“I can tell you about the Judge, but... perhaps ignorance is true bliss.”
Jörð turned slowly, her gown trailing a mournful arc through the void. Her face was terrifyingly calm, as if she were speaking of something that had nothing to do with her.
“I have slept here for far too long. Many of my memories are no longer clear.”
“But one thing I can be certain of: the disappearance of the gods back then was not because of that great war. It was because something... went wrong with this world.”
“In that era, any creature whose strength reached Godhood was cursed... Ignis and I chose to give up most of our power and enter a near-permanent slumber. But it seems that even after lingering for ten thousand years, we are still not accepted by this world.”
“And the ‘Judge’ is the most direct cause of that...”
Just as Jörð was about to continue, the space they were in suddenly trembled. She looked up sharply to see that the previously flowing dome had transformed into a terrifying vortex.
“Hmph... they certainly arrived quickly! Hehe... do they have no intention of giving me a moment to breathe?”
Jörð gave a tragic laugh and waved her hand to disperse the vortex above. A second later, the entire watery veil lost its color, becoming completely transparent.
Starlight and the others looked up to see that the sky, where the moon had once hung high, was now covered in dark clouds. Pitch-black darkness enveloped the entire world, with only the flashes of lightning in the sky providing a sliver of light.
“You should leave. If you go now... there is still time.” Jörð stared fixedly at the thunderclouds in the sky as her body suddenly shot upward, returning to its original size.
Her long hair began to transform into flowing crystal, and ancient divine patterns began to surface on her translucent skin. The Power of Creation flowing from her rose-red eye dyed her entire body in brilliant colors.
Her aura as a deity finally revealed itself alongside her physical transformation.
In an instant, the Goddess of the Earth’s divine pressure swept through the entire space like a tsunami. The ice-crystal floor cracked into spiderweb-like patterns under the terrifying pressure.
Her power eventually settled at the peak of a Half-God, yet it still made everyone present find it difficult to breathe.
The five Frost Giant lords present all looked up at once, gazing at the heroic and vibrant Jörð with near-fanatical eyes.
The one holding a staff stepped forward and shouted in a low voice, “Divine Lord, your people shall stand with you!”
“Silly children...” Jörð shook her head, her crystalline fingertips lightly brushing the wrinkles on the Frost Giant Elder’s forehead. “This was never meant to be your fate...”
But the Frost Giants did not retreat. They silently formed a battle formation, using their bodies to build a wall of flesh around the goddess.
Seeing this, she no longer hesitated. She turned to look at Starlight’s group, her heterochromatic eyes swirling with complex emotions. “Leave. Treat everything you have seen today... as a dream. My existence is destined to be an illusion.”
Before the four of them could react, a faint light enveloped them.
At the final moment before the teleportation activated, Starlight saw a bolt of purple-black lightning tear through the heavens, striking directly down toward their position! Jörð threw a punch, forcibly shattering that heavenly thunder.
“Remember... never... touch the divine realm...”
Amidst a blurred warning, Jörð’s figure gradually faded within the lightning.
When Starlight’s vision refocused, he felt a bone-chilling wind pour into his collar. The four of them were slumped on the vast ice field, their boots sinking deep into the snow.
In the distance—at least ten kilometers away—the location where the Lake-Center Island had been was now swallowed by a terrifying thunderstorm vortex.
Countless bolts of purple-black lightning, like the whips of a celestial god, lashed down frantically from the roiling thunderclouds. Each bolt was as thick as a castle tower, weaving a massive web of destruction between heaven and earth.
Even from such a distance, the four could still feel the tremors beneath their feet. Every strike of lightning made the entire ice field shudder.
“Is that...?”
Starlight looked up, thinking he could see a massive shadow moving within the thunderclouds, but it was too indistinct to be sure.
At that moment, a piercing alarm sounded from inside Stark’s power armor: “Warning! Spatial readings abnormal! The area ahead is undergoing collapse!”
He snapped his head toward his companions and shouted, “We have to get further back! Otherwise...”
Before he could finish, a purple light more brilliant than all the previous lightning exploded between heaven and earth, striking straight down at the island’s location and illuminating the entire ice field like broad daylight.
Under this lightning of divine punishment, the entire world seemed to freeze... the falling snowflakes hung still in mid-air, the howling wind stopped abruptly, and even their hearts seemed to stop beating.
Only after several seconds did a heaven-shaking roar sweep across the land with a powerful shockwave.
“BOOM!!!”
A wave of air like a tsunami hit them almost instantly, blowing the four into the sky. Fortunately, Starlight reacted in time, pulling his companions into the parallel space just as the following shockwave and a hundred-meter-high wave of snow arrived.
When everything returned to calm and the group tumbled out of the parallel space, the sight before them made their blood nearly freeze.
The Lake-Center Island... and even the entire frozen lake had vanished without a trace.
On the distant land, only a perfect circular abyss nearly ten kilometers in diameter remained. The charred cross-section was as smooth as a mirror, and the ice at the edges remained in a molten state, emitting an eerie glow.
Maela reached out with a trembling hand to catch a crystal shard drifting through the air—a faint ripple of Jörð’s divine power still lingered upon it.
In the next instant, the shard transformed into a speck of light and dissipated in her palm, as if foretelling the end of an era.
...
The residual lightning in the sky continued to flicker against the pitch-black night for nearly the entire night. It was not until dawn approached that this divine punishment finally subsided.
Starlight and the others had long since emerged from the parallel space, but they stood looking at the devastated snowfield, lingering for a long time.
“Did... did Jörð... the Goddess of the Earth truly perish?”
Maela was the first to break the silence, but no one could answer her question.
That lightning that tore through heaven and earth was far beyond the understanding of mortals like them—it was a power capable of erasing a god.
Detection magic stopped abruptly at the edge of the abyss, as if some rule were preventing them from peering into the truth.
The only thing Starlight could be certain of was that both the Goddess of the Earth and the master of that lightning had completely vanished.
This upheaval had directly affected the terrain and ecology for dozens of kilometers around, leaving almost no living creatures behind. Consequently, Starlight and the others had no way to contact Moen and the others using their previous methods.
They could only hope that the others would notice the situation and arrive as soon as possible.
They waited on the spot for two full days before the dwarves’ follow-up team finally arrived. Everyone couldn’t help but gasp in shock at the sight of the terrifying abyss ahead.
Due to Jörð’s final warning, Starlight and the others did not tell everyone what they had seen and heard. They simply said that the area was already like this when they arrived. They only quietly explained everything to the two Moen sisters in private.
This was not the first time they had seen such an unfathomable circular abyss. Whether it was the restricted zone of Night Lotus Valley or the core of the Dragon Nest, they were identical to the sight before them.
“Do you think there’s a connection between these three places?”
That night, Xia Duo and Moen came to their campfire and asked cautiously after confirming no one was around.
“The Goddess of the Earth said not to set foot in the divine realm. Whether it’s the Night Elves or the Dragon Race, there might have been deities existing there in the past. Perhaps it was their existence that caused such scenes?” Starlight offered his guess.
“If that’s the case, then the deities who disappeared in the Age of Gods didn’t truly perish. Instead, to avoid something, they chose to go into dormancy... just like a hibernating bear.”
Moen keenly linked the information they had gathered and made a hypothesis.
Rate on N.U.
