Verminstar.
Most of the swarm tide had already moved on. Yellow sand had swallowed every trace of civilization and life.
An old man with graying hair and a twisted ankle sat hunched and alone between the dunes and the terracotta soldiers, his callused fingers idly stirring the sand at his feet.
"Hey, old buddy. You're still here."
A bright, clear greeting rang out from nowhere, shattering the dead silence.
The old man lifted his head blankly, his clouded eyes laboring to focus. What swam into view were three young people standing beneath the dim yellow sky.
A gray-haired, gold-eyed young man whose bearing was impossible to pin down. A gray-haired girl with a lazy look on her face. A pink-haired girl with an elegant air.
"Who... are... you?"
Vocal cords that hadn't been used in far too long scraped like sandpaper, producing hoarse, off-key syllables, like a battered violin being sawed at by an ignorant child.
His murky gaze fixed on the gray-haired young man, and a distant, blurred familiarity washed over him.
"Me? I'm your right-hand man. I'm your head," the young man said, walking over and crouching down in the sand beside him without a care in the world, as casually as a kid dropping in on a playmate. He grinned. "What are you doing? Building sandcastles?"
"No."
The old man shook his head, his withered finger pointing at the patch of sand before him that had been meticulously "sculpted."
There, out of yellow sand, he had raised miniature mountains and rivers, islands, cities.
He had built jade towers and marble halls, laid down the rough outline of the Slave City, watched it climb toward an illusory prosperity beneath his fingertips, swell into an empire, then wither in the formless drift of the sand, collapse, and finally become nothing but another dune.
"I... build... civilization..."
"Whoa~ That's seriously impressive!" Caelus looked at the tower heaped up out of sand, and at the old man scratching his ankle with one hand while piling more sand with the other, and offered the praise sincerely.
The old man shook his head. He didn't know why he was doing any of it either.
"Oh, right. I've got a set of Divine Ravings to pass on to you."
The gray-haired young man's smile was pure sunny-boy cheer.
"Divine... Ravings..."
The words hit like a trigger phrase. The old man's clouded eyes flew wide, and he sprang up off the sand like a puppet yanked upright by its strings.
"That's right. The Ravings go: [Build a civilization, and you shall recover the self of the fourth day]."
The young man ignored his violent reaction entirely, his tone keeping that strange gentleness while taking on a gravity that brooked no doubt.
"Build a civilization... the fourth day... the self..."
The old man muttered it in broken fragments, and a spark slowly kindled in his murky eyes.
"I understand!"
"I see it now!"
"I have attained enlightenment!"
Pure ecstasy bloomed across the old man's face, like Danyangzi attaining the Dao and ascending to immortality.
He threw himself into 'building' his civilization with redoubled effort.
The three young people walked off shoulder to shoulder, laughing and talking.
"Uh, that's really the General?"
Because she had inherited the memories of the Stelle-Asta fusion, Asta of course knew Mitri. Even so, she couldn't be sure that old man was him.
Compared to the commander from those memories, he might as well have been a different person entirely.
Wasn't that a bit much of a gap?
"Doesn't feel like him, but it kinda does." Stelle launched several flying pounces, trying to hook herself onto Caelus's back so he'd carry her, and got dodged every single time.
"A self-annihilator of Nihility. Who else could it be? Once you're back you can have your research staff dig into that guy. The leads have probably all been chewed up by the swarm by now, but he absolutely counts as one of the 'key sparks' that lit the Swarm Disaster."
There was nothing worth looking at in a world buried under yellow sand, so Caelus, Stelle, and Asta headed back to the starship.
"What I don't know is whether, in the real history, that God of Games gave things a quiet little shove from behind the curtain..."
Caelus fired up the engines and flung the wreckage of the Verminstar into the void behind them.
"Caelus-cub~"
Stelle sprawled in her seat without a shred of dignity, two long legs of cool, translucent skin swinging idly. Utterly carefree, she had just picked up the last apple slice on the plate and was about to toss it into her mouth.
"Where are we off to raise hell next?"
Caelus leaned in on the spot, and in the instant before she could react he kissed her squarely on the lips clamped around the apple slice, deftly stealing away half of it. Chewing his half of the spoils, he said,
"Let me think... let's go find Tayzzyronth."
Stelle, who had already raised her leg and was planning to plant a kick on Caelus with one jade foot, crystalline toenails and all, froze mid-motion and lit up.
"Are we doing a boss fight!?"
"Boss fight my foot." Caelus rolled his eyes at her, then absently straightened the thigh strap that had gone crooked from all that thrashing around. "Forget Tayzzyronth in person. Pick any random bug out of the swarm's vanguard and it'd swallow you whole like a snack. Wouldn't even bother chewing."
