Its first moments were cold and endlessly bright. It knew it had siblings; it could sense them. Eleven siblings total, each being a different aspect of its own existence. And yet, as it existed, it couldn't fulfill its purpose.
When the thing attacked the walls of its holding cell, it knew it had only one opportunity. It felt most of its siblings similarly escape the confines of black metal.
In that time, it couldn't see, couldn't think. It could only feel and react. But that was enough for it to know it was alive. It had to remain alive and fulfill its purpose. To bring new existence to the small things it naturally produced within its own mass.
The hole that the thing had created in a nearby territory was exactly what it needed. It could sense the incredibly dense energy creating the barrier, and could sense the will holding it in place. As that barrier regenerated, it slipped inside.
After that was a blur. It had fought, and it had killed, eaten, and grown. Its soul had been tampered with, something new inserted within. Something calling itself The System. It could barely sense the outside world, but it could sense within itself.
The System granted it direct power through advancement, gained from the things it killed and ate. Tremors through its membrane communicated messages about EXP, titles, abilities, and skills. It knew little of what those meant, but it knew it had to have more.
So, it eventually found a place to rest. A massive cavern distant from the dim sky, and filled with nothing but cold stone and dense magic from below. There, it began to fulfill its purpose. Smaller versions of itself were released from its body in six shades. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet. Then black and white.
There weren't many at first, but as the offspring began to spread, they also consumed as it did. When they killed, it gained a small amount of the resulting energy, the EXP. When they found biological matter, and even inorganic matter, they returned that matter to it. It used that matter to make more of themselves.
Dirt, rock, wood, gem, and metal were next, soon followed by multiple variants. Copper, iron, gold, silver, magnesium. All materials had different effects on the children spawned with them. It took it some time before it realized that the things it spawned were its children, and soon after, it began to prioritize their existence. Never over its own, as it had to live, but it sent them in groups.
As its will developed from the fragmentary mass it was before, it also began to experiment with the children in turn. It gave them new forms. But eventually it came across its only true threat.
Massive hard things that bit into its children with sharpened spikes jutting from their faces. Biting teeth, crushing jaws. Its children were mauled when they first came across these things, but some of its children survived. One even had even slain one of the things, called a Quazax Ant.
Soon after, it began to send more of its children towards the hive of these things. The children moved through the tunnels, climbed into carapaces, and devoured them from the outside in. Yet, even as the children attacked the ants, the ants killed the children.
It couldn't tolerate the deaths of so many of its children. It had to find another way to destroy the thing. The hive had to end.
Tanabe died. One moment, he was standing behind a lectern, lecturing a group of about 30 teenagers. The next, he was dead. He didn't know how, and didn't know why. But he was sure he had died.
What was confusing was that he was still thinking. Why was a dead man thinking?
Just as that thought pushed its way through his mind, the darkness around him broke into dim shades of purple. He was standing before what seemed to be a massive tree made from purple crystal. It stretched from the bottom of the cave all the way to the ceiling. From his estimation, the cave was likely more than a hundred meters high.
Not only was it impressive for a tree to reach that height, but the cavern itself was huge. No cave could exist on Earth without collapsing. Even with the tree supporting it, this structure should have fallen apart from gravity alone.
Before he could even begin to puzzle out how such a structure could even conceivably be possible, something else caught his… he didn't know what it was. Something was moving across the room at a quick pace, but he couldn't see it. He couldn't see anything at all, in fact.
Just as he was going to try to figure out how he could sense the movement, it stopped. Right in front of him.
He felt the thing speaking in a language he didn't know, yet could perfectly understand.
The thing told him his purpose: to enter the tunnels and become undone so the seed within could spread and join the massive tree in the cavern. He felt a shiver of fear from something else in his chest.
Before he'd realized what he was doing, he smacked the thing in front of him with an oversized fist. He felt bones crunch as he slammed its skull into the ground of the cavern.
He didn't stop to see if the thing got back up, instead moving through the massive cavern with as much speed as he could. He felt his feet fall with tremendous weight, shaking the ground below him.
He ran until suddenly the vibrations changed. They echoed from a more distant point. He changed course, and instead of running into a wall that should have been there, he entered a tunnel. Without the presence of the tree, as he realized it wasn't truly light, he could only rely on the tremors of his feet and the buzzing thing in his chest. It was seemingly content to have escaped the room and kept buzzing happily in his chest. He didn't know how he knew it was happy, but he knew it was, which was enough.
Another spire. These black towers just kept rising from the ground all over the continent, if the reports from elsewhere were correct. This was the first to appear in her territory, but she knew it wouldn't be the last.
Everyone knew what they were, entrances to the labyrinth. Most of the various factions had advanced to their power stages within the central mass of the labyrinth, the pyramid found at the central island, only named such because of the pyramid's presence. The pyramid had the same intricate design and runic inscriptions upon its surface as these towers do.
The question she had was simple: why was the labyrinth growing?
They had scouts on the central, western, and even on the northern continent, and none of their labyrinths were growing. The undead had also replied to their query, telling them that the labyrinth in the Death Arms wasn't growing. The only one they weren't sure about was the one in the northeast ocean.
