After some questioning, I found out where Lilina and the little doll had run off to—they really had chased and fought quite a long way. In fact, the two girls had even made it all the way to the nearby Ice-Rock Planet... Fine, let's not discuss how much commotion the children of Gods made when fighting. The important thing was that they had found ruins made of Homeland Material on that ice-rock planet, and there were even corpses inside!
The little doll had no way of distinguishing Homeland Material. She had never installed any of those strange radars in herself. But Lilina was more or less "an adult who needed to handle serious business" (though we won't discuss how much truth there was in that statement). She had received a detector from Tawell for identifying Homeland Material, so she could say with absolute certainty that there was a suspected emergency landing site on a planet twelve astronomical units away—at some point, a group of Shilin Ancestors had crash-landed there, and their remains had been preserved to this day.
I knew that sounded unbelievable. It had been so long since the creators of the Shilin Apostles went extinct that even the God Race considered the span of time immense. No ordinary material could survive such an age intact, much less mortal bodies, things that would turn to dust in only a few years. The creators had ultimately just been a mortal race. No matter how great their achievements, they were still mortals, no more powerful than any vassal race of the New Empire—yet we had to face the facts. The Homeland World had endured to this day as well, long past its theoretical lifespan. Some unknown factor must have caused this, and perhaps that factor had also affected the creators.
I