Vivian had often judged the historical legacies of short-lived races from the perspective of a long-lived species, and those judgments were always profound and accurate. Take the witch legends passed down through the Andre family: just three hundred years of familial transmission had caused the truth of that time to deviate so drastically. What more could one expect from the Dream Plane's records spanning ten thousand years—with several upheavals and interruptions in between? It was understandable that the legends passed down to the present contained such enormous errors.
Even the longer-lived races of the Dream Plane could no longer figure out what the truth of that time had been.
People had always believed that the Ancient Magic Empire's research into forbidden technologies had angered the Goddess, and that the artificial miracles built by those Magic Emperors were symbols of blasphemy. The three great wonders, including Sunset Volcano, had long been regarded as evidence of heresy. But who could have imagined that these things had actually been used to suppress the Firstborn?
Though the suppressive effect of these things was probably quite limited.
At the foot of Sunset Volcano lay a vast rocky wilderness. The ground, layered with enormous black rocks, stretched all the way to the eastern coast. On a small hill between this rocky wilderness and Grayrock Stronghold stood an ancient monastery that looked almost completely abandoned.
This monastery was the Radiant Church's final facility on the eastern side of the kingdom, and only a few elderly ascetics tended to it.
Thorns covered the monastery's mottled, peeling exterior walls. Apart from vast stretches of rubble, only a few sparse clusters of salt-resistant shrubs grew around it. Judging solely by its appearance, no one would have guessed that this was the guardian church of the second Divine Cave. Hao Ren