The apocalypse had already arrived, yet the Ancestor Civilization had repeatedly delayed the true moment of the world's end. By folding the information of the entire world, they had transformed the worldlines that should have closed along with the apocalypse into open ones, thereby avoiding the worst possible future—the future in which the end of all things became established history.
Thus, whenever this world was destroyed to its limit and the moment came when the power of the Lord of Madness was about to devour all order, the world would restart, replaying everything from the beginning as though loading a save file. The Ancestor Civilization used this method to refuse to accept the apocalypse. Even now, no one knew how many times this cycle of reincarnation and delay had occurred.
This delay appeared to be indefinite, but the facts proved that the Ancestor Civilization could not truly accomplish this forever.
The world was constantly deteriorating. The inheritors responsible for finding a way to defeat the Lord of Madness completely and rebuilding the civilization system after each Era Restart were also declining. The complete universe of the beginning had grown weaker with every restart, retreating from the sea of stars until only the planetary surface remained. The inheritors, meanwhile, had changed from the godlike leaders of the Ancestor Civilization into generations of muddleheaded mortals.
According to the records in the Heart of God database, there had originally been thirteen leaders among the inheritors of the first restarted era. But through each Epochal Shift, those leaders had declined one after another. Some had even been completely contaminated and devoured by the power of the Lord of Madness. After the world had restarted more than a hundred times, most of them had vanished without a trace. Even those who had held on through