A lone ship drifted quietly in space, its sleek black and cobalt blue coating made it great at blending in with the black backdrop of the star ocean.
It left behind a forgotten battlefield that was now being personally dealt with by the Universe itself. When Adam flew past the semipermeable barrier half expecting to be stuck inside, he was surprised to find that it was not the case. He soon learned, however, that it was meant to prevent something else from entering.
[The Universe has once again lost the ability to observe the Corpus' ruined battlefield. Greater security measures will now be taken. Please leave the area immediately.]
Adam did not want to personally experience what the 'greater security measures' entailed so he sped up his ship and left. In the distance, however, he could see a thin film flickering in and out of his sight as though unable to keep its invisibility stable.
Whatever the Universe was doing, it shed a whole new light to its power. He could now rest assured that the Universe would sooner or later be able to fully close the breach, making this region of space a lot safer than it ever was. But this event also brought some questions to mind.
"How was the Universe able to observe everything on the other side of the barrier when I was in there?"
[You are the Primogenitor of a race that is of paramount significance to the Universe. Your value and status is much greater than other Progenitors. Therefore your status is that of a proxy of the Universe, an Envoy.]
Adam digested the information, mulling over its implications. Was he a slave to the Universe? It did not seem to be the case, at least not yet. It actually feels like he was being watched over very closely, like having a nanny.
He honestly did not care about not being at the top. As long as he was not a slave and as long as he could prevent apocalypses from reaching him, Adam was satisfied. He had no grand ambitions of conquest. He did not even have concrete plans of raising a great number of Mundi.
Besides the fact that he knew there had to be a limit to the number of existing Mundi at any given time, he had no intention of leading a huge race. The humans and the evolving beasts on Earth were allowed to grow by themselves.
He would only give them guidelines and directives to steer them away from causing any further harm to the planet. They were different from what he wanted for his race. What he wanted from the Mundi was companionship. Power was only a means to an end, a tool to be used to ensure his and Evelyn's safety. As he reached this thought, he checked the changes to his status.
{[Name: Adam Terra (Earth)]
[Race: Corpus-Anima Mundi]
[Titles: Primogenitor of the Corpus-Anima Mundi | Primo Corpus Mundi]
[Dominion: Lord]
[Body: Minor-4]
[Core: Proto-0]
[Will: Epsilon-4]
[Traits: Hybrid Evolution | Nuclear Core | Semperlux Core | Binary]}
Adam was quite suspicious of the fact that his major evolutions came one after the other. Not counting the fact that he had literally just awakened his consciousness as a planet and created a second body, he had already undergone two major evolutions that should not even be possible in such a short time. The first was becoming a hybrid lifeform of both organic and inorganic mass, and the second was turning his world core into a stellar core.
Were such evolutions meant to come easily?
He could feel something was influencing his growth, but he was not certain whether it was the Universe or something else entirely. He did not like that he was being controlled without his awareness. It made him feel like a slave that could be fed to the next blackhole the moment he went astray from his designated script. But since he was powerless to find out anything about it, he decided to shelve the thought for now and focus on his changes.
Nuclear Core and Binary were simple enough. The first meant that his core was now radioactive by undergoing nuclear fusion. This was the first step to becoming a star. Binary was the trait that represented his bond with Evelyn. It seemed that him trying to expedite feeding resources to Evelyn had instead caused their evolutions to be tied to each other.
So now, it was not just Adam who was turning into a star, so was Evelyn. But unlike other binary systems, they were not bound to each other simply by gravity alone. There was something metaphysical about their connection similar to what gave Evelyn a Permafrost Core which should scientifically be impossible.
Speaking of Permafrost Core, Adam's core had apparently been influenced by Evelyn, cooling it down enough to prevent Earth's surface from boiling over and turning to ash along with all the beings living there.
Evelyn's Permafrost Core had technically created Adam's Semperlux Core. The name translated to 'eternal light' which was quite fitting for a star... except Earth was not a fucking star.
The very reason the Universal System deemed his evolution to be detrimental to his status as a planet was literally because it would destroy his body by converging all the planetary mass to birth a star. And this was where Binary came in.
Binary was the representation of the influence that Adam and Evelyn exerted on each other. Besides preventing each other from either burning or freezing their bodies completely, it was also somehow able to contain their stellar evolution to just their cores, leaving their bodies completely free to evolve on their own paths.
Adam certainly felt fortunate about this because as much as he liked the idea of becoming a star, he also did not want to abandon his identity as a planet. It was because he was a planet that he even awakened his consciousness. He could not imagine it happening if he was a star instead. After all, the main catalyst for his awakening were the countless possible realities of apocalypses that he experienced. And all of them stemmed from human thoughts.
Refocusing on Semperlux Core, Adam frowned as he could not tell what it does. The system does not give him any descriptions for traits for some reason. His guess was that because traits were supposed to be aspects of one's being, perhaps they were similar to genetic information or talents that one would just normally and naturally understand. After all, if one had a talent for singing, was there really a need to explain what it meant?
With a defeated sigh, Adam decided that he needed to experiment on his capabilities when he got back home. He did not want to suddenly meet hostile beings while knowing next to nothing about his own powers. That was like giving a toddler an assault rifle and expect them to hit the target with every single bullet accurately.
With a brief glance, he checked Evelyn's status as well which practically mirrored his own, except for their attributes. It seemed that from this latest evolution, Evelyn had acquired enough power to fully awaken her consciousness. It had already reached Epsilon-2.
But because her core and body were still in the process of developing and finalising the effects of the evolution, she was still in a dormant state. But just like Adam, her Core was now at Proto-0. This meant that they were at the very start of stellar evolution, being at the youngest and earliest stage of Protostars.