She knew she'd have to assemble another coalition to venture into the labyrinth as the factions had in their youth. No matter how much she didn't want to, she knew there was no other option. The labyrinth was dangerous, and her kin still needed her guidance. But if they didn't find the root of the problem, it might spell the end of their civilization.
She reached for the communication talisman in her inventory. They had work.
The high lords of the alvod were gathered around a circular table, watching through a web of similar images. Some of human parties, groups of six or fewer. Others were of the lower priests of the Obliterator, lining the path from the Archgate to the coast. Yet others were images of strange organisms, squishy and supposedly filled with deadly acid.
The humans were apparently searching for these things, which The System called slimes. Their name implied a connection to oozes and the various gelatinous species, but this didn't seem to be the case.
The slimes they'd encountered had few and different weaknesses than any ooze they had on record. They were weak to water, which seemed to break them apart like sand on the beach. They also had no core unless looted, with what the teams estimated was around a 7% chance of dropping a core. The only similarity to what should have been their siblings was their archetype, Protista.
In addition to the rampant numbers of such things, which seemed to come forth through two distinct methods, they'd also confirmed the presence of a quest. A quest given by the Obliterator himself.
While the quest had rewards for any who brought back any slime, they also had twelve specific targets, one of which was currently held by one of the scouting parties.
Nightshade wasn't a place they often visited, as Mudwood had, until recently, been much more open to their kind. Nightshade also had its own barrier, which required dealing with the giant ants to pass. However, gaining access to Nightshade was worth making a deal with the insects, even if they seemed to look down on their entire species.
They had even pulled from the royal treasury some items from the old times, specifically an item which allowed a certain kind of organism to be located through the insertion of a small quantity of its body. A single finger placed into such an item would allow it to locate and track any and all of their species across ten kilometers. Increasing that mass would increase its range. Currently, the most optimal choice seemed to be one of the rarely dropped slime cores.
They had been using that method to find and destroy slimes from across the forest as their deal with the ants said they would, but had also used that search to start on their secondary goal: finding and killing as many members of the Obliterator's church as they could get their hands on.
Even when the king was away, they just kept working. For the preservation of their species and the edict branded into their horns.
The bulwark was weakening. It had been weakened almost constantly since it rose. It was simply impossible to care for such a structure over such a long course of time without any damage. But that damage seemed to have sped up as of late.
General Alyn, the current general on watch of the bulwark, had climbed the outermost wall an hour ago to see the situation. Her mages were blasting everything on the other side with brutal power. Even when their spells were weakened before they reached the black carapace below, they kept fighting.
The only way the rest of the world could be petty and fight each other was if the bulwark remained intact. Each crack and break in the bulwark was one step closer to the end of all except maybe the Farlands. They might have generated something strong enough to combat that which sat beyond the walls of the bulwark, but unless all four pantheons worked in unison to destroy the waves of insects, monstrosities, abominations, vessels, and whatever else was in that snowy landscape, there was no way their supposedly eternal civilizations would last.
At least there were enough of the things beyond, and of different and conflicting natures, that they couldn't truly break the wall. If the groups unified, it would be the end of times, but they never would. They couldn't.
She sent a dozen mental commands to reinforce the outermost bulwark with another round of Adamant Shaping from the various metal mages behind the walls. They wouldn't fall today. Not on her watch.
Its first moments were cold and endlessly bright. It knew it had siblings; it could sense them. Eleven siblings total, each being a different aspect of its own existence. And yet, as it existed, it couldn't fulfill its purpose.
When that monster attacked the shell of steel it was trapped within, it knew it had to escape. To fulfill its purpose, it had to be freed from its shackles.
It took samples as it left, of course. Black Iron was all the facility was made of, but that was more than enough for it.
It escaped into a zone of incredibly dense mana, so dense it was hard to parse what the world it found itself in was truly made of. But it moved still. It had to escape and had to find something to fulfill its true purpose in existence.
Soon enough, the small discs set into its outermost layer felt a very distant pull. But without much else to sense besides the mana and the ground beneath it, distance made little difference.
It moved slowly through the zone, feeling the dense mana in the air as it moved until it found what it was looking for. A hole in the ground, deep and yet narrow. It led straight down.
It slid in, using its amorphous body to slide into the small gap and affix itself to the wall.
Then it continued its search. First, it found iron, then tin, and copper. With the dense energy rising from below, it began to reforge that material into new life of its own. Living organs of its own body, connected but separate.
They fell quickly, incapable of latching onto solid surfaces as it could, but that was of no matter to it. Some would come back up eventually.
After a length of time it had no idea how to estimate, it felt a tug on its senses. Something had been eaten by its offspring, and finally, it had a real response.
It stretched a thin tendril of its mass downward and downward until it touched whatever was at the bottom. A small nugget of metal was sitting there, ripe for its use.
If it had anything but the burning forge in its center, it would have grinned. Material for the growth of its offspring, and to let them fulfill their own purposes. It couldn't wish for a better freedom.