(Time-Stilled World, Conclave of the Ancients, Leo's POV)
After finishing the first book, Leo flipped deeper into the second history book, the fragile paper crackling beneath his fingers as he carefully turned another page.
His eyes scanned each line with mounting tension as he delved further into the lives of the ancients— into what they had endured, and what they had lost.
And what he found… was a tragedy.
A haunting account of how their paradise had crumbled.
While the earlier chapters spoke of a golden age—an era of abundance and order beneath the watchful eye of their god—the final sections shifted in tone, growing darker, more personal, as the narrator described how the madness had begun.
He spoke of living in a sprawling metropolis suspended by floating bridges, of a mighty empire that controlled the vast rainforest beyond its walls, where beasts bowed at the command of voice alone, and harmony reigned under the balance of mana and divine will.
He wrote of Zharnok—their god—not as a ruler in the traditional sense, but as the law itself. A silent deity whose breath governed the winds and whose presence shaped their seasons, their blessings, their fate.
It was, by every word and measure, a paradise.
Until the Great Dimming began.
At first, they thought it was an eclipse.
A passing curse.
The sun dimmed over a period of five days.
Their crops suddenly withered.
The sky stopped changing.
And the stars, once visible through high observatories— vanished entirely, being replaced with an endless gray sky.
The priests called it a trial.
The scientists called it a disastrous phenomenon.
But the people?
They just called it the beginning of the end.
Leo's brows furrowed as he skimmed the next few pages, as the narrator's tone changed, and formal sentences gave way to more frantic scrawling.
Symbols were no longer written in straight lines but scattered like afterthoughts. Scribbles in the margins. Whole pages scratched out and rewritten.
What came next was even worse.
As the sun faded, the mana began to shift.
It didn't vanish. It warped.
It turned… black.
Slick, heavy, clinging to the skin like a wet cloth.
First came the headaches.
Then the nosebleeds.
Then the madness.
People began to scream in their sleep.
Some tore out their own eyes.
Others clawed open their chests, trying to release something that wasn't there.
Children were the first to fall into madness, then it was the elderly, and finally the warriors/ scholars and mages.
Cities fell to panic. Empires burned from within. Priests pleaded with the god, but received no answer.
Because it wasn't the sun alone that was gone.
Because, Zharnok was gone too.
Because Zharnok had been slain in battle.
The last sentence on the scroll was barely legible—half-erased, written in a hand so frantic it tore the parchment in places.
> "It was not the sun that died."
> "It was Him."
> "And when He fell, He took the sky with Him."
Leo leaned back slowly, his fingers sliding off the scroll, breath caught somewhere between awe and unease.
So that's what the Great Dimming was.
Not just the loss of light.
Not just the collapse of an empire.
It was the moment this world's god was killed—ripped from existence.
With his death being the turning point for everything wrong that happened to this world.
> "They buried Zharnok's body inside Castle Bravo. However, the high priest turned mad from the burial.
He said that although Zharnok's body was dead, his soul was still intact, and that this world had a barrier that was preventing his soul from escaping it's boundaries"
> "Zharnok was killed by a warrior who wished for his powers.
An Origin Beast cannot be killed, however, absorbing its power can turn a mortal into an immortal."
> "Zharnok's soul still lingers in this world, waiting for a suitable body to take over.
However, his soul bleeds energy every year that he doesn't find a suitable host.
And it's this leakage of divinity that is turning this world mad.
The priests call me a heretic for pointing this out, however, the fact of the matter is, that the corruption is the strongest near Castle Bravo"
Leo read on, his eyes scanning the frenzied lines etched in shaky ink, only for the writing to suddenly stop.
Abruptly. Unevenly. As though the scribe had either lost the will to continue… or something far worse had happened.
'What? What does this mean?' Leo muttered internally, his fingers tightening around the edge of the scroll as a cold weight settled in his chest— because for the first time, he felt like he had stumbled onto something he wasn't supposed to see.
Because if he was understanding this correctly— then everything the outside world believed about Time-Stilled worlds was wrong.
Completely wrong.
It wasn't that the mana in this world had just grown old and stagnant over time, like the universe theorized it to be.
But rather something far darker.
This world hadn't become corrupted by accident—it had been poisoned on purpose.
It was a tomb.
A grave.
A place sealed off from reality because something had died here… something so powerful that even in death, its presence twisted the laws of nature around it.
The stale mana?
The corrupted atmosphere?
The maddening silence and deteriorating sanity?
They weren't natural consequences.
They were symptoms.
Symptoms of a deeper rot.
Symptoms of a divine soul slowly losing its energy.
And suddenly, a line Leo had read weeks ago echoed in his mind.
"No god may enter a Time-Stilled World."
At the time, it had sounded like superstition. Like one of those ancient warnings that scholars quoted in jest.
But now?
Now he understood.
Because these weren't just abandoned ruins lost in time.
They were prisons.
Burial sites sealed off from the rest of the universe—each one holding the soul of one of the Twelve Ancient Beasts, the original divine entities who once ruled existence before the current pantheon rose to power.
Their bodies were long gone. Slain. Erased from history.
But their souls… their wills… remained.
Trapped.
Festering.
Waiting.
Waiting for a body strong enough to host them.
Weaker cultivators, even Grandmasters, were not strong enough to enter their eyes or be affected by their death.
The corruption was subtle with them, nothing more than background noise.
But the stronger one became—the closer one reached toward godhood—the more the pressure would mount, the more the soul of the dead beast would stir, drawn to power like a moth to flame.
And should a true god ever step foot inside one of these grave-worlds…
They wouldn't leave whole.
If they left at all.
Which was why no True God ever entered this place, as they were genuinely scared of the consequences of making such a move.