For a plumber, Gerrick's father was absolutely an anomaly in this world. There were certainly people who cared about what lay beyond this world, people who tried to uncover the secret behind the Energy Storm, even people who worried that this world would one day stop running. But ordinarily, those concerned with such matters were well-informed important figures. Their positions determined the knowledge they could access, like the captain of the Hope, who was something of a legend among the common people and was said to have once been a high-ranking cultivator in the Great City Senate.
Yet Gerrick's father had merely been a plumber, born and raised in an inconspicuous little town called "Condenser," a plumber who had spent his entire life sorting metal. That made his insight truly worthy of admiration.
No wonder even an Old Man as seemingly generous and mild-tempered as Barnard had called Old Gerrick's ideas "wild imaginings." As a commoner, Old Gerrick really had been far too out of place. Perhaps, in the eyes of ordinary people in this world, he belonged to the sort with severe persecution delusions. Of course, his "delusions" had been one hundred percent real.
Gerrick showed us many things left behind by his father: squeaking Data Terminals, flickering holographic recorders, battered notebooks, and illustrations. After hundreds of thousands of years, many things had been worn down by time until they had nearly lost their original appearance. Even Imperial creations that should theoretically have existed forever had continued to deteriorate over the years since the war. Amid those jumbled, murky records, Gerrick's "wildly imaginative" father had deduced the Truth of the World and reached the astonishing conclusion that this world had already been destroyed once, and that everything now would eventually run dry.
If even a plumber could discover such