Chapter 431: history of the past

The original cycle plane was not inherently a meat grinder-like war fortress.

It once nurtured a unique civilization, a race of beings that, by some stroke of fortune, ignited the spark of wisdom from mindless insect-like creatures.

They were resilient, united, and possessed astonishing capacities for learning and evolution.

Wisdom brought technology; technology drove development.

They emerged from subterranean nests onto the surface, established city-states, explored the mysteries of the stars, and eventually turned their gaze beyond the plane, toward the vast unknown that wizards called the Endless Chaotic Void.

The first expeditionary fleet, the first hopeful yet apprehensive attempt to leave the cradle that had birthed them and venture into the sea of stars… this should have been a glorious coming-of-age ceremony for a civilization.

Then disaster descended without warning.

On that day, the Endless Void, which had previously followed some chaotic rhythm, suddenly boiled over.

Terrifying energy torrents, material storms, spatial folds, and temporal ripples, phenomena far beyond the limits of that civilization’s understanding, were stirred by an invisible giant hand, transforming into a tide of destruction that swept across everything.

The expeditionary fleet, which had only just broken free of the plane’s barrier and had yet to truly set sail, was extinguished like candles in a gale. Not even wreckage remained.

The dreadful aftershocks even shook the plane itself: continental plates shifted, ley-line energies ran rampant, and the ecosystem teetered on the brink of collapse.

To this fledgling civilization, it was nothing less than apocalyptic.

Merely repairing the severely damaged plane exhausted nearly all the civilization’s resources and the life’s work of its scientists.

What followed was an even more despairing inference, spread among the top scientific minds: judging from the trajectory and characteristics of the devastating impact, it was not a natural phenomenon. It was extremely likely the mere residual shockwave of a battle fought by some unknown existence at an unimaginably distant location.

A single leaked aftershock, crossing who-knows-how-many light-years, had nearly annihilated their entire civilization.

Panic spread like plague.

Fortunately, the insectoid civilization’s innate collectivism and discipline kicked in, forcibly dragging society back from the edge of collapse into order.

After prolonged and agonizing debate, the high council made a decision: since external threats of such terrifying magnitude could arise at any moment and destroy them again, they must acquire the power to resist.

And since the plane itself required complete reconstruction to repair the damage anyway… why not forge the entire plane into an unprecedented superweapon?

A plan of grandiose madness was set in motion.

The whole civilization poured its strength into reshaping mountains and rivers, rewriting energy circuits, attempting to transform the plane itself into a war fortress capable of active defense, and even counterattack, against such “cosmic catastrophes.”

The process was unimaginably arduous, filled with technical barriers and sacrifice.

Yet with indomitable will, they stumbled and struggled their way to the end.

However, just as success seemed within reach, the scientists responsible for the core system delivered devastating news: due to missing foundational theories and the limits of material technology, the “superweapon” they had originally envisioned, one capable of affecting the outside world and striking proactively, had failed.

The system that ultimately took shape had its core functions severely castrated. Only one remained: upon detecting an irresistible threat to the civilization’s main body within the plane, one that would lead to imminent extinction, it would activate a full-plane mandatory time reversal, resetting everything to a “safe point” before the threat occurred.

This meant they had created an incredibly sturdy shell—but one that could only lock them inside.

Once they left the plane, they remained as fragile as ever, vulnerable to annihilation by the mere aftershock of some distant battle.

Even more fatally, the power of time reversal could not exempt themselves.

Each reset would erase their memories, technology, and social structures—even causing civilization to regress.

Such an infinite cycle—what difference was there from slow suicide?

To resolve this paradox, the civilization, already stretched to its technical limits, ultimately chose the cruelest possible “solution.”

Abandon the flesh; aggregate the spirit.

Using the highest technology they possessed, they forcibly stripped away the consciousness, memories, and wisdom of the entire populace—the very “soul” of their civilization.

Through fusion and digitization, they injected and solidified it into the core control unit of the time paradox generator—the “Core Will.”

Then, they subjected their physical bodies to large-scale biological modification, turning them into “biological weapons” with basic combat instincts and limited learning ability—the prototypes of the Sickle-Skull race.

