally protected for centuries could disappear.
Adam looked toward the empty landscape.
“I should have come back sooner.”
He knew there was no point in saying it.
He said it anyway.
For the first time during his journey, Adam stopped thinking about where he would go next.
He simply sat there.
Alone.
And remembered Avalon as it had been.