Grey’s memories flashed with the realization of something. Back in the trench that separated the catacombs of the church into two halves, that tomb existed. When Calixan opened it up, the black version of the Fog of Chaos came out and swallowed up the more misty, fog-like version.
Grey had been confused at the time, but watching the black hole here work, he couldn’t help but wonder...
Was that actually a form of restraint? Did the black hole-like Fog of Chaos have a magnetic effect on the more liberal, free-flowing sort of Fog of Chaos?
But in that case, why would the various civilizations coming out of their bubbles cause the Fog of Chaos to react differently?
Grey simply didn’t have an answer for all that.
As he continued to observe, he watched as the uses of the Genesis System evolved, everything progressed forward, but no one seemed to grow any closer to finding a solution for dealing with the Fog of Chaos.
That was when the universe split into two halves once again.
One half believed that they should desire to continue finding ways to fight against the Fog of Chaos, and the other half believed that they were doing things all wrong... that the Fog of Chaos was a part of the universe and thus they should be trying to embrace it like any other...
And that was when the Dark Kin and the Savage Races appeared.
Grey’s heart skipped a beat. He had already realized that he was watching the start of the universe, but there was something about this that just felt truly...
Was he supposed to be seeing this? This was his reward? To see the matters that triggered the start of everything?
But was he seeing everything...
Grey often acted like a bit of a knucklehead, but he was far from one. He understood human nature—or what seemed to be the nature of life in general.
Seeing it from this vantage point, he was even more sure.
Life was selfish, self-serving, it would do anything to survive.
There was no real difference between the Lurking Races and the Signalling Races, as this flashback called them. The Lurking Races weren’t any more sinister than the Signalling Races even though this flashback actively tried to paint them as the aggressors.
The Lurking Races—the Races that waited for signals to approach them instead of sending them out themselves—were only doing what they thought would protect themselves most.
The Signalling Races—the Races that sent out radio waves and pulsing light signals in hopes of making contact—were selfish in their own ways.
They wanted to learn more about the universe, greedily gobbling up any sort of connection and paradoxical tidbits they could to grow stronger and control more themselves.
Grey himself was part of a Signalling Race, but after everything he had seen the humans of Earth be capable of, was he really going to be on his high horse?
Honestly, he would have preferred to be part of a Lurking Race. Right this moment he felt that way. At least then his life wouldn’t be hanging by a thread every day.
If he could honestly feel that way, who was he to say that he was better than a Lurking Race?
Maybe if the Signalling Race Alliances were all peaceful, he might have changed his mind. But they were no less flawed, no less aggressive when the situation dictated it be so.
He had fought against Esmeralda through enough loops to know this. If the likes of Joaquin and Calixan could become Buddhas and high-level Priests, then there was really no distinguishing them at all.
So, even as he watched the narrative be twisted right before his very eyes, Grey couldn’t help but wonder if this was really history he was seeing in front of him now, or just a version of it, one painted through the tinted glasses of someone with a hidden motive.
But this realization changed little about the shock of what he was seeing.
The two halves of the universe clashed again, and this time, the war raged on for so long that a victor had to be chosen.
The Dark Kin eventually lost, their numbers cut and sliced away until too few of them remained to be any sort of threat any longer. However, it looked like they only had themselves to blame.
The Black Hole Fog of Chaos was too difficult to control. They demanded more and more of it as the war reached toward its apex and they ended up flying too close to the sun.
The strongest of them lost their humanity even if they did survive, but more of them were shredded apart, the balance between their Neural Frames and the Fog of Chaos being too skewed to recover from.
The Savage Races took advantage of this fall at their top echelon to command a decisive victory and they inevitably took over the universe, driving the Races that remained to follow their path.
But it was too late. The actions of the Dark Kin had pumped far too much Fog of Chaos into the universe and everything felt painted in black.
They fought, and fought, and fought to understand it, to try and coexist with it...
"Holy fucking shit, no way..."
Grey’s eyes widened as he watched the last thing he would have expected to happen do exactly that right in front of his very eyes.
The Fog of Chaos grew, it consumed, it reaped. Stars began to blink out, planets were swallowed whole, the world as they knew it fell further and further into a quagmire of nothingness...
Until the universe itself was just gone, erased.
Grey floated there in an endless black that grew so saturated it didn’t feel like he was staring into a shade any longer. It felt like he was staring into true nothingness. This was no longer a black hole. It had no mass, no existence, no nothing...
And then a pulse of light radiated out from it.
Out from within the massive black hole, a new universe was born around it.
Stars blinked back into existence from a sludge of dense, swimming energies.
Then, Grey saw a window into what was left trapped within the new Black Hole.
The Genesis System muted, the laws of the universe twisted, and the land of the Genesis Games was born.
’No... that’s not what happened...’
The land of the Genesis Games evolved.
This wasn’t the first time this cycle had happened.
And it may very well not be the last.