Li Wei's expression was spectacular the instant he saw that enormous face. First came utter bewilderment, then shock, and finally a baffled confusion that nearly made his head bald.
Because although the sight of that enormous face had left him shaken with shock, he hadn't felt even a trace of the instinctive, blood-born killing intent that could drive dragons mad.
That alone was enough to make Li Wei doubt whether the colossal being before him was truly the Titan he remembered.
After all, during the Dawn Era, dragons and Titans had fought for over a thousand years to claim dominion over the whole world.
That hatred had been forged atop mountains of corpses and rivers of blood, etched into their bloodlines and souls. It had even become part of the soul inheritance passed down to every new generation of dragons, so that whenever a dragon saw a Titan, it couldn't restrain its instinctive urge to grind the creature's bones to dust! Even if it was dead!
Actually, in the Coriel Universe, the Titans hadn't originally been called that. They'd been known as giants.
It was an extremely plain name.
So, according to the research of scholars from various races, the mighty-sounding title "Titan" was probably just the giants' creation-descendants, the Dwarves, trying to make them sound more impressive.
According to the knowledge Li Wei had inherited, in the beginning, a God Above Gods named Ao had come to this chaotic place, where neither matter nor time existed. He had defined its constants and laws, then drawn a circle like an eggshell. That was the embryonic crystal wall of the entire Coriel Universe, and later generations called it—
[Kingdom of the Heavens]
Countless millennia later, two goddesses were born from the essence of shadows where light and darkness intertwined. They were Surun, Goddess of Light, and Shar, Goddess of Darkness.
After their birth, they created the stars. The interplay of light and shadow also brought the first warmth to Shangdiya, the newly awakened Earth Mother Goddess. She began instinctively nurturing different forms of life in the earth, but most perished for one reason or another. (Later conspiracy theorists blamed Shar, Goddess of Darkness, for sabotaging them.)
It was worth mentioning that Mithriel, the First Generation Goddess of Magic, was born when the two goddesses had a falling-out over their conflicting ideals and started tearing into each other. (Surun tore off her own magical essence and hurled it at Shar, and then, well...)
When Li Wei first read this part, he'd been dumbfounded for a long while. So the saying that a lesbian relationship was all fun and no consequences was wrong—apparently, it could produce children too.
And it wasn't just Mithriel. Many other ancient deities had also been born from the goddesses' divine natures during their fights.
But back to the point. On a certain celestial body stood a supercontinent called Meru Robros (the Material Plane). Thirty-seven thousand years ago, this excessively vast and arid continent had been slowly split into several pieces by the Earth Mother Goddess Shangdiya, using her divine power over countless years. The influx of ocean moisture made the once-dry, barren land suitable for life.
This act also drew the expectant attention of the ancient gods.
They even named this vibrant plane Coriel, meaning "Prime Material World," which showed just how much hope its creators had placed in it.
In the primordial, chaotic Age of Thunder, a civilization of Lizardfolk had risen on the land, only to vanish amid war, meteorites, and plague.
After an unknown stretch of time, two powerful races finally emerged on the continent: the primordial dragons and the giants.
History called this the Dawn Era.
At the beginning of the Dawn Era, dragons—naturally attuned to the elements and blessed with tough hides—held an overwhelming advantage. With their wings, they claimed dominion over the land, sky, and sea, and established the once-prosperous Dragon Empire.
But nothing could escape the fate of rising to a peak and then declining. While the Dragon Empire was consumed by internal strife and power struggles, the giants, who had long been suppressed, made offerings to the god they worshipped—Father of All Angn—in hopes of receiving his aid.
Angn, wary of Shar's influence and bound by the gods' agreements, didn't dare interfere directly in the conflicts among the continent's inhabitants. But if the rules only forbade direct interference, couldn't he interfere in some other way?
So this eccentric god secretly bedded a low-ranking demigod giant, and she conceived on the first try, giving birth to eight descendants endowed with divinity.
Led by these eight Divine Descendants, the giants established their own Giant Empire and swiftly seized the continent's borderlands while the dragons were too busy fighting among themselves to govern.
In Li Wei's opinion, those Divine Descendants were clever indeed. They even knew the classic strategy of surrounding the mainland from the wilderness. Too bad their luck wasn't great.
Only then did the dragons finally take seriously the opponent they'd never considered a threat. But by the time they realized what was happening, they'd already lost their enormous advantage.
And so the dragons and giants began their thousand-year Blood War. Savage, frenzied elements ravaged every continent, while countless races enslaved by the two sides suffered heavy casualties. Every civilization caught in the war zone was wiped out.
Later generations called this conflict the—
War of a Thousand Years!
