PROLOGUETHE BEGINNING AGAIN
The idea of beginning again has always lingered in the deep recesses of the human mind. It is one of the oldest desires to take root within the collective imagination of the species: the hope that destruction need not be the end, that what is broken can be restored, and that humanity might one day transcend the consequences of its own mistakes.
It appeared in the sacred texts of the ancients, in the forgotten songs of nomads, in the philosophies of civilizations long since reduced to dust, and