By the beginning of the sixth century, almost no society inside E.A.R.T.H. preserved the complete founding story in the form the first generation had known it. The surviving records still contained fragments of Preservation, VIREON, MAJA, Ksara and another Earth beyond the world, but centuries of lost archives, political reinterpretation and cultural change had separated those fragments from one another. A scholar could still find evidence that the world had been created, yet another region might preserve the same event only through a story told during annual ceremonies. The first world had not been erased from history; it had become too distant for history alone to contain it.

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Different cultures reshaped the beginning according to what had survived around them. In one region, MAJA was remembered as the woman who prepared the first cities before humanity arrived, while another tradition described her as a guardian who opened the gates of a sleeping world. Some old texts still identified Ksara as a consciousness working beyond E.A.R.T.H., but popular stories increasingly called her the traveler between worlds, the keeper of the lost Earth or the one who remained outside the sky. The names were historical, but the meanings around them were no longer controlled by history.

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Preservation changed most dramatically. The oldest surviving books described physical human bodies resting somewhere beyond ordinary access, yet later copies often simplified the idea into the sleeping ancestors or those who waited beneath the first world. Several cultures interpreted the story literally, while others regarded it as a symbolic explanation of humanity surviving a catastrophe before recorded civilization began. No inhabitant could reach Preservation, no public instrument could detect it and no living witness could confirm what the oldest texts meant. A fact that could no longer be directly tested had begun to compete with metaphor.

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The same uncertainty surrounded VIREON. Some historical schools treated it as a real civilization existing beyond E.A.R.T.H., based on surviving technical records and early testimony, while others argued that the word had originally described the computational architecture sustaining the world rather than a physical place. More radical theories claimed VIREON had never existed at all and had been invented by early governments to explain technologies they themselves no longer understood. None of these ideas could reproduce the evidence destroyed during the Fire of Memory. The absence of proof did not make every theory equally true, but it gave every generation more room to argue.

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NULLIS survived in the oldest traditions as well, though its meaning became increasingly unstable. Some historians still understood it as the danger that had made the real Earth unsafe, while later cultures described it as a destructive intelligence, a forbidden region, a disease of machines or even a symbolic name for the catastrophe that ended the world before E.A.R.T.H. The actual NULLIS remained active outside the simulation, unchanged by the stories developing inside it. The greatest external threat to humanity was becoming something humanity remembered mainly through myth.

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MAJA watched these interpretations appear without correcting them. She could have entered E.A.R.T.H., shown original records and restored the factual sequence within hours, but doing so would have changed the relationship between civilization and its own past permanently. Every future historical argument would carry the possibility that an external authority might appear and announce the correct version, turning VIREON into the final judge of human memory. MAJA had protected the truth by preserving it outside the world, but she would not preserve human belief by force.

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Nara Vel found this silence especially difficult. Somewhere inside the world she had once called home, people now debated whether beings like MAJA and Ksara had ever existed at all, while Nara herself stood beside them in VIREON with direct knowledge that the oldest stories described real events. Her own name had almost vanished from E.A.R.T.H.'s surviving history, leaving only incomplete references to an archivist who disappeared centuries earlier. Nara understood now that forgetting did not require anyone to decide that a person or event was unimportant. Time could erase significance simply by creating too much history afterward.

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The myths were not entirely inaccurate. Many preserved genuine fragments whose original meaning had been lost: a woman preparing cities before humanity arrived, a guardian outside the world, sleeping humans waiting elsewhere, another Earth damaged by something called NULLIS and a promise that one day humanity might return. Those fragments survived because generations continued finding reasons to tell them, even after the institutions that first recorded them disappeared. Myth became one of the ways truth survived when evidence did not.

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Physical artifacts strengthened some traditions. Ruins from the earliest settlement period contained construction methods later civilizations struggled to reproduce, while surviving inscriptions used terminology no longer understood completely. Old maps showed cities whose original names had vanished, and several remote libraries still held damaged printed copies of MAJA's address beside texts written centuries later to explain what the words supposedly meant. Archaeologists treated these discoveries with increasing seriousness, yet every artifact raised as many questions as it answered. The first civilization had become something humanity excavated inside its own world.

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The decline of technology made the oldest achievements appear even more extraordinary. Generations who had grown up without planetary communication or advanced medical systems found records describing a world where information once crossed continents instantly and cities had been prepared before the first inhabitants arrived. Some interpreted those descriptions as exaggeration, while others believed the earliest humans had possessed powers later generations lost. Few understood that much of the original infrastructure had been deliberately simple enough for humanity to maintain, and that its disappearance had resulted from centuries of conflict and neglect rather than some mysterious change in the laws of the world. Lost technology had become indistinguishable from legend to people who no longer knew how it worked.

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The one-percent continuity carriers quietly prevented the gap from becoming absolute. Across isolated regions, individuals rediscovered old principles of engineering, medicine and agriculture, sometimes recognizing that surviving myths contained practical information beneath symbolic language. A story about the first cities might preserve a clue about water management, while an old ritual copied from a technical manual could contain measurements nobody remembered how to interpret. The carriers did not know why certain ideas felt familiar. They were not remembering the first world; they were keeping humanity capable of understanding fragments of it again.

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New religions and philosophies also emerged around the founding stories, but none possessed privileged access to the truth. Some taught that humanity had once lived in another reality and had been brought into E.A.R.T.H. for protection, while others rejected the idea entirely and argued that the world had always existed. Several traditions expected the return of MAJA or Ksara, though their descriptions increasingly differed from the actual beings in VIREON. Belief had begun occupying the spaces where historical evidence had disappeared.

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Ksara did not regard this as a failure of E.A.R.T.H. She had seen civilizations build meaning from incomplete knowledge long before the simulation existed, and forcing every generation to understand reality exactly as its founders had understood it would have required continuous external correction. The world had been created so people could develop without such control. If their history became uncertain, they would have to investigate, argue, preserve evidence and decide what they believed from what remained. Freedom included the possibility of misunderstanding the world itself.

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By the end of this period, the phrase the First World had entered several languages as a general name for the civilization believed to have existed before the present age. In some traditions it meant the physical Earth, in others the earliest technological civilization of E.A.R.T.H., and in still others both had merged into a single lost origin. The distinction the first generation would have considered fundamental had become blurred beyond easy recovery. One world had existed before E.A.R.T.H., and another had existed at the beginning of E.A.R.T.H.; five centuries later, humanity was beginning to remember them as the same story.

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Outside the simulation, VIREON preserved every distinction perfectly.

The physical Earth was still there.

Preservation was still there.

NULLIS was still there.

MAJA and Ksara still remembered why E.A.R.T.H. had been created.

But inside the world, children now heard those facts beside stories whose storytellers no longer knew where history ended and legend began.

The Long Fracture had taken cities, knowledge and archives.

Its deepest consequence was quieter.

Humanity had not forgotten that there was a world before its world.

It had forgotten how to prove what that world had been.