Chapter 649

Chapter 649: The Postponed Day of Ruin

Amid the embers that slowly cooled after Universal Extinction, the corpses of the Elder Gods ruled the ashes of the world, and certain things that ‘sprouted’ from those corpses built replicas and phantoms of the past among the ash. Stripped of every mythic halo, once he re-sorted all the information he had, the ‘Deep Sea era’ before Duncan showed its truest—and most chilling—face.

He could of course use milder phrases to describe this era, or use some more acceptable way to explain the current state of the gods, but that would not change the essence of things.

He stood up and scratched Goathead’s neck. This former ‘creator’ raised his head and studied Duncan’s expression. He said: “You look weighed down by worries.”

Duncan sat back down. After a brief silence he suddenly spoke, almost to himself: “…The whole world is just a heap of embers slowly going out…”

Goathead spoke at once: “I’ve heard Lucretia say that sentence.”

Duncan nodded and said nothing more. Instead he reached into his coat and rummaged around. After a moment of searching he took out two objects.

One was a ‘sphere’ that shone with brilliant light. It was an Ancient Star shrunk countless times over. Flames flowed over its surface, and gentle radiance kept surging, returning, and rippling, as if it were truly maintaining the ‘operation’ of a star.

This was the ‘gift’ Vanna had received from Tarrigan. It was the Sun that had once belonged to Senkin.

The other was a piece of finely cut, pale-gold crystal about the size of a fist. It had dozens of irregular, asymmetrical faces. Each face showed a smooth, flawless texture, and within the crystal there seemed to be extremely intricate and delicate structures, as slender as strands of hair, spreading outward from the crystal’s center to form a three-dimensional lattice wrapped inside the crystal.

Goathead’s attention was first drawn to that ‘little Sun’, but it soon fell on the strange pale-gold crystal. After staring blankly for a moment, he asked in great puzzlement: “What is this thing?”

“If we go by the classifications of the ‘civilized world’, this should be some kind of ‘blasphemous archetype’,” Duncan said casually. “This is something that separated from the body of that Sunspawn when it fell from the sky—before the flames burned it away, AI ‘picked’ it up and brought it back.”

Goathead froze for a moment, then finally recalled the scene from back then—

In its final moments, the Sunspawn had tried to escape the dream of the Nameless One, but had been intercepted in the sky. At the time, he had given that freak its final blow in his mythic form. The thing had fallen from the clouds in pieces, and at the center of its shattered fragments something shining had seemed to be flung out. But the situation had been chaotic then. That thing had flashed once in the sky and had then been ‘swept away’ by a mass of eerie green flames, and no one had paid it any mind… so it turned out to be this?

A flurry of flapping wings sounded from the side as AI beat its wings and flew onto the chart table. It tilted its head to look at the strange crystal it had picked up. After watching it for quite a while, it stretched out its neck and tapped the surface of the crystal with its beak, crying: “The crystal is full of hatred! The crystal is full of hatred!”

Duncan ignored the stupid bird’s chatter beside him. He stared at the crystal before him in thought, and in his mind he recalled the strange large umbrellas held by those tall, thin men in black who were called ‘the Sun’s residue’. He remembered that inside those strange umbrellas, besides machinery and circuitry so delicate they far surpassed the age, there were also crystal structures cut with extreme precision.

These crystal-based ‘blasphemous archetypes’ seemed to be the unique ‘technological creations’ mastered by the Black Sun and His spawn and Remnant Folk.

Long ago, when he had first seen those strange large umbrellas in the hands of the men in black, Duncan had realized something. The Suntists possessed technological creations, which meant they were not a primitive tribe of savage chaos. The advanced manufacturing techniques shown in these blasphemous archetypes actually displayed an extremely advanced civilization.

Or rather, the ‘afterglow’ left by an extremely advanced civilization.

And now, after personally witnessing the truth of the Great Annihilation, Duncan had a new understanding of this matter.

The collision and annihilation of worlds had brought about the Deep Sea era, and the worlds that collided were by no means limited to the homelands of the Elves and of Senkin. The world of that warrior who had flung out his long sword, and Duncan’s own home world as well, had clearly all been destroyed together during the Great Annihilation. Reasoning from this, every race now in this world, every style of relic, every inexplicable and mutually contradictory historical record, likely represented a civilization that had been destroyed.

Some of those civilizations might have come from different planets within the same universe. But those with huge discrepancies, enough to cause corruption to other ‘heritages’, clearly came from universes with different laws.

Duncan slowly furrowed his brow. He gently rubbed the surface of the crystal and murmured to himself: “Then the Black Sun… from which universe was He a leftover orphan? So they are also the Lost Ones…”

“Who?” Goathead did not react at first, but soon understood what the captain meant. “You mean the Black Sun and His freaks?”

