A boundless radiance rushed toward them. The brilliance was so intense and blinding, Ji Jue could barely see. All he could perceive was a unique aura belonging to the Supreme Benevolence, Eternal Gate. It was pure, without a single flaw.

It felt as if he had plunged into the torrent of time itself and let it carry him toward an unknown and distant past.

Then, the endless light finally faded from his vision, and a breeze drifted in from afar.

Bells echoed across a plaza. Birds startled into flight, then settled again. Perched on swaying branches, they tilted their heads curiously, gazing at a visitor who did not belong here.

Ji Jue looked around in confusion, only to realize he seemed to have returned to the surface once more.

But the surface was not like this. The ruins were gone, and the collapsed skyscrapers had vanished without a trace. Instead, rows of slightly weathered buildings lined the streets. Crowds of people passed by, chatting and laughing. They walked straight through Ji Jue, leaving only faint ripples behind.

In the distance, the bells of a cathedral rang out, possibly marking a celebration of some sort.

“What is this?” Ji Jue raised his hands in confusion, instinctively trying to touch his surroundings, but his palms passed straight through everything without resistance, leaving only water-like ripples in the air. “We traveled back in time?”

He was unable to suppress the doubt, even as he immediately rejected the idea. This was not real. It was more like a reflection from within time itself, fragmented and incomplete. Upon closer inspection, some flower pots by the roadside flickered constantly, and the unstable flowers inside shifted colors. Willow branches drooped and twitched, unable to settle into any fixed form. Most pedestrians’ faces were blurred, indistinct. Their voices felt distant and unreal.

In the distance, buildings and scenery had no color at all, their positions constantly shifting. At the edge of the sky, the towering, solemn spire reaching into the clouds was brilliant and radiant, yet cracks kept appearing across it, opening and closing, only to quickly repair themselves. It was like a game full of bugs.

“What exactly is this?”

The Seer looked around. “These are fragments of time. Reflections of the past. Nothing more. This is the collection of phenomena gathered by Mercury, the culmination of the workshop’s work over all these years. The appearance of her hometown before it was destroyed.”

Against Ji Jue’s chest, the devil’s work ball jolted violently, as if it had finally come online. “Holy shit! I get it. I finally fucking get it. So that’s why that wench Mercury went to all that trouble for nothing and expanded her workshop across the entire rift realm!”

This was the most incomprehensible question for the Divine Creations. To control a rift realm, to manipulate everything within it... On the surface, it sounded absurdly grand and terrifying. In reality, it was extremely inefficient.

There were countless secret rituals within the Origin Path that could achieve the same effect. Multiple rift realms could even be stitched together to produce similar results. One could conjure wind or rain as one wished.

A workshop could simply operate from the center and regulate everything directly. There was no need to painstakingly transform an entire rift realm into a workshop. The cost of such an enormous undertaking was astronomical. Even if Mercury was insane, she was not so irrational that she couldn’t do basic math.

Besides, bigger workshops were not necessarily better. The priority of any workshop was to maximize alchemical efficiency, not coverage. With Mercury’s ability, if she had reduced the workshop’s range by half—no, even by a third—it would never have fallen into its current state of runaway collapse.

“It’s not that Mercury expanded the workshop to cover the rift realm. It should be the other way around. She needed the rift realm to become her workshop. The entire rift realm has already been transformed to revolve around the workshop itself, a collector specifically designed for the Supreme Benevolence, Eternal Gate! She spent so many blessings and materials and over hundreds of years just to complete the collection of time itself!”

It was like in remote cliff cities or small settlements outside urban areas, where people with poor signal erected giant satellite dishes just to watch TV. The entire rift realm had been turned by Mercury into an unprecedented, colossal receiver! On such an exaggerated scale, even a sage would be bankrupted and forced into endless debt.

Across long years of time, it drifted outside the world, floating among the stars and endlessly pursuing the sun, trying to capture fragments of the past scattered within darkness day after day, year after year. For four hundred years, it continuously collected fragments of time, tirelessly piecing them together over and over again, and attempting to reconstruct the past that once was.

Everything on the surface was merely the manifestation of these results. The records and phenomena hidden within this deep shaft were the true treasure she sought.

As Ji Jue walked through the remnants of the past, he could no longer suppress the question sitting on his tongue. “What exactly is she trying to do?”

The Seer sighed as she looked at how things had once been. “Have you not already seen it? She simply wants to return to the past. That’s all.”

To reclaim everything that had once belonged to her. To reclaim the people’s homeland, their loved ones, and their future from death, from a predetermined ending, and from the disasters she herself had brought about!

Day after day, the town repeated its endless cycle, while the colossal Tower of Origin in the sky, as well as everything here that could never be repaired, continued to collapse.

