Avery stared speechlessly at the broken wreckage of his inner world. He hadn’t been paying much attention to what he perceived as a hopeless war, and had been caught by surprise by the explosive resolution.

The Owner was floating aimlessly through the void with his unfortunate companions, making the best use of his time by studying the Elder’s personal rune, and upgrading his martial arts technique to harness the power of the stars.

The great city of the Sil’piceus was gone, submerged deep in the middle of the ocean. When the Elder had ripped the Great rune from its place, it had critically unbalanced the blood formation that linked all of the runes together, causing everything to blow up.

The power of these combined items was immense, and the collapse of the formation had sunk the entire continent, while rescattering the thousand defined runes across the world.

The only sign of the great city left on the surface was the color of the surrounding ocean, which had been forever tainted red with blood. While the Sil’piceus had been protected by the power of the dream world, and this might have been part of the Elder’s plan to make sure no one disturbed their slumber, for the rest of the world, this was an unprecedented catastrophe.

More than ninety percent of the world's population had been gathered on the blood lakes shores. While a very small number of them actually died during the great war, the subsequent runic disaster had pretty much wiped them out. Of those lucky enough to survive, fewer still had managed to remain sane after confronting the hideous demigods.

Even if you survived with a stable mind, you were left alone under the sea, forced to fight your maddened friends as they took out their pain and hatred on you. How long would you last, and how long did you want to last? This was the punishment for daring to abolish the Great Ones, the creation of a cursed land where resentment had grown so deep it had manifested.

This did not mean the world was completely dead, as the mortal wildlife on the other continents were practically unscathed. The cultivation civilization, on the other hand, was crumbling in ruins. The only remaining cultivators were the handful that had been powerful enough to resist the divine dragon’s call, along with one hibernating god and two fallen ones.

Unfortunately, few of these survivors had time to raise the new generation of cultivators. They were too busy hunting down the last remaining Sil’piceus who had not taken part in the Great War. Not a single one of their cruel masters could be left alive, or they would have the opportunity to climb their way back to power.

However, even weakened and isolated, robbed of their source of power, the Sil’piceus remained near-unkillable demigods. They could create and hide backup bodies faster than their enemies could kill them, and were a nightmare to deal with.

In the end, the atavism cultivators took inspiration from the mysterious god who had struck the final blow in the Great War, eradicating the Sil’piceus consciousness directly. Instead of killing their body, they sealed their spirits with the power of the world tree's roots, and forced them to join it in its slumber.

At the same time, everyone was searching everywhere for the enigmatic benefactor who had taken the opportunity brought about by the mutually destructive result of the battle between the Sil’piceus leader and the three gods to deliver a final blow.

That ultimate attack had enveloped the entire world in its silver glow, and by the time it had vanished, the Great City was no more, and the Great War was won. Everybody wanted to meet that unknown hero to which the world owed their freedom.

However, no matter how hard or long they looked, they never found any traces of this supreme cultivator, and this Lord of Mysteries was believed to have perished as a martyr fighting his enemies in a battle of minds.

All this meant that apart from a few exceptions, the world was left to recover by itself. The new era was to be born from the ashes of the old one without interference, flourishing in this free world their predecessors had sacrificed to establish.

Cultivation knowledge was not lost, for the countless magical steles the Sil’piceus had erected throughout the land remained. No matter where you were in the world, you could never be more than a few dozen kilometers from one of these monuments, containing the supreme wisdom of an ancient race.

Cultivating sapience took time, but eventually a new civilization would be born, and in turn they would attempt to shape the world to their whims. In the meantime, nature was free to enjoy the relative peace of the law of the jungle.

Avery was a little sad to see the familiar civilization he had watched develop for centuries fade into obscurity, leaving only ruins behind. Although perhaps a little violent, it had been a thriving and vibrant world, and now it was gone.

Avery felt a terrible melancholy rise up, amplifying his ever present feeling of loneliness. This was yet another thing he had lost to time, an entire world that had left him behind in his unchanging abyss. Loneliness was his destiny, and even creatures born from his imagination could not accompany him forever.

He accepted those feelings, letting the pain wash over him, but refusing to let it affect him. He was better than that, and he would not let himself have a breakdown when escape was at hand. Besides, there were many things that mattered more to him than this sense of loss, and he was deadly curious to explore the secrets of the Gods and the Dream World.

In regards to Godhood, he was in a similar position to the divine dragon. He technically had all the information he needed. He just had to contain his instinctive hatred towards those that would contest his supreme authority and get to work studying it.

The problem was that Godhood was an extremely complex and delicate subject, and the amount of data to understand was massive. It would take at least decades of dedicated efforts to analyze everything and make a comprehensive conclusion on the nature of divinity. Because of how long it would take to understand it, it would have to wait for when he successfully became immortal, but it was possible.

The same could not be said about the Dream World. The Elder truly was a genius, and to be able to create a virtual world without the aid of the Tao, he must have surpassed even Avery in his understanding of the world. Even now, Avery had no idea how the Elder had created the Dream world, or anything about his powers at all.

If studying Godhood was like a high-schooler trying to read a super advanced scientific paper on quantum mechanics, peeking at the Elder’s Dream world was like trying to access a password protected file. He could see that it existed, read some metadata like its size and when it had been created, but that was about it. He had no way to even access the truly important information, so there was nothing to study or understand.

He did not know how it worked, what its purpose was or even what happened in it. The Dream World was beyond his reach.

This obviously did not sit well with Avery, but there was nothing he could do, and it was useless to worry about it. It was not like he had not gained anything either, as the Elder’s actions had made his inner world, and therefore his intent, undergo a huge leap in quality.

In fact, this development of his inner world might not be a bad thing. There was nothing left to distract him, and he could concentrate completely on overcoming his tribulation.

Taking one last look at his visualization, Avery switched his Dao vision back to monitor the outside world, more motivated than ever to ascend. It might be childish to compete with creatures born from his imagination, but he was not going to let what little authority he had over his inner world get usurped.