The Great Evil. Dark Power that came from deep dark corners of the universe and drove the world to destruction. All consuming and insatiable. Darkness that brought only pain, suffering and futility. Darkness from which beings of equal evil and wickedness originated. The demonic race.
Beings that fed on souls and empower themselves by enslaving the very spirit of the living people. Beings that did not discriminate in their cruelty and violence toward anything alive. Beings that strived to only destroy and consume everything of nature. As long as it breathed, grew or somehow proliferated it was crushed, destroyed and absorbed.
Something like that sounds unrealistic and fantasy-like right? Especially if you are living in the world of advanced science and infotechnology. Epoch of high-tech devices and laser weapons. The age of effortless space travel and constant planetary colonizations. If you live in The Era of Galactic Conquest.
Is there any place for such unscientific things in the beliefs of people living in that age?
Such things are only part of made up stories and dreams. Myths. Fantasy of ancient people dumb enough to believe in such a thing. Something like that had no place in a world of science. Science is part of reality and stories of monsters, gods, demons are mere creations of imagination.
That's what the people living in the galactic empires, star kingdoms, solar republics and plenary alliances of ancient times, all across the populated galaxy believed.
Until they've met it. The force of pure Evil, the demons and the Great Lord of Hell himself. One day they were just a fantasy, the next day, they were an unprecedented threat and common enemy of the whole universe. As well as part of the Common Sense of this world.
That's right. Turns out that the concept of soul is a common sense and existence of eternal evil is a scientific fact.
How fast your science view changes when you are face to face with something you considered unreal.
The worst thing is that no God or Angels came to people's rescue. Unlike demons, they decided to remain as mere fantasy concepts.
What a twist right?
For those numerous crazy sect fanatics struggling for centuries to somehow fit their outdated belief into the Era of Galactic Discovery and then barely being mentioned in the Era of Galactic Conquest , where space ships traveled through space at the speed faster than light, it sure was an opportunity.
The time of the second dawn.
But it never came to be.
When people flooded to the priests and temples, they had only one question.
Where was their God?
Where was he and his angels with his army of light when the entire universe was burning in flames, trampled by the forces of darkness?
Why didn't it show itself?
Where was this salvation from pain and suffering for the believers and pious that they promised?
There was no peace and bliss after death. No one reached heaven. Because all who died from the demons' hands went straight to hell.
The demons did not just kill. They stole and enslaved the souls to empower themselves. Those who perished turned to slaves, forever. They were absorbed and turned into mere objects, to be used as tools and building blocks. There was no salvation from that. Even if you were dead they could drag your soul out and consume it. You do not get protectection in God's eternal kingdom after death. The only thing eternal after death was misery and suffering. And no amount of prayer could allow you to escape from it.
At the end of the day people had to come to terms with reality. There was no God, no Kingdom of light in the afterlife. It was up to real kingdoms with real armies, warriors and belief in science to defeat the immortal forces of evil that came from beyond.
And they did. With unimaginable sacrifices and undescribable struggle. But they did defeat it. Living beings defeated the demonic beings with their own power, saving themselves and the galaxy. Not some almighty God. Not his angels. The second down for religions never came on the contrary they were finally cast away once and for all. The victory belonged to people. Why do they need Gods when they could defeat the darkness with their own strength? People were the Gods of this Era.
People were supreme beings.
At that time people still did not understand how dangerous it was to let that thought ferment in the heads of people.
They were still in the euphory of their victory and did not put much thought to it.
They've won. Defeated the Evil.
Or at least they thought they did back then. Naively so I might say looking back at the events centuries later.
After all, if they really defeated it, why is it that more and more people today think that we live in hell?
Were we really the victors? Or were we consumed and turned into the very evil we struggled to defeat, if hundreds of years after our victory, we are now ruled by the same demons we fought as enemies. Only now they have faces similar to ours. Who really won in that war?
After so many years we see it more clearly. That was no victory. The end of that war was just the beginning of our fall.
However, it's too late to do anything about it. After all that evil seeped into every one of us. It took root deeply in our everyday life. We rely on it in everything and can't imagine life without it. The very science that became our salvation, became the source of our corruption. It was the technology that we grasped into our hands and were not able to cast away. The Evil is not some alien race, not some unknown civilization, it is now ourselves. We are the new Evil Civilization. We are the new demons.
To defeat the Great Evil our ancestors had to do what they later understood was the worst of their decisions. Using their science they grasped the basics of the cursed technology that the demons used against us and reverse engineered. People used that cursed technology themselves, gaining immortality and power equal to Gods.
