The air inside the grand hall stopped flowing.
It was as if every breath, every faint current of wind, had frozen in place—suffocated beneath the crushing weight of words too dreadful to comprehend.
To say that an entire world had been destroyed and erased from existence… was not merely terrifying. It was inconceivable.
For thousands of years, humanity had proven its stubborn resilience, an indomitable will to live that defied reason. Civilizations rose and collapsed, yet always another took its place. People bled, suffered, and buried their dead—but they endured.
The chronicles of mankind were soaked in calamity. Great wars had shattered nations and rewritten borders. Viruses and plagues had ravaged continents, leaving corpses piled higher than the ruins of the cities they devoured. Nature itself had unleashed fury—earthquakes splitting the land, volcanoes blotting out the sky, floods swallowing entire towns whole.
