In the future of fire, the world was incinerated.

Flame was not eternal, and the firewood in the sanctuary had its limits. Beyond the reshaped land and sea, a layer of eternal veil still bound the entire world—and when everything within the veil turned to ashes in the fire, the world ended in a long, slow cooling.

It was said that this "cooling" lasted a full four hundred years. Finally, the age of embers arrived—cold ash covered the entire world. No new flames rose, no living beings cried or breathed. The world stagnated in this pile of cold ashes, with neither new things being born nor old things dying out.

In a sense, this sanctuary, which had experienced the Great Annihilation, finally ushered in eternal peace. Embers returned to embers—doomsday was permanently frozen in this moment, and no new suffering would befall this land again.

Duncan came to a large rock and sat down without hesitation, not caring about the ubiquitous ashes. He looked at the city ruins on the plain, which were still weathering and collapsing, constantly turning into ash. After a moment of contemplation, he suddenly said, "In other words, there's no turning back from this option."

"You can reshape everything," Crete said, coming to Duncan's side. His thin, withered body stood in the cold wind like a crooked, dry branch, "But there is one exception."

"Myself," Duncan realized, softly, "I cannot redefine myself…"

Crete remained silent, and after a long time, he spoke, "If there truly is no path, then the future of fire is at least a continuation—but I hope you will be cautious and thoughtful. Time is like a river; many of its tributaries can be rewritten, but once you cross the main trunk that leads to the end, there is no turning back."

"No need to worry about that. The moment I rejected Navigator One's plan, I had already figured these things out—what you've shown me has only further refined my initial conjecture," Duncan shook his head gently, "More than that, my real gain is finally confirming one thing…"

As he spoke, he reached out and slowly made a grasping motion in the air—a ghostly green spirit fire immediately burned between his fingers, expanding and leaping in the air like a phantom.

"Is that so," Duncan nodded slowly, suddenly feeling a bit emotional, "Now I'm a little envious of Duncan Abnomal a century ago. You revealed the future to him. Although it was an accident, at least he knew where he should be going."

Light and shadow shifted and reorganized, things returned to their original positions, and the dim, enclosed cabin reappeared in Duncan's vision. The gate to the subspace still stood quietly at the bottom of the cabin—it was as if nothing had happened here.

Duncan looked at this scene with a solemn expression, thoughtfully, "These 'fires' are indeed just a facade."

In this terminated branch of history, there was nothing that could push it forward.

Then he turned his head to look at Crete, who was still standing quietly beside him, "You can see this branch of history, so can you see my other choices?"

"I'm sorry, I cannot," Crete met Duncan's gaze frankly, "We are ghosts trapped within the sanctuary's internal time loop, and we can only see everything within the scope of this time loop. Your other choices are all outside the loop—to us, it's like a huge hole in the night sky, and my gaze cannot cross that vast darkness."

His gaze turned one last time to the sky and earth here, sweeping across the faint sunlight behind the clouds and the towering cathedral in the city ruins. He did not ask Crete about the future of others or their whereabouts at this moment, but turned around without any nostalgia.

"Groping in the darkness is suffering, and knowing fate is also suffering. At the end of time, there is no peace—I'm sorry, we have no good news. We haven't since the day we set out."

"No big deal, I wasn't expecting good news. It's enough to get some inspiration this time," Duncan got up from the big rock, not a trace of ash on his body, "It's time to leave here."

Duncan quietly watched the flame in his hand, then casually turned his palm over.

The spirit fire instantly extinguished, and the silently shattering flames turned into many tiny sparks, flickering briefly at his fingertips. For a moment, they looked like the phantoms of distant starlight.

This branch of history collapsed behind him with a bang, just like the great fire in Prandre.

The world of ashes seemed to be touched by this wisp of flame. The wind on the mountaintop suddenly became a little restless, and even the nearby ashes showed abnormal fluctuations—but this was only a momentary illusion. In the next second, the wind and ashes returned to normal.

"…Sorry, I don't know."

"Outside the loop… In other words, outside this 'known world' of the sanctuary?" Duncan immediately reacted, "So, we still need to find a way to break through that eternal veil?"

Crete was still standing next to the door, still holding the pose of reaching out to pat the doorframe.

