41: Chapter 41 The Origin of the Secret Realm

Mo Yufei looked at Wang Chen. The questions that had been building up in his heart had long been surging endlessly; he desperately wanted to thoroughly understand the origins of this world.

Now that the pressure of life-or-death crises was gone, the doubts he had suppressed in his heart could no longer be contained.

Mo Yufei leaned forward slightly, his tone carrying a touch of eager certainty as he asked, "Wang Chen, I still want to ask: what exactly has this world experienced? And this secret realm we are currently in, what is its origin?"

Hearing this, Wang Chen slowly raised his eyes. His gaze swept over the dreamlike, lingering mist that never dispersed in the secret realm throughout the year, and his eyes suddenly darkened a few shades, as if he had been reminded of distant, ancient events sealed away for eons.

He was silent for a moment, his fingertips unconsciously clenching slightly, before he slowly spoke. His voice was flat and waveless, yet it hid an irrepressible sense of vicissitudes and sighs. He did not deliberately emphasize the heaviness; instead, it was as if he were recounting a dusty past that had long been carved into his bones and blood, weathered by the passage of time.

"This goes back a long way. The Main World we rely on for survival today was not like this in the beginning."

"In the ancient era, the spiritual energy in this world was so dense it almost turned into fog. It was a golden age of cultivation where ten thousand paths truly vied for glory. Human cultivators, ancient demon races, and various spirit races thrived and coexisted between heaven and earth. For those top-tier experts, flying, escaping into the earth, moving mountains, and overturning seas were all commonplace."

But later, various factions erupted into a world-destroying war in order to compete for heaven and earth resources and inheritance legacies.

The top powerhouses struck without restraint, their might too terrifying. They forcibly shattered the complete great world into pieces, causing the heavens to collapse and the earth to crack. The very foundations of the world were completely destroyed, and the entire Three Realms and Six Paths nearly perished along with it.

Fortunately, after the war, a few ancient powerhouses standing at the peak of the cultivation world remained. They exhausted their lifelong cultivation, even paying the price of the total destruction of their souls, to jointly repair the broken heaven and earth, barely restoring the Main World to eighty percent of its original appearance.

But in the end, it was beyond saving. The missing twenty percent of the world's origin shattered into countless small pieces, drifting in the endless spatial turbulence and turning into Fragment Worlds of various sizes.

Some of these fragments were found by later powerhouses, who used great divine abilities to refine them into exclusive heavenly abodes.

The other part relied on the remaining thin spiritual energy to slowly evolve on its own, eventually forming secret realms independent of the Main World. The place where we are staying now is an ancient Fragment World that evolved on its own without any supervision."

He paused, sighed softly, his tone carrying a bit of helplessness, and continued: "That world-destroying war almost exhausted all the spiritual energy of the Main World. Thousands of spiritual veins were completely severed, and the world directly entered the Age of Dharma Decline. The path of cultivation was completely severed, and the once-prosperous cultivator race gradually disappeared into the long river of history."

With no cultivation power to rely on, the human race had to find another way out. They turned to study technological civilization, relying on their own wisdom to explore and develop step by step, creating airplanes, artillery, and intelligent machinery. Technology eventually became the new foundation for the human race's survival.

At that time, the world was still divided into many independent countries, with constant disputes among them, and the flames of war never truly ceased."

"Until a few hundred years ago, when human technology developed to its absolute peak, a large-scale spatial tearing experiment accidentally forcibly tore open the spatial barrier, opening a long-sealed fragment secret realm."

Explorers who entered the secret realm discovered that it was filled with rare flowers and plants that had gone extinct since the Age of Dharma Decline, ancient rare birds and beasts, and precious spiritual minerals that had long since disappeared from the Main World. Once the news spread, the whole world was completely thrown into a frenzy."

"Other countries followed suit, all using top-tier technological means to forcibly open the spatial fragments within their borders, opening secret realms of all sizes."

At first, everyone was caught in a frenzy, competing over the size of the secret realms and the amount of resources, thinking it was a windfall from heaven, without realizing the hidden world-destroying crisis."

Until countless secret realms were opened, and the aura of the scattered world fragments mingled and gathered, unexpectedly triggering the dormant origin of the Main World. The spiritual energy of heaven and earth, which had been silent for eons, began to fully recover without any warning."

"The spiritual energy came too swiftly and violently, without any warning. The mortal bodies of ordinary people could not withstand the scouring of the spiritual energy. Large numbers of the public underwent mutations on the spot, losing their sanity and turning into walking corpses that would bite anyone they saw. The prosperous world turned into a doomsday purgatory overnight."

Fortunately, some people withstood the spiritual energy impact, their internal potential awakened, and they became Ability Users with special powers. Scientists also quickly combined spiritual energy with cutting-edge technology to develop supernatural weapons to fight against the mutants."

Relying on the desperate protection of Ability Users and the support of technological weapons, humanity struggled for nearly a hundred years before barely stabilizing the survival situation and rebuilding order."

"After this devastating catastrophe, all of humanity finally awakened. The fragmented, separatist regimes could not withstand the world-class crises brought by the secret realms and mutants."

So, all countries cast aside their previous grievances and completely merged and unified, forming a single world government to uniformly control secret realm development, research the ability system, and prevent mutation crises. After generations of management, they finally achieved the stable situation we have today."

Until this moment, after hearing Wang Chen's detailed account of the rise and fall, from the brilliance of the ancient golden age to the disputes of dynastic changes, and then to the catastrophe that devastated the living, all the puzzles had answers, and all the fog had been cleared away.

Mo Yufei slowly raised his head, his heart surging with indescribable emotions—there were sighs, melancholy, and even more, a sense of powerlessness that penetrated his marrow.

Those plots that once only existed in the novels he had read, those world-ending catastrophes, the ups and downs of all living beings, and the cycles of civilization depicted in writing, now perfectly overlapped with the reality before his eyes.

He had once thought those were just fictional stories, figments of an author's imagination, but now that he was experiencing it personally, he understood that it was not fabricated out of thin air.

"So that's how it is..." Mo Yufei said softly.

"I always thought that the world-ending calamities written in those novels were just illusory legends, plot devices used to enhance the story. But now I understand that the rise and fall of this world, and the life and death of living beings, truly cannot escape the shackles of fate."

A faint panic and worry welled up in Mo Yufei's eyes, and his thoughts involuntarily drifted back to the world he originally came from.

But at this moment, looking at this world before him that had endured catastrophe and was riddled with scars, his heart suddenly tightened.

"Perhaps this is the true calamity." Mo Yufei muttered to himself, his tone full of heavy sighs.

"The cycle of heaven and earth is an irresistible trend. Whether you are a peerless powerhouse or a prosperous dynasty, in the face of the calamity, you are nothing but a drop in the ocean, unable to resist."

Mo Yufei suddenly thought of the stable daily life in his own world, remembered those ordinary yet precious moments, and a strong sense of attachment surged in his heart.

Wang Chen looked at Mo Yufei's profile, watching the melancholy and worry intertwined in his eyes, but did not speak.

He understood. Regardless of who it was, upon seeing the ruthlessness of civilization's cycles, anyone would feel such powerlessness and panic.