Chapter 92

Chapter 92: Endless Speculation

Morris let out a sigh.

“When people like us, who dig through history, fight our whole lives to come up against the high wall of the Great Annihilation,” he said, “when we spend our lives seeking relics and comparing ancient texts, trying to glimpse the scenery on the other side of that wall… what we end up facing is just this kind of bizarre, absurd stuff.”

Deep weariness and frustration lay on the old man’s face. He looked like a traveler who had spent most of his life on the road, reached the end of the journey, and still could not see the destination, yet had to accept the limits of the Mortal Realm.

“History before the Great Annihilation is shattered and full of contradictions,” he went on. “The records of different city-states are like strange tales, or like dreams that have nothing to do with each other… There is no decisive proof that any one record is correct, and no theory that can pull all these contradictions together.”

Duncan did not speak right away, because his thoughts rose and fell like waves. In these unbelievable “scraps of unofficial history” that Morris described, he felt as if he were going through a baptism in a storm of information.

As a “foreigner” who had lived through an information age and had a decent talent for association, he could imagine or guess at many things from the other man’s words—

The dome that covered the whole continent might have been some kind of artificial ecological system, a power system that shared a source with the Sun, drawing fuel from substances in the seawater. That might have been fusion technology.

The gigantic ships that sailed through the void, catching dust and gas clouds in space for power, might have been one or several colony starships.

As for the so-called dream of a demon god… and the seawater that flowed from that dream into the Mortal Realm… he could not picture what that was for the moment, but it sounded like a fantasy concept, something completely different in style from the technological feel of the first two strands of history.

He could find explanations or guesses for many things, yet these things still could not be pieced together in any way.

Just as Morris had said, they were more like separate dreams that had no connection, each sketching a completely different Pre-Cataclysm History.

They were contradictory and broken, and could not be used at all to rebuild what the world before the Great Annihilation had looked like.

“Maybe you are right,” Morris’s voice came from behind the counter, breaking Duncan’s thoughts. The old man held his forehead, his tone low. “Around the key event of the Great Annihilation, there may be a kind of ‘Horizon Limit’. We cannot observe the ‘events’ beyond that horizon, so the history before the Great Annihilation becomes, for us, a concept we can never truly trace back.”

Looking at the emotional Morris, Duncan’s own thoughts still did not stop. Little by little, he instead came up with a rather bold idea: “Then… what if all those records are true?”

Morris raised his eyes and looked at Duncan in surprise: “Oh?”

“What if all those records are true?” Duncan rubbed his chin and spoke in a thoughtful tone. “What if the history recorded by each city-state or each race really is the true shape of what they knew as ‘the world before the Great Annihilation’?

“Maybe our ancestors ten thousand years ago really came from completely different ‘homelands’, with entirely different civilizations. The Great Annihilation trapped these exiles from different worlds on this sea. Before the legacy of their civilizations was completely cut off, the descendants of those exiles barely managed to record what they knew. Ten thousand years later, those records became the ‘contradictory histories’ that trouble scholars today…”

His thoughts grew livelier. After a pause, he went on: “Maybe the nature of the Great Annihilation was not the world’s Doomsday at all, but a ‘Great teleportation’.”

Morris stared at Duncan in surprise and suddenly said: “…The Brock Bendis school’s hypothesis? The World Drifting Theory? That is a rather obscure school of thought. I did not expect your study of ancient history to be so deep.”

He meant it as praise, but Duncan instead became a bit dazed: from the sound of it, someone had already thought of this possibility?!

He blinked, but did not let his surprise show. He only acted as if he were following the topic and said: “It’s just bits and pieces I picked up, but I really like this hypothesis.”

“I like it too—though it is very obscure,” Morris shook his head. “But like every other hypothesis, without evidence it can only stay a hypothesis.