Then he retracted his hand and bowed slightly to Duncan, "I hope this hasn't caused you any trouble."

"No big deal, I have enough things to worry about already. One more isn't going to make much difference," Duncan said casually, "At least now we've confirmed that one path is very bad."

"The sanctuary is dilapidated and beyond repair, although I shouldn't say that," Crete sighed, "But its destruction is already doomed—doomsday has been chasing this world in the long river of time since the moment of the Great Annihilation, and now it has finally caught up."

"…Doomsday theory. This is the theory that the Endtime Preachers have been propagating. People have always thought that this is just your mad ramblings after going insane."

"There is only a fine line between madness and reason, and 'truth' does not care about the difference between the two," Crete said calmly, "Perhaps from another perspective, my companions have never truly been mad. They were just… a little tired, so they chose to embrace all the truths and became madmen in everyone's eyes."

"Will you become like that too?" Duncan was suddenly a little curious, "In some branch of time, or in the near future…"

"…I don't know," Crete hesitated for a moment and slowly shook his head, "Twilight has arrived, but this world will not suddenly be extinguished. My journey still has a short distance to go, and in order to communicate with you during this window period, I can only extract the most stable 'part' of myself to come here, so the current me does not know what the me at the end of the journey has seen. Perhaps…"

He paused slightly and continued, "Perhaps one day in the future, we will meet again. At that time, what appears before you may be a crazed madman, or a twisted and shapeless monster. That would mean that I have reached the end, wandered in the darkness for too long, or perhaps…"

Crete suddenly stopped here, and then, his eyes changed slightly, as if he had suddenly seen a direction in the long darkness, and suddenly thought of something. The deep wrinkles on his face relaxed, and his eyes looked at Duncan, "That's right… I will try my best to see you again, whether I am sober or crazy, I will definitely appear before you—at that time, I am afraid there will be no suitable window period, so I probably will not be able to communicate with you directly as I can now, and you may not even be able to see me… but I will definitely try to leave something behind, you can…"

The old man's voice stopped abruptly.

In the dim and empty cabin, only Duncan's solitary figure stood quietly in front of the subspace gate.

Standing like a statue for a long time, he finally turned around, picked up the brass lantern hanging not far away, and slowly walked towards the exit of the bottom cabin.

…

It was now twelve hours after nightfall.

Just as the scholars had warned—the sun had not risen, and the dawn had not appeared on the horizon.

If there were still some people who had illusions before, who were still praying that the seventy-two-hour twilight before was just an "isolated anomaly", and that the morning sun would still rise on time the next day, then now this fluke had been completely extinguished.

The long night had become a fact.

Near Light Breeze Harbor, the four ark-class giant ships were still docked near the coastline, and the "glowing geometry" located in the eastern offshore area, as always, released a soft, pale golden "sunlight", so that the entire city-state would not completely fall into darkness.

The Academy Ark was brightly lit.

The short, stout Luen stood in the "Temple of Knowledge" on the uppermost level of the ark, praying reverently before the statue of Lahm, the god of wisdom.

The prayer, composed of "0" and "1", with a rhythm and pronunciation that were particularly strange, was gradually coming to an end.

The smoke of incense rose in the temple, and the statue of Lahm stood silently in the smoke. The statue had no human form, but was a black rectangular stone tablet—a rune of the "Eye of Wisdom" was engraved on the top of the stone tablet, and dense symbols and fine lines covered the entire tablet body.

In the sound of Luen's prayer, those symbols and lines faintly showed a slow change of light and dark, as if they had been injected with life for a time.

But as the prayer ended, the stone tablet's brief "vitality" also dissipated.

Luen turned his head to look at a Truth Priest who had been waiting beside him since just now, "What's the situation now?"

"The bad news is that the sun has not yet risen. It seems that the night will really last a long time. The good news is that according to the monitoring data from various city-states, the temperature drop is gradually slowing down—according to the current cooling curve, it seems that the extreme low temperatures in each city-state during this night will not be lower than the lowest value in historical records. The world will not completely freeze in the long night as you worry… the 'Frost Disaster' will not happen."

Listening to the priest's report, Luen's expression finally relaxed slightly, but soon he frowned, "…Is that really good news?"

(End of this chapter)