1198 Malfunction

"Earth? Like the grade?" Alex asked.

"No, no, not like the grade. They happen to share the name, but this is something completely different," the man said. "This is a planet that does not exist in our world."

"I'm confused, senior," Alex said. "How can this place not exist in our world? We came from this planet called Earth, didn't we? In the first place, what even is a planet?"

The man chuckled and shook his head. "Honestly, what you're asking is far beyond my own understanding as well. Uhh... let's start with the small stuff before we get into the bigger stuff."

"So, what is a planet you ask? Basically, a planet is a world just like our own, only it is spherical in shape and humans live all around it. Imagine a world in the shape of the sun or the moon, and the people living around it. That is a planet."

Alex was surprised. In all his life, he had only ever known about the worlds being a plane. However, he was now hearing about a world of a different shape than his own, and it was even a world his ancestors had apparently come from.

"Are there planets in this world too, senior?" he asked.

"No, there are none," the man said. "Every world out there is a flat plane. There is no such thing as a planet that exists in this world."

Alex frowned. "Then how do you know that this place that goes by the name of Earth is a planet?" he asked.

"From your ancestors," the man said.

"From... my ancestors?" Alex was surprised.

"I was here when your ancestors arrived. Well, arrived is not the right word. I should say... misplaced," the man said. "After they came, they were in a disarray, so I had to help them. While doing so, I came to learn their language and soon enough learned a lot of things about them."

"The world they came from resembles the modern-day world. They had cars and trains just like our own, and maybe even more. Their world was developed, but they seem to have troubles of their own."

"Those people spoke of monsters that would come through void gates and fighters who could kill them. They swore that most of them had similar powers, but I never saw that."

"They never truly understood that the world that they had come to was different from the ones they had previously been in, and after I was sure they could not go back, I decided to help them get settled here."

"Unfortunately, as a wounded man without much Qi in me, I couldn't do many things.  As such, not many years after they came here, your ancestors started fighting on their own. The war lasted decades before any peace was in this world again."

"By that time, those people had destroyed most of their history themselves. I had only later realized just how much had been destroyed. Fortunately, I had a few things saved beforehand for research, and they now remain in the Archaic National Museum of the Global building in Pinewood city."

Alex could only nod as he listened to the man speak. "So... the reason we don't know where we came from is that we got rid of all knowledge of it?" he asked.

"Yes," the man said. "Also, for mortals 600 years is enough time to lose a lot of knowledge about the past, especially when your source of history happens to be an important resource."

"Destroyed buildings were used as rocks, broken machinery was scraped for metals, etc. Such things happened all around. It was some time before they found any ore deposits and such, so they didn't have to use old stuff," the man said. "But of course, by that time, almost everything was gone."

"I came out occasionally to help them, mostly with helping them learn about the limits of this world, like how they couldn't go out of the natural boundary of this place or they would die. Quite a few died while testing, and they finally started believing that there was a void they would fall into out there," the man said.

I see," Alex said. "You must've suffered throughout the years."

The man didn't say anything.

"There are many things I'm still confused about that information, but one thing sticks out more than the others," Alex said. "What did you mean by the people were misplaced?"

The man sighed. "Your ancestors were victims of an accident that was never meant to bring them here at all. It all just... happened, and they came here," he said.

Alex looked at the man curiously, waiting for more information, and the man seemed to be somehow pressured into answering more.

"It all began when I tried to leave this realm," the man said. "I had come here unintentionally as well and wanted to leave this place. I had been hiding in this continent due to its nature, and fortunately, there were teleportation formations here already."

"All I had to do was change it so that instead of teleporting me to one of the continents outside, it teleported me to where I came from."

"I spent nearly a hundred years fixing the teleportation formation, doing whatever I could to make it work, and when it finally did, I used it. I was going to connect the space in this realm with one from a higher realm and go there."

"However, that was when the accident happened. As it turned out, there was an opening on this land, one that connected to the planet Earth. My formation malfunctioned, connecting to this opening, and sucked in a majority of the people from Earth."

"So, when I say they were misplaced, I mean they were stolen from their home world by me due to my formation malfunctioning. I felt very guilty at the time, not only because people were brought here, but also because quite a few died in the process. I tried my best to fix it, but I could never send them back through the opening no matter how hard I tried."

"In the end, I had to give up and help them settle here," the man said with a drooping face. He seemed to be truly pained by this incident.

"Then, my ancestors never intended to come here?" Alex asked. "They were brought because of the accident?"

"Because of my accident, yes," the man said.

Alex didn't know what to say. Was he supposed to get angry here? Or was he to try and console the man by saying that he never meant for it to happen? In the end, he knew that even though something bad had happened to his ancestors, that was the reason he was born in the first place.

"If not for those specific set of events, I wouldn't be here right now," Alex said softly. "Although, I'm curious senior. Why was there an opening here that connected to Earth?"

"Sigh, I only came to learn about it recently too, but not long before I had arrived in this world, someone had created the opening here to travel to Earth," the man said.

A vague guess floated in Alex's head. "H-how long ago?" he asked.

The man shrugged. "Some 5000 years ago."