To be honest, although Hao Ren had seen plenty by now, he would never have imagined that La Rian's true history was like this—not before hearing the truth from Constance.
This was a world that had been destroyed many times over. The apocalypses it had endured went far beyond the two Hao Ren had initially suspected: the one caused by Lord of Madness, and the second brought about by the fall of the Creation Goddess. In fact, compared with everything else it had been through, the shock wave that split the planet in two when the Creation Goddess fell was nothing at all.
From the destruction of the Ancestor Civilization in the First Era—a civilization so powerful it could almost overturn the laws of the universe—at the hands of Lord of Madness, which shattered the world and annihilated the entire civilization, to the present, when only a broken planet remained and its successors had regressed to fighting with swords, spears, and other weapons, the gulf between those times amounted to far more than just the passage of time.
Each collapse of the universe meant that the timeline was utterly shattered and reassembled. Everything was shuffled and started over, as though the universe had been reformatted, while the successors were like "stubborn files" that each reformat had failed to delete completely. They had forcibly preserved certain things through cycle after cycle of annihilation, and by now, they no longer even knew what they were preserving.
Hao Ren finally understood what the Gorgon Empire, Tumen Empire, and Helsunga—all seemingly worlds apart—really were. They were all La Rian Civilization: different names for the same civilization as it cycled through annihilation, each in a different Worldline.
Looking into Constance's eyes, Hao Ren spoke slowly. "The first thing I want to know—is Madness... I mean,