The final scene of the mural depicted a group of Felynes wielding stone spears, using their sheer numbers to grapple with a grounded Bazelgeuse that could no longer take to the air.
Though the Bazelgeuse was gravely wounded and ill-suited for close-quarters combat on the ground, its raw physical power still dwarfed that of the Felynes by a wide margin. Before long, more than twenty of them lay motionless on the earth.
Just as the situation was teetering on the edge of collapse, one Felyne discovered the unconscious Lin not far away — and the Plasma Pistol holstered at his side.
The mural ended abruptly there. Clearly, they hadn't had the chance to paint the rest yet. But Lin already knew how the story concluded.
Seeing this, Lin finally understood: tonight's feast was not only a celebration of a hunt won, but a remembrance of those who had fallen.
The Felynes had not made such an enormous sacrifice to hunt the Bazelgeuse out of some cold calculation of survival odds. They had done it to prove something — that they were not creatures condemned to spend their days fleeing in terror before every monster that crossed their path. They, too, had the strength to rise up, to fight back, to overcome the gravest threat their kind had ever faced.
For an intelligent species, that kind of spiritual uplift matters far more than mere survival. Lose the will to live — lose the sense of purpose and direction — and even those who scrape by are nothing more than walking corpses shuffling toward inevitable extinction.
These Felynes had conquered their enemy, and conquered themselves. Their sacrifice had laid down a path — a future, a hope — for the entire tribe to walk forward upon. That was why they had gathered here, feasting on the flesh of the Bazelgeuse, every last Felyne drinking themselves into a stupor. When tonight was over, they — and their entire people — would face a new beginning.
Lin felt as though he was not witnessing a hunt, but a grand expedition — a Felyne odyssey. He was drawn in not just by the all-or-nothing ferocity the mural's Felynes had thrown into the fight for their future, but by something deeper: a resonance of the spirit.
Still, for all the courage these warriors had shown in lifting their tribe's morale, Lin wasn't particularly optimistic about their long-term prospects.
In the original Monster Hunter world, monsters ran rampant, yes — but humans, Wyverians, and other intelligent races with genuine martial capability had carved out relatively safe territories, and had systematically organized the Hunter's Guild to combat the monster threat.
Felynes who integrated into human society naturally had nothing to worry about. Even wild Felynes could eke out an existence in the open wilderness, where Hunter Guild patrols regularly culled the large monster populations, and simple trade with nearby settlements was always an option.
But this planet was different. There were no other intelligent species here. Felynes alone, small and fragile as they were, could not hold up the sky by themselves. From an evolutionary standpoint, without a reasonably stable source of high-energy meat, the odds of a species developing higher intelligence were vanishingly small.
Their omnivorous nature might keep them from starving — but if every waking hour was spent foraging for low-calorie wild berries, where would the energy come from to reproduce and expand? Where would the time come from to develop and study tools? How could any species hope to evolve under those conditions?
Consider that humanity on Earth had already stood at the top of the food chain back in the Stone Age. These Felynes had been spinning their wheels in their own stone age for who knows how long and had barely inched forward. Lin had serious doubts that a tribe of barely a hundred cats could manage a generational leap forward in the time ahead.
Then again, their intelligence was genuinely remarkable. They had simply witnessed him blasting the Bazelgeuse out of the sky with a Plasma Pistol in midair — and from that alone, they had thought to borrow his weapon, had even managed to disengage its safety lock and fire it.
Lin mulled it over, turning the question of what the Felynes could become over in his mind.
By the standards of the Imperium of Man, these creatures — primitive glimmers of civilization, yet so far removed from humanity — would unquestionably be classified as xenos. But the Felynes' level of civilization was so rudimentary, and Lin knew well that Felynes had a strong instinct for attachment and companionship; they were capable of forming genuinely close bonds with humans. If he could bring this tribe under his wing...
While Lin was still thinking, a few Felynes came padding over, carrying buckets and crude brushes fashioned from feathers. Lin glanced over and saw that the buckets appeared to contain primitive pigments they had ground from ore themselves. The Felynes first bowed respectfully to the elder Felyne, then dipped their feather brushes into the paint and began drawing on the cave wall.
Lin watched with genuine interest as they worked in their primitive but history-capturing, world-depicting way — and then he saw a small figure in a red robe clutching a blue pistol get slapped onto the stone. His eyes went wide as he realized these cats might very well be painting him.
He leaned in for a closer look. In the mural, his figure was accompanied by a sleek black dragon. Based on the depiction, it seemed that in the Felynes' understanding, the black dragon had spread its wings, and the gust of wind from those mighty wings was what had swept Lin down to them.
What on earth?
Lin pointed at the black dragon in the mural and started asking questions. What he found was that every Felyne regarded that black dragon with reverence and devout awe.
Led by the elder Felyne, a group of Felynes brought Lin before a rough-hewn shrine. Within it sat a figure that was just barely recognizable as a black dragon, enshrined within. Watching the Felynes prostrate themselves before it, Lin's eyes went wide — and he realized, for the first time, that this tribe of Felynes already had the beginnings of a primitive religious faith.
In the Monster Hunter world, Elder Dragons were a broad term for a category of dragon-type creatures whose nature lay beyond human comprehension — and among Elder Dragons, none were more legendary than the black dragons. They almost invariably possessed power beyond human resistance; their very appearance could reshape an entire ecosystem in ways that defied calculation.
Here, however, in the eyes of these Felynes, the black dragon was the embodiment of a natural force — the god of this very planet. It maintained the balance of the world's ecosystem, and Lin, who had fallen from the sky and helped the Felynes slay the Bazelgeuse, was the Chosen One gifted to them by the black dragon's divine will.
The Felynes' interpretation left Lin somewhere between amused and exasperated. With no shared language, he had no intention of wasting the effort to explain the misunderstanding. Instead, he simply reached out and picked up the shrine, intending to get a better look at it up close.
The moment it was in his hands, however, he felt a faint but unmistakable resistance emanating from the object.
Lin paused. He recognized that sensation. It was what happened when he, as a Blank, touched items imbued with psychic energy — the psychic object would push back against him, repelling his presence.
But for that feeling to appear here, now...
Did that mean this shrine was actually psychically charged?
But why? Had these cats somehow accidentally prayed divinity into a lump of wood, the same way a weasel deity gets conjured up by enough people bowing to it long enough?
No. Wait. That wasn't quite right. Even the most ephemeral form of belief-born power could ultimately be understood as a form of psychic energy — just expressed differently. And if that was the case, it couldn't be anchored to something that didn't exist. There had to be something on the other end: some form of psychic entity, or a warp-born presence of some kind...
While Lin was still working through his thoughts, the shrine in his hands had already begun to buckle under the mutual repulsion between a Blank and psychic energy. Fine cracks spiderwebbed across the surface of the wooden object.
Lin moved to set it back down, but the aged wood was already in poor condition to begin with. After exhausting itself against the Blank's presence and spending every last trace of psychic energy it held, the shrine could no longer maintain its own cohesion — and it split cleanly in two right in Lin's hands.
Lin froze. The Felynes froze.
They stared at him with wide, fearful eyes, unable to determine whether their Chosen One had destroyed the shrine — or whether the god itself was displeased with them.
Looking at the bewildered faces before him, Lin snapped out of his stupor and quickly realized this, too, was an opportunity.
Without hesitation, he crushed what remained of the shrine to powder in his grip. Then he stepped forward to stand in the very spot where the shrine had rested, raised both arms above his head, and began to address the Felynes gathered below.
"You need not fear the darkness."
The expression on Lin's face became sacred and solemn. "For the light of the God-Emperor has arrived!"
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