From the end of the world

Chapter 721 The Whereabouts of the Divine Seal in the Present World

"I must admit that for a long time, I haven't truly faced this new world that has been changed by the Divine Seal. In fact, even the previous world, which is called the 'Primitive World,' was likely a product that had been modified countless times by an ancient civilization using the Divine Seal," said Tai Sui, the Lord of the Divine Seal. "When looking at the people around me, I always consciously or unconsciously treated them as fictional characters, like NPCs in a video game. I was too arrogant."

"But Yama dealt me ​​a severe blow, bringing me back to my senses."

By analyzing the personality of Tai Sui and the fact that it possesses the black divine seal disc, Yama, the Lord of the Gospel Court, can easily deduce Tai Sui's true purpose.

Destroying the apocalypse with the power of the divine seal sounds wonderful, but from Yama's perspective, there is only one possibility for this approach: to revise current human history and make his current existence seem like something that never happened.

This approach is absolutely unacceptable. In order to protect "the present world," Yama attacked Tai Sui without hesitation.

As for the power of the Great Impermanence, Tai Sui is roughly on the same level as Huang Quan. In addition, due to the conflict between its spirituality and the New World, it is difficult for Tai Sui to skillfully control its power. Facing Yan Mo, whose strength is even two levels stronger than Xuan Ming, Tai Sui can only be said to be powerless to fight back and was defeated in the blink of an eye.

However, at this time, Tai Sui already had some ability to use the black divine seal disc.

In fact, like his former student—the one whom Xuanming and I called the "Seal Bearer"—Tai Sui is also a user of the complete Divine Seal and has the authority to use the black Divine Seal disc.

However, there should only be one authority to hold the seal; if one side occupies more, the other side occupies less. In this world recreated by the seal holders, the share held by Tai Sui, the master of the divine seal, has been significantly squeezed. Originally, the black divine seal disc should have possessed enough power to easily overwhelm Yama, the master of the Gospel Court, but Tai Sui is unable to unleash it.

He could only unleash a limited portion of its wish-granting power, and that was insufficient to turn the tide of battle. Just as the Silver Moon of the past could also wield the power to grant most wishes, it still couldn't overcome the overwhelming power disparity. Originally, Tai Sui intended to use this power to travel through time and space to the world of the living, but he was intercepted by Yama before he could even set off. Thus, in his moment of death, Tai Sui made a decision.

To prevent the Black Divine Seal Disc from falling into Yama's hands, Tai Sui used his authority to order the Black Divine Seal Disc to self-destruct, and sent the scattered fragments of the explosion to the world of the living.

Due to Yama's interference, a very small number of Divine Seal fragments ultimately failed to traverse the barrier and ended up in the afterlife. One fragment even failed to successfully penetrate the rift between the two realms and became stuck in the void. This is why I found the Divine Seal fragments in the basement on the fifteenth floor, and the fragments that Xiaowan and Number Seven obtained in the past were also those that failed to traverse the barrier.

Even as Tai Sui was defeated and dying, he did something desperate: he tried to attach his last consciousness to the scattered fragments of divine seals.

“I used the power of the Divine Seal to simulate the talent of the Son of God,” said Tai Sui, the Lord of the Divine Seal. “After discovering that my spirituality could not adapt to the new world, I searched for many ways to overcome it. One of the ways was to obtain the talent of the Son of God and strengthen my adaptability.”

"This approach did not go smoothly. It seems that my act of denying the New World upon contact with the complete Divine Seal has consequences that outweigh the adaptability brought about by the Divine Child's talent. Fortunately, it is not entirely without effect. After the Divine Child's power to emulate the heavens and earth is strengthened to a certain extent, it can manifest the Taoist concept of the unity of heaven and man. Although I cannot achieve the unity of heaven and man in the environment of the New World, I unexpectedly discovered that my spirituality can achieve a great synchronization with the black Divine Seal disc, making it a container for my consciousness."

"Compared to the divine seal that can change the world, my spirit is undoubtedly insignificant. Perhaps this is a different kind of 'unity of heaven and man'. After that, I became the 'Lord of the Divine Seal' that you see today."

"My consciousness resides within all the fragments of the divine seal formed from the split of the black divine seal disc. Thanks to this, I can now do many things that I couldn't do before. For example, I can know most of what has happened in this world after it was recreated by the divine seal. But it is precisely because my consciousness, like the black divine seal disc, is in a split state that I can only exert my power within this virtual realm and cannot interfere with the real world."

"Conversely, as long as I can gather the scattered fragments of the divine seal here, I can do more and more. Because I am now the de facto 'spirit of the divine seal,' I am no longer limited by the authority to control the seal as I was in the past. Once the black divine seal disc is reassembled, I can do most of the things that the complete divine seal can do."

At this point, it seems that the Lord of the Divine Seal, Tai Sui, has almost finished recounting his past.

He paused his speech for a moment, and I took the opportunity to try to process the massive amount of information I had just received.

The Lord of the Divine Seal is Tai Sui... This part is no longer surprising now; what's important is the identity of the other character.

Then, I asked a question.

"Who exactly is your student... the one who holds the seal?" I asked.

