Caelum stood alone at the peak of a collapsed mountain and said nothing.
Below him, his divine realm lay in ruin.
A hurricane tore through his body as though he were made of paper. He didn’t resist it. There was no point. He simply stared down at what remained and let the wind do whatever it wanted.
Above him, the blazing sun and full moon hung together in a sky that seemed to have forgotten which one was supposed to rule the heavens.
The Five Elements churned without order.
Yin and Yang bled into one another.
The foundation of the realm continued its slow, inevitable collapse, crumbling at the edges like old parchment held too close to a flame.
Even if he poured every last drop of Divine Power into stabilizing it, the outcome wouldn’t change.
Without the faith of his followers, the realm was already doomed.
It was no longer a question of whether it would collapse.
Only when.
And his Divine Power was leaking away.
He could feel it draining from him, steady and unstoppable, like water escaping through a cracked vessel. If he used what remained to hold the realm together, everything would be gone within hours.
There would be nothing left.
Not even the hollow shell of what he had built.
Caelum lowered himself onto the broken stone and sat cross-legged amid the wreckage.
He sighed.
He could still recognize every landmark.
Every shattered peak.
Every dried riverbed.
He had shaped them himself. Placed them with care. Watched them change over the years.
He remembered what had happened here.
The families.
The settlements.
The arguments.
The celebrations.
The countless small, meaningless moments that had somehow accumulated into something resembling a life.
All of it was gone.
No one would remember any of it.
Not really.
Only him.
And soon, even this land would disappear, taking the last physical proof that any of it had ever existed.
’There’s no cure for this.’
His gaze drifted into the distance.
’So stop looking for one.’
He exhaled slowly.
"Eighteen years."
His voice was barely louder than the wind.
"Eighteen years."
Caelum was not from this world.
In another life, on another Earth, he had been an ordinary young man.
Sometimes, that life felt less like a memory and more like a dream he had once forgotten.
He had studied because his parents and teachers told him that studying would lead somewhere worthwhile.
He worked hard.
Earned decent grades.
Entered a decent university.
Then graduated into a world that had no particular interest in rewarding any of it.
The job he found paid enough to cover rent.
Barely.
His boss made promises the way other people made small talk, casually and without weight. Every promise disappeared as quickly as it was spoken.
He told himself he would quit.
He never did.
He was afraid of the gap between one month’s rent and the next. Afraid of watching his parents grow older while pretending he couldn’t see the changes.
Their health.
Their future.
The sacrifices they had quietly made for him.
All of it had gradually settled onto his shoulders without him noticing.
He hadn’t broken dramatically.
There had been no single moment when everything collapsed.
He had simply been worn down.
Day by day.
Month by month.
The kind of exhaustion that accumulated so gradually you couldn’t point to where it began, yet eventually became impossible to ignore.
Then, one day, a meteorite crossed trillions of light-years of empty space and struck him directly.
The absurdity of it was something he had never quite forgiven the universe for.
When he opened his eyes again, he was here.
In this world.
An infant, surrounded by a civilization he didn’t understand.
Eighteen years had given him plenty of time to change that.
This was Earth too.
Just not his Earth.
History had followed almost exactly the same path as the world he remembered until the summer of 1945.
The Second World War was entering its final stages.
Germany had fallen.
The Pacific War was grinding toward its brutal conclusion.
Humanity was preparing for whatever came next.
What came next was something no one had prepared for.
On August 6th, a Star Gate tore open above the Pacific Ocean.
It happened on the same morning the first atomic bomb was supposed to fall on Hiroshima.
The bomb never reached its destination.
The aircraft carrying it turned back after its instruments began registering something impossible.
Something vast.
Something structured.
Something descending through the clouds where the target should have been.
Within seventy-two hours, the first alien forces had established themselves on three continents.
Humanity’s wars ended overnight.
Not because nations suddenly discovered peace.
Not because exhaustion finally forced them to negotiate.
They simply encountered an enemy that made every previous conflict look meaningless.
The Allied powers.
The Axis.
The Soviet Union.
Every distinction humans had killed each other over became irrelevant.
The invaders recognized none of those borders.
They killed across all of them with equal indifference.
What followed became the darkest century in human history.
And then, slowly and impossibly, humanity began to win.
The alien forces were driven back through the Star Gate they had arrived from.
