Reversing the Era

Chen Ling's arrival did not surprise Chu Muyun in the slightest.

He smiled faintly, dragged a chair out of the convenience store, and gestured for Chen Ling to sit.

"Looks like you finally have the patience to hear us out about our 'justice.'"

"I'm all ears."

Although Chen Ling was desperate to learn everything about the USB drive, he trusted that since Chu Muyun had given it to him, he would surely explain it. So he patiently waited for Chu Muyun to begin from the very beginning.

"How much do you know about the Great Cataclysm?"

Chen Ling recalled what Doctor Lin had told him before.

"They said a Crimson Meteor streaked across the sky, the Ash Realm intersected with this world and affected it... and Calamities crawled out. That's all."

As he spoke, Chen Ling suddenly remembered the Crimson Meteor he had seen in the news footage on the USB drive...

As if realizing something, he widened his eyes in shock.

"Wait... the one in the USB drive was the world before the Great Cataclysm?!"

"That's right." Chu Muyun glanced at him in surprise, seemingly not expecting Chen Ling to figure it out so quickly. "What you just described is the 'Great Cataclysm' as most people in the nine Domains understand it. But the real Great Cataclysm was far more than that..."

"What do you mean?"

"According to rumors, the world before the Great Cataclysm was prosperous and flourishing. Humans could use the power of science to accomplish many things... such as flying into the sky, bringing the dead back to life, lighting cities as brightly as day throughout the night, building virtual worlds within reality, even leaving this planet to explore the more mysterious and unknown 'universe'..."

As Chu Muyun spoke, he watched Chen Ling's expression. When he found that Chen Ling showed no reaction at all, he could not help asking:

"You're not surprised?"

"Huh?"

"Aren't the things I just described surprising enough?"

Like everyone else in this world... no, this era, Chu Muyun had grown up here. Naturally, he had never seen the level of technology from before the Great Cataclysm. To them, everything described in the legends was intangible and unreal, much like modern people hearing myths.

"...Oh. Pretty amazing." Chen Ling nodded expressionlessly.

Wasn't that just airplanes, medicine, electric lights, games, and spaceships? To Chen Ling, who had lived in a modern city, those things had long since become commonplace.

But if his so-called "past life" had actually been the world before the Great Cataclysm, didn't that mean he had never traveled between worlds at all...

He had traveled through time?

"In any case, 379 years ago, a Crimson Meteor streaked across the sky. From that moment onward, humanity's material civilization began to regress." Chu Muyun spoke with the practiced ease of someone reciting a prepared script. "The technological achievements humanity had been proudest of were the first to collapse: lithography machines, spaceships, and superweapons capable of annihilating the world..."

"You mean... human civilization was regressing?"

"That's right. The people before the Great Cataclysm discovered that they could no longer manufacture new versions of those things. It was as if the most fundamental scientific principles within them had all failed. Even if every component was assembled perfectly, with no difference from before, they simply would not function...

As time passed, more and more things lost their function: mobile phones, computers, high-speed rail, and large-scale power stations...

Panic spread through human society. They had no idea how far material civilization would regress... and in that fear, they began slaughtering one another."

"Wait." Chen Ling interrupted Chu Muyun. "The regression of material civilization should have been a crisis facing all humanity. Why didn't they unite and work together to overcome it? Why did they start killing each other?"

"They did unite, but it was useless." Chu Muyun paused. "And as I said, they possessed certain superweapons capable of destroying the world, but not every country had those weapons...

Once all those weapons failed, and everyone's technological civilization regressed to the same level, the original balance of power would be shattered... powerful nations would no longer be powerful, and weak nations would no longer be weak.

In order to preserve their status, resources, and wealth, the powerful nations would choose to..."

"Launch all their superweapons and wipe out the weaker nations that didn't possess them?" Chen Ling seemed to realize something. "A world war?!"

Of course Chen Ling knew how important nuclear weapons were to powerful nations. If they were the first to learn that every country's technological level would regress to the same starting line, they would inevitably launch a war first.

Because losing their weapons meant losing their deterrent power. Other nations would surely set their sights on their oil, wealth, and everything else...

"You're basically right, but the powerful nations did not only attack the weak ones... they attacked one another as well. If technological levels truly regressed severely, then human resources would become what truly determined a nation's survival. To balance every nation's strength, they had to weaken the populations of countries with opposing positions as much as possible.

The crystallization of hundreds of years of human civilization ultimately became nothing but pure killing machines beneath the tide of regression..."

Chen Ling was silent for a long time before slowly speaking.

"The Ash Realm's intersection wasn't the root cause of the Great Cataclysm... humanity's self-destruction was."

"After that Great Cataclysm, the world was devastated. The survivors believed the world had gained a new order, but only a few days later, the Ash Realm began intersecting with reality...

Pollution from an unknown world corroded the land, and savage Calamities slaughtered living beings. Human society, already on its last legs, suffered a devastating blow.

After that, nations no longer existed. The survivors gathered together and established nine bases. Later, they mastered methods to resist the Ash Realm's intersection. The nine bases gradually expanded and became the nine Domains of today."

"I see." Chen Ling let out a long sigh.

Wait...

If what Chu Muyun said was true, didn't that mean his parents had also perished in the Great Cataclysm?

Not only his parents—every relative, friend, and colleague he had known would be caught up in that disaster... How many could possibly have survived?

Those people standing on the streets and watching the news at the time could never have imagined that, before long, the world would undergo such a tremendous change.

Chen Ling's eyes trembled slightly. Now that he knew everything that had happened in that era, he knew that nearly everyone he cared about would perish, yet he could do nothing... That era was already nearly four hundred years in the past. Even if he knew, what could he do?

"...You told me all this. And then?"

"And then comes the Dusk Society's sole purpose, the 'justice' we believe in." Chu Muyun pointed outside. "What do you think of the Aurora Domain?"

Wu Youdong's limping figure immediately surfaced in Chen Ling's mind, along with the rickshaw puller's disdain for the Enforcers, the vicious and arrogant people of Ice Spring Street, and the Enforcers who colluded with them for profit...

"...It's a mess." In the end, those were the only two words he managed to squeeze out.

"What if I told you that compared to the other Domains, the Aurora Domain is already doing quite well?"

Chen Ling froze.

"The Dusk Society gathers a group of pitiful wretches rejected by society. In the eyes of the world, we may be madmen, failures, executioners... The only thing we have in common is that we have completely despaired of this era..."

"So, we gathered together."

"Gathered together, and then what?" Chen Ling asked.

The dim yellow sunset gradually sank beneath the earth, and half of Chu Muyun's face fell into shadow.

He took a deep breath and spoke, one word at a time.

"Reverse the era. Restart the world."