While the dragons and giants were both battered and exhausted, a band of pointy-eared folk fled their homeland, which was facing destruction. Using divination magic, they located this war-torn continent and smuggled themselves here through a portal.
They were among the ancestors of all the Elves who would later inhabit the Coriel Continent: the Golden Elves and Silver Elves.
To give themselves a legitimate local identity, the Golden Elves and Silver Elves chose to merge with the Green Elves, who already had legal local status. Thus, the Sun Elves and Moon Elves were born.
But the Elves had barely settled in before the dragons caught them. With their knack for appreciating every race's unique beauty, the dragons promptly enslaved the Elves, who ended up having a pretty great time for quite a while.
That dark chapter, which later generations of Elves tried their hardest to bury, was also the era when the greatest number of Elf Dragons—magical creatures—were born.
As time passed, these unfortunate Elves seized the opportunity presented by the war between dragons and giants and let out a world-shaking cry:
"Down with the tyranny of the dragons! The world belongs to us!"
It was just like the Qin Empire in Li Wei's previous life. The slogan "Are lords and generals born to their station?" had shaken the foundations of a mighty empire.
The continent's races, already worn down by a thousand years of incessant warfare and ready to die, rose up in the first rebellion of living beings in the Coriel World, led by the Elves—who were only half outsiders.
The Dragon Empire's millennia-long reign crumbled.
At least, very few enslaved races were still willing to fight for the dragons.
Taking advantage of the chaotic era when "the dragons had lost their prey, and every race in the world vied for it," the Elves established their first stronghold: Larissan.
Using the dark magic they'd brought from another world—the Mythal—they turned Larissan into an impregnable fortress and stood against the dragons, whose power was already waning.
Then they discovered the Godslayer Star, which drove dragons into a frenzy. One vicious Mad Dragon Enchantment turned the dragons into mad idiots, forcing them off center stage for good.
After completely defeating the dragons and overthrowing their rule, the Elves then turned on the Orcs and giants, their former allies in the fight against the dragons, and defeated them one by one in the struggle for supremacy over the continent.
After these three wars, the Elves finally established themselves among the continent's races. Their comparatively peaceful rule and conciliatory approach toward other races also won them widespread support.
The Sun Elves created Ossidion, a city of art renowned for its music and dance.
The Moon Elves, meanwhile, built Salalion along the coast, which eventually became the world's center of commerce.
History called this the First Flourishing.
Humans were also one of the races that gradually rose to prominence under the Elves' gentle rule.
But the Elves, too, couldn't escape the fate of reaching a peak and then declining. Their downfall, however, came about differently from the dragons'.
At the height of their civilization, the Elves gathered several hundred of their most powerful mages in the center of the Coriel Continent. They sought to create a High Magic spell that would let them build an Elf Homeland no longer plagued by the Mana Tide.
But they'd ultimately overestimated their own abilities and underestimated the power of such a colossal High Magic spell.
During the casting, they lost control.
A cataclysmic explosion nearly tore the Coriel Continent apart, and the terrifying Mana Tide swept across more than half of it. Hundreds of Elf cities were destroyed, and countless Elves perished in the disaster.
Consumed by grief, madness, and despair, the Elves turned on one another with accusations, and eventually plunged the entire continent into a devastating civil war.
This civil war erupted five times in all, spanning four generations of Elves.
Later generations called it the Crown Civil War.
When the Crown Civil War ended, it had completely exhausted the Elves' resources.
And so humanity began to flourish.
That was the general outline of Coriel's history as Li Wei had inherited it from the dragons.
So here was the problem.
'This thing in front of me doesn't look like a Titan. Who's ever seen a Titan wearing Alloy Armor? And that Mental Erosion suffered by those three Orcs, along with the Beast Tide these past few years...'
Just as Li Wei's thoughts hit a dead end, the name of another being he'd come across in the Soul Space leaped into his mind.
Li Wei's pupils shrank to pinpricks. 'Holy shit, could it be that thing? That'd be an even bigger problem than a Titan!'
He immediately turned to the trusted subordinates behind him and said:
"Huozi, have the Gnolls seal this place off at once. No one is to touch this thing for now!"
"Yes!" Huozi answered without hesitation.
"Tiger, have someone set up a defensive line in Mine Shaft 13 later! I'm determined to claim this place!"
"Yes!" Tiger was full of questions, but he quickly acknowledged the order.
Li Wei looked around at everyone. "Also, I need you to swear a River Styx Blood Oath here! You must never reveal this place!"
His gaze returned to the cold, enormous face. Thinking of the most terrifying possibility, he murmured:
"If this gets out, I'm afraid even those gods sitting comfortably in their Divine Kingdoms will go mad over it."
Looking up information took quite a while, so this is a bit late. Thanks to [xiaotang246] and [Yi Liuliu] for the Hundred Rewards.
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