Humanity sealed the gate.
Then they studied it.
Eventually, they learned to build their own.
Over the millennium that followed, humanity did what it had always done whenever it gained access to new power.
It expanded.
Gate after Gate carried humanity into other Crystal Wall Systems.
New worlds were conquered.
New resources claimed.
New territories absorbed.
Civilization grew larger, stronger, and more ambitious with every passing century.
And at the heart of it all stood the gods.
A deity, once awakened, possessed a divine realm.
A private kingdom.
A sovereign territory that could be expanded, cultivated, and developed.
Within it, followers could be raised, believers gathered, and faith converted into Divine Power.
When enough faith accumulated and the conditions were right, divine fire could be ignited.
A deity could then take the final step.
Ascend.
Become a True God.
But divine realms weren’t merely sources of power.
They were mobile fortresses.
Deities could store resources within them, transport troops, and relocate entire forces across enormous distances in moments.
In an age defined by interstellar conflict, that made them indispensable.
They were, by almost any reasonable definition, the protagonists of the current era.
The chance of awakening as a deity was roughly one in ten thousand.
And when it happened, everything changed.
Status.
Wealth.
Power.
A future that ordinary people could never reach suddenly became possible.
Caelum had been one of the fortunate few.
More than that, he had awakened a nine-square-kilometer divine realm.
That scale placed him among the most talented students in his generation.
His potential had been extraordinary.
So had the temptations that came with it.
He ignored them.
Instead, he devoted himself almost entirely to cultivation.
At the center of every deity’s power was their retinue.
The races that populated their divine realms.
The followers who sustained their gods through faith.
Retinues were divided into three broad tiers.
Low-grade races included Goblins, Murlocs, and other lesser creatures.
They were generally weak, unintelligent, and poor at generating faith.
Useful in large numbers.
Little else.
Medium-grade races were different.
Hobgoblins.
Harpies.
Naga.
These races possessed genuine intelligence and could develop deep, loyal faith toward their deity.
They formed the backbone of most divine realms and served as the primary fighting forces for the majority of successful deities.
Then there were high-grade races.
Elves.
Dwarves.
Orcs.
Beings with exceptional intelligence, powerful bodies, and an almost extraordinary capacity for faith.
They were the dream of every ambitious deity.
A high-grade retinue could transform an ordinary divine realm into something terrifying.
But cultivating such races required a divine domain of at least nine hundred square kilometers.
Most deities couldn’t reach that threshold even after four years of Academy cultivation.
There were exceptions, of course.
There were always exceptions.
The chosen ones.
Some were born with rare resources already embedded within their domains.
Others discovered special structures that allowed them to bypass limitations that bound everyone else.
Caelum had found another way.
Or at least, he had thought he had.
The idea had come to him in the Academy library.
He had been browsing through old records when a particular book caught his attention.
The Bloodline Ascension Technique.
Combined with the drop of Eternal Water he had received upon enrollment, a thought began forming in his mind.
It was ambitious.
Reckless.
Almost absurd.
He wanted to transform his Hobgoblins into Orcs.
According to ancient legends, it was possible.
Hobgoblins had once been tempered for generations within the Bloodforge, a primal volcanic region said to burn away everything weak within a bloodline.
Those that survived eventually developed into the first Orcs.
It was an evolution.
Slow.
Mythical.
But real.
The Bloodline Ascension Technique offered a way to accelerate that process.
The success rate was catastrophically low.
Caelum knew that.
He wouldn’t have attempted it without a reason.
From the moment the idea had taken root, however, he had felt something strange.
A certainty he couldn’t explain.
The technique was connected to something beyond his ambitions as a deity.
Something connected to Earth.
To his previous life.
To the possibility of returning.
He wanted to go back.
Not because he missed the misery of his old life.
He was honest enough to admit that he didn’t.
It was easy to descend from comfort into hardship.
The reverse was far more difficult.
He had grown accustomed to power.
To influence.
To living a life where his choices actually mattered.
He couldn’t pretend otherwise.
But his parents were different.
He couldn’t let them go.
Distance had a way of changing people.
Things that once irritated you became memories you desperately wanted back.
The sound of their voices.
Their complaints.
The little arguments that had once seemed so meaningless.
He had disappeared from their world without warning.
Without explanation.
