The universe no longer had enough mass.
And so this was the ultimate ending of the six-thousand-six-hundred-and-sixty-year-long apocalypse.
That slender arthropod limb rested lightly on his hand, cold and hard, as if it were the apocalypse itself—or the greatest impression those who had passed away had left of the "homeland world" they had lived in: cold, malicious, like a massive machine in the process of collapsing, unwavering as it crushed all things.
The mortals' fear and awe toward their homeland itself had become the world's final deity. Their fierce obsession with survival and all their aspirations for the new world had also been entrusted to that deity. Hope belonged to her, despair belonged to her, and so did the emptiness that followed the end of all things.
No wonder those spiderwebs had been so cold and resilient.
But Yu Sheng suddenly found it difficult to let go.
"No, why? What the hell is this?" He even grew agitated, abruptly rising from the stone-paved ground before the temple. "After making it this far, how could it just..."
"There is no why. Misfortune is simply so," the slender arthropod limb remained resting on Yu Sheng's hand, its voice as gentle and patient as ever. "'Fairness' is not the foundation on which the world operates. Mathematical laws have no warmth, either. Compared to the flickering firelight on the mother planet, coldness and darkness are the norm in the universe. Civilization itself is a low-probability event. We simply happened to have our entire civilizational cycle occur within the final notch of the temporal scale."
Yu Sheng stared blankly at the limb resting on his hand until it gently withdrew into the darkness beyond the temple gates.
The enormous shadow slowly retreated into the darkness.
Yu Sheng froze for a moment, then instinctively stepped forward,