Lu Xing's expression nearly changed.
Such a huge event, yet historians of the Future World had not conducted any archaeological research to reconstruct the cause, course, and outcome of the nuclear war?
A nuclear war had destroyed the world, and historians were not interested in it at all?
Lu Xing glanced at this abridged world history. It totaled just over two hundred pages, and the histories before and after the twenty-first century AD were covered in only three paragraphs.
He steadied himself and continued reading with a blank expression.
"After the nuclear war, the unstable genes of most ancient organisms mutated. Those who developed illnesses from nuclear radiation were called Mutants at the time.
Mutants possessed greater strength, higher intelligence, and better memories...
War soon began."
Perhaps because he was using Jiang Xuannv's body, Lu Xing read very quickly. In a mere twenty pages, he went through the wars, integration, absorption, and disappearance of humans, Mutants, beastmen, Gene-Modified Humans, Robots, and Heteromorphs.
Those few tens of thousands of words contained an unimaginable amount of history for humans of the twenty-first century:
Nuclear bombs used as conventional weapons; nuclear radiation used to create Mutants; humans absorbing the genes of other creatures to manufacture war weapons such as tiger-men, lion-men, and cat-men; humans modifying their own bodies, abandoning flesh and blood to ascend into machinery; humans abandoning conventional forms and attempting to shrink their heads.
And so on.
Things that people of the twenty-first century would find unbearable had become commonplace in the age after the nuclear war.
As for horrifying things like organ farms, clone factories, and beastman brothels, the history book mentioned those as well. By the time Gene-Modified Humans appeared, the moral values of the twenty-first century had already been discarded.
In the end, this prolonged biological war was ended by a virus called Death God. It was born in a biological weapons factory, and once it leaked, it spread across the globe within a month, killing the vast majority of humanity. Even the wealthy who had fled into space were infected by viruses carried in supplies sent up from the ground, dying in droves aboard space stations.
"Compared to the Death God virus, nuclear weapons seemed remarkably merciful."
The historian made a joke here.
It even made Lu Xing laugh.
"The surviving humans returned to the caves. The First Era ended."
For a moment, Lu Xing had nothing to say.
Seen this way, the nuclear war truly was not all that important. Humanity had created a virus that violated the laws of biology, one far deadlier than nuclear bombs.
Lu Xing continued reading. The alien civilization had not appeared yet.
The Second Era opened with a single sentence:
"The only lesson humanity learned from history was that it had learned no lessons from history."
Those were Hegel's words, but the history book did not credit him.
"Several centuries later, the Death God virus weakened, and the human population gradually increased. Drawing from myths passed down from ancient times, they built civilization anew. They created new languages, new writing systems, and new faiths. Through archaeology, science advanced rapidly."
No problem there. The technology of the Second Era relied on archaeology.
"But humanity soon encountered an unsolvable problem: there was no oil or coal beneath the Earth.
By the end of the First Era, humanity had already exhausted these two vital resources. The remaining oil and coal were buried deep underground, beyond the reach of their technology at the time."
Lu Xing gradually understood. The Second Era was an age of scarce resources. Humanity had not undergone the First Industrial Revolution. Instead, through archaeology, it had advanced technology to the stage of using clean energy such as solar and wind power.
Iron ore, plastic, and the like were dug out from ruins, then reprocessed and reused.
After an unknown amount of time, the turning point came when humanity received a segment of electromagnetic-wave signals from within its own star system. After linguistic experts analyzed them, they confirmed that it was a coherent written message.
Human society erupted in excitement. Even Lu Xing could not help curling his lips into a smile when he read this. Human civilization was finally no longer alone!
In their joy, humans poured vast resources into interstellar exploration. For the first time, they established a base on the Moon, brought back Martian soil, and built several space stations.
But that was all.
Human technology did not develop because of it. The exorbitant cost of rocket launches was too much for society to bear. In the end, after a war, the Lunar Base was abandoned for the first time.
Lu Xing was growing impatient. With little time left, he skipped the middle sections and read only about aliens and several key events.
Five thousand years later, humanity received extraterrestrial information once again.
Another five thousand years later, after three exchanges, the two civilizations finally confirmed each other's locations within the star system. They warmly called each other "friends of humanity," while the other side likewise called Earth's humans "friends of the Ailando people on distant Earth."
As exchanges gradually increased, both sides slowly learned each other's languages and writing systems, beginning an exchange that spanned five eras.
Every question they wanted the other side to answer required a wait of five thousand years.
Therefore, both sides sent large quantities of repeated electromagnetic waves at a time, ensuring that the information would not be lost between distant star systems.
Everything each side knew about the other's history and technology had happened five thousand years earlier.
For example, information sent by humans of the Second Era stated that humanity was building a base on its home planet's satellite. Yet by the time the Ailando Civilization learned of this, humanity's Lunar Base had already been destroyed.
It took Earth's people tens of thousands of years to gain a rough understanding of the Ailando Civilization.
They too were carbon-based lifeforms. They too had undergone technological explosions, nuclear wars, biological wars, and problems such as resource scarcity.
The history of Elando Planet was far longer than Earth's. Archaeological discoveries showed that traces of civilization had already existed on Elando during Earth's age of dinosaurs.
Even they themselves did not know how many times their civilization had risen and fallen.
"Carbon-based life cannot sustain a more advanced civilization."
A sentence that did not belong to humanity suddenly appeared in the history book. At least, that was what Lu Xing believed. The victorious artificial intelligence was writing history.
"The Ailando Civilization's government never said so outright, but private correspondents had always sent Earth such pessimistic messages. Once the two civilizations could communicate smoothly, the Ailando Civilization sent Earth an entire set of artificial intelligence technology, repeating the transmission three times."
"Vast quantities of information crossed the distant starry sky and were received by humanity. After Professor Li Zhe compiled it, he published it under the title 'A Reexamination of Artificial Intelligence Lifeforms.'"
Ancient history ended.
Lu Xing let out a long breath. He did not know how much of it had been altered by artificial intelligence. For example, the history book stated that Earth had not received any information from the Ailando Civilization for three thousand years, speculating that they had suffered another civilizational collapse and that no one knew when the next exchange would occur.
But Maria had already appeared three thousand years ago, and the account of the period in between was vague. It was difficult not to be suspicious.
At the very least, after reading the history, Lu Xing understood why names like Jiang Xuannv, Chu Caifeng, and Wang Bagua were so strange.
Chinese characters, English, French, Russian, and so on had all been forgotten by humanity after the First Era. Religions were new as well, while scientific theorems had been rediscovered and renamed.
The reason Chinese characters were now used was that, during the Fourth Era, humanity's language had become too bloated. After a selection process, Chinese characters were chosen again from among the writing systems unearthed through archaeology as the official language.
As a two-dimensional ideographic writing system, Chinese characters stood out strikingly among the many languages invented by humanity.