The Eastern Continent was vast beyond measure. Beyond Great Xia's borders lay enormous tracts of uninhabited wilderness, where poisons ran rampant and magical beasts covered the land. As Great Xia's population surged, its territory had expanded almost every year for centuries. Yet no matter how much Great Xia expanded, beyond those desolate provinces to the north and west of its mapped domain remained vast swathes of black and gray. Those gray-black areas on the maps represented uninhabited regions that had yet to be developed and explored.
To Great Xia's east and south lay Da Hai. Thus, the unexplored gray-black regions on land were concentrated mainly to the north and west on the maps.
There was a saying that before the Great Cataclysm, this planet had only one continent: Kun'ang Continent. The Great Cataclysm and the violent geological upheavals it caused had shattered Kun'ang Continent into pieces. Those fragments became the various subcontinents of today, while the main body of Kun'ang Continent that had survived the Great Cataclysm was, in fact, the present Eastern Continent and Western Continent. The Eastern Continent was simply Kun'ang Continent's eastern region, and the Western Continent its western region. The two had originally been connected by land, but an unimaginably vast uninhabited wilderness lay between them, and at the heart of those wildernesses stood the even more immense Black Iron World—a forbidden zone for all life. Separated by the Black Iron World, the Eastern and Western Continents appeared to be two separate continents. Travel between them therefore relied mainly on sea routes rather than land routes.
Before the first Holy War, the Black Iron World had another name: the Calamity Realm. This was where the Star of God, which had triggered the world's Great Cataclysm over nine hundred years ago, had fallen and shattered. It was