In theory, the “Sphere Will,” possessing an independent time-line hiding place, could remain unaffected by the time reversal and remotely control the army of bodies outside through some form of mental link, conducting infinite cycles of trial and error.

Whether the external bodies died or were reset mattered not—as long as the Sphere Will endured, the flame of civilization lived on, and it could continuously “optimize” its armed forces through the cycles.

Here the scroll of memory ended: a civilization, for the sake of survival, chose collective “ascension” into ghosts within a machine, driving their own discarded husks into eternal war.

Consciousness struggled upward as if surfacing from the deep sea, breaking free from that viscous, tragic torrent of data.

Jie Ming’s “eyes” snapped open. He instinctively gasped for breath in great gulps, as though he had nearly drowned in that vast and despairing sea of memory.

Emerging from the immersion in history, a complex sigh of emotion swept through Jie Ming’s heart.

But the sentiment lasted only a moment.

His gaze regained its clarity and sharpness.

Now was no time for lamentation. Beyond the history of this civilization, the information flow had simultaneously delivered a massive trove of technical data concerning the sphere’s own architecture, energy circuits, firewall nodes, and operational protocols—the true weapons that mattered most at this moment!

He immediately took action.

Guiding his mental power with consciousness, he precisely injected streams of energy signals, carrying specific frequencies and encodings, toward several key energy circulation hub nodes on the sphere’s surface, following the methods he had just “learned.”

Buzz…

The sphere’s surface flashed with rapid streams of light. Then, before Jie Ming, a virtual operation interface materialized out of thin air, composed of intricate three-dimensional patterns and energy lines.

Its style was utterly unlike wizard runes, full of geometric beauty and a flowing, bio-circuit aesthetic, yet its fundamental logic of input, output, control, and storage was universal.

Jie Ming’s hands flew across the interface, his consciousness and movements perfectly synchronized as he rapidly input commands.

The technical data freshly acquired in his mind became the sharp blade of cracking.

The progress bar for breaching the sphere’s internal system firewalls advanced at lightning speed beneath his dancing fingers.

With its “active defense” capabilities lost and its internal protocols being systematically dismantled, the sphere’s defenses crumbled step by step.

“No!!!”

At that moment, a colossal will, mixed with rage, terror, and despair, erupted once more from deep within the sphere, slamming directly into Jie Ming’s consciousness.

This time, it was no longer a chaotic information flood, but a mental roar saturated with emotion.

“Stop! Invader! Cease!” the will shrieked. “We only want to live! We abandoned our bodies, abandoned our freedom, all for the sake of enduring in this cruel void! Spare us! We can negotiate! We can surrender part of our technology! Stop the breach!”

The wails and pleas were utterly different from the cold, majestic will of before was now, wretched, and shrill.

Despite the turbulence shaking his mental power, Jie Ming’s expression remained unchanged.

His hands never paused; the progress bar continued to climb.

To prevent the constant interference, however, he diverted a thread of consciousness laced with mockery and sent a direct reply:

“You say you want to live? But hasn’t your civilization already perished long ago?”

The will inside the sphere froze abruptly, as if struck at its most unwilling truth, momentarily “crashing.”

Seizing the opening, Jie Ming accelerated, breaking through two more layers of encrypted protocols while continuing to transmit, his tone cold as a blade:

“What now occupies this plane, serves as the war entity, possesses social form, and struggles for survival through endless death and cycles—is the Sickle-Skull race.”

“They are the very bodies you once ‘discarded,’ which, under the influence of long ages and the laws of reincarnation, gave birth to new life native to this plane—possessing their own naive yet tenacious collective consciousness.”

“And you,” Jie Ming’s mental “voice” continued mercilessly, “who claim to be the masters and continuators of civilization—in the observation and definition of us wizards, you are merely an aggregate of lingering consciousness echoes, imprisoned by your own fear, parasitic within this machine. On the tree of civilization’s evolution, you are a branch deliberately severed yet deluded into believing itself still the trunk. You are the scraps abandoned by civilization.”