“I don’t know,” Tai Sui said. “He should be like me, having acquired a completely different identity in this new world. However, unlike me, who was completely passive, his identity was probably something he actively set himself. Given his personality, he would likely have set himself up as a character with an almost superhuman talent that allows him to achieve his desires. “Even if he isn’t the Great Impermanence, he probably has the ability to become the Great Impermanence whenever he wants. Or, to put it another way, although he doesn’t have such outrageous innate qualities, he has a fate and adventures like a protagonist in a story… He might even have deliberately erased his memories in order to pursue a better experience in the new world.”

“When it comes to another user of the divine seal, my knowledge is not as effective.”

After thinking for a moment, I said, "Since the black divine seal disc automatically followed you after the new world was formed, then the other half of the divine seal... the other divine seal disc should also be in the hands of the seal holder, right?"

Unexpectedly, Tai Sui shook his head and replied, "That's not necessarily true."

"What?" I asked, surprised.

"This is something I only learned after becoming the master of the Divine Seal. The reason the Divine Seal split into two is only partly because of the two users; another part is because he made contradictory wishes," Tai Sui said. "Contradictory wishes create contradictory worlds. Not only does the Divine Seal split, but the world itself can also split. It's just that this splitting phenomenon is stopped by the existence of the afterlife."

"The real world belongs to the material spacetime of the living, while the afterlife belongs to the spiritual spacetime of the dead... The latter has prematurely occupied the position of 'the other world that should have been split.' Perhaps the phenomenon of world splitting caused by conflicting desires appeared in the ancient civilization period, and that's how the afterlife was formed. In any case, the black divine seal disc after the split... Xuanming seems to call it the 'Doomsday Divine Seal,' and the Doomsday Divine Seal entered the afterlife world corresponding to itself."

"The reason it happened to fall right next to me is simply because there is a strong connection between us. However, the other divine seal disc that remains in the real world—the 'Present World Divine Seal'—is different. Since the Present World Divine Seal does not need to go through world movement, it will probably just stay in place."

"Standing in place...you mean, the North Pole?" I asked.

Tai Sui nodded and said, "To be more precise, in the New World, since there is no scientist like me leading a research vessel to the Arctic, the Divine Seal of the present world will most likely remain in that ancient civilization's ruins."

"But if that's the case, shouldn't the Divine Seal of the Present World still be in the hands of the Seal Bearer?" I asked. "Shouldn't only the two of you, who came into contact with the Divine Seal, be able to retain the memories of the original world in the New World? Since you delayed for so long in the afterlife and couldn't interfere with the present world in any way, wouldn't the Seal Bearer, who still remembers the location of the ancient civilization ruins, be able to go to that place again and seize the Divine Seal of the Present World first?"

Tai Sui replied, "We originally discovered the ancient ruins by accident on an Arctic glacier. It was a place without coordinates on a map, and there were no landmarks around. It wouldn't be easy for someone to find that place again. Of course, I marked the approximate location on a map and left a signal positioning device there, but all that data and equipment disappeared with the world's updates."

"And that's only a secondary obstacle. After all, as long as I remember the latitude and longitude data recorded back then, I can draw a roughly accurate search area. The most important point is that after I became the Lord of the Divine Seal, I had the power to find the coordinates of the North Pole. Unfortunately, the relics of the ancient civilization have disappeared from there."

"Disappearance... Could it be due to historical changes?" I pondered. "But the wish of the Seal Bearer should only have been to alter the timeline of human history, not to affect the 66 million years ago when the ancient civilization existed, right?"

Tai Sui seemed to be thinking about how to explain this to me, and then said, "Zhuang Cheng, you should know very well where the contradiction lies in the wishes of my student... the Seal Bearer. He added strange things and magical elements such as witchers to this world, but forcibly preserved the original history. And it is because this worldview cannot work in the real world that as soon as the new world was born, all the witchers realized the contradictions of their past and no longer acted according to the original settings."

"The same phenomenon of preservation has also occurred in the history of climate change. The climate changes of the past hundreds of thousands of years, in the primitive world, should have been scientifically consistent, but in the new world setting, they have become the result of the activities of the Great Impermanence. This part is not so easy to have problems with; it's just that the perspective of explanation has changed from a scientific perspective to a mystical one. It's not as bad as current human history, which cannot even be made self-consistent."

"However, this new Earth climate model has a problem: as the number of unpredictable events increases, the global climate will also undergo significant changes..."

"Excuse me, I need to interrupt. Why did we suddenly bring up Earth's climate models?" I said. "Aren't we talking about why ancient civilization ruins disappeared?"

“I’m explaining this to you now,” Tai Sui said patiently. “Because after the new human history was established, there was another person like you, a great fiery being, who has the qualifications to manipulate fire. Carbon emissions and the greenhouse effect in the new world have intensified rapidly, global warming has progressed further, the melting rate of Arctic glaciers has accelerated significantly, and the relics of the ancient civilization have sunk into the Arctic Ocean along with the disintegration of the glaciers.”

"So even I don't know where the Divine Seal of the Present World is now, and the one who holds the seal may not have successfully retrieved it yet."

"Huh?" I was dumbfounded.

(End of this chapter)