Chapter 464 — The Black Trap

"It's not exactly being kept back, but there is one thing in it we've never been able to confirm," Tyr said, gently patting the rock beneath her with her fish tail. "I believe you're a rational, level-headed man—so I intend to tell you about a phenomenon we once discovered."

Gao Yang's expression turned grave, and he listened quietly to Tyr's account.

And her very first sentence brought a look of astonishment to his face: "...Not all civilizations were destroyed by the arcane tide. Some extinguished themselves before the tide ever broke, for one reason or another; and some... vanished suddenly after surviving the tide. I mean the true great arcane tide."

According to Tyr, there were two kinds of arcane tide. The one the Gondo Empire had endured seven hundred years ago could only be called a small-scale "ripple." When the true great arcane tide arrived, the whole world would be turned upside down—that was the one truly irresistible.

So Gao Yang was startled at once: "There were those that successfully withstood the great arcane tide?"

"Yes, and more than one," Tyr said with a serious nod. "They found protective techniques that could withstand the tide, or they discovered the patterns of its fluctuations and built safe zones in advance. One race even completed a transformation of its entire species' life-form before the tide arrived. All of them survived the coming of the great arcane tide, and we once assumed those civilizations were probably safe... but in the end, they perished suddenly, right after the tide had passed."

"Perished suddenly?" Gao Yang heard the deeper meaning in her words. "In other words, you don't know the cause either?"

"It looked like wars of enormous scale breaking out all at once, but there was no telling who they were fighting. Our observers went ashore to investigate, but they found that the records kept by the land civilizations had been almost entirely destroyed; and even where some records survived, they held only the ravings of madmen. We also observed instances of mass suicide and ritual burial on an enormous scale... utterly beyond explanation."

Gao Yang's brows knit tightly. This was a situation he had never imagined before, and yet he dimly remembered... that when he had hung in the sky as the satellite spirit, he had indeed observed warfire spreading across the whole continent—even wars sufficient to destroy every nation on it...

His observations then had been severely intermittent, and he could not piece together a complete course of events from those fragmented images, but the mere existence of those images was enough to corroborate that Tyr was not speaking falsely.

What destroyed the civilizations on the continent was not only the arcane tide.

"Our ability to observe the land is limited, because we too are affected to some degree by the arcane tide—sirens do not die when the tide comes, but our instruments suffer great interference, and the ocean itself becomes very dangerous and hard to control. So we do not know exactly what happened before and after the tide. The one thing we can be certain of is this: it seems that once a civilization on land develops to a certain point, it is bound to meet with an extinction-level calamity. There is a bottleneck waiting there, and that bottleneck... should appear after the arcane tide has ended."

A bottleneck—an invisible bottleneck; or rather... a trap.

"Very much like a trap, isn't it?" Tyr's voice came from beside him, echoing exactly what was in Gao Yang's mind. The siren lady propped herself up on her fish tail and lifted her head to look at the star-strewn night sky. "Civilization after civilization, like ships sailing a dark ocean. We sirens watch from far off, watching their lights flicker on and off in the dark waters. Some are swallowed by the storm; some go out before the storm ever comes; and those that by luck break through the storm zone—before we can go congratulate them, they too suddenly go dark. This is a terrible world. It's as if there are whirlpools in that dark ocean that no eye can see, sudden whirlpools that swallow the careless voyager. So we gave this mysterious and terrible phenomenon a name—

"We call it the 'Black Trap.' A trap in the dark waters."

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