The next Chapter bore a simple title.
THE GREAT WITHERING
According to the book, the second great disaster arrived only a few years after the Night of Vanishing.
This time, it was not people who disappeared. It was the world itself that began to change. Qi, the invisible force upon which the Age of Dao had been built, started to fade.
The decline was gradual at first. Almost imperceptible. Yet it was undeniable. Spirit veins weakened. Sacred lands lost their vitality. Heavenly treasures became increasingly rare.
Regions that had once overflowed with spiritual energy slowly grew barren. Generation after generation, the decline accelerated.
Cultivators across the world noticed the change. Ancient clans launched investigations. Great sects gathered every record they possessed.
Powerful elders traveled between sacred lands in search of answers.
None were found. No source could be identified. No solution was discovered. No one understood why the very foundation of cultivation was disappearing.
As the centuries passed, cultivation became increasingly difficult.
Techniques that had once been commonplace became impossible.
Breakthroughs that had once required years now demanded decades. Entire cultivation paths vanished from existence.
The book preserved several theories proposed during that era.
Some believed the vanished races had served as anchors between Heaven and Earth, and that their disappearance had wounded the world’s spiritual foundation.
Others theorized that the vampires, werewolves, demihumans, and True Humans had somehow foreseen the catastrophe and chosen to leave before it arrived.
A few even suggested that this Qi Disappearance, called the Great Withering was merely the aftermath of whatever had caused the Night of Vanishing.
None of these theories were ever proven.
In the end, most surviving cultivators arrived at the same conclusion. A conclusion born not from understanding, but from fear.
Whatever force had removed entire races from existence in a single night remained beyond comprehension.
And if it had been capable of erasing the vampires, the werewolves, the demihumans, and every True Human on Earth simultaneously...
Then no one remaining possessed the power to oppose it. Fear spread throughout the cultivation world. Not the fear of defeat. Not the fear of death. But the fear of something unknown.
Something vast enough to erase civilizations without resistance. Something so incomprehensible that even the greatest cultivators could not explain it.
In response, the surviving sects withdrew from public life.
The book described the beginning of what later generations would call the Hidden World.
It was not a single event, but a process that unfolded over centuries.
One by one, the remaining cultivators either went into seclusion, deep sleep to preserve life span and like that cultivators were erased from history. Existing only in fictional stories.
Records were destroyed. Artifacts were concealed. Ancient libraries vanished. Memories were altered. Witnesses were silenced. Knowledge was buried.
Cultivation techniques written in the ancient Dao language gradually became incomprehensible to ordinary humans, and the few cultivators who still understood those texts took deliberate steps to ensure they would not survive into the modern age.
The world forgot. And as the world forgot, humanity inherited the Earth.
Without sufficient Qi, cultivation became nearly impossible.
The existence of vampires, werewolves, demihumans, spirit beasts, and immortals slowly transformed into myths.
The Age of Dao faded into legend. The Golden Age became folklore. The Great Withering became a mystery. And the Night of Vanishing became a secret so unsettling that even hidden cultivators refused to discuss it.
By the modern era, only a handful of ancient organizations still remembered fragments of the truth..Even they possessed little more than fragments. Broken records. Half-preserved traditions.
Scattered accounts passed down through generations. Because the greatest mystery of all remained unsolved.
Where did the Qi go?
Where did the vampires go?
Where did the werewolves go?
Where did the demihumans go?
Where did the True Humans go?
The book paused there. Then came the another passage of the Chapter.
A passage preserved from some of the oldest surviving records in existence.
And according to the book, every surviving source agreed upon one terrifying fact.
The Night of Vanishing was not a war. It was not a plague. It was not a natural disaster. It was not an extinction. Done by someone who had probably broken to the peak of cultivation and beyond.
Stan’s eyes lingered on the next line. A faint chill crawled up his spine.
The words seemed strangely out of place among the otherwise scholarly text.
As though they had been copied directly from a witness who had seen the impossible.
’Something called them. Probably.’
For several seconds, Stan simply stared. Then he read the final sentence.
’And they went.’
Silence filled the room. Stan slowly closed his eyes. The words lingered in his mind long after he had finished reading them.
Not because they answered anything. But because they raised a question far more unsettling than extinction.
If they had been destroyed, there would have been remains. If they had been defeated, there would have been a victor. If they had perished, there would have been evidence. But that was not what the records claimed.
The records claimed they had been called. And that they had answered.
After a long moment, Stan opened his eyes once more.
Then he turned the page and continued reading.
THE FORGETTING
The next Chapter described the long, gradual erasure that followed the Great Withering. It had not been a single event. It had been a process.
