Almost the instant He Zheng finished his question, Eve, seemingly unconcerned by his violent reaction, projected footage of the excavation in front of her:
"Hard to believe, isn't it?"
"The Buddhas were built by the previous human civilization."
"When we finished excavating, we discovered that the site was a ruin of the previous civilization. According to the information they left behind, the Sun's eruption would raise surface temperatures above three hundred and seventy degrees, destroying Earth's entire ecosystem."
"With no food and no water, and with all their desires amplified without limit by the solar storm, people would become monsters that knew only killing and eating. By the time they realized they could not withstand this disaster, they had already paid a terrible price. To preserve their civilization, they chose to abandon their bodies and transfer everyone's consciousness into a virtual world, until the next cycle began."
"The so-called Pure Land, where one could escape every disaster, was nothing more than a virtual space. There, people truly did feel no pain."
"And these Buddhas were the machines they used to maintain the servers."
"Only Buddhas without wants, desires, or thoughts could survive on the surface."
"As for the Buddhas we knew, they were the result of humans who refused to live in the virtual world merging with machines. To keep their thoughts from being affected, they cut away their 'desires.' Over the long years, their memories deteriorated, until all they remembered was the nature of this disaster. Like witnesses to the catastrophe, they repeated that calamity over and over."
When Eve finished, all four were shaken, but the story hit Aroro hardest.
His world faced a similar situation. He had wished his people could live without food, but Goblin technology was nowhere near capable of that.
*Abandoning our bodies to