What lay in the depths of the World Rift? Every La Rian person felt curious about it, yet no one had ever dared to truly investigate.
Or rather, those who had dared to seek the truth had all been buried forever in that scorching abyss radiating a faint red glow. Among those who survived, no reckless fools who cared so little for their lives had ever appeared again.
Looking down through the terrifying chasm of the World Rift, one could see only an endlessly deep darkness that seemed capable of swallowing even light itself. Although the La Rian people had realized long ago that the land they lived on was spherical, and that the World Rift had split the planet in two, their current observational technology was still insufficient to directly observe one end of the rift from the other—not even half the distance between them was within reach.
Their vision was blocked by the ever-present clouds of gas deep within the mantle, leaving them able to see only a tiny, faint red glow stirring in the boundless darkness and chaos. Scholars had given that glow all sorts of interpretations: the heart of the world, the tomb where the gods had fallen, the place where the planet's consciousness slept, or the destination where the souls of all living beings reincarnated. Some even believed that the red glow was the eye of a giant serpent, which would one day crawl out of the abyss and devour the entire world.
As that red glow grew fainter over the passage of time, scholars obsessed with proposing various hypotheses came up with all sorts of accompanying doomsday and disaster theories, such as the idea that the World's Heart was gradually going out.
But all those claims were absurd. The red glow had no mysterious