Chapter 632 - 4: Return to the Divine Wood World

"But I can’t stop thinking, what if on the other side of space and time, with time accelerated fifty-fold, they already have High-level Commanders, or even Overlord Level beings? How is our Earth Civilization supposed to face them in the future? If they discover your Space-Time Sect, Azhou, defeat you, and then use it as a springboard to invade our world, then we’d be Sinners to Earth, wouldn’t we?"

As he spoke, Shao Qiming closed his eyes, using his Spiritual Power to interface his personal terminal with a drone. The drone then silently lifted off from his hand. After a flash of multicolored specks of light, it disappeared inside the old house, achieving complete optical invisibility.

Then, Shao Qiming’s voice came from the drone’s speaker: "I can’t help but dwell on these things. I hope you aren’t angry."

"I’m not angry. After all, you genuinely have the best interests of Earth Civilization at heart. Besides, you weren’t planning to act without telling me, and that’s enough for me."

Su Zhou looked in the drone’s direction. Even though it had achieved complete Optical Invisibility, he could still see it as long as it hadn’t completely shielded its Spiritual Qi fluctuations.

In response to his friend’s words, he first nodded, then shook his head. Su Zhou set the Blade of Annihilation aside and said calmly, "You’re right about one thing—time is a civilization’s greatest asset."

"But you also have to understand that time is also the force that pushes a civilization toward its end."

"Never mind anything else. Just look at our own world’s Third World War in 1972 and the First Cyber World War that immediately followed. The first war created vast nuclear wastelands in the Middle Eastern oil fields, which are still uninhabitable to this day. The Spirit Summoning Association recruits its members in places like that, which is why they are so hard to wipe out. And if the proxy wars between the major powers back then had escalated any further, that kind of nuclear wasteland would have appeared in every corner of the world."

This was all common knowledge from elementary school history, so there was no need for Su Zhou and Shao Qiming to elaborate. Their parents’ generation had lived through that tense era. Recalling the public sentiment of his childhood, the young man shook his head and said, "The Cyber War was even worse. It almost shattered the entire global internet into a collection of fragmented local networks, completely snuffing out the budding information society. It wouldn’t have been surprising if it had caused a total collapse of the global supply chain... I think if humanity hadn’t gotten so lucky, we could have easily destroyed ourselves twice, maybe even several times, in less than fifty years."

Shao Qiming couldn’t argue with that. In fact, he himself was a beneficiary of that era.

The devastating blow the Third World War dealt to oil-producing regions had accelerated global investment in the new energy sector. It was in this climate that the Shao Family had resolutely thrown themselves into the new energy industry, which was how they made their fortune.

And it was true that while a civilization’s development accelerated over time, so too did its capacity for self-destruction. In the ancient feudal era, a brutal war would, at most, wipe out a large portion of the population. There was no way a conflict could result in the mutual annihilation of both sides, leaving no survivors. But in the modern age, a single nuclear war was enough to send humanity back to the Stone Age.

And not just back to the Stone Age.

Su Zhou remembered it clearly. Not long ago, during a mid-2016 conference, he had heard a report from the Military Saint. Even though the world had been at peace for forty years, Zhengguo still possessed a thermonuclear arsenal sufficient to completely destroy all of Earth Civilization. And after the Otherworlds appeared, they planned to increase their strategic weapons stockpile even further, researching new weapons of annihilation to ensure that not even an Otherworld would be spared by their dead-hand system.

And the miniature biological weapon Shao Qiming had just shown him was merely one insignificant part of that chain of destruction. A dangerous creation like that, capable of destroying a modern industrial civilization, was something a mere student from the Extraordinary Academy could request. It wouldn’t pose much of a threat to Earth Civilization, where the entire population engaged in Cultivation, but for an Otherworld, it could be a weapon of mass destruction.

"Whether a civilization destroys itself or is destroyed by an outside force, it’s all perfectly normal. In fact, the more advanced a civilization becomes, the easier it is for it to self-destruct."

Though his words were cold and ruthless, Su Zhou’s tone was perfectly calm and natural. "Frankly, for this trip to the Divine Wood World, I’ve already braced myself for the possibility that they’ve self-destructed. I warned them not to pursue the Divine Wood Power before I left, but if they ignored my words to continue their pursuit of immortality, what could I have done? Besides, apart from the Divine Wood Power, there are plenty of other things that can lead to a civilization’s ruin."

"However, you don’t need to worry too much about the Divine Wood World using its temporal advantage to invade us."

As he spoke, Su Zhou pulled the unremarkable Celestial God Seal from his clothes. He gazed at this ’Divine Artifact,’ which resembled a pocket watch and was, in a sense, the true foundation of his current power. A smile appeared on his face. "If you want to cross different flows of time, to open a Space-Time Sect between different temporal frames of reference... as far as I know, only the Celestial God Scale is capable of that."

The young man raised his head and looked at his friend. Shao Qiming suddenly realized his link with the drone had been intercepted and hijacked by another electromagnetic signal—and in the next second, the drone landed in Su Zhou’s hand.