History was rapidly rolling backward.
The history that had not yet solidified—or had already begun to solidify—shattered under Doctor Manhattan's destruction like waves crashing against the shore.
Everything was changed anew, as if the cards had been reshuffled.
When the First Lantern awoke from his dream, he saw the distant horizon. Countless fragments leaped and surged backward, restoring themselves like a reversed flow. The people who had just been killed by Perpetua's creation, the Prometheus Giant, all came back to life in an instant. They stared blankly at their surroundings, then began whispering among themselves.
To the DC Multiverse, this was merely a stretch of history that had been erased. But to the people who had lived in those fragments, they might have experienced an entire lifetime.
The Over-Time Stream caused a complete alteration of the timeline. In other words, once the Over-Time Stream changed, countless brand-new timelines would be generated.
Although those timelines had now been erased once again, the beings who had lived on them had successfully experienced a complete history—from the Big Bang to the universe's natural destruction at the end of its lifespan.
In particular, the Over-Time Stream had briefly collapsed downstream because of the punch, causing countless timelines to overlap. People from all kinds of different eras collided with one another. Within those shattered timelines, who knew how many earth-shaking joys and sorrows, loves and hatreds, had been played out? But now, all of it...
No longer counted.
The First Lantern watched all of this sadly. Of course, for those who had already died, the resetting of the timeline might have been a good thing.
Death in the DC Multiverse was not an absolute concept like it was in the Watchmen Universe. The dead were merely preserved in the divine kingdoms of the Black Death