Otherworld Advance Team
Chapter 1135 - 1128: Source River Technology

Chapter 1135: Chapter 1128: Source River Technology

"You will know, when the second Otherworld Gate opens, everything will start to get better," Luo’er comforted.

"Tell us a story from the Ancestor Era," the always silent Nightingale suddenly spoke up.

"Don’t you have that thing? Can’t you read it yourselves?" Xia Yue asked.

"The stage plays cover too many things, including the customs of the time, geography, and astronomy. It’s not easy to watch it all, but we urgently need to sort through the development of the Ancestor Era," Nightingale answered.

"Hmm, let me think, alright." Xia Yue tilted her head and thought for a moment, then nodded happily.

"Is this really okay?" Luo’er asked with some concern.

"This history was meant to be shared with future generations by the Ancestors; it doesn’t matter who speaks of it. As the heir of that era, I also have the duty to warn posterity not to repeat the Ancestors and Gods’ Twilight of the Gods," Xia Yue said.

"That would be great; we will listen with rapt attention," Luo’er said, unable to hide his excitement upon hearing Xia Yue’s words.

"Where should I begin?" Xia Yue shifted to a comfortable position, looked up in thought for a moment, and then let out a deep sigh, his voice growing more solemn.

In the Titan Era, the giants born of the Earth fought wars against the Behemoth, Scouring Sky, and Leviathan for living space. Ultimately, the Behemoth became extinct on the Continent, Scouring Sky dared not covet the land, and Leviathan retreated thousands of miles to the coast, hiding in the abyss. That war established the dominant species of the world; Titans, in effect, became the masters of the entire Continent.

About a hundred thousand years after the war, as the world’s order stabilized, Titans no longer needed to maintain their massive stature. Thus, every ten thousand years, their height would decrease by about a meter, but they consistently remained around three meters tall.

At the same time, other intelligent primates were born on the Continent. During the twilight of the Titan Era, these dwarf creatures merged with the Titans and eventually became one with them. Since then, there were no more Titans or dwarfs, replaced by a new breed of people, the Ancestors. Henceforth, the world officially entered the Ancestor Era.

However, compared to the Titan giants, Ancestors were a very fragile race, unable to inherit and maintain the top of the food chain held by the Titans. Order collapsed, and the world once again fell into chaos. The most tragic time for the Ancestors, the entire world had less than ten thousand people.

But it was in such a dark era that the spark ignited by lightning dispelled the darkness. Ancestors discovered a miraculous phenomenon, the Source river. And this great discovery eventually changed the fate of the Ancestors and the landscape of the world.

Source river, as the name suggests, in today’s terms, is simply a river where magical power flows. In a certain period of that era, magical power would appear in liquid form and accumulate due to gravity, forming rivers, known as Source rivers.

However, with the changing eras, Source rivers on the surface of the Earth became increasingly scarce, and traces of Source rivers might still be found in the deep sea.

The discovery of the Source river led Ancestors to pay attention to and value this substance, present in the air and on the ground everywhere, the Source, also known as magical power.

In their research on the Source river, they discovered some interesting phenomena. First, the Source was affected by specific sound wave vibrations and would resonate with them. This marked the origin of Spells.

Second, magical power in liquid form, when channeled along a fixed trajectory, would produce a similar reaction. This was the origin of Magic Arrays and Runes.

With all this knowledge in hand, Ancestors were no longer lost. From that point on, Ancestor wisdom fully blossomed, taking them directly from the era of chaos to the era of science. Yes, science, the exploration of the laws of matter. Ancestors also referred to it as science.

At the time, all Ancestor science and technology revolved around the Source, hence their technology was also known as Source river technology. As research on the Source deepened, the life of the Ancestors began to rapidly advance. About two thousand years into the scientific era, Ancestor civilization reached its pinnacle.

Unlike the splendor of the Titan Era, the civilization of the Ancestors was the pinnacle of advancement in all aspects. Even the ancient behemoths that still ruled the skies and the oceans willingly submitted to the Ancestors.

However, nobody at the time could have imagined that this was, in fact, the final brilliance of the Ancestor Era.

Since time immemorial, humankind has had two insatiable desires: curiosity and exploration of the unknown and the longing for immortal life. At the peak of their era, the Ancestors began to delve deeply into these two areas.

The first was the exploration of the unknown. The Ancestors tried to gaze into the starry sky but found that their starscape was like a painting, devoid of any worth for exploration. They never had the chance to explore the unknown worlds beyond Earth through the stars.

By the way, saying the starscape was like a painting does not mean there was a painted barrier in the sky, but that they could never escape this region no matter what, as if they were bound in some way. In terms that you Earthlings would understand, it’s somewhat similar to a black prison. All speeds of light were confined below a certain value, dooming the Ancestors to never be able to escape this region through the universe.

The exploration of the starry sky left the Ancestors utterly dejected, countless people despairing and even many committing suicide due to this.

After the hope for exploration had been dashed, the Ancestors opened another Pandora’s box. Since exploration was hopeless, why not cherish the present life? With this thought, the Ancestors began their pursuit of eternal life.

Their fragile bodies turned the dream of eternal life into a mere bubble. Despite their research on the genes of many long-lived creatures, they could never apply it to themselves. Though they already lived for over a thousand years, they were still not content.

The result of their insatiable greed was the touching of the world’s taboo.

According to the Ancestors’ hypothesis, if one could extract the soul and then keep switching bodies, one could theoretically achieve immortality. However, the results of their research drove them yet again into boundless despair because their hypothesis was wrong from the start—humans simply do not possess souls.

At that time, artificial intelligence already existed in the world, created by the Ancestors and reduced to their servitude, satisfying their daily needs without any say of their own.

An Ancestor scientist noticed the artificial intelligence and had a bright idea, which now seems like a terribly bad one—backup immortality.

Backup immortality had a philosophical-religious undertone, so when it was first introduced, not many people responded.

According to the logic of this theory, if humans don’t have souls, could they not create an artificial intelligence with their own personality and traits, a replica of themselves, to achieve immortality in their place?

To be honest, to this day, I still have a critical view of this. Clearly, the Ancestors were so obsessed with eternal life that they lost touch with reality, completely neglecting the absurdity of this theory.

As the theory describes, if you want eternal life, you need to create an artificial intelligence identical to you, because artificial intelligence relies on the magical energy in the atmosphere for power and is, in principle, almost eternal.

Then, when you die, your backup would become the real you, living eternally in this world.

As the theory was rolled out, the world’s first Human God was thus born. And this became the starting point for the Twilight of the Gods. While everyone looked up to this Human God with admiration, nobody imagined that this ridiculous act would eventually change the world and lead to the downfall of the splendid civilization of the Ancestors.

The birth of the Human God stimulated the Ancestors’ pursuit of immortality. At first, those scientists had very strict standards for eternal life, only those who were morally upright and well-informed were deemed worthy of becoming a Human God.

However, the government at that time was relatively soft, and some malicious, scheming individuals incited populist protests to force the government to capitulate and order relevant institutions to lower the thresholds for admission, allowing all sorts of unworthy and ignoble people to become gods.

From that point on, Pandora’s box had been completely opened; the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were ready to strike. The bright civilization of the Ancestors began to plummet rapidly and eventually caused a catastrophe that led to the destruction of the Ancestors’ civilization—the Twilight of the Gods.

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