The Martial Unity

Long, long ago, there was Earth.

It revolved around its humble, but young sun, in a humble solar system at the further ends of a humble spiral galaxy.

Based on the information that he had gathered, this was not the Earth of the twenty-first century. In fact, this was Earth that was a few centuries ahead of the era in which he, John Falken, had lived.

Their technology was greater. Their weapons were greater. They had reached a stage where mechs could roam the streets without disrupting society. They had also evolved their language to the point that even Rui no longer recognized it. He recalled seeing some texts when he went searching for the Shepherd, and he couldn’t decipher the language, even if it was clearly Anglo-Saxon.

This Earth in the 23rd or 24th century was the ‘civilization of unparalleled prosperity’ that the Shepherd had referred to.

It was what the six civilizations of the true world referred to as the ancestral or primordial civilization. Then, a meteorite came to Earth.

A meteorite containing vast amounts of esoteric matter.

It must have been large enough to utterly annihilate the planet with its sheer momentum. And must have been so durable that not even the advanced human civilization of the future must have been able to do anything about it. They were doomed.

Or so they thought.

Instead of destroying Earth, the meteorite used some strange esoteric matter to dig into Earth without causing absolute destruction. It managed to avoid wiping out all life.

Of course, just because it managed to avoid complete extinction of all life does not mean that the process was peaceful. It was not.

It destroyed human civilization as they knew it, and it indeed killed a large number of human beings as it integrated into Earth and began transforming it.

This was what was referred to as the Epoch of Evolution by the true world. It was so long ago and such an esoteric phenomenon that they had no idea what the nature of the extinction event was, but they knew that something had happened that had destroyed life as they knew it and had triggered an evolutionary arms race.

Upon impact or perhaps rapidly after, the meteorite had inadvertently destroyed all existing continents, whether it were the Eurasia, the Americas, the poles, Africa, or Australia, and created new continents in their place.

Seven new continents.

Each of those seven new continents, Panama, Genora, Samarkha, Kiriket, Acherialis, Moridia, and Sirinwel, contained human survivors.

They had lost everything.

They banded together to barely survive, perhaps no more than a hundred or a thousand people at one point in time.

Those thousand or so people in each of the seven continents were the ancestors of all of the trillions of the seven homo sapien descendent races that existed, though they weren’t homo sapien anymore.

The seventh continent just so happened to form where the meteorite had struck. It was a truly unfathomable miracle that any life had survived such a massive collision, but once again, Rui suspected that the esoteric matter had somehow softened the blow and had allowed the meteorite to ‘dig’ into the crust without destroying the surface.

Once it dug in, it must have planted the manifold tree.

Rui wasn’t sure where the manifold tree species came from. He highly doubted that this was derived from Earth trees, given the fact that the manifold tree was made up of layers, not cells. It was a completely and unfathomably different model for life.

He suspected that the manifold tree must have come from another alien world where the alien virus must have succeeded.

It must have succeeded in its plan of exploding the planet to spread the alien virus across the cosmos.

The negatron core of Gaia was shaped as Earth, and he knew that the alien virus had absorbed all the information it could get from Earth and Gaia. This meant that it was possible for the alien virus to carry information about all life.

It could use primordial seed to recreate that life for whatever purpose it wanted, just as it had with the species of Gaia, such as the Dragon Emperor or Anthea.

It must have done just that to plant a powerful manifold tree at the exact location where it crashed in Gaia, the epicenter of the Panama Continent. The manifold tree subsequently created an extraordinarily powerful manifold that completely swallowed the Panama Continent, hiding it from the rest of the world.

At that point in time, human civilization would have been destroyed, thus no global surveillance or satellite systems would have been able to detect the disappearing continent to know exactly what happened. At most, they would know that a large patch of land have just disappeared.

Once the Panama Continent was swallowed into the manifold, the meteorite must have commenced the esoterification of the Panama Continent, spreading esoteric matter across the entire continent and, simultaneously, wiping out all information of the past.

It created a ‘blank slate’ of a continent, or as close to it as possible, with the remaining surviving life within it. The humans could try as they might to keep the truth of their past alive, but eventually, it would be forgotten. Children born in Panama shortly after the manifold was created would have no idea what ‘Earth’ was. And even if their parents insisted it was real, they would simply not be able to connect. The surviving humans of Earth would have also likely been extremely desperate, only reproducing out of baser instincts rather than what would have been a more planned parenthood. They would have returned to their tribal roots and their caveman ancestors within a generation. The truth of the past would have been long wiped out even from their societal memories, as no record, no imprint, no ruins, and nothing of the past would remain to create that connection.

And thus was born the Panamic human.

They were born on a continent with esoteric matter.

In a continent that was rapidly expanding.

This rapid expansion of Panama and of, then, Earth would undoubtedly have pushed all life to the very brink of absolute extinction. It would have created extremely hostile, volatile tribulations and a world of chaos.

This was what the true world referred to as the ‘Age of Tumult.’

Homo sapien survivors on all seven continents, long evolved for a more mature civilization, would have had to undergo rapid evolution if they wanted to survive.

And they did.