As it turned out, none of them had deliberately deceived Zhang Hongxing.
Qian Sen, Deng Jia, Yuan Ping, and the dozens of other former Immortal Venerables had not lied when they told him that the Defensive Grand Array randomly selected a group of humans every hundred years to travel to other planes.
They had said so simply because that was all they knew. From the day their memories began, that had been the version of events they knew.
And although much of what the Netherfire Black Tortoise had told him was hearsay, some of it was true.
Lies that contained a measure of truth were the hardest to see through.
The Classic of Mountains and Seas World had indeed once been part of Earth, and they had indeed been separated because someone had shattered them. But it had not been one person—it had been a group.
A group of demons and gods from other planes, a group of Demon Gods who had already all but conquered every plane.
They shared a single name: the Western Demon Gods.
The various immortals and demons on the Xia Kingdom's side, meanwhile, were called the Eastern Gods and Demons.
This war had begun in the Divine Realm. Zhang Hongxing did not know the current situation there, but he now understood most of what had happened on Earth's plane.
The spatial rift that had opened on Mars did not connect to the Divine Realm, either.
Instead, it led to a second-tier universe capable of accommodating the descending avatars of Demon Gods.
All of this was knowledge and memories Zhang Hongxing had absorbed along with the orb of light when he devoured it. His current state was also one no one had ever entered before.
That orb of light had actually been the planetary will of