Chapter 1 The Inevitable Departure

Lily's departure was inevitable, and this event made Hao Ren realize more keenly that he would ultimately have to complete this journey alone.

Crossing the Twilight War of the Mythological Age in 44 BC, this journey back in time delved deeper and deeper into the depths of history. In Hao Ren's eyes, the world before Christ increasingly presented a bizarre and motley appearance. His original historical knowledge was overturned time and time again during this long journey. Human historical records were hard to guarantee accurate, and those involving the ancient gods were even more so. Too many supernatural traces were interspersed with reality, leading later, more materialistic historians to often choose to extract all the mythological parts of ancient books and hand them over to religious scholars and mythologists for discussion. But for Hao Ren, those things that were eliminated by historians...

Were what he was experiencing firsthand.

He personally witnessed one ancient kingdom after another that was not recorded in historical books. Those kingdoms were filled with dark magic and indescribable otherworldly auras. Some kingdoms were built on land floating in the sky, relying on the power of sunlight to operate, while others were buried deep underground, drawing energy from magma and rocks. Bizarre alien creatures ruled these bizarre city-states, implementing strange laws and formulating many rituals that seemed absurd to modern humans. And humans—as servants of these city-states, served their alien masters for generations and waged endless wars with other "Cities of Miracles."

He also saw the real-life versions of many myths: When he passed through the Mediterranean region for the second time, he found Jason under the guidance of Hesperides, and located Vivian in exchange for assisting this legendary hero in finding the Golden Fleece; in Egypt, when Set launched a sneak attack on Horus and stabbed the Egyptian guardian god with a knife, he suddenly appeared and beheaded Set on the spot, in exchange for Ra's gratitude and trust, and had the opportunity to board the anti-gravity fortress ship cruising above the clouds—the Sun Boat. With the help of the Sun Boat's radar, he found Vivian's pyramid that had been buried by yellow sand; in ancient Babylon, the heavenly god Marduk and Tiamat were locked in a fierce battle, and Hasu shot an arrow from a nearby mountain, piercing one of Tiamat's eyes, causing the Babylonian gods to be in awe and submission, and reveal the location of the "Maze of Vivian, the God of Blood"...

The heyday of the mythological era lasted for five thousand years. Throughout this heyday, Hao Ren saw a world where alien creatures ruled the land, humans were reduced to slaves and livestock, and countless lost ancient kingdoms rose and fell like fleeting tides. Rulers from other worlds built countless city-states or kingdoms, large and small, but due to constant wars between them and a lack of rational and effective social order, these ancient kingdoms often disappeared into the annals of time before they could leave much historical trace.

Those alien gods who could survive the initial two or three thousand years of "adaptation" usually had two things going for them: either they had strong innate qualities, or they possessed many technologies or magical creations brought from their home worlds (and these things happened to be useful on Earth). The kingdoms they established were therefore divided into two distinct types. The former was darker and more barbaric, with the smell of blood almost every day in the stone cities. Cruel blood sacrifice rituals were the favorite entertainment of these beast-like "gods." In Hao Ren's eyes, the latter was more like a colonial base established by aliens on Earth—era-transcending metal walls and energy barriers wrapped these ancient cities of the gods. The core hinterland of some ancient cities of the gods was simply a stranded alien spacecraft. Primitive and rough stone cities of humans were built around these "citadels" that looked both sci-fi and magical, creating a sense of incongruity mixed with mystery.

But no matter which type it was, it didn't make much difference to the humans of that time. Even those advanced cities filled with the atmosphere of higher civilization and driven by high technology or magic were not prepared for humans.

What was prepared for humans was usually biochemical laboratories, radioactive material excavation sites, and battlefields for fighting other city-states.

Of course, there were always a few relatively mild "heavenly paradises." After all, even alien visitors who had no feelings for Earth would have a few extraterrestrial saints (the real kind), but in the face of the general trend, this little bit of kindness could not reverse the power of the entire era—throughout the mythological era, humans lived in dire straits.

A bolt of lightning ripped through the sky, and the dazzling electric light solidified in the night sky before it could dissipate, and then the whole world was filled with monotonous colors of black, white, and gray, and fell into stillness in the blink of an eye.

The Babylonians who were worshiping in the square outside also turned into gray-white stone statues and were quickly swallowed by the darkness pouring in from afar, leaving only the Babylonian king standing at the front of the crowd. He wore a crown and was very imposing. Although the gods only regarded him as a "leader of a monkey group," a useful tool for ruling, he still had the full momentum as a human king. Now, this king with full momentum had also turned into a stone statue. He stared forward with a slightly surprised look, and with this expression, he would be solidified in this time and space forever.

