When Daniel finally saw light ahead, a full century had already passed.

"This journey is a little too long, don't you think?" he muttered, exhaling softly.

Beside him, Kartora smiled faintly, her voice light and amused.

"No matter how far we've traveled," she said, "at least it proves that my direction was correct."

Indeed, their voyage had been unimaginably vast.

They had spent a hundred years inside the time tunnel itself, moving through an existence that no longer obeyed any natural law of duration.

Daniel hadn't even bothered to use Time Stream this time.

Here, within the interstice of timelines, time itself had lost meaning.

Even if he invoked the ability, he would only loop back to the moment he stepped into the portal.

Those hundred years spent traveling could never be undone.

In the quiet that had stretched across centuries, Kartora had become his longest companion — the one who had walked beside him through endless silence and collapsing time.

The two stepped together through the radiant veil of light.

...

And on the other side, Daniel realized something astonishing.

They had arrived five million years before his present era.

This was no mere journey — it was a dive into the deepest past of the Land of Origin itself.

The moment he emerged, Daniel could feel that the very fabric of space was… unstable.

Reality rippled like a fragile mirror; temporal fissures appeared and vanished at random, as though the world itself was still learning how to exist.

Kartora's face, however, glowed with excitement.

"It should be here," she whispered. "This timeline — this is the one!"

Daniel nodded, extending his mind power outward in vast waves, scanning every layer of the surrounding dimension.

At the same time, his avatars split away, spreading through the air to begin an immediate exploration of this ancient, half-formed Land of Origin.

But the sight that greeted him was far from familiar.

There was no Storm Sea.

The entire surface of the world was one massive, continuous continent.

And high above, countless stellar bodies burned in the sky — some tearing free from the heavens and plunging to the ground as falling stars.

Daniel frowned deeply.

This defied the very laws of the Primordial Plane.

Normally, stellar entities were bound by the strictest cosmic order.

None could leave their celestial spheres at will.

Yet here, he saw hundreds — thousands — forcing their way out of orbit, their flames streaking across the sky like rivers of light.

Each falling star carried the death of a god.

As they fell, their divinities ignited, burning themselves out entirely before ever touching the earth.

And yet, the exodus did not stop.

Endless stellar beings continued to hurl themselves down, desperate to escape the binding laws of the Primordial Plane.

The few who remained above had already surrendered to the system — accepting their confinement as the price of survival.

It was beautiful… and tragic.

The sky was filled with a magnificent meteor storm, thousands of divine lives perishing in silence.

The spectacle was breathtaking — a dance of light that could only be born from annihilation.

Beautiful, and cruel.

Even so, Daniel could tell — the number of stellar bodies was overwhelming.

In the modern Primordial Plane, the stars were spread across unimaginable distances, each separated by oceans of void.

But here, five million years in the past, they were packed so tightly they almost touched.

It was a sea of stars so dense that light itself seemed solid.

Daniel could barely comprehend it.

This was a cosmos in its infancy, still bursting with raw, unfiltered divinity.

...

Turning his perception inward, Daniel extended his awareness toward the Mental Plane.

At this point in time, the only things that had even begun to stir within the Mental Plane were the stellar consciousnesses themselves — faint, half-formed sparks of thought.

No other life, no structured will, no civilizations of mind.

The deep sea plane, the banishment plane, all the later realms he knew — none of them yet existed.

The Land of Origin itself was barren.

Primitive.

There was life here, but it was rudimentary — microscopic, single-celled, the barest whisper of biology.

No animals, no beasts, not even plants as Daniel understood them.

And gods?

There were no gods at all.

This was a world before divinity.

Yet even in that emptiness, Daniel could feel something ancient and desolate stirring beneath the surface — a faint pulse of law, vast and alien.

It was a different order, one that predated everything he understood.

This Land of Origin resembled the Backworld far more than the world he had come from.

After a moment's contemplation, Daniel decided to test something.

From within his mental realm, he summoned one of his people — a demigod-ranked human awakener.

The moment the man appeared in this barren world, something incredible happened.

The universe responded.

A tidal surge of divine power rushed toward him from every direction, flooding his body, his soul, his very name.

The barren air itself seemed to sing.

In an instant, his strength expanded to the peak of demigod rank — no rituals, no resistance, no interference.

And even more strangely, his will remained intact.

He did not lose control, nor did he fall under any alien influence.

His consciousness was whole.

Seeing this, Daniel's eyes narrowed in thought.

He tried again — summoning several more humans, each of high tier.

As soon as they emerged, each was similarly transformed, chosen by the nascent world itself.

Within seconds, they had inherited divine thrones and ascended as Old Gods.

Fascinated, Daniel observed carefully.

These new gods — all once human — began to exert mutual influence upon one another.

The first to ascend, the one who had reached demigod first, radiated a subtle dominance.

The others unconsciously synchronized with his divine presence, their thoughts and auras adjusting slightly to match.

Daniel tested further, comparing and measuring through Mental Deduction.

The conclusion came quickly.

The higher the tier, the stronger the divine power — the greater the influence exerted upon others.

The entire structure of the Old God System operated through this principle.

Over time, lesser gods would inevitably begin to conform — merge — with the strongest among them.

Their divinity would harmonize, their wills becoming interwoven.

The weaker you were, the more easily you were shaped by those above you.

The Old God system was, in essence, a chain of assimilation.

Yet what Daniel found particularly interesting was that the influence wasn't purely one-directional.

Each god affected the others in return, albeit faintly.

The balance constantly shifted as power flowed between them.

This mutual distortion — this contagion of identity — was the defining mark of the ancient divine order.

In the modern system, godhood was isolated: a clear boundary separated each domain.

But here, in this primordial time, godhood was a living network — fluid, mutable, and perilous.

Daniel observed the experiment for a long time.

The differences between his subjects were small; their powers roughly equal.

As a result, the influence they exerted over one another was minimal — almost imperceptible.

Still, he sensed it — a faint resonance threading between their minds.

A ripple of shared thought.

It was so subtle that even the gods themselves didn't notice it.

Had Daniel not possessed the Eye of Insight and Psychic Perception, he might have missed it too.

But the evidence was there.

The stronger the god, the deeper their influence over the rest — and the more dangerous the entire system became.

The conclusion was clear:

The Old God lineage was fundamentally unstable.

Powerful, yes — but perilous beyond comprehension.

Unlike the modern pantheon, the ancient divine order offered no safety.

To join it was to risk becoming something else entirely.

Every new god added to its chorus only deepened the danger — and brought the system one step closer to consuming itself.

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