The Grand Finale, Part Three

Time flew, and three years passed in the blink of an eye.

Earth grew increasingly desolate. Factories shut down, farmland fell into ruin, and cities began to sprout weeds and vines. Wild animals appeared in the cities in large herds.

Aside from a few scattered population centers, the entire Earth was all but deserted.

Over the nearly decade-long war, countless people had perished from hunger, war, disease, chaos, and slaughter. The number of people left on Earth was far lower than the earlier, more optimistic estimates.

According to the statistics, Earth's population had fallen from over seven billion before the war to fewer than three billion.

Great Xia Nation still retained nearly ninety percent of its pre-catastrophe population, but elsewhere—such as the European Alliance, Lucy Nation, the United States, India-West Nation...—the losses ranged from twenty percent to more than half.

Yanzhou, which had fallen repeatedly, had lost nine out of every ten people.

It was a cataclysm for humanity. Compared to this, the First and Second World Wars were child's play. Some small nations had even vanished without a trace.

The year 2025.

It seemed an ordinary year, yet in human history it was anything but.

That year, Uranus disappeared from the Solar System. The cataclysm drew ever closer, like the noose of the Grim Reaper.

At the same time, humanity officially set out for a new world.

Chen Shouyi floated in space.

Eerie silver light blazed from his eyes. His body flickered between light and dark, half-real and half-illusory. Vast amounts of energy from the spatial descent flowed into him, warping the space around him. Over these three years, his soul had finally completed its qualitative transformation, becoming quasi-four-dimensional.

His strength had increased more than a hundredfold.

He no longer needed the Book of Knowledge to enter a state