Hao Ren poked his head out from the door and took a look, confirming that the entire city of Babylon had turned into information fragments as it had done in the previous few regressions, and then turned back to the temple.

It was another hasty meeting, and this time Vivian gave Hao Ren a suggestion before leaving:

"In the future, don't act as a human anymore. Further ahead, humans will find it difficult to move. Every human walking in the wilderness will be regarded as a slave who has defected from a certain god. At least this is the case in most places where alien gods are active."

"We'll meet again in the next era..."

"The mythological era is such a terrible period," Hesperiana leaned against a black stone pillar and sighed after Vivian left. "I caught the tail end of a mythological era and could feel what those so-called 'gods' were like. Originally, a bunch of unorganized and undisciplined aliens came to an ecological planet that no one cared about, and it's not surprising what they could do. When the goddess of creation was selecting passengers for the Ark, she must have been rolling dice."

Hesperides couldn't help but glance at the little bat spirit: "You have one of the 'so-called gods' standing in front of you—I cared about humans a lot back then, okay? I even saved an entire city-state."

"Your whole Olympus family was just as rotten," Hesperiana mercilessly spat out while complaining. This daring little bat spirit didn't have so many concepts of seniority when facing people other than Vivian. "You know what kind of person Hades is, and that violent maniac Ares, and Poseidon who stirs up storms when he has nothing to do..."

Hao Ren saw that the atmosphere was a bit awkward and quickly coughed twice: "Ahem... let's not talk about the bad debts from thousands of years ago."

Hesperiana rolled her eyes to the sky and leaned more comfortably against the black stone pillar: "Okay, okay. But having said that, compared to those small city-states without any order, large divine systems like Olympus and Norse mythology are actually a bit more conscientious. At least they are big families, and they all pay attention to the rules. As long as the human countries under them abide by the laws they make, they can generally survive. But the human city-states in the corners ruled by mythical beasts or lone demon gods are even more miserable. Sometimes, just because the demon god they serve has a whim, the entire city-state is destroyed."

"Those guys don't even count as intelligent creatures," Hasu said lightly. "They probably had their brains impacted when crossing the wall of reality. Some guys mutated on Earth and became like beasts. The humans ruled by them are the most miserable—but they have no way to resist."

"Okay, okay, in this sense, your Demon Hunters have done a great job in killing all the false gods in the world. Thank you for promoting the civilization of this planet and preventing it from drowning in the swamps of the barbaric era," Hesperiana bared her teeth at the old hunter, and after spitting out a torrent of complaints, she relaxed and gathered her strength. Then she looked down at her legs, which were gradually being covered by the gray-white luster of stone, and looked back at the Code of Hammurabi stone pillar she was leaning against. "Looks like I'm going to follow in that silly dog's footsteps. The Hammurabi period... tsk, I haven't even lasted as long as a husky..."

The gray-white "petrification light" spread to Hesperiana's waist, but this phenomenon caused by space-time solidification did not affect her speech. She rolled her eyes and thought for a while, as if she wanted to summarize a few more words that could remind Hao Ren, but time was obviously not enough. She had to shake her head: "Forget it, anyway, you've seen a lot of the world, and I don't have anything to remind you of. Just remember, listen more to Hesperides' advice. The mythological era is her home field. The Demon Hunter next to you was just an illegal armed force in the two thousand years before Christ..."

Following Lily, Hesperiana became the second member to leave the team, and this time, no new members joined.

Hao Ren only had Hesperides and Hasu by his side.

Admittedly, Hao Ren knew more ancient beings than just those two. The Norse god Odin and the elder of Corpus, Grigorioven, were both old guys who had been very active in the early mythological era and were still alive in the outside world. In fact, Raven 12345 had long since gathered every ancient being Hao Ren knew and left them by the Gate of Time, waiting for a summons at any time—however, the historical regression itself had too many uncontrollable factors, and Hao Ren couldn't just randomly choose to summon these people in.

Because he could only regress at certain nodes, and the location of the regression was limited to being near Vivian. Given the countess's excellent lifestyle of running around the earth, this "regression node" might be in the center of a city in the Age of Gods, or it might be at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, or in the vast desert, or even in a volcano in extreme cases...

God knows how Vivian could sleep in such a hellish place.

In short, whether or not he could find "space-time wanderers" who could be recruited as allies at these regression locations was entirely a matter of probability.

Rather than expanding the scope of activities and increasing the risk of failure in order to deliberately collect these teammates, it was better to rely on the existing forces at hand to find a way to solve the problem himself. This was the conclusion reached after Hao Ren and Hesperides and others discussed it.

Now the little bat spirit had also returned to the real world, and the team only had three people left.

The current time is 1788 BC, and the road ahead is still long.