The world seemed to fall silent.
Year after year passed. It seemed there were no longer any mighty beings fighting in the mortal world. As though overnight, the beings who had formed forbidden zones over the past century, who could slaughter the entire world single-handedly, seemed to vanish from the mortal realm.
In just twenty years, the creatures hidden in the forbidden zones began to emerge into the world, beginning to grow accustomed to the Endless Night.
All the mighty beings disappeared without a trace.
And so the world began anew, its creatures adapting and surviving in the darkness.
A hundred years passed. The world's creatures began to adapt to a world with scant spiritual energy, sustaining themselves through the "monsters" that appeared in the world formed from the Heavenly Dao Prophet's flesh and blood.
The creatures living within secret realms began waging conflicts between their realms.
A full thousand years passed this way.
And so the world's creatures developed civilizations of their own, civilizations in which the various races struggled to survive in the darkness. They knew nothing of the Heavenly Dao Prophet, the Heavenly Dao, the Thirteen Ancient Sages, Li Yaowen's avatars, or the Azure Cloud Li Family. To them, immortals were mysterious beings.
By the ten-thousandth year, these civilizations had undergone change after change. These creatures and the mighty beings who had survived since ten thousand years ago seemed to exist in two different dimensions.
These creatures knew only that the sky was forever dark, and that the occasional flash of lightning across the heavens could bring the mortal world a brief spell of light, lasting anywhere from a day to a month.
Cracks gradually appeared in the sky, and auroras from the cosmos scattered across the mortal world.
Ten thousand years was a long time.