He couldn’t stop wondering what that had done to them.
So he prepared.
Carefully.
Thoroughly.
For months, he conducted trials.
Collected materials.
Tested every variable he could think of.
He didn’t begin until he believed he had eliminated every reasonable risk.
Then he started.
At first, everything went according to plan.
The Hobgoblin bloodline began purifying.
Its essence gradually sublimated upward, moving toward the threshold between one race and another.
The evolution progressed.
Caelum pushed it forward carefully, monitoring every change.
Then the first obstacle appeared.
He overcame it.
Another followed.
He overcame that one too.
Each barrier required more effort than the last, but he continued pushing forward.
Until he reached the final obstacle.
And discovered that it wasn’t an obstacle at all.
It was a wall.
The Bloodline Ascension Technique described the advancement of a lineage within itself.
One form of Elf becoming a higher form of Elf.
One type of Dwarf advancing into another.
The technique had never been designed to transform one lineage into an entirely different one.
Caelum wasn’t trying to ascend a bloodline.
He was trying to change it.
Hobgoblin into Orc.
It wasn’t evolution within a lineage.
It was transmutation.
Two entirely different paths.
The technique only covered one.
But there was no way to stop once bloodline evolution had begun.
It could only move forward.
So Caelum did the only thing he could think of.
He dismantled the technique.
Then rebuilt it.
If the original method moved from derivation toward origin, he would reverse the process.
He would move from origin toward derivation.
He was forging a path the technique had never intended to create.
A path built entirely through improvisation.
Somehow, against every reasonable expectation, it worked.
The Hobgoblins began to change.
Slowly at first.
Then faster.
Their bodies shifted.
Their bloodlines altered.
The first signs of something Orcish began to emerge.
He was close.
He could feel it.
The transformation was almost complete.
Then something appeared.
Caelum had no name for it.
He still didn’t.
It arrived without warning.
Without a source.
Without any recognizable quality that he could analyze or counter.
The first time it appeared, it simply severed the evolutionary path.
Like a blade cutting through thread.
Once the path was broken, the Hobgoblins had only one possible fate.
Annihilation.
Caelum immediately reversed the technique.
He tried to drag them back from the brink.
To return them to what they had been.
To save whatever could still be saved.
Then the force returned.
This time, it didn’t interfere.
It didn’t obstruct.
It devoured.
Every last Hobgoblin vanished in an instant.
Their life force disappeared.
Their faith disappeared.
And without that faith, the divine realm began to collapse.
Caelum stared at the destruction surrounding him.
"Heaven itself moved against me."
His voice was quiet.
"What could I have done differently?"
He had done everything within his power.
Then he had gone beyond it.
And something far greater had appeared and undone everything in moments.
For a long time, he simply stood there.
Eventually, he lowered his head.
’Take one last look.’
Then leave.
Go back to an ordinary life.
His eyes moved slowly across the ruins.
The shattered mountains.
The dead rivers.
The remnants of a world he had spent years building.
He closed his eyes.
Then he felt it.
Again.
That presence.
Vast.
Ancient.
Sacred.
Impossible to mistake.
It carried the same overwhelming weight as before.
The same force that had destroyed his hopes now seemed to be waiting for him.
Caelum’s eyes snapped open.
Something was glowing within the ruined realm.
A brilliant blue light had appeared among the wreckage.
It pulsed with the rhythm of something alive.
Around it, the realm’s collapse had slowed.
Not stopped.
Slowed.
As though the light itself were holding the dying world together through sheer force of will.
And at the center of that light was a small object.
A bead.
Caelum slowly raised his hand.
The bead floated toward him.
It crossed the distance without resistance, as though it had been waiting for this exact moment.
The instant his fingers closed around it, understanding struck him.
He knew this object.
It was the meteorite.
The same object that had crossed trillions of light-years and ended one life so another could begin.
He recognized it without knowing how.
The sensation was strangely familiar.
Like remembering something he had never actually learned.
He stood there for a long time, staring at the bead in his palm.
Eighteen years of memories settled around him.
The academy.
His parents.
His followers.
His ambitions.
Everything he’d built.
Everything he’d lost.
Then, slowly, a small smile appeared.
It was bitter.
Almost sad.
But there was something strangely gentle about it too.
"So..."
His fingers closed around the bead.
"I really can’t go back."