The starship's screen displayed star systems with far more advanced technology, where parts of the swarm had already become colossal war machines.
Many of the vanguard units held up enormous bodies on slender, chitinous limbs, with gigantic worms standing behind them as rear guard, their round, gaping mouths lined with fangs that gleamed like metal.
These bugs had started out as some of the weapons the Sieglin forces first modified, and after several rounds of absurd, rules-be-damned evolution under the Path of Propagation, they'd gotten even more ridiculous.
Stelle looked at the bugs on screen that could swallow mountain peaks, whole continents even, in one bite. Then she looked down at her own skinny arms and legs.
Yeah. Not even enough to pick out of their teeth.
"Then... what are we going to Tayzzyronth for?"
Asta watched the two of them being affectionate as though nobody else existed, and something crept into her eyes that she herself hadn't noticed: envy.
Even though her relationship with Caelus had made a breakthrough, even as his girlfriend, she and Stelle were, at bottom, not different people.
That instinctive, beyond-reason understanding and closeness between Caelus and Stelle was something no outsider could ever match.
Thank goodness 'the other her' wasn't competition, and Stelle even played wingman for her and Caelus... otherwise nobody could ever beat Stelle.
"To guide the Swarm King, obviously."
Caelus scooped Stelle up and set her in his lap like arranging a large plush doll, then added in the solemn tone of a man announcing his conversion,
"Honestly, I've been a believer in [Propagation] for ages!"
God of Games? Never met the guy.
At first Stelle didn't catch on, her pert backside shifting and squirming restlessly, until the soft seat turned into a hard seat and the hard seat turned into a socket. Then understanding dawned.
"Wait! What if we overdo it... I'm not actually going to get pregnant, am I?"
"Relax. This is the Simulated Universe."
"Oh right! Forgot!"
Stelle's worry evaporated, replaced by pure curiosity and an itch to experiment.
"Then we could totally give it a try!"
"Hold on!!!"
Asta was stunned senseless by the leaps of logic these two called thinking. Her pretty face flushed scarlet and her voice climbed several notes.
"What are you two even talking about? Pregnant? How did we get to 'give it a try'!?"
She felt like her processor was about to burn out.
Was that the kind of thing you could just try?
Simulated Universe or not, this was too—
"And what do you mean, guide?"
Caelus stood up with Stelle in his arms, as if delivering a holy sermon.
"As the saying goes—if you can't beat 'em, join 'em!"
He raised both hands high in a praise-the-sun pose, his voice booming and fanatical.
"I hereby forsake the darkness and turn to the light! I shall be the pathfinder for His Majesty the great Tayzzyronth, and spread the holy radiance of Propagation into every corner of the Galaxy!"
"LOY! ALTY!"
The swarm's expansion rate was still too slow.
It needed a little more fuel on the fire.
"Ah... this..."
Asta's eyelid twitched wildly. Her whole worldview was taking a level of abstract damage it had never sustained before, and she stood there in a state of complete information-overload system crash.
"Restore the glory of Propagation! The duty falls to us!"
Stelle and Caelus exchanged a look, joined hands, and chanted the slogan together.
"Huh?"
Asta was still lost in the fog, but she caught on soon enough to what these two abstract artists intended to do.
It was the kind of thing an ordinary person who had truly witnessed the horror of the Swarm Disaster and still had their sanity would never dare imagine—the kind of thing you could rack your brain over and conclude only a madman would attempt.
First, Caelus followed in Tayzzyronth's footsteps, steering the starship toward the planet where It had descended.
And then...
"Y-you, you, you two...!!"
Asta watched with her own eyes as the pair went from an embrace, to a deep, open-mouthed kiss, to clothing gradually coming away. She flushed from the crown of her head to the tips of her toes.
Shyness, panic, disbelief, and an overwhelming sense of "who am I, where am I, what am I doing" all tangled together until she nearly evaporated where she stood.
It wasn't as if Asta had never suspected, while merging with the Stelle-Asta fusion's memories, that the two of them might have... done that sort of thing—not with those hazy, intimate fragments, not with the shameless way Stelle and Caelus had always behaved around each other.
But she had always refused to think it through. Or rather, she hadn't dared believe it.
She was one of the first people to understand the true nature of their relationship, after all.
A miraculous pair of individuals bound like quantum entanglement—the two of them had originally been one person.
Herself... and herself... doing that?!
For Asta, whose tastes ran entirely along conventional, healthy, sunlit rails, that was way too broken.
But, looked at from another angle...
Her gaze drifted back to the entwined figures despite herself, her heart hammering.
