Ke-style law enforcement officers

Chapter 773 The Great Race
The sentry's real name is "Zaman Akra".

They are dreamers from the waking world, or more precisely, dreamers from Earth.

After accidentally entering the Kunyang underworld, he was initially welcomed and treated with courtesy by the Kunyang people. However, as time went by, he soon became unable to tolerate the decadence and debauchery of Kunyang society and tried to escape to the surface. But he failed, and the consequence of his failure was that he was personally executed by his abandoned Kunyang lover and turned into a sleeping sentinel guarding the Sato Passage.

...

It raises a question—why didn't death send him back to his original world…

That's because the original world no longer exists.

...

But Milo didn't know how to tell it the news.

The Sentinel had been imprisoned and controlled for an unknown period of time. Its soul was riddled with holes, and it had fallen to such a state that even the character it imagined in its dreams was afraid of being taken away by the Kunyang people, which showed that the Kunyang people's control over it was quite thorough...

...

"Wait a minute, tell me in detail about the decadent and dissolute social atmosphere of the people of Kunyang. I'm curious about how decadent it is." Yan quickly grasped the "key point".

Unfortunately, the sentinel's will soon waned after he awoke, and he fell into slumber once more while muttering to himself.

It has been transformed into a stone sculpture, leaning against the outside of the archway, devoid of any sign of life.

...

“Now we have no choice but to go into the ancient city of Sato and take a look, right?” Yan was very interested in all the decadent lifestyle.

Especially when he learned that Kunyang people and humans were not significantly different in appearance...

...

Then, the long-skirted figure further recounted the past of the Kunyang people.

The gist of it is that in a long, distant period of history, the Kunyang people possessed an extremely high level of civilization, and had even broken through the technological barrier of immortality. At that time, they lived on the unsunken continent of Mu. However, from the moment they collectively migrated to the underground world, endless time began to erode the Kunyang people's character, and something called "primitive" or "beastly" began to erode and control them.

To put it bluntly, they have become depraved and started seeking sensory stimulation. They repeatedly stimulate their nerves through methods such as intercourse and torture in order to seek the feeling of being alive.

As a result, many other races who mistakenly entered the Kun Yang Underworld suffered.

...

To some extent, the dissolute society of Kunyang was indeed exactly what Yan had hoped for.

Beneath the elegant and magical azure aurora, lies a decaying and corrupt country.

Fortunately, Yan was resurrected in the junkyard of Pence Canyon. If he had woken up in Sato, he probably would never have had the desire to go to the surface world and would have stayed here forever.

...

Of course, the reasons why Sator has gradually fallen from an advanced civilization to its current state are not limited to those that can be easily grasped on the surface. There are also other rumors that the underworld itself is cursed, and even the most virtuous people can be gradually lured into becoming beasts driven by desire.

Other rumors point even more explicitly to the massive ravines deep within the earth's crust in the underworld, claiming that the so-called curse originates there.

Of course, these are just the long skirt shadow's side of the story, so Milo should just take it as a story.

Perhaps it was the inexplicable trust from Vovados, or perhaps some other magic at work, but guided by the shadow of the long dress, Milo stepped directly into the ancient city of Zato without much thought.

...

However, the absurd scene of advanced civilization colliding and blending seamlessly with bestial desires, as imagined, did not materialize.

Today, Sato is deserted, and there is no trace of the Kunyang people here. The once bustling streets and squares are now only covered with dust and fallen leaves. Many alleys have long been blocked by vegetation and vines, including the huge clock towers which are also covered with roots.

Desolate, lonely...

It seems that one second scholars are reciting poetry, and the next second only the sound of the wind remains, a testament to the vicissitudes of life.

Milo saw no trace of the Kunyang people's migration. If they had ultimately chosen to leave collectively, they would have at least taken something with them, but they didn't. The city remained exactly as it was when it was still in operation, only the Kunyang people within it had been replaced by dust and wildly growing vegetation.

The Kunyang people seemed to have vanished into thin air, isolated from this world, disappearing without a trace.

...

Milo was not as disappointed as Yan.

For some reason, he secretly breathed a sigh of relief when he didn't see anyone from Kunyang.

What exactly happened to the people of Kunyang is a question that will probably never be answered by the traces left beneath the dust.

As a race that once served different sequences of Great Old Ones such as Cthulhu and Sathogua.

They once broke through the technological barrier that limits lifespan.

