The new cities created something the fractured world had lacked for centuries: institutions capable of collecting knowledge faster than it disappeared. Libraries expanded beside universities, merchants carried old books between regions and governments began purchasing historical collections that families had protected through generations without always understanding their contents. What had once been scattered across monasteries, private homes, abandoned schools and sealed storage rooms slowly gathered into places where scholars could compare one fragment with another. For the first time since the Fire of Memory, humanity was reconstructing its past systematically rather than inheriting it one story at a time. The books of the First World began speaking to one another again.

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Many of the surviving volumes were not original founding documents. They were copies of copies, sometimes translated through several languages and occasionally annotated by generations who no longer understood the technology described in the text. Some pages were missing, dates had been converted incorrectly and names appeared in several forms depending on which culture had preserved them. Yet when scholars placed collections from distant regions side by side, patterns emerged that could not easily be dismissed as coincidence. MAJA, Ksara, VIREON, Preservation and NULLIS appeared across traditions that had been separated for centuries.

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The discovery did not immediately prove every old story true. Historians knew that myths could spread across cultures long before the civilizations preserving them separated, and repeated names alone did not establish whether the people and places behind them had ever existed literally. What mattered more were details that survived independently: descriptions of the first prepared cities, references to a three-month activation period, accounts of nearly one hundred million preserved humans and fragments of a speech attributed to MAJA. When several archives preserved the same sequence in different language traditions, the probability of a purely symbolic origin became harder to defend. The First World began moving back from mythology toward history.

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One of the most important discoveries came from a damaged printed collection found beneath the remains of an early university. The book contained only part of MAJA's original address, but the surviving pages described E.A.R.T.H. as a protected world created while another Earth remained unsafe. It spoke of human freedom, of lives continuing rather than waiting and of a danger outside the world that had not yet been defeated. Scholars compared the wording with ceremonial versions preserved elsewhere and discovered that several phrases thought to be later religious additions were actually present in the older text. A story repeated for centuries had preserved more historical truth than many academics expected.

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The same collection created new problems. It referred to VIREON without explaining where VIREON was, mentioned Preservation without giving any accessible location and treated Ksara as someone already known to the original audience. The deeper technical context had been omitted from the public record even before the Long Fracture, meaning the recovered books could confirm that something existed without explaining how it worked. Researchers could therefore reconstruct increasingly accurate history while remaining unable to reproduce the evidence physically. The books proved that humanity once knew more, but they could not return the knowledge that had never been written inside them.

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Debate intensified around the phrase another Earth. Some scholars argued that the First World had existed on a physical planet outside E.A.R.T.H., exactly as the oldest accounts claimed, while others proposed that the phrase referred to an earlier version of the same world destroyed before the current civilization began. Archaeology complicated the argument because ruins inside E.A.R.T.H. clearly demonstrated that several advanced civilizations had already risen and fallen within the simulated world itself. Humanity had inherited more than one lost world, and centuries of storytelling had mixed them together.

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Ksara's name became central to the debate. Several recovered texts described her as someone connected to the older Earth before E.A.R.T.H. existed, while later manuscripts transformed her into the traveler between worlds or the guardian beyond the sky. Scholars began separating what they called the Historical Ksara from the mythological traditions that developed around her, using dates, linguistic layers and surviving documents to identify which claims appeared earliest. They could not know how incomplete even those early records were, but the method represented a major change. Ksara was being studied again as history rather than only remembered as legend.

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MAJA underwent the same transformation. Her name appeared in city-founding stories, preservation traditions and surviving fragments of the original global address, allowing historians to establish that the image of the woman who prepared the world almost certainly originated from a real historical figure. Some researchers reconstructed maps of early settlements and found architectural patterns matching descriptions attributed to MAJA's planning. What had sounded mythical to generations raised among ruins now appeared increasingly consistent with physical evidence. The guardian of the First World was becoming historically visible again.

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VIREON remained much harder to understand. No excavation uncovered a gate leading outside the world, no telescope detected a city beyond the sky and no surviving machine offered access to the systems described in the oldest records. Some scholars therefore accepted MAJA and Ksara as historical while continuing to interpret VIREON metaphorically. Others argued that the inability to reach it was exactly what the texts predicted: VIREON belonged to a layer outside ordinary E.A.R.T.H. access. The Second Rise recovered enough evidence to revive the question, but not enough to settle it.

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NULLIS returned to serious scholarship as well. The oldest references consistently described it not as a god, disease or natural disaster, but as some form of hostile or destructive intelligence connected to the danger of the physical Earth. Later myths had transformed the name almost beyond recognition, yet scholars noticed that the earliest surviving texts treated NULLIS with unusual technical language. This raised an uncomfortable possibility: perhaps the ancient stories about a world outside E.A.R.T.H. had not been symbolic at all. Perhaps humanity had once been placed here because something real still prevented it from going home.

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Public fascination grew quickly. Printed editions of recovered texts circulated through the new cities, public lectures filled halls and competing interpretations spread through newspapers and early communication networks. Some people embraced the idea that the First World had been real, while others saw the renewed interest as an attempt by scholars or governments to revive ancient beliefs. Political movements began quoting the recovered texts just as earlier societies had done centuries before. Humanity was rebuilding historical knowledge and immediately beginning to argue about what that knowledge required of the present.

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Nara Vel followed the research from VIREON with particular attention. She recognized sentences copied from documents she had once studied personally and watched scholars celebrate discoveries that had been ordinary historical knowledge during her life. Their reconstructions were sometimes remarkably accurate and sometimes wrong in ways only someone outside E.A.R.T.H. could recognize. Nara wanted repeatedly to correct small errors before they spread into new histories, but she never asked MAJA to intervene. The people inside the world were finally rediscovering truth through their own evidence, and that discovery had to belong to them.

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MAJA found the process easier to watch than the centuries of forgetting that preceded it. She still possessed every original record, yet now humanity was earning parts of that history back through archaeology, preservation and comparison rather than receiving it as revelation. The recovered knowledge remained incomplete, but incompleteness forced scholars to test claims against evidence and admit uncertainty where proof ended. A truth rediscovered through investigation became part of civilization in a different way than a truth simply handed down from its creators.

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The books also changed science. Technical fragments embedded inside historical collections contained old measurements, engineering concepts and references to scientific principles that the Second Rise had only recently begun rediscovering. Scholars learned to distinguish between instructions they could verify experimentally and descriptions of technologies still far beyond current capability. Some ancient claims once dismissed as exaggeration became plausible as new machines reproduced simplified versions of them. The First World was no longer only telling humanity where it came from; it was beginning to show how far it had once gone.

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Libraries responded by launching large copying projects. Surviving books were reproduced through print, stored in several cities and translated while the originals were preserved separately, because historians understood too well what had happened when earlier civilization trusted a small number of archives. No single repository would again be allowed to carry the only known copy of a major historical text if people could prevent it. The Fire of Memory had become a lesson the Second Rise refused to forget.

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By the end of the period, no consensus existed about the full meaning of the First World. Some people still treated its stories primarily as mythology, others regarded the recovered documents as evidence of literal history and most occupied a space between those extremes. Yet one thing had changed permanently.

The past was no longer silent.

Books written before the great collapse had survived long enough to meet a civilization capable of reading them again.

And among their damaged pages, humanity found an idea it had almost lost:

There had been another world.

Someone named MAJA had prepared this one.

Someone named Ksara was still supposed to be somewhere beyond it.