Gods. Funny how the cursed technology in the hands of our enemies made them demons, but made us the Godly beings now that we were the ones using the same cursed technology ourselves.
Our ancestors did not put to mind that controversy in judgement until they defeated the Demon race and The Great Evil, but when they did, it was too late, because by the end of that war, even though the ancestors were the last one standing it was hard to discern who actually won. The evil or them. After all that technology fed on souls. You can imagine the price of that victory.
But it was only temporary, right? We only used it to protect ourselves. It was only a tool. An extreme measure that we would not do ever again now that the enemy is gone.
How naive that was.
It should have been obvious that the moment people got hold of the power equal to Gods, they were not going to give it up or give it away to someone else, simply because they were higher in social status or military rank, because they had some imaginary authority or material wealth. What are they before Absolute Power.
When you held such power, authority and seniority meant nothing. When you were this strong, you were the authority and all others had to bend their knees and silently accept you as a new leader….or perish.
Soon everything we struggled to protect from demons, everything we held dear and were proud of, was cast away and burned in fires of new war. Only this time by our own hands.
As if it really was cursed, the moment we touched that technology the God complex seeped into the minds of people, spreading as a sickness throughout the whole galaxy.
Kingdoms, Empires and all their armies were trampled and torn apart by their own champions, who by the end of Demon War gained power far beyond anyone's understanding and comprehension. People who held power equal to Gods and were not ready to let go of it decided to change the world order and their social standing in it. In an instant turning from Heroes into Conquerors.
Before people even understood what happened, civilization had been consumed by that technology.
At that moment we understood that the Demon race has never been the true Evil. They were not the true enemy. It was the technology they used. And the moment we touched this cursed technology was the moment we succumbed to its evil will. Just as the demonic race did. We were no better than them.
The Demon race and the Great Evil that came from another universe may have died. But people of this universe have become their successors, inheriting not only their powers, but their darkness as well.
We've won the battle. But the true Evil won the war.
Something in this technology corrupted those who used it, as if some evil was hiding within it. In exchange for Absolute power that it offered, you were consumed by the Dark Side.
The will of this technology pushed people to desire more strength, and the more of it people gained the more of it they desired. This was an endless cycle of greed. The insatiable and all consuming. Just as The Great Evil itself.
We are not quite there yet. But if this goes further, I think we will one day be reborn into the Great Evil that our ancestors have defeated and will become a dark force of evil from beyond for some other unlucky universe.
Maybe the Great Evil that we faced ended up this way, just the same way we did. Maybe they too were just unlucky enough to touch that technology and were cursed just like us. Were consumed by the God complex and never saw themselves as demons, but as God-like almighty beings while others were mere bugs whose lives are just there to be taken as they please, the same as many of us now perceive themselves and the rest of the population.
Well, even if we all know where we are going, with our current development path, it's too late to do anything about it.
Maybe if our science continued to develop, we could find a way to break free from this technology one day. Tame it. Use it without being corrupted by it.
But as if this technology really had a will of its own, it made sure we could not do it. As if wishing to stay as the highest point of our scientific achievement, it allowed us to become more powerful with other means than science.
It gave people a way to accumulate strength and could be used through mere imagination and power of will, making it available regardless of how intelligent its user was.
Science had no place in the path to Godhood with this technology.
The scientific advance we were so proud of before was soon cast to the background and has been stagnant ever since, leaving us with no major progress in technologies for centuries.
Anyone listening to me may wonder, what is stopping us from renewing that scientific advance in hope to overcome this cursed technology, now that we realize the evil in it.
But the answer would be, we can't.
Was it by the will of cursed technology or simple coincidence, but in the last centuries we have burned most of our knowledge and achievements with our own hands, losing centuries of scientific advance.
Not on purpose. No, we did not burn the books in bonfires or purge computer datas with intricate programs as was done in some pre cosmic eras, when governments tried to ban some unwanted information or dirty history from general public knowledge.
No, of course not.
We are not some cavemen.
Before the Great Evil, We've been through the Galactic discovery and Galactic Conquest. We are far away from the times of crazy zealots that ordered their men to set fire to temples and libraries full of precious knowledge.
Nah…
We burned whole planets.
