Within the Imperial instance, Zhao Cheng raised his eyes and saw more than thirty parallel worldlines unfold before him.
Thanks to the flow of time within the spacetime battlefield being out of sync with the real world—and much faster at that—although quite some time had passed in the spacetime battlefield, only a few days had gone by in reality.
Over Zhao Cheng's thirty-plus simulations, he had also opened more than thirty worldlines. Within those timelines, the starry sky held nothing but boundless dead silence. Only a handful of artificially constructed ecological bottles still endured, like the last sparks of fire in the darkness.
But even those sparks would one day be snuffed out. They could not endure forever.
Take the first worldline, for example. Its sole ecological bottle had shattered amid the apocalypse after a long stretch of time. Yuan, who had arisen from the apocalypse yet split off from it due to Zhao Cheng's intervention—even though she was extraordinarily special—could not resist the erosion of the apocalypse in the end. Her only path was annihilation.
Yet through all of Zhao Cheng's many rounds of research, he had come to feel that the power of the apocalypse bore some resemblance to the White Calamity. To him, the White Calamity seemed like a variant of the apocalypse—or perhaps the apocalypse was a variant of the White Calamity.
As for why this power had appeared within him, recalling his own loss of control, Zhao Cheng could not help but suspect that those who gazed into the abyss would be gazed upon by it in return, stained with the abyss's aura. Those who challenged the apocalypse would likewise be tainted by its factors.
After all, it couldn't be that he, who had always devoted himself to saving the world, was actually the apocalypse's