User blog comment:FairyRaven/Fairy Tail Chapter 337: The Golden Plains, Review and Commentary/@comment-60.53.102.237-20130703114213/@comment-7418318-20130703160028

I didn't mean to say that the entire message was wrong, just some details of it.

Even if the gate is rebuild, they could only go into their own future (if the gate can be used to go forward), but not to a parallel timeline, so those other timelines might as well not exist for the people within the story, making the difference between "sent back" and "ceased to exist" irrelevant to the people of the current timeline.

Though it's a bit different for us people outside the story.