Every 9 weeks, a storm triggering a great flood starts to rip the world asunder, finishing this task after one additional week. Gentle whirlpools and wild whirlpools form in all sorts of bodies of water over this week.
If you go through a gentle whirlpool, your ship and anything within it appear in a paradise, a parallel server where the game never wipes, except in cases of divine intervention. Wild whirlpools infrequently appear here.
If you go through a wild whirlpool, you wash ashore naked, without belongings, in a new and untouched world where, after 9 weeks, a great storm will appear anew. Your character has all stats reset to fresh and your spiritual connection to previous ancestors are severed... But you retain memories of your previous credos.
Also, you can only get one credo per world (quarryman no longer relies on forager.) Also, "fresh" worlds have new rare resources that do not exist in the permanent, never-ending, paradise... They also tend to be smaller archipelagos with islands carrying new sorts of dangerous threats both above and below ground. Both old and new environmental obstacles are more likely to end your life in these dangerous lands.