SSS Awakening: All My Clones Have Divine Bloodlines!

The possibility that Evan might be dead hit her harder than she had expected.

They hadn’t known each other long, and yet the time they had spent together had been enough for him to become someone that mattered to her.

Only now did she seem to realize just how much he mattered, far more than she had initially allowed herself to believe.

’No... he shouldn’t be dead. He can’t be dead,’ she told herself, but if that were true, then the only remaining explanation was the first condition, that he had chosen to sever the bond himself.

But why would he ever do something like that?

In the middle of her turmoil, Luna completely overlooked an important detail Evan had once told her about the bond.

If he died, she would die as well.

And if he chose to sever the bond, the Void Energy within her could potentially spiral out of control.

Neither of those things had happened.

But she failed to realize it.

Meanwhile, the very person responsible for Luna’s panic was facing the reality of his own situation.

He was no longer in the cave. He stood atop a nearby mountain, staring at the landscape before him with a complicated expression.

’This can’t be,’ he murmured, taking in the particular geography of the place.

It was familiar. How could it not be, he had been here many times before, in his past life, before everything fell apart.

’Catskill Mountains,’ the name surfaced in his mind on its own, along with the name of the nearby city that had also been his grave.

He had spent years wandering those streets, sleeping under bridges, scrounging for food, invisible to everyone around him. It was not a place he could easily forget, even though the memories associated with it were anything but pleasant.

Seraphine stood beside him, looking out at the view, an enormous white expanse that swallowed the landscape almost entirely, erasing the geography beneath it.

When she had told him they were home, he hadn’t understood what she meant. Or rather, he had understood, and hadn’t wanted to believe it. Now he did, and he wasn’t sure how he felt about it.

"So you’re also originally from this world?" he asked, still looking out at the view as though it confirmed everything on its own.

"Yes," she said, and unlike him, her expression was calm, as though the place itself no longer held the weight for her that it once had.

Evan had already noticed several things wrong with it. Starting with the snow.

It hadn’t taken him long to realize it wasn’t normal snow.

And when Seraphine explained that it wasn’t snow at all, but rather a manifestation of the laws of time and space themselves, the same laws that had preserved this reality until now, he could only listen in silence.

The realization of his actual situation had hit him harder than he expected. But now that he was calm, there was one question pressing on him more than anything else.

"This world... has it already fallen?"

He had looked in every direction and perceived no signs of life. He knew from experience that in areas with concentrated populations, the traces of living people overlapped and extended outward, you could sense a city from a distance by that alone. But right now he felt nothing. Which meant either very few people were alive here, or none at all.

"In this version, no one survived," Seraphine said. "Well. Almost no one."

"This version?"

Evan caught that immediately. And as he did, something from a long time ago surfaced, a dream, the first time he had encountered her, in that hall, where that other being had spoken of cycles and of the world approaching its end.

Were these the cycles she was referring to?

Thinking from that angle, he couldn’t help but arrive at another realization, and his mind began running through possibilities, each one more absurd than the last.

’Is it possible that I never transmigrated?’

As if she had read his mind, Seraphine looked at him and said, "Yes. This version is the starting point. This is where our endless war against the Abyss began."

’War against the Abyss? It started here? How is that possible? The Abyss didn’t open until the Age of the Gods,’ he thought, running through what he knew of that world’s history.

It was said that before the Abyss there had been the Mana Apocalypse, and that as the level of beings on the world rose, the first divinities appeared, and it was during that period that the Abyss had also emerged.

But if he had never truly transmigrated, and this was actually his original world, then how could the Abyss have already appeared this early?

Things weren’t adding up, and he understood immediately that many details were still missing.

"Tell me," Seraphine said, out of nowhere. "What do you remember about what was happening in the world before you died?"

Evan was caught slightly off guard by the question.

Not because she knew about his transmigration, he had understood that the moment she presented this world as their home. And it was already clear she knew he was from here. What he didn’t fully understand was why.

What was the point of asking him about events from back then?

"Not much, honestly. It was a long time ago. But why are you asking me this?" he said.

Seraphine shook her head at that and replied, "Everything. Everything is connected to it."

Before he could ask anything further, she continued.

"You see, in those days there were rumors that life on this planet would end within a few decades, due to all the natural disasters that had begun to occur with increasing frequency."

At those words, something stirred in Evan’s memory.

He remembered the endless protests that had apparently been happening all over the world, driven by the belief that the disasters were linked to climate change, a climate that had deteriorated to the point where winter had nearly ceased to exist, and summer had become lethal enough to claim countless lives every year.

That, like a chain reaction, had accelerated the melting of the ice caps, the rising of the seas, earthquakes more frequent and more powerful than anything ever recorded, in some areas stronger than anything in human history.

In short, everything and more was unfolding slowly, and people were in a constant state of panic.

Evan, at the time, had been homeless. The only thing that had mattered to him was making it to the next day. Some days he worried about finding food. Other days it was finding a place where he could sleep without being chased away. The future wasn’t something he concerned himself with, what was the point of thinking about it when there was no guarantee of reaching tomorrow?

For someone struggling just to survive, discussions about climate disasters, rising sea levels, and the fate of the world felt distant. Important, perhaps, but distant. Those were problems for people who had the luxury of planning for the future.

"At the time, most people believed it was due to climate change, and that the cause was the major corporations that had begun pushing heavily into geoengineering," Seraphine said. "But the reality is far more complex than that."

She finally turned, pulling her gaze away from the panorama, and looked directly at him.

"The reason I’m telling you this is because it is the direct cause of the first Mana Apocalypse."

The Mana Apocalypse, the event that had turned the world upside down. That much everyone knew. It was probably the only thing about the distant past of Evan’s new world that was considered certain.

Assuming it was a new world at all, now that he had reason to believe it wasn’t.

"The first Mana Apocalypse?" he said, not sure he had heard correctly. "Were there others?"

The first Mana Apocalypse had triggered the race toward evolution, which in turn had led to the current state of the world.

Every history book, every academy, every scholar treated it as the singular turning point of civilization. It was one of the few facts nobody ever questioned.

But now he was learning there had been more than one?

At first glance it made no sense, but he held back his questions. It was clear she had much more to say.

"Yes. Five, to be precise. You only know about the first, which is also considered the starting point of everything that followed, but in reality, it was the last one to occur," she said.

"But do you know what caused it in the first place? How it actually happened?"

Naturally, Evan had no answer to that.

What had caused the Mana Apocalypse?

No one knew.

There were hundreds of theories, but none that could ever be proven. It was one of those questions about the world’s past that had given countless scholars headaches over the centuries, yet no definitive answer had ever been found.

"It’s because humanity found a way to explore one of the most inaccessible places on our world," she said.

"The Earth’s core."