“You’re standing on my head right now,” Etos said slowly.

Lily had just transformed back and was busy straightening her skirt and tugging at the fur on her tail. Hearing this, she yelped and jumped up: "Etos? *The* Etos?!"

That slow voice sounded again, seemingly without any emotional fluctuation: "I don't quite understand your way of speaking..."

"Don't mind her, she's into literature," Hao Ren casually pressed Lily down, then subconsciously looked up at the sky. Due to the energy accumulated from the previous battle that had not yet dissipated, the invisible "jellyfish" in the sky reappeared. Its undulating surface shimmered, and countless slender tentacles hung down from the sky like threads between clouds, connecting to the golem legions on the ground. "You... you're the one in the sky?"

"You are the first to observe me. Before I was affected by the energy-rich environment, you observed a part of me," Etos seemed to confirm Hao Ren's guess. "This has made me interested in you... Few creatures can observe the spirit body of a Chaos Wanderer, except for those that are extremely special or extremely ancient. But no matter who or what you are, I should express my gratitude to you for freeing me from this long service..."

"Chaos Wanderer? Is that the name of your race?" Hao Ren frowned. He hadn't asked what "long service" meant yet, but was first intrigued by Etos himself. "Weren't you supposed to have died many years ago? Killed by that 'Great Sovereign'..."

He suddenly remembered something: "Could the 'Great Sovereign' who fought you back then be that 'evil spirit' in the pyramid?"

"Chaos Wanderers do not die easily. Often, death is just a change of form for us," Etos said slowly. Its immense spirit body stretched out in the sky, seemingly repairing the damage caused by the previous battle. "As for the 'Great Sovereign' you mentioned, she is indeed the fallen monster in the pyramid... but I noticed that one of you looks very much like her. May I ask her name first?"

"You can call me Vivian," Vivian said proactively. "Don't worry, I'm not like that crazy thing in the pyramid. We just look alike."

Etos seemed to believe this: "I see... that's interesting."

Hao Ren coughed and brought the topic back: "Ahem, so you've never actually died? The Great Sovereign didn't really defeat you after that big battle back then?"

"No, although the 'Sovereign' destroyed my form, we were not enemies, and I did not deceive her in any way," Etos's answer was unexpected. "We never had any battles."

Even Izhaks couldn't help but speak: "What does that mean?"

"The murals we found described you as a destructive monster in ancient times. Many human city-states were destroyed by you, and then the Great Sovereign suddenly descended and completely destroyed you," Hao Ren also frowned. "Is that legend wrong?"

"Humans will use their own ways to understand what they see, but they often do not see the true nature of things," Etos's voice seemed very emotional. "The first half of the legend is correct. My activities caused widespread destruction—but that was not my intention. I cannot control my own energy leakage, just as humans cannot control their own organ function, aging, and death. For Chaos Wanderers, storms and flames are just part of our bodies, but in the eyes of humans, those mean devastating disasters... I once tried to dissuade those who rashly approached, but communication always ended in war... Ah, war, there was war everywhere back then..."

Hao Ren thought to himself: Is Etos actually a pacifist?!

Lily stared blankly at the giant jellyfish in the sky, suddenly blurting out: "So what's the real story of your fight with that 'Great Sovereign'?"

"She suddenly appeared before me, showing great power. I realized that this was an opportunity to resolve the predicament, so I reached a consensus with her," Etos replied. "I asked her to help me change my life form in order to eliminate the damage I was unintentionally causing to the outside world. As you know, the way to change my life form was to dismember my original body."

Hesperides couldn't help but stick out her tongue: "...The taste in plastic surgery back in that era was really heavy..."

"So you and that Great Sovereign never actually fought?" Hao Ren also never expected the truth of the past to be like this. After a moment of愣住, he continued, "Then what about the stone tablets that recorded you two fighting for days? You two were throwing ball lightning back and forth..."

Etos said faintly: "That was our conversation—but for humans, that kind of conversation is probably quite terrifying."

Hao Ren: "..."

Hesperides continued to mutter: "The patient-doctor communication back in that era had a heavy taste too..."

"I see... I see," Hao Ren didn't know what expression to make, so he could only sigh with a wry smile. "Alas, human-recorded history is always limited by the times and perspectives. It's even more so when it involves you ancient gods. So what happened after that? From the looks of it, you've always stayed in this city, right? Why was Etos City destroyed? What about the residents here? What about those stone statues? How did the evil spirit in the pyramid become 'fallen'?"