“The Clark school once suggested that interference from Subspace with the Mortal Realm twisted all historical records. The Vilentim school believes that the world before the Great Annihilation was made of countless separate lattices that were cut off from one another. The scholars of the Bologna City-State even insist that the world before the Great Annihilation never existed at all, and that all records of Pre-Cataclysm History are illusions made by Shadows in Subspace…

“To say something I probably shouldn’t, even some heretical cults have their own take on world history. The Enders, who worship Subspace, firmly believe that Doomsday has already begun and is chasing our civilization along the river of history, swallowing it piece by piece. The contradictory historical records of the city-states are, in their view, the result of real history slowly being torn apart by Subspace. The Great Annihilation is a barrier standing in front of Doomsday. When the history after the Great Annihilation is also torn apart by corruption, that will be the day the whole world falls into Subspace…”

The more Duncan heard, the more shocked he became. After a long time, he finally shook his head without thinking: “I really did not know there were so many strange and wild theories…”

“Ordinary people do not step into this field,” Morris said. “Studying history from the angle of occult studies is a dangerous business, after all. But there is one clear truth: if tens of thousands of scholars have already spent centuries, even millennia, groping in a field that seems to have no exit, then they have already put forward every hypothesis that can be imagined.”

Duncan slowly understood what the old man meant.

For people who had truly spent their lives buried in stacks of texts and piles of relics, putting forward some hypothesis that could explain the present was simple. As scholars, they were never short on imagination or vision.

What they lacked was evidence—evidence that could prove even one of those hypotheses.

“…No evidence at all has survived?” Duncan asked. “Nothing at all from before the Great Annihilation, nothing that can prove that any of those ‘unofficial histories’ have a basis in fact?”

“None has been found so far,” Morris said slowly. “Ten thousand years of time, and in between them one Dark Age after another. Countless city-states have risen and fallen across the Boundless Sea. It is far too hard for anything from the Age of Antiquity to survive…

“What has made it down to us is either hand-copied manuscripts of doubtful origin, or stories passed on by word of mouth. And even those may have already changed form during the process of being passed along.”

Duncan did not speak for a moment.

In the depths of his mind, far away on the Vanished, the waves rose and fell gently. The boundless sea was as it had always been, covering the whole world.

It also covered all truths that might exist.

He could not help sighing: “Studying ancient history really is full of difficulties.”

“Yes. We face not only shattered ‘years’, but also an empty present with nothing to lean on,” Morris sighed. “On the limited land of the city-states, if there were anything we could dig up, we would have dug it up long ago. If we cannot, then it means the things that can prove our history are hidden where mortals cannot reach.”

“Like the seafloor?” Duncan suddenly said.

“The seafloor? Ha, what a frightening and bold idea,” Morris laughed. “But that really is the last hope many historians cling to when they reach the end of their road…

“They imagine that the seafloor holds the evidence, mountains of relics, cities of ancient civilizations, and ruins that can explain everything. But what use is that? When we dive down, we can only touch Shadows. Mortals cannot reach the deepest places of this world.”

He paused for a moment, then spoke again: “But that did give rise to another hypothesis… It never became its own school of thought, but quite a few people have guessed that the lost ‘Old World’ in history is actually just below the surface of the Boundless Sea. Some even try to locate it exactly at a certain ‘depth’ between the Abyssal Deep Sea, and the Spirit Realm—the world from before the Great Annihilation lies sleeping at that depth.”

“Why do they say that?” Duncan was curious. This very serious, yet completely baseless hypothesis caught his interest.

Morris thought for a moment and explained: “Because many broken ancient histories mention that the world before the Great Annihilation was covered on all sides by a ‘Starry Sky’. And, as everyone knows, the ‘Starry Sky’ lies right at the boundary between the Abyssal Deep Sea, and the Spirit Realm.”

Duncan almost choked on his own saliva: “Cough, cough… what?”

“Are you all right?” Morris was startled by Duncan’s reaction. “That should not be anything unbelievable…”

“I am fine, I just got too caught up in what you were saying and choked,” Duncan quickly waved his hand. “The Starry Sky is between the Abyssal Deep Sea, and the Spirit Realm, of course I know that, of course I know…”