Chapter 268: Ancient Secrets
"No, what are you excited about?"
Li Ke looked at Aatrox, which had been partially broken, and asked in surprise.
“…”
Aatrox's voice disappeared immediately, making the atmosphere rather awkward.
The God of Stories and Poetry, who had never appeared in any story in the League, also made the final move at this time.
"He was just excited that he could finally escape from the cage. This sword gave him an immortal body, but it also made him unable to feel anything. It was his eternal cage... To be honest, you shouldn't have used that kind of artifact to smash his sword. Although he won't escape before the sword is completely broken, once he escapes, it will be a disaster for the world."
"What do you mean?"
Li Ke was really curious.
But it was not the god of stories and poetry who answered him, but Pantheon.
"Their empire, that fallen empire, clearly possessed the technology we gave them, the technology that could allow this world to step into the galaxy and truly stand with us gods. However, they used the warriors created with this technology to oppress and slaughter other lives... It is precisely because of this that a monster called the Void appeared in your world!"
After Pantheon finished speaking, a scroll opened in front of Li Ke: He saw that people from every region wanted to become ascended warriors with divine power, but because of various prejudices, such as the fact that they were not Shurimans, these people were not selected fairly.
Then, a group of mages found a power called the Void, and wanted to use it to fight against the power of those so-called "God Warriors" such as Aatrox.
Finally, the void invaded massively, and the once glorious empire had to invest a lot of manpower and resources into it. Their most glorious God-King - a queen who was an ascended being fell under the army of the void.
This is a great person. Her existence makes the ascenders of the ancient empire, such as Aatrox and other god-warriors, extremely submissive and selfless.
But after her death, perhaps due to the pollution of the Void, or perhaps because there was no leader who could unify the goals, Shurima became unstable.
And all this was attributed to the gods' inaction in the void war.
"When humans feel they can handle things, they don't want gods to intervene, because that's an insult to them. They shout slogans saying that humans should decide human affairs! But when we stand aside and watch their civil war, and don't interfere when they can solve the problem, and when they lose a lot of important things, they say we are a group of treacherous gods who didn't help them... It's really hard for humans to understand."
Pantheon's voice appeared again. Li Ke didn't want to listen to him, but there was nothing he could do. Under the Giant God Peak, he could not resist the power of the gods.
But the picture in front of him changed again.
Although that glorious empire had experienced turmoil, it still existed. Although all levels of society had discovered the weakness of the empire, with the god-warriors at the center and the direct bloodline of the ascended queen Setaka, there was still hope - as long as another ascender appeared in the royal family, the Shurima Empire would be glorious again.
Unfortunately, in the fight for power, by the time the emperor named Azir was confident enough to do so, he was the only branch of the royal bloodline left.
The king named Azir started the ascension ceremony, wanting to ascend through the ascension ceremony. Then his dishonesty and a "joke" caused his slaves and brother Xerath to betray him and started a rebellion.
The capital of Shurima was destroyed, and its king, Azir, was killed.
The glory of Shurima came to an end from then on.
The powerful ascended warriors began to act on their own and no one obeyed anyone else, because they had conquered this empire themselves, and without the ascended bloodline, they felt that they were the masters.
However, due to the erosion of the void and the expansion of ambitions, their honor and beliefs are no longer there.
It started out as a quarrel, then some minor frictions, and finally war - hundreds of years of war.
Basically, only Ascendants can deal with Ascendants, so after hundreds of years of war, even the most gentle Ascendants have changed.
They use flesh magic to transform humans, or they kill for fun those who support their enemies.
Because their power is supreme, and no one can restrain them.
The unrestrained Ascendants wreaked havoc across the land.
The Shurima Empire originally had a population of nearly 300 million and a territory covering almost every place. However, over the course of hundreds of years, it was shattered by the rampage of the god-warriors, and the population of Runeterra was reduced to only one in a hundred.
A population of nearly 300 million was simply turned into a wasteland.
In the end, the total human population did not exceed four million.
Afterwards, these ascenders were still unwilling to give up fighting each other, so the gods relied on the power of mortals and let them use their wisdom and will to seal these darkspawn, so that they would never be able to wreak havoc on this land again. They even summoned the Dragon King and completely sealed Icathia at the cost of Pantheon's life.
"That's what Aatrox meant by betrayal. We left when they asked to leave, and we cleaned up the mess when they made a mess of everything. We also cleaned up these 'Dark Indigen' that you humans no longer trust and hate. The most important thing is that you humans did it, and we just gave you a plan. Everything, including whether to seal the Dark Indigen forever or kill them, was a choice you humans made."
Pantheon's voice disappeared, replaced by the voice of the God of Stories and Poetry, who sighed slightly.
"That's them, but now they say that the gods betrayed us... In fact, they just want to die because of thousands of years of loneliness and solitude. They became paranoid while sealed and think that if we hadn't intervened, they would have been able to restore the former glory of the Shurima Empire."
"It sounds like you guys didn't make any mistakes at all."
Li Ke nodded, but couldn't help shaking his head in his heart.
The empire he built in the simulation did not have these problems, but why was it still destroyed by the gods?
He doesn't have any god-warriors doing evil things.
So obviously...
The gods should also be divided into factions.