With all their residing races, kingdoms and millenias of cultures. Centuries of scientific advance, knowledge, technologies and huge chunks of historical references were simply part of general mass that was pulverised and turned into cosmic dust and debri when the greed for power sparked the Era of Immortals or, as it is also sometimes called, the Era of Battle Royal, after the name of the greatest event that the galaxy has ever created - The Intergalactic Battle Royale.
Crazy right? How did we come up with that?
When the whole galactic community divided into hundreds of thousands of independent forces that fought for supremacy in a free for all fight, the galaxy quite quickly was laid to ruins, making everyone soon realize that something had to be done with it, or there would be nothing to rule over.
What's the point of being God when you are the only one left alive.
So leaders of all the powers agreed on peace talks. But not the kind you might imagine. No, they were not discussing actual peace. No one even thought of mentioning it when the stake of the fight was absolute power.
The strangest thing was that even when we stood on the ruins of our previous world, losing centuries of our scientific knowledge and technologies, we have always retained enough science and knowledge to keep using the evil technology.
People keep wondering was it simply our greed that made us hold on to this cursed technology so strongly, that even after setting the whole galaxy aflame and losing so much knowledge we managed to keep the cursed technology safe? Or does it really have a will of its own and it was its intent from the get, to make us intentionally regress, so that we would never be able to ever understand it like our ancestors did and would not be able to overcome it. Could it have intentionally set the things so that we would be forced to use it indefinitely until we fully turn into demons.
Whatever the reason for it, when we regressed in science and culture our basic desires only grew stronger, enforcing the cursed technology's place in our everyday lives, and with it the greed for power.
So no. Peace was never an option in the intergalactic peace talks.
Instead the people or, it would be more correct to say, the elites who ruled over the general mass of people devoid of voting rights, decided to fight it out in a more confined space. A battlefield of a smaller scale.
They decided to fight in the Arena.
Sure there were still wars and fights outside The Arena, but the galaxy has regained a semblance of peacefulness lightly similar to the times before the Great Evil's appearance.
We still fight and kill each other a lot, just not to the degree of destroying planets and solar systems.
Not only that but we even created a semblance of the united government and civilization as it was in the previous era. Only this government looked the same as the leaderboard of the tournament we held at the Arena. And consisted of small concentrations of power. Not like kingdoms, but more like sects in ancient Chinese Wuxia novels, where power decides your place and status in the world. The stronger you are the higher your place is, but the stronger you are the more of a threat you are to the others. Which always ends up as a bloodbath when others unite to take you down. No friends. Only enemies and rivals who make short time alliances and change sides as seasons change on planets.
But if we live in the wuxia world, then this world is screwed. Because there were no Just and Righteous sects. Only demonic.
I'd say we are more like demons in hell who are still in the process of choosing a new Lord of Hell.
Once we do, we would be stepping out into other worlds to bring them darkness and destruction, repeating what the demonic race did to us.
We should have foreseen this outcome when we took those horns from demons and fit them to our own heads.
The throne of the Lord of hell. That's the goal that united so many sides of the conflict, all of which equally consumed by God complex, greed and lust for power making them follow some kind of code or unwritten rules and create a new civilization.
Sounds unrealistic for so many adversaries to actually find a common ground in something. But two factors at our hands helped us to realize this.
As I already mentioned immortality, you can guess that this was the lead factor.
What would you choose? To fight to the death only without the risk to your life or blowing each other up in outer space where even this cursed technology's ability to resurrect you from death could not save you?
First option seemed a tiny bit more advantageous to everyone.
And the second factor was the existence of a very suitable arena that could hold such events indefinitely without needing much maintenance.
The husk of The Great Evil, defeated by our ancestors.
The indestructible debris the size of the giant planet or even a small star, that in defiance of all known to us laws of physics, with that huge size, had the gravity of a normal inhabitable planet.
It had such a vast space to maneuver that even after holding Tournaments and Battle Royals on its surface for hundred years now, not even a quarter of all the corners and tunnels of its surface had been properly mapped. Not to mention its inner core structure that we failed to penetrate into after its death.
They say it was not like that when it was alive. In ancient records it was described as a cloud or Nebula with a core at its depth. But something happened to it when it died. In a split second its cloud-like body compressed, crystallizing and converting into a huge lifeless orb. Leaving behind only its skeleton distantly reminding you of a dyson sphere or an enormous fir cone with a huge nut surrounded by an indestructible shell as its core.
When I say indestructible, I mean to the degree where with several centuries worth of constant attempts to try to get into its inner structure, we ultimately failed to put a dent into its shell. We did not even leave a scratch.