A process that unfolded across centuries, generation after generation, until the original truth had been buried beneath the accumulated weight of ordinary history.
The surviving sects, according to the book, eventually came to believe that preserving too much knowledge of the old world was dangerous.
Whether that belief had been wisdom or paranoia remained a matter of debate even within the hidden world.
The book offered no definitive judgment. It merely recorded the consequences.
Over time, the remaining cultivators initiated what later historians of the hidden world would call The Forgetting.
It became one of the largest coordinated efforts to erase knowledge in human history.
Ancient records were hidden. Others were destroyed. Libraries vanished. Historical accounts were removed from circulation. Artifacts disappeared into sealed vaults.
The ruins of supernatural civilizations were quietly demolished, buried, or concealed beneath ordinary structures.
Evidence of vampires, werewolves, demihumans, spirit beasts, and cultivators was systematically removed from the public record.
The process was neither rapid nor absolute. It unfolded over centuries. Each generation inherited less knowledge than the one before it.
Stories became legends. Legends became myths. Myths became fairy tales.
And eventually, even the Age of Dao itself faded from public memory.
To modern humanity, the book stated plainly, vampires, werewolves, demihumans, and cultivators had become creatures of fiction.
Schools taught no history of them. Universities possessed no accepted evidence of them.
Mainstream historians dismissed them as products of folklore, imagination, and cultural storytelling.
To the overwhelming majority of humanity, the supernatural races had never existed at all.
Then came a line set apart from the rest of the text.
’Yet the truth never disappeared completely.’
Stan found himself reading more slowly. The book lingered on the point. Fragments had survived.
Ancient memories had persisted in unexpected places. Folktales passed from grandparents to grandchildren. Regional legends preserving distorted accounts of genuine events.
Symbols from vanished civilizations appearing in artwork whose creators no longer understood their meaning.
Stories emerging independently across distant cultures despite having no obvious connection.
Again and again, traces of the old world resurfaced. Never whole. Never accurate. Yet never entirely gone.
The hidden world found the phenomenon both fascinating and unsettling.
Humanity had forgotten. Yet somewhere deep within its collective memory, it still remembered.
The surviving cultivators eventually developed a theory to explain the phenomenon.
They called it Ancestral Echoes.
According to the theory, traces of the old world still existed within humanity itself. The Age of Dao had endured for thousands of years. During that vast span of time, bloodlines had intertwined countless times.
The descendants of cultivators, vampires, werewolves, and demihumans had gradually merged into the greater human population.
Though their inheritances had long since become dormant, something remained. Not power. Not cultivation but memory. Or perhaps the faint shadow of memory.
Occasionally those buried remnants surfaced. A dream that felt impossibly vivid. An intuition with no clear source. A story idea that appeared fully formed.
A fictional world that felt strangely familiar.
A sense of recognition when encountering something that should have been entirely imaginary.
Most people called such things creativity. The hidden world called them remembrance. The book’s tone shifted subtly at this point. Not enough to become informal.
Just enough for Stan to sense the faintest trace of irony beneath the author’s words.
And so, after centuries of concealment, the truth survived.
Not in official histories. Not in archaeological records. Not in scholarly institutions. But in stories. In novels. In films. In games. In folklore.
In the collective imagination of a species that no longer remembered why it remembered.
Modern humanity laughs at tales of vampires, werewolves, beastfolk, immortals, and cultivation.
Never realizing that many of those stories are distorted reflections of a world that once existed.
A world that lived beneath the same sky.
A world that vanished during the Night of Vanishing.
A world whose echoes still linger in the dreams of its descendants.
The final line stood alone;
’And a world that some fear may one day return’
Stan read the passage twice. Then a third time. His thoughts drifted.
He remembered the cultivation novels he had devoured as a teenager.
The vampire dramas that had dominated entire years of popular culture.
The endless stream of werewolf stories, beastfolk fantasies, supernatural romances, urban legends, and fantasy worlds that humanity seemed endlessly fascinated by.
An odd realization settled over him.
The book was claiming that modern imagination was not creating those stories from nothing.
It was remembering them. Poorly and imperfectly.
Through layers of distortion accumulated across centuries. But remembering them nonetheless. He found himself thinking about how strangely compelling such stories had always felt.
As though some part of humanity instinctively recognized them.
As though the world had forgotten something important and had spent generations trying to reconstruct it through fiction.
The thought settled heavily in his chest. Not frightening. Not comforting. Simply weighty.
Like a truth too large to fully grasp. For several moments, Stan sat in silence.
Then he turned the page.