However, the process of mental decline and barbarization is unimaginably rapid compared to the overall rise of civilization.

From depravity to destruction, it can happen in the blink of an eye.

…However, when Milo and his companions ventured deep into the ancient city of Zato and reached the central library, the woman in the long dress had a new perspective on the fate of the Kunyang people.

That was her idea after she stumbled upon some strange clues in the library.

The first thing discovered was a strange crystalline sculpture.

The numerous cracks inside outline a unique species that resembles a giant, wrinkled cone with four retractable tentacles at the top. The ends of the tentacles have heads and other organs, including two structures resembling claws or pincers.

This is just one of them.

Then the long-skirted figure found a chronicle in the library that was not written in Kun Yang script. The dates in the calendar started from an ancient world called "Is", and it recorded hundreds of worlds. Each world corresponds to an era, and the time span of each era is at least tens of millions of years, and some are even hundreds of millions of years.

This goes far beyond the history of the Kunyang people, and even beyond the history of the Dreamland…

What sent a chill down Milo's spine was that this series of accounts didn't stop at a certain point in the past, but continued until...

future?

He wasn't sure if this judgment was correct, because after Kun Yang's era, there were many other records that were unclear in meaning, like a diary.

And at some point in the middle, Milo read that he himself had appeared.

In other words, what he was doing at this very moment was—the Fiery Devourer of Terror passed through the archway into the ancient city of Sato, belonging to the Kunyang people, and perused the calendars left behind in the library…

...

The coolness that Milo felt now turned into an even stronger chill.

Reading my current self in a pre-written calendar, how absurd, how chilling…

Fortunately, much of the text in the almanac was in a state of chaos. Even if one could recognize each character, it was impossible to understand the meaning of the entire sentence. It was as if time had filtered through this content, preventing Milo from peeping...

...

The mystery of the disappearance of the Kunyang people lies in the descriptions from the upper reaches of this era.

These contents are clearly not recorded from the perspective of the Kunyang people, because what Milo found is a record similar to academic research, which provides a brief explanation and assessment of the entire Kunyang civilization.

"A fallen civilization", "An excellent vessel"...

Those cold, impersonal statements are like a description and weighing of the cost-effectiveness of a product...

...

Ultimately, the race to which the chronicler belonged "bought" the Kunyang civilization.

To be precise, they "replaced the corrupt souls of the Kunyang people," as the original text states.

In Milo's understanding, this so-called "replacement" is actually account theft.

A race from another world, or even another dimension, engaged in a collective spiritual exchange with the Kunyang people of Sato. According to the chronicles, the world in which this race of thieves lived in the previous era was on the verge of collapse, and the end was nigh.

...

From the world of "Is", they have been constantly replacing their bodies in this way, constantly transferring between different worlds and time periods, escaping the crisis of annihilation time and time again, thus achieving another form of immortality.

Throughout this journey, they never forgot their original form, the ugly biological model outlined in the crystal…

That is "Is as a great race".

...

In their endless search and exploration, they found the corrupt Kunyang people.

Perhaps it was fate playing a cruel joke.

The great race of Yith and the Kunyang are like two extreme civilizations. The former constantly transform their bodies, but their minds never decline, and their civilization continues to advance and develop. The Kunyang, on the other hand, do the opposite. They break through the shackles of natural death of the body, but when they reach the ultimate height of technology, they are dominated by nihilistic emotions and eventually disappear into the long river of history.

The Is people replaced the Kunyang people; no, to be precise, they merely invoked the spirit.

The souls of the Kunyang people must have died in the previous Yis era, dying as Yis people.

The true Is people, however, donned the skin of the Kunyang people, picked up the technology, philosophy, and art they had once abandoned, and continued to stride forward on the path of civilization's evolution.

...

The few cold words in the chronicle deeply shocked and impacted Milo's mind and soul, as if he had witnessed the transition between two eras of the Yithians in just a few breaths...

...

Milo didn't know how the Kunyang people, whose accounts had been hacked, had vanished from the Sato world. Perhaps they sensed some kind of curse in this underworld, or perhaps they felt threatened by other races. In any case, at some point, they migrated en masse, leaving behind this empty city, and forgetting to take the sentries at the city gate with them...

He had no idea why the Iss had left behind such a chronicle, comparable to an ancient text…

All he knew was that he had struck gold.

(End of this chapter)