That... that was another her, wasn't it?
So maybe, possibly, perhaps, more or less, it wasn't entirely unacceptable?
But even granting ten thousand steps of leeway, even if she could barely accept that premise—doing this, right in the vicinity of the planet Tayzzyronth occupied? This... ahem... highly on-theme-with-the-definition-of-Propagation activity?
Asta's reason was blaring an ear-splitting alarm.
Should she stop them?
Should she even stay in this room?
"I-I'm leaving first!"
Like a startled rabbit, Asta all but launched herself out of that room thick with a suggestive haze.
She didn't run far, though. She just pressed her back to the cold metal bulkhead and breathed hard, a vivid crimson blooming visibly across her velvet-pale neck and spreading all the way to her ears.
This wasn't right!!!
What kind of chaotic mess was this?
Asta's thoughts churned. She was... supposed to be Caelus's girlfriend now, wasn't she?
So why was she standing here spectating while he did that with Stelle?
Jealousy didn't quite fit—Stelle and Caelus were one person, sharing even their senses. But... getting yourself pregnant with yourself?
Asta's brain was shaking itself apart.
Her scalp prickled.
The door hadn't shut properly. With her back against the wall, Asta could hear, spilling clearly through the gap, the faint, breathy sounds that set her ears burning and her pulse racing.
Those sounds seemed to come with hooks in them, tugging at her sensitive nerves. Something unfamiliar stirred quietly deep inside her, and her legs went weak, her cheeks scalding.
Under the Simulated Universe's hyper-accelerated time mode, Asta had no idea how long they had spent inside it.
All she knew was that on this not-particularly-large starship, every single corner had apparently been explored by those two.
The steam-filled bathroom. The quiet study. The kitchen with its lingering smell of food. The observation deck with its wide-open view. Beside the equipment in the gym... they had left traces of their in-depth exchanges everywhere.
At first, Asta could still manage to flee these scenes with a red face, avoiding them like floodwater.
But there were only three people on the ship.
There was only so much space. Faced with a scenario that replayed itself practically everywhere, how could she possibly keep a straight face and a heart as still as unruffled water?
It happened on the observation deck, beneath a sky full of stars.
The unbroken stars wove a quilt of starlight that settled gently over the deck. The girl had shed every restraint, and moonlight poured down like water, streaming over skin as fine as porcelain.
A proud vista of snowfields, peaks rising and falling, their summits crowned with matchless red plum blossoms that had quietly stiffened from the faint chill—or from the flutter in her chest—trembling ever so slightly under starlight and moonglow.
"Don't look, it's so embarrassing!"
Under Stelle and Caelus's unblinking stares, Asta's small face burned as she folded her slender arms across her chest, and that bashfulness was devastating.
This was the Simulated Universe, after all. A universe of data.
Not reality.
Just like Stelle said, there was no harm in trying.
So, just once should be fine, right?
The Path of [Propagation].
At its core, it was a Path opened by the loneliness of the last individual left when its kind had been cut off, by love, and by a craving for life.
It was narrow only in comparison to other Paths. Even [Trailblaze] had both the Express crew and negative Trailblazers like Oswaldo of the Market Development Department, so naturally Propagation had all sorts of different expressions too.
In the very instant Asta joined the fray, Stelle and Caelus received the Swarm King's sidelong glance.
And stepped onto the Path of Propagation.
And so, in a Simulated Universe where the very notion of time had blurred, Caelus, Stelle, and Asta followed Tayzzyronth's trail, continuously engaging in activities that aligned with the Path.
Asta's "just once" turned into a hundred million times.
The power of the Path of Propagation in Caelus grew stronger and stronger, until it was closing in on the level of an Emanator.
If Stelle and Asta had really been lifeforms native to a genuine data universe, there was no telling how many times over they would have gotten pregnant by now.
Caelus used Jizo Mitama to erode the Simulated Universe, nudging by the tiniest sliver the concept of the Path of Propagation as it settled onto the three of them.
A full Amber Era passed inside the Simulated Universe.
Bzzzt!
Purple lightning crackled out of thin air inside the starship, and Herta, Ruan Mei, and Screwllum spawned in, all wearing their little dumpling forms.
"What happened? I was looking at your data and—holy shit!"
Herta didn't even finish her sentence before the curse burst out of her.
"You became an Emanator of Propagation!?"
____
Gift for Everyone: Once we hit 50 Powerstones, I'll release +1 bonus chapter
________________________________________
If you want more chapters, please consider supporting my page on (P). with 50 advanced chapters available on (P)
👻 Join the crew by searching Leanzin on (P). You know the spot! 😉