Part Two: The Ancient Era: The Fall of Hengguang

[Overview of the Era] Modern historians generally call the period from the aftermath of the Benqi Realm gate-construction conflict to the end of the Second Stargate War and the formation of the postwar alliance framework the Final Chapter of Antiquity. The Fall of Hengguang, the Three-Day Punitive Campaign, and both Stargate Wars all occurred during this period. Unlike the Great Loss of Deep Antiquity, regions throughout the known worlds preserved wartime diaries, private correspondence, military orders, academy records, port ledgers, dream-pattern testimonies, local chronicles, and postwar memoirs, allowing later generations to see how specific individuals behind the grand alliances made choices, committed errors, sacrificed, and changed the course of the war.

By the Final Chapter of Antiquity, the conflict between Hengguang and civilizations of the powerful such as Benqi had crystallized around highly concrete questions: who could decide whether ordinary people lived or died, stayed or left; what responsibilities must accompany the power of the strong; and whether Hengguang should continue using its stargate capabilities to help a ruling bloc that rejected such constraints grow still stronger.

Hengguang had long respected the role of apex beings in disasters, wars, and hazardous engineering, while requiring them to use their greater capabilities first and foremost for protection and rescue. To Benqi and many self-defense powers, this principle—that the stronger one became, the more constraints one bore—directly inverted the ethic of strength upon which their rule depended.