Many people think there must be something inside and they still try to crack this huge nut open. But so far we haven't found any means to get the 'delicious' price from inside that shell. And we tried anything in our arsenal…Literally everything. Ancient weapons that pulverised planets, when they still existed and when we still had enough knowledge to operate them, did not even put a dent on this shell, only chipped the outer bone structure.
This nut proved to be too tough for us to crack.
Well, if we can't destroy it with our most powerful weapons, why not make it the biggest Coliseum ever known?
So the place received a unanimous vote to be the battleground for the entire galaxy.
A person of another Era might have thought that it was a good thing. That destruction and endless slaughter all across the galaxy has been stopped. That it is better to sort out differences and bouts in an arena than out in the open outside of it. That we have succeeded in substituting war with something akin to a sport or a game. We should be content. Right?
And with immortality and all that it may really seem like a games, but you have to know the price.
After all, the stakes in these games are lives.
No, not the lives of those who fight, after all they are immortal. Or more like undying and may return to life. But as I said. There is a price. And that is the lives of those who feed this technology. Those who have to be sacrificed for them to stay immortal and gain the power that they wield so proudly.
Remember I mentioned that Demons fed on human souls?
Well, so do we now… in a way.
We gave it different names to not make it sound so menacing or scary. But it does not change the fact that the source of it is the lives of living beings.
Through that cursed technology our very lives have been converted into currency that may be sold, bought, lent or stolen equal to any other product on the market.
We are now just walking wallets or money making machines with an obligation to give part of our lives to others in the form of tax, pay or whatever other means we used to suck out money out of working people. Only now it's life.
We pay taxes in our lives. Live off the lives of others, consume each other's lives as if they were some kind of cannibals. Those who have worth for the society live longer, the worthless ones are getting eaten. The thing is for this system to sustain itself there has to be a lot more of those who have nothing to offer other than their lives to be slaughtered and feed the rest.
How the hell did we fall so low?
Something so cruel. So demonic.
The thing that scared our ancestors so much that they united the whole galaxy to fight back against The Great Evil, was quickly implemented as an everyday norm and accepted as inevitable fate as soon as we grabbed on to that cursed technology.
With just one chilling difference. The demonic race was doing it to other races from different universes. We commit these sins against each other. Well, at least for now.
If we continue like that we may reach a point where the lives of everyone living in this universe would not be enough for us and we will step out into the other universe and find a new source. That's right. Just as the demonic race did.
That's a lot of thoughts I poured on to you all.
I should get to the point already, because it sounds more and more as if I am looking for excuses or trying to justify myself for something, but it's really not the case.
I just wanted to know your honest opinion and ask what would you do, if you somehow stumbled upon the source of unimaginable power in this world?
Would you choose the same path as those who were stained with God complex and announce yourself as God, forcing others to kneel at your feet, or would you use that power to destroy this world's order of greed and endless fights and try giving this civilization and the whole galaxy a new chance to start anew? Without that cursed technology. Try to cleanse the curse.
Don't get me wrong. I am not asking for myself.
For a friend. Yes. I ask for a friend of mine who… let's say, accidentally stumbled upon something that could destroy the galaxy.
It's not me, alright.
"Yeah. I am surely not asking it just because I stand in the middle of the control room of the most powerful weapon ever in existance, that nowadays civilization, with today's regressed technology level has no chance of recreating." My own voice sounded eerily reverberating with an endless echo through the cold dark rooms and tunnels.
"It's not like a screen could appear before me all of a sudden asking me if I would like to power up the Star Devourer? And then patiently wait for my reply. Right?" Sounded my voice cracking. Damn I have not used my voice so much my throat feels sore from speaking.
"Star Devourer…. So that's how The Great Evil was really called. I think we never got its true name from the demons." I muttered. I don't think its true name was ever mentioned in any know records. At least I never heard this name before.
Well anyways…
What would you…as a friend of the person that stumbled to something like that advise him to do with this power?
Because I sure as hell already pressed the option YES on that screen.
What remains to see is how I would use this power. Will I be consumed by it and become a new Lord of Hell or will I manage to change the world before that?
Is it even possible to reverse this universe to the time before it was consumed by evil with the help of even greater evil?
A vibration passed under my feet and spread through walls, floors and ceiling. For the first time in years I've heard some kind of noise made by anything other than myself or my machines.
The sound reminded me of the pulse of a heartbeat. If so, then The Great Evil may really just have been resurrected.
By me.
Oops…