Faced with this sudden barrage of questions, Etos's voice was still unhurried: "That was many years ago—after the 'Great Sovereign' you mentioned finally helped me shed that outer shell that could not adapt to the environment, some natives took local materials and began to rebuild their homes with my fragments. They used my armor to make weapons and golems, used my organic matter to make medicines and living materials, and built a city on my bones. My spirit body wandered around them because these vibrant little creatures were truly curious... And after wandering for a while, I found that the 'Great Sovereign' had also moved into the city from the wilderness, which was even more surprising, so I simply attached my spirit body to the city, wanting to pass the time by observing the activities of 'humans,' these short-lived little creatures...

"In the early days, all the races in the city lived in peace. Humans worked diligently, the tribal leaders, who were slightly larger and called 'Beast-Headed Gods,' were responsible for giving orders, and the 'Sovereign' lived in the Great Temple in the city center, receiving offerings from everyone as the nominal supreme ruler."

Hao Ren couldn't help but interrupt here: "That 'evil spirit' really acted as the 'city lord' here for a while? About how long?"

"Not very long, perhaps a few decades," Etos didn't mind Hao Ren's interruption. "And she never really 'ruled' this city. She mostly just slept in the pyramid, and when she occasionally woke up, she just talked to herself. But in any case, the city was peaceful for the first few decades... After that, the situation gradually deteriorated.

"The 'Sovereign's' emotions were unstable. In fact, I suspect that she did not have normal reason and logic most of the time. She seemed completely immersed in her own world, and the reactions she made to external stimuli were strange even to me. In the popular parlance of that era, she was a 'capricious and unpredictable god of chaos.' At first, her emotional fluctuations only caused her to be occasionally irritable, but as time went on, her irritability gradually turned into tyranny.

"The 'Sovereign's' growing tyranny naturally caused panic among the residents of the city, but no one was her match. The only ones in the city with combat power were those 'Beast-Headed Gods,' but they and the combat stone statues they created were not enough to suppress the enraged 'Sovereign.' Conflicts became more serious day by day, and the 'Sovereign's' behavior gradually reached a point where it was completely incomprehensible. So the residents of the city finally rebelled under the leadership of the priestly class, the Beast-Headed Gods.

"Strangely, the usually brutal 'Sovereign' turned a blind eye to such blatant rebellious behavior. She watched coldly as humans and Beast-Headed Gods gathered in the city, and when the rebels were about to rush up the high ground, she disappeared from the Great Temple without leaving a trace. The angry rebels were blinded by their emotions and did not realize the abnormality of the situation. They looted the entire temple, taking all the gold and silver treasures back home—based on my years of observing humans, I think this was precisely a manifestation of fear."

Lily nodded: "Fear can make people do things that go beyond fear, because only with more crazy behavior can they numb themselves and escape the unease in their hearts."

And Hao Ren next to her felt that a doubt in his heart was finally answered:

Why did the Great Temple appear to have been looted? It seemed that it was indeed due to a rebellion, but the specific form of this rebellion was very different from everyone's initial speculation: it was not the lower-level commoners rebelling against the upper-level priests, but everyone, including the priests and the commoners, jointly rebelling against the 'gods.' And in the early stages of this rebellion, the so-called 'gods' did not take action at all, which led to the fact that the Great Temple, in addition to being looted, did not suffer more serious damage.

"That 'evil spirit' definitely didn't suddenly turn into a good person," Izhaks said in a muffled voice. "She should have taken action soon, right?"

"Yes, just when this rebellion came to a hasty end, and the priests and commoners dispersed, the 'Sovereign' suddenly appeared and brought down a great disaster."

Hao Ren raised an eyebrow: "She destroyed Etos City?"

"More terrible than that," Etos said. "She summoned a blood-colored moon and bathed the entire city in moonlight. The moonlight controlled everyone's minds, and everyone in the city began to kill each other. Some tried to escape through the city gates, but the moonlight formed a wall-like barrier in front of them. Some tried to record what was happening here before they died to warn future generations, but the moonlight plunged them into hallucinations. They simply engraved words in the air. The last group of Beast-Headed Gods who remained conscious put up a desperate resistance and almost succeeded: they summoned the power of the ancestral spirits to collapse a section of the city wall and punched a hole in the moonlight barrier, but they still failed..."

Lily couldn't wait to ask: "Why?"

"Because space collapsed," Etos said. "The 'Sovereign' tore apart the spatial structure and threw the entire city into another dimension."