“Lies! Insolence! Bastard! We are the essence of civilization! The ascended form!” The sphere’s will was completely enraged.

Perhaps because its deepest wound had been pierced, the roar grew even more frenzied and shrill: “It is you! You outsiders, you invaders! You destroyed our home! You interrupted our path of ascension! You are the true destroyers!”

Jie Ming’s expression remained unmoved by the accusation. Instead, the other side’s violent emotional fluctuations revealed several more logical vulnerabilities, allowing his cracking speed to increase yet again.

“Invaders? I admit it. Indeed, wizard civilization came with the purpose of conquest and the pursuit of knowledge. That is nothing worth denying,” Jie Ming replied calmly. “But the one who destroyed this world was never us.”

At this point, the mockery in his mental will was so strong that even a faint, sardonic smile appeared on his face:

“The one who destroyed this world was yourselves. Or rather, it was this part of ‘you’—the consciousness that chose to flee, to fear, to imprison itself.”

“You… what did you say?!” For the first time, the sphere will’s rage was mixed with an uncontrollable tremor—the fear of having its deepest secret exposed.

“That historical record is beautiful, tragic, yet riddled with holes,” Jie Ming stated calmly, even as he performed the final firewall removal operations.

“For a higher civilization with individuals possessing independent will, was the social chaos after the plane’s damage truly resolved naturally through ‘insectoid discipline’? When they discovered the superweapon plan had essentially failed and could only produce a time prison, did the entire civilization truly unite so ‘selflessly’ and agree to the cruel ritual of ‘spiritual ascension’?”

“Moreover, from our actual research, low-tier Sickle-Skulls primarily rely on pheromones and soul-level instincts to communicate—they are more like independent newborn life. Only a minority of high-tier individuals exhibit traits resembling ‘remote control’ or ‘memory implantation.’ If your so-called ‘mental link to manipulate bodies’ were truly perfect, why would so many uncontrolled ‘war-weariness’ and ‘fear’ emotions spread among the Sickle-Skulls, even running contrary to your will?”

Jie Ming’s reasoning fit together like puzzle pieces, forming a cruel picture of the truth:

“Thus I deduce that, in the face of catastrophe and despair, the original Sickle-Skull civilization must have suffered severe division. One faction—perhaps the ‘Exploration Faction’ or ‘Resistance Faction’—likely insisted on continuing research, repairing the plane, and eventually venturing into the stars despite the unknowable dangers.”

“And the other faction was you—the ‘Lockdown Faction’ or ‘Fear Faction,’ utterly terrified by the disaster, believing that only by completely sealing the plane and transforming it into an absolute defensive fortress—even if merely a time prison—could they obtain ‘safety.’”

“The so-called ‘spiritual ascension’ and ‘body modification’ were not a glorious, unanimous act of the entire civilization. They were far more likely the brutal suppression and transformation inflicted by your victorious ‘Lockdown Faction’ upon the defeated.”

“You shattered or imprisoned their consciousnesses, turned their bodies into the most basic Sickle-Skull war weapons—cannon fodder and consumables to guard your ‘shell’!”

“And you yourselves,” Jie Ming looked at the gradually dimming, trembling mechanical sphere, “your so-called ‘ascension’ was likely nothing more than transferring this fearful collective consciousness into a relatively safe control core, lingering on in another form, deceiving yourselves into believing you remain the masters of civilization and are still waging a great ‘war for survival.’”

“Those high-tier Sickle-Skulls may include some pre-arranged ‘control terminals’ of yours, but the majority were likely deformed products that, over long cycles, re-evolved from the modified bodies, carrying fragments of original memory imprints.”

“No… that’s not true… you’re lying! We are the saviors of civilization! We saved…” The sphere will’s roars became chaotic and fragmented, filled with frantic denial and the rage of having its most shameful truth laid bare.

But its reaction only confirmed Jie Ming’s deduction.

Ding!

A crisp system notification indicating a change in authority sounded in Jie Ming’s ears.

The final core firewall had been removed.

The data flows and operational privileges representing the highest control over this “Time Paradox Generator” opened to Jie Ming like an undefended treasure vault.