Before Ji Jue’s eyes, among countless recorded phenomena, a fleeting illusion emerged. It was a solitary figure wandering through the ruins. With her own hands, she dug with all her strength, pushing aside rubble, only to uncover piles upon piles of bones. She bent down, holding a half-drenched, bloodstained wedding dress, and weeping. Her sounds of grief could not be heard.

This was the price Mercury had to pay.

It was as if lightning flashed through Ji Jue’s mind. Everything he had seen before entering the rift realm, as well as the ancient history and past events, finally began to connect. He turned around and asked, “The disasters appearing in the town... they were caused by Mercury, right? Because of the collapse of the Tower of Origin?”

BOOM!

That apocalyptic scene once again manifested from the reflection of time.

Amid the collapsing cries of the towering spire, catastrophe surged from the sky once more. Earthly fire spread, devouring everything. Wails and screams echoed in the wind that swallowed them all.

Everything once belonging to Origin’s blessings dissipated completely, leaving only endless corruption and aberration. The prosperity and brilliance built upon it faded like wind, leaving behind only a fractured imprint eternally carved into time itself.

Origin had lost its authority!

The Seer said, “To annihilate the Eternal Lord, to sever the Tower of Origin, to break a world that had stagnated for thousands of years, and to end all accumulated corruption of the Eternal Empire, this thousand-year-long aspiration was completed at the hands of Onyx. Mercury was a crucial key in the plan. The blade of change that severed Origin was forged and honed by her...”

“But the price? What was the price?”

Softly, she replied, “The price... was losing everything.”

Just as everything unfolding before their eyes showed.

The moment the Tower of Origin shattered, all participants suffered the backlash of a collapsing order. Regardless of intent, from the moment the Eternal Empire fell, endless calamities spread across the land.

This was the consequence she had created with her own hands. She knew she would lose everything. She should have understood that long ago. But she loved too much, and there was too much she could not let go of.

Even with the help of the Aether sages, even if she erased her original name and rewrote her history, fate was not something so easily deceived. She thought that after the empire’s fall, she would be able to step away gracefully and return home. But once everything ended, there was nowhere left for her to go except ruins. Everything she had cherished was utterly obliterated along with the collapse of the empire.

First came natural disasters, then earthquakes, followed by the mutations triggered by the loss of Origin, and then the wars that erupted from the chaos. Everything she cared about was destroyed within just seven days.

Her daughter, her older brother, her younger sister, her mother, her friends... every ordinary person who could still remember her name, all were wiped out by the catastrophe. Only the lonely sage remained, wandering through ruins and wastelands, bearing both honor and curse.

“How ironic,” the Seer muttered, looking over the false remnants of yesterday. “She personally ended the rule of the Eternal Empire, hoping to create an ideal world, yet in doing so, she brought forth disaster and endless corruption, thus becoming the first Cursed One in history born from catastrophe.”

The Seer sighed. “Even after exhausting her entire life and all her efforts, trying to return everything to the way it was before the disaster, trying to reclaim what she had lost, there was no turning back. She couldn’t restore even an illusion. What remains is only this false dream, and an endless, unceasing cycle of torment.”

For a long time, Ji Jue remained silent and unmoving. “It can’t be restored?”

“It can’t,” the Seer answered without hesitation.

Ji Jue had nothing else to say. Frozen in place, he stared blankly at nothing in particular, faintly hearing the distant whistle of a departing train, and a song drifting from somewhere far away.

How could restoration be impossible? Sages transcended the mortal world. The Ember Path could reshape creation itself. This world was far too vast, far too brilliant.

The Twelve Supreme Benevolences, the Nine Foolish Abominations, the Federation, the Empire, the Central Lands, the Security Bureau, the Wasteland Assembly, the Taiyi Ring... so many blessings, so many abilities, so many powers beyond his reach.

He had once believed, no, even now he still believed that perhaps one day, when he became strong enough, when he possessed enough power, he could reclaim everything that had been lost, and even prevent a certain disaster from ever happening.

“I thought... there would be a chance,” he murmured to himself, not sure who he was speaking to.

The Seer sneered. “She thought so too. And what you see is the result. Humans cannot change their past, nor can they choose what they become. What is gone will ultimately be gone, no matter how unwilling to let go one is, no matter how many regrets remain. That is why the present is more precious than the future.”

At first her tone was cold as she was unable to suppress her contempt, but in the end, she could not help but pause and let out a sigh.

“Why must I, a puppet who cannot even control her own life, be the one teaching you this kind of truth, Ji Jue?”

“Who knows?” Ji Jue murmured to himself. “Who would ever be willing to accept it?”

When faced with fate, should one bow in submission and endure in silence, or resist despite knowing it was futile?

What lay before him was the tragic end left behind by those who had once tried to lead the way.