“Everything in the Deep Sea era comes from those worlds that were destroyed during the Great Annihilation,” Duncan said slowly. “The Elder Gods are merely powerful individuals that survived in a half-dead state after the Day of Ruin. The Black Sun could not have appeared out of nowhere—this crystal should represent the civilization that ‘the Sunspawn’ once belonged to.”

Goathead thought for a while and then slowly said: “…But now this ‘civilization’ stands on the opposite side from us. Their very existence is a kind of destruction for the whole Mortal Realm world. The Black Sun wishes to extinguish himself, while His spawn are obsessed with destroying the Mortal Realm dimension and letting the Black Sun ‘be reborn’ from the ruins of the mortal world. They may once have been a glorious civilization, but now they are mad from top to bottom. It is clearly impossible for them to coexist with the mortal world.”

“Exactly. They cannot coexist,” Duncan said. “There are many other things in this world that cannot coexist with the civilized world—dangerous Elder Gods, the shadows in the Spirit Realm, and those things in Subspace… But have you thought one level deeper—why can’t these things coexist with the mortal world?”

Goathead was taken aback and seemed to fall into thought.

Duncan said: “Everything is ‘ash’ left behind after the Great Annihilation. The gods’ corpses opened the present Deep Sea era from within the ash. In theory, the current Deep Sea era is already the result of the worlds in the Great Annihilation merging with, reshaping, and compromising with one another. In other words, since the Great Annihilation has ended, and the third Long Night has successfully remade the world, what exists in the world now is already the ‘rebalanced’ result. There should no longer be the same mutual corruption and contamination as during the collision of worlds…”

“But in reality, there are still Elder Gods like the Black Sun,” he went on. “There are still many ‘corruptive things’ that will cause disasters as soon as they appear in the Mortal Realm world. This kind of corruption is exactly the same as the ‘corruption’ that appeared around Atlantis during the Great Annihilation. It feels as if…”

Duncan stopped there, as if unable to find the right words for a moment.

Beside him, Goathead suddenly spoke: “As if the Great Annihilation has never actually ended?”

“Yes. As if the Great Annihilation has never actually ended,” Duncan slowly nodded, his expression especially grave. “It has only been postponed, temporarily isolated somewhere, and then slowly released into the world as time passes. The corruption still exists, and the conflicts and corruption between different worlds are still going on slowly. The third Long Night forcibly ‘pressed’ the embers together, but within this barely ‘pressed-together’ order, the underlying opposition and destruction of all things has never stopped…”

Goathead gradually reacted and said: “This corresponds to that ‘dusk’ those Enders talked about…”

“Self-corruption and self-destruction are the destined path of the Deep Sea era. The Day of Ruin was set at the very beginning of history. Doomsday corrupts history and will eventually chase it down along the long river of time—that has always been the ‘gospel’ preached by those Enders,” Duncan slowly nodded as he spoke. “All along, this kind of Doomsday doctrine has been rejected by mainstream society. But after learning the truth of the Great Annihilation and combining it with the various ‘features’ of the current Deep Sea era, I had no choice but to start taking those madmen’s Doomsday theory seriously.”

At this point he paused, then went on as he thought: “Perhaps this is not really some Doomsday theory at all, but just a kind of objective description of the third Long Night. The third Long Night was an incomplete, unsuccessful Genesis Protocol. It did not fundamentally resolve the ‘conflicts’ triggered by the collision of many worlds. It only provided a buffer zone, so that within a term of ten thousand years this world could find its own way out… and that is why a fourth Long Night is needed.”

“…Do you think that ‘way out’ has appeared?” Goathead asked quietly.

“No,” Duncan shook his head. “Those Enders seem to know some things, but only what kind of ‘hidden danger’ the third Long Night left, and that the underlying conflict and collapse of all things in the world are going on slowly. If they truly knew how to solve this problem, they wouldn’t have treated the Annihilators and the Sunspawn as cannon fodder, and wouldn’t have sent them into the Nameless One’s dream to search for answers.

“The information they provided to the Annihilators and the Suntists were vague and ambiguous. It did not sound like clear guidance toward a definite goal at all, but more like some kind of test. That shows that those Enders themselves did not know what the correct direction was.”

Goathead stayed silent for a while, then suddenly asked: “How are you planning to handle this crystal? If it really is some kind of blasphemous archetype… then the longer this thing remains in the Mortal Realm world, the more dangerous it will become. Even if it is kept on the Vanished, it might not be safe in the long run.”

Duncan thought for a moment and slowly raised his hand.

Fine strands of flame rose from his fingertips and seeped into the crystal.

“I am very interested in their secrets,” he said.