Chapter 868: The Plot Can Be Skipped
As Old Song's gameplay progressed, Altair's character gradually began to take on more depth.
At the start, Altair was an arrogant young man, dismissive of everything, hot-tempered and irritable. His actions in Jerusalem led to very serious consequences, and the Mentor of the Assassins carefully orchestrated a "death" for him, stripping Altair of his status as an Assassin Master and forcing him to start over from scratch.
The Mentor gave Altair nine names, all individuals connected to the Crusades. Altair was to kill these warmongers to bring peace to the local people.
During his assassinations, Altair discovered that these people were not irredeemable villains. At that point, the Mentor told him that they were actually Templars, all conspiring to seize the Piece of Eden: the Golden Apple, in an attempt to control the entire Mediterranean and even broader regions.
This realization made Altair begin to reflect on his own actions and recognize his responsibilities as an Assassin to the Assassin Order and the people.
In the end, Altair killed all nine targets, only to learn that his Mentor was the tenth person. It turned out that the Mentor wanted to eliminate everyone else who knew about the Apple of Eden and keep it for himself. Ultimately, Altair defeated his Mentor and, through the Piece of Eden, saw the information that Abstergo wanted Desmond to uncover: the location of the Piece of Eden.
...
Altair's story was far longer than Old Song had imagined. Throughout the entire process, Altair traveled far and wide, assassinating one target after another until he finally defeated his Mentor. By then, Old Song had understood the cause and effect of Altair's story, but one question remained.
"How far along is the plot?"
In terms of playtime, Altair's entire storyline was essentially equivalent to the normal length of a game. But clearly, this was far from everything in *Assassin's Creed: Revelations*.
Because the content from the latter half of the promotional CG hadn't been touched at all.
What Old Song didn't expect was that the subsequent plot of *Assassin's Creed: Revelations* continued to flow smoothly forward, even though the two ancient protagonists were separated by hundreds of years.
Desmond, with Lucy's help, escaped from Abstergo and arrived at the modern-day Assassin Order. He continued to read the memories of another legendary Assassin, hoping to use this to stop the Templars' conspiracy.
It turned out that the feud between the Templars and the Assassins had already stretched for thousands of years into the present. The Templars' influence had infiltrated politics, economics, culture, and every other aspect of society, and Abstergo was essentially the Templars' organization.
This time, the memories Desmond saw belonged to Ezio Auditore, an Assassin active during the Renaissance.
Clearly, from Altair to Ezio, hundreds of years of history had passed.
Ezio was originally the son of a banker, living a carefree life of fighting and chasing girls. But his father and brothers were betrayed, framed, and publicly hanged.
Driven by a desire for revenge, Ezio embarked on the path of the Assassin. Under his uncle Mario, he learned the meaning of the Assassin's Creed and various assassination and combat techniques. He began tracking and killing the Templars who had conspired to murder his father, traveling from Florence to San Gimignano, then to Venice, and eventually obtaining the Golden Apple and information about Altair's Codex from the Templars.
After seizing the Golden Apple, Ezio formally joined the Assassin Brotherhood. But on their way back to Forlì, they were attacked by Templar soldiers. Ezio was injured, and the Golden Apple was taken.
Ezio returned to Florence and successfully reclaimed the Apple. As Ezio collected more and more of Altair's Codex pages, the Assassin Order pieced together a world map from them and, using the Apple, found more mysterious locations. To enter the underground vault, Ezio broke into the Sistine Chapel alone, defeated Pope Alexander VI, and opened the hidden passage beneath the chapel. From the First Civilization beings, he learned the prophecy that humanity would face a great disaster in the future.
Ezio and his uncle Mario returned to Monteriggioni, but it was attacked again by Templars. Uncle Mario was killed, Ezio was shot and escaped, and the Golden Apple once again fell into Templar hands.
Ezio went to Rome, steadily weakening the Templars' power. After reclaiming the Golden Apple, guided by the Apple, he hid it in a temple beneath the Colosseum, waiting for someone to appear five hundred years later.
Ezio solidified the Assassin Order's influence in Italy, expanding and strengthening the entire organization. While reading his uncle Mario's documents one day, Ezio discovered a letter from his father, mentioning a secret library hidden in Masyaf, the birthplace of the legendary Assassin Altair.
Ezio embarked on a journey to Masyaf, which took a full ten months of arduous travel to finally reach. But unexpectedly, he was greeted by a large number of Templars. In a hallucination, Ezio saw a white-robed Assassin—the same scene from the promotional CG.
After successfully escaping, Ezio questioned workers who had been captured by the Templars and learned that these Templars were also searching for a way into the library.
Guided by the books of Niccolò Polo, Marco Polo's father, Ezio continuously searched for the keys to Masyaf and became entangled in the internal struggles of the Byzantine royal family in Constantinople.
These keys to Masyaf were shaped like golden discs radiating light, clearly products of First Civilization technology. They also contained Altair's memories—memories that Desmond had never seen before.
It turned out that in his later years, Altair had built a library in Masyaf and recounted his life story to Niccolò Polo. At the same time, Altair sent Assassins across the world. Because Altair had assassinated Genghis Khan, it provoked retaliation from the Mongol army. So Altair entrusted his Codex, library keys, and other items to the explorer Niccolò Polo, hoping that one day, an Assassin would find this place.
As Old Song experienced all this from Desmond's perspective, his emotions were complicated.
Ezio successfully opened the door to the library, lighting torches along the walls as he went. But inside, it was completely empty, except for Altair's remains, which had been waiting there for so many years.
In Altair's memories, the elderly Altair bid farewell to his son and then entered the library, the heavy door falling shut behind him.
Altair walked forward unsteadily, extinguishing the torches on the walls one by one and carefully hiding his Golden Apple.
[Sit down and rest for a while.]
A line of small text appeared in the field of view. Altair groped for the chair in the center of the room and sat down shakily, staring at the Masyaf key in his hand as if lost in thought.
But then, the scene shifted. It was over four hundred years later.
After countless twists and turns, these two greatest Assassin Masters finally met—in a way that no one had anticipated...
The Golden Apple glowed with light. After so many encounters with the First Civilization beings, Ezio understood that he was merely a conduit. All he had been through was simply to allow Desmond to obtain the First Civilization's information through his memories.
At the end of the game, Desmond received the message from the First Civilization. It turned out that tens of thousands of years ago, Earth had once suffered a terrible catastrophe, one that directly led to the extinction of the First Civilization. Now, the apocalyptic disaster was about to strike again, and the hope of saving the world rested entirely on Desmond...