I am the Arcane Archer, and all my skills are self-created.

The atmosphere on the platform became extremely oppressive.

The thirty-odd people who chose to remove the panel were scattered around.

Some people kept their heads down and didn't speak, while others stared blankly at the threads of law beneath their feet.

Li Wu stood still.

His brain was working at high speed.

The Starbreakers, the Ones of Unity, the Transcendent Ones, the War of Extinction.

These words collided in his mind, piecing together an increasingly clear picture.

"You said the vanguard of the Starbreakers has arrived," Li Wu asked. "What about the main force? When will they arrive?"

"According to Erling's calculations, there are about 29 years left," Gu Yuan said.

"Twenty-nine years," Li Wu repeated.

Twenty-nine years sounds like a long time.

But if we want to cultivate five hundred transcendent beings within twenty-nine years...

"It's too late," Hua Zitong said, voicing his thoughts.

"I also think it's too late," Gu Yuan said decisively.

"What should we do then?"

That's why I said time is running out.

Gu Yuan stood up from beside the stone pillar; this time, he did not sit back down.

His tone and demeanor changed; his previous nonchalance disappeared, replaced by a sense of oppression.

"Twenty-nine years from now, the main force of the Starbreakers will arrive on Blue Star. By then, if we don't have enough transcendent beings to fight them, everything on Blue Star—humanity, civilization, history—will be wiped out. Completely wiped out, leaving nothing behind."

"This is a war of extinction."

Four words.

The war of extermination.

Zhui Feng's Adam's apple bobbed up and down.

Ye Feng's fingers unconsciously clenched.

The shadow leaned against the stone pillar, his head lowered, his expression unreadable.

The three members of the Heavenly Punishment Guild who chose the second option huddled together, their faces filled with fear.

There were also a dozen or so veteran players from other guilds who had been trapped in the Tower of Despair for half a year or even more than a year. They finally managed to clear the tower, only to be met with this news.

How do you know all this?

Li Wu suddenly asked a question that everyone wanted to ask.

Gu Yuan said so much: the origin of the Star Shatterers, the existence of the Unity Beings, Erlin's sacrifice, and the truth of the Origin Realm.

The amount of this information is enormous, ridiculously so.

How does a so-called "test player from Zone 0" know so much?

"How did you know?" Li Wu repeated.

Gu Yuan did not avoid the question.

He reached inside the armor at his waist and pulled something out of a hidden pocket.

He opened his palm.

A few small fragments lay in the palm of my hand.

The fragments are irregularly shaped and have a faint luster on their surface, resembling the broken pieces of some kind of crystal or gemstone.

Their colors change constantly, from white to gold, from gold to blue, from blue to purple, in a continuous cycle.

Li Wu's gaze fell on the fragments.

Then, he froze.

His perception of the laws detected a very familiar fluctuation in those fragments.

too familiar.

He knew him so well that he could recognize him even with his eyes closed.

"This is……"

His voice faltered for a moment.

He instinctively reached for his pocket.

No, my pockets are gone, my stats are gone, and my equipment is gone.

But the traces of that thing remained deep within his soul.

Lucky Dice.

To be precise, they are the fragments left after the lucky die shattered.

Now, those fragments are in Gu Yuan's hands.

"You fucking..." Zhui Feng recognized it too; he had seen the glow of the dice fragments in Li Wu's backpack before. "Isn't this the boss's dice fragments?"

Gu Yuan grasped the shard and looked up at Li Wu.

"To be precise, these are the remaining fragments of the dice."

"What do you mean?"

"The Lucky Dice is no ordinary item," Gu Yuan said. "It is a supreme creation woven by Erlin using twenty-seven laws, and it is one of the most unique existences in the Origin Realm."

"You should know that a complete die can manipulate probability, but what about the fragments after it's shattered..."

He flipped his palm over, letting the fragments roll between his fingertips.

"Each fragment retains a portion of the dice's power. The largest fragment you got inherited the effect of amplifying luck. As for the fragments I have..."

His voice paused for a moment.

"There is a fragment that inherited the ability to travel through time."

This statement exploded like a bomb on the platform.

"Time travel?!" Chasing Wind jumped up.

Hua Zitong's pupils contracted for a moment.

Li Wu stared intently at the fragment in Gu Yuan's hand.

His perception of the laws was working frantically, verifying the truth or falsehood of Gu Yuan's words.

The fluctuations on the fragments do indeed contain traces of time-related cryptic texts such as "Heng," "Wei," and "Zhuan."

Gu Yuan was not lying to him.

"What did you do with that piece of debris?"

Li Wu's voice was unusually calm.

His heart was racing, but his face remained expressionless.

This is an instinctive reaction; the more important the information he encounters, the calmer he becomes.

"I went to the future."

When Gu Yuan uttered those four words, his expression was very complicated.

It was neither pride nor fear.

It's more like someone who's seen too much is recalling an experience they don't want to talk about again.

"How far into the future did you go?" Hua Zitong pressed.

"Fifty years later."

"Blue Planet fifty years from now..."

"That's all."

Just two simple words.

Hua Zitong felt as if she had been punched in the face.

"What do you mean 'gone'?" Zhui Feng's voice rose sharply.

"Literally," Gu Yuan said, "Blue Star is gone, the Moon is gone, and the entire solar system is left with only one sun burning in the empty sky."

"The Starbreakers ate all the planets. Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn—they were all gone. Only the Sun remained, because the Starbreakers don't eat stars."

The platform was deathly quiet.

"Where are they?" Li Wu asked.

"It's gone too."

"Not a single one?"

Gu Yuan took a deep breath.

"In the timeline I arrived at, the war for extinction was over. Humanity lost. Not a Pyrrhic victory, not a mutually destructive one, but a complete and utter defeat."

"Erlin's plan has failed; the Origin Realm has not selected enough transcendent beings."

"When the war of extinction began, humanity only managed to muster less than a hundred Transcendent beings, and they couldn't even last a day against the main force of the Star Shatterers."

"Then the Starbreakers spent ten years eating up everything on Earth."

"Minerals, seawater, atmosphere, crust, and finally even the core were hollowed out. Blue Star went from a planet to a pile of rocks floating in space."

After Gu Yuan finished speaking, he did not add any further embellishment.

Facts are facts, and embellishing them won't change anything.

Hua Zitong's hands were trembling.

She is a reborn person.

She had died once and then came back to life.

She thought she had a sufficient understanding of "death" and "extinction".

But annihilation, the annihilation of all humanity...

This was beyond her capacity to handle.

"That's why you're here."

Li Wu's voice remained calm.

But Hua Zitong, standing beside him, could feel his laws fluctuating slightly.

He was not at peace either.

He just wouldn't let anyone see it at this time.

"Yes," Gu Yuan said. "That fragment sent me fifty years into the future, where I saw the wreckage of Earth."

"Then the fragment ran out of energy and sent me back."

"Back to which time?"

"Let's go back to the time when I set off, which was about a year and a half ago."

"So you've been here, on this platform, waiting for a year and a half?"

"It's not just about waiting." Gu Yuan shook his head. "In the past year and a half, I've used the remaining fragmented energy to repeatedly deduce all the possibilities of a future war of extinction."

"And the conclusion?"

"There is only one possibility: humanity can win. But the conditions are extremely stringent."

"explain."

"More than five hundred transcendent beings, of whom at least three have reached the level of Law Weaver."

Li Wu did some mental calculations.

The weaver of the laws, he himself is one.

Where is Gu Yuan?

"Are you a Law Weaver?" he asked directly.

Gu Yuan gently patted the sword at his waist.

"You've barely made it to the threshold. You're stronger than me; I realized that when you parried my sword strike just now."

Li Wu was not modest.

He is indeed stronger than Gu Yuan.

He blocked the power of that sword strike with his Law Barrier. Although the barrier cracked, he hardly lost any energy.

"That makes two," Li Wu said. "We're still one short."

"We're way short," Gu Yuan corrected him. "Three Law Weavers are just the minimum. If possible, the more the better. You and I combined aren't enough."

"Where do we find a third one?"

"From among them," Gu Yuan pointed to the twenty-odd transcendent beings present.

Li Wu looked around.

Hua Zitong, Zhuifeng, Yefeng, Anying, and Tiexue Dizun. There were also three people from the Tianfa Guild, and more than a dozen veteran players from different guilds.

These people are all newbies who have just been removed from the panel.

Let alone the Law Weavers, they don't even know what the Law power within their own bodies is.

They need to be trained to become weavers of the laws.

A word popped into Li Wu's mind:

impossible.

But he immediately pressed the word down.

He never uses the word "impossible".

"Time," he said. "The key is time. You said the main force of the Starbreakers will arrive in twenty-nine years."

"But the vanguard is already on the moon. When will the vanguard begin its attack on Earth?"

"Uncertain." Gu Yuan's expression turned serious. "In the timeline I visited, the vanguard began a full-scale invasion of Earth five years before the main force arrived. In other words..."

"Twenty-four years." Hua Zitong's voice was a little tense.

"No." Gu Yuan shook his head. "That timeline has already changed because of my return."

"The butterfly effect means the vanguard of the Starbreakers might move ahead of schedule or behind schedule. I can't give you an exact figure."

"Then give me a range."

"At the fastest, three years; at the slowest, ten years."

Three to ten years.

Everyone present held their breath.

Three years.

If the vanguard invades Earth in three years, they will only have three years to prepare.

"What can you do in three years?" Zhui Feng's voice trembled slightly.

"Do a lot of things," Li Wu suddenly said.

Everyone looked at him.

Li Wu didn't look at anyone; he stared at the threads of law beneath his feet, his mind racing with calculations.

Three years.

More than twenty transcendent beings.

At least five hundred are needed.

The gap is too big.

But from another perspective, the source of those who transcend are not just the people in front of us.

The Origin Realm is still running, with tens of millions of players.

How many of them will be able to get through the Tower of Despair?

After it's approved, how many people will choose to remove the panel?

he does not know.

But he knew one thing...

He needs to bring this information back.