How long, exactly, was thirty thousand years?
In truth, five thousand years was enough for a pack of hairless apes wielding stones to reach the stars.
Even reduced to three hundred years, it was enough for a group wielding firearms to create weapons that could orbit the planet and use Taiyang's radiance to bombard one another.
Thirty thousand years could see a civilization flourish, perish, flourish again, and perish again—six full cycles. It was enough for a people to forget their own name and acquire a new one, enough for a civilization to forget its history, then recreate that history anew.
Yet Da Chen had maintained an almost wholly identical order for thirty thousand years.
And not only that.
Looking across the entirety of Huaixu, ever since the Devil Calamity, the Huaixu Realm had maintained nearly the same order for more than three hundred thousand years.
Era after era, civilizations were suppressed in their primitive state. Time and again, wisdom was spent reinventing the wheel, replaying the struggle between oppression and resistance, while the suffering within it, like recurring events in a game, reappeared day after day without end.
Shenjing, this city that had stood here for thirty thousand years.
The center of Beixuan Jizhou's Earth Veins, the continental Zhongshu that had been established more than four hundred thousand years ago.
From beginning to end, they had never changed. Or rather, any change was merely the cyclical reappearance of what had come before.
Perhaps this was a kind of demon, a kind of "wearing-away." To halt the evolution of the Heavenly Demon, they had sealed even themselves away. Such swallowing of one's grievances was, without a doubt, also a kind of fall.
Tragic. There seemed to be nothing more tragic than this.
Sects born to protect all living beings oppressed