Noah Rithmast was there when the Continent of New Hope was destroyed fifty years ago. Not on the continent, a few thousand miles away from it.

As a Deific Ranked Explorer returning from the Plains of Heshkaron, he had always intended to pass by this direction on his way to the Light Alliance, to build up Merit, power, and influence. He was in a hurry because it was a rare opportunity for anyone to be able to gain all three at once.

The continent of New Hope was a new domain that was birthed along the Coast of Perdition, a stretch of land and sea that contained thirty million continents, New Hope as a newly emerged domain was one of the smallest, but there was great potential in this continent because the Calamity ravaging them was at the Glorious Rank.

Noah thought that Hope was a great name for this continent for it was indeed lucky at the hand that fate had given it, when in this Era most calamity began at the higher ranks.

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New Hope’s weak calamity was not an unforeseen situation, although it was rare. If the inhabitants could crush the calamity over their continent, they would have dozens of Glorious Rank Explorers arising from the ashes, and perhaps in an incredible stroke of fate, a Heroic Rank Explorer could arise from the conflict.

Noah Rithmast was here to purge the continent of the Calamity, for a hefty price of course. He doubted if any in the Continent had surpassed Human Rank, and he could find himself the owner of a brand new continent while boosting his ranking up the Deific ladder.

Ridding the continent of its Calamity would inevitably lead to weaker inhabitants, but that could be easily fixed with a careful funneling of weaker Calamities toward the continent, and he could finally create a base of operation away from the war-torn Heshkaron Plains. Even as a Deific Explorer, he could not guarantee how long he would survive in those lands, and after fighting for so long, Noah wanted a place he could rest and call home. New Hope would be the place where he would do that.

He had been delayed on his journey here because he wanted to avoid anyone tracing him to this continent, and he had been irritated when he had to dodge three separate parties that wished to follow him to this place, but Noah had not lived for so long without understanding how to throw people off his trail.

When he had finally assured himself that he was alone, he sped towards New Hope, in the distance he could see the vibrant continents, its beautiful image was spoiled by tens of thousands of spots where flames and smoke were rising. Like all continents in this world, it was always at war. One that he would hopefully be ending soon.

He was maybe two thousand miles away from his destination that was when he felt it.

Noah was three hundred thousand years old, he was an old Explorer who had clawed his way to the Deific Rank after untold years of hardship and constant life and death struggles, and this alongside his Ranking had given him an uncanny intuition about danger.

He did not know what was about to happen, perhaps a Gate was going to open up in the area around him, and Noah could only prepare himself, as a Deific Explorer, he would be able to easily flee if the challenges turned out to be too much.

Noah did not know what made him look upwards, and when he did not see anything alarming he wanted to look away and then it suddenly appeared.

Whatever it was it must have been falling from an impossible height or traveling at speeds denied to all but those above the Deific Rank for one moment the sky was empty, and then something tore by so fast that Noah could barely see what it was, only brief glimpses of something blue and incredibly massive, the size of a city.

A loud keeping sound entered his perception and he shook himself from his daze and looked forward and whispered, “Of course,” before he was slammed by a shockwave, but a quick slice from his Natal Weapon tore the kinetic energy that would have pushed him back for miles.

He could not help but shiver when a wave of frost so terrible it broke through a dozen of the defensive runes over his body and seemed to almost freeze his soul.

The descent of whatever it was had torn through the atmosphere with great force, generating winds that could crush even Glorious Ranked Explorers, and before Noah could wrap his mind around all the strange events happening around him, the impact came.

Once again he had wondered why he did not expect it to happen. Something had been falling, so he should have expected that it would inevitably hit the ground.

There was a bright flash of light, that Noah feared could have been seen by hundreds of continents around. The light nearly blinded him, and the resultant shockwave drove him senseless for a few moments and this state was not helped by the loud rumblings as if an entire continent was being crushed by an angered titan.

This speculation proved to be closer to the truth than he thought for as the chaos around him went down, he was stunned at what he saw in the distance.

New Hope was gone, replaced by…. Words failed Noah Rithmast.

Massive frozen spikes hundreds of miles tall that filled the horizon like sharp spears and numbering in their billions had sprouted from the continent.

For nearly an hour Noah was frozen with indecision, even when the rumbling emerging from the depths of the earth ceased, Noah did not move.

Another hour passed and then he began to slowly travel towards the grim location, a thousand theories abound in his head, most of them not good, but he knew that he could not be the only one to have seen this event transpire, but he was the closest.

This event did not seem like any Calamity Gate or related to a Calamity event, it was most likely something new.

It was this thought that excited Noah and finally pushed him away from his lethargy, making him move faster, his mind began working furiously.

Looking at the spikes of ice ahead, he looked to the sky and frowned in thought. If this object had fallen from the heavens then it was understandable where the chill came from.

No one has reached the heights of the heavens, even Ascended Ranked Explorers, past a level, the chill became unbearable, and could destroy anything. Either the thing that fell had survived passing through that zone of death, or it might even be a piece of the heavens itself, Noah knew that he might have come across a great opportunity.

The loss of an entire continent had been brushed to one side of his mind as the allure of an unexpected treasure filled his senses,

Getting closer to the continent he began to see the full range of devastation and the allure of treasure in his heart faded, replaced by fear. The full scale of the devastation reached his heart, and although he had seen many horrifying things in his life, a continent vanishing from the map in the blink of an eye was not one of them.

Noah did not know how long it took for him to reach the edge of the continent and saw a massive hole in the middle of the spikes that seemed to descend into the depths of the earth.