Chapter 001: The Beginning

For Wang Bo, the experience of crossing over was something he was already very familiar with.

Open and close his eyes, and there was a new world. This time was no exception; when Wang Bo opened his eyes, he entered a brand-new world.

This world was still Earth, and it was a modern society, with time having entered the twenty-first century.

The person Wang Bo had replaced this time was a mecha maintenance technician.

Interestingly, the mecha maintenance technician he replaced was also named Wang Bo.

For an instant, Wang Bo almost thought this Wang Bo was his parallel-world self, but he quickly realized that although this world was also Earth, it was not a parallel version of Earth.

And this Wang Bo was not his parallel-world self either.

It was merely a coincidence of names.

To be honest, when he first saw that his identity was a mecha maintenance technician, Wang Bo almost thought he had arrived in the space age.

But he quickly realized this was not the space age; it was the twenty-first century.

However, this was not a peaceful twenty-first century.

On the contrary, it was a turbulent twenty-first century where humanity stood on the brink of life and death.

The reason humanity stood on the brink in the twenty-first century was not because Earth was about to be destroyed, nor because the sun was about to explode, but because humans had encountered monsters.

And this story began in 2013.

In 2013, a breach to a parallel universe appeared deep beneath the Pacific Ring of Fire.

Subsequently, a colossal monstrous creature rose from the ocean and landed on the coast of San Francisco and surrounding coastal cities.

San Francisco was destroyed by the monster.

Humanity took a series of measures, using various weapons including tanks, aircraft, rocket launchers, missiles, and so on, but they were of little use against the monster.

In the end, three cities were destroyed by the monster, with tens of millions of people injured or dead.

Humanity, pushed to the limit, used the ultimate weapon... nuclear weapons!

And nuclear weapons lived up to expectations, killing the monster.

But what humanity on Earth never expected was that the monster's blood was highly toxic; as it evaporated in the air, the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Area, the sixth-largest metropolitan area in the United States, became a wasteland for a hundred miles around.

This disaster was historically known as the 'San Francisco Incident.'

The day the monster landed was called 'K-DAY.'

After the incident, humanity named the monsters 'Kaiju' and gave them a code name... 'Invaders.'

When humanity thought the matter would come to a close again, six months later, a second monster swept in and destroyed another coastal city, Manila!

Manila, the capital and largest city of the Philippines, was one of the most international cities in the world and also one of the most diverse, often called the 'New York of Asia.'

The destruction of this city undoubtedly dealt a heavy blow to humanity.

Then, as time passed, monsters appeared in Tokyo, Sydney, Hong Kong, and other places. It was then that people realized the monster attacks on humanity were not an end, but merely a beginning.

Even worse, scientists analyzed that to fight the monsters, nuclear bombs could not be used indiscriminately, because although they could kill the monsters, they would trigger a massive release of toxins from their bodies.

This was a 'natural selection' behavior—changing Earth's atmosphere, soil, and water environment through suicide to exterminate Earth's life. In other words, although nuclear bombs could kill a certain number of monsters, humanity would be finished before the monsters were wiped out.

But even crueler was that without nuclear bombs, humanity's conventional weapons were utterly incapable of defeating the monsters.

This would only make the monsters more rampant.

To be honest, when Wang Bo saw this content from the residual information of the mecha maintenance technician, it was enough for him to judge what kind of world he had come to.

Without a doubt, he had arrived in the world of Pacific Rim.

At this time, humanity did not know that the monsters invading Earth were acting on the orders of an alien race called the Precursors.

As early as the Triassic period, the Precursors had set their sights on Earth, but back then, Earth's atmosphere had extremely high oxygen levels, and the monster forces could not adapt, so the colonization mission ended in failure.

However, with the advent of the age of civilization, Earth's pollution worsened, and the carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere increased, reaching levels that could support monster survival. Thus, the second colonization mission began.

That was how the invasion of 2013 came about, and how the successive monster invasions occurred.

For humanity, what was truly terrifying was not the monsters.

It was the Precursors.

The monsters were merely weapons created by the Precursors, specifically designed to exterminate humanity.

Therefore, there was never any peace between humans and monsters.

This was a life-and-death war.

If humanity failed, they would face extinction, completely disappearing from Earth, never to exist again.

And the Precursors would become the new masters of Earth, stepping on the corpses of humanity to build a more prosperous civilization.

On the other hand, although the Precursors possessed powerful intelligence and civilization, they would not easily descend to fight humans directly; after all, intelligence and combat ability were two different things.

In terms of combat, they were actually weaklings.

But they could create monsters and send them to Earth continuously through a wormhole, thereby completely exterminating humanity.

However, human wisdom was infinite. After several invasion incidents, a scientist named Jasper Sheffield had an inspiration, which came from his son.

Once, Jasper saw his son playing a game of fighting Godzilla with a toy robot in the room, and inspiration struck. He decided to build a monster belonging to humanity—a giant mecha that could match the monsters.

To this end, Jasper sought out a neuroscientist from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, also his old flame, Caitlin Lightcap.

By the way, the relationship between these two was not simple. Caitlin was Jasper's student, and they had been flirting since college.

But at that time, Jasper was already engaged to his wife Nancy, so Caitlin's role was essentially what people called a third party.

After Jasper got married, his family was harmonious, and his son was well-behaved, but he still maintained an ambiguous relationship with Caitlin.

After all, to Caitlin, Jasper was a very charming man.

Even though he already had a wife and child, she still couldn't forget him. Whenever Jasper needed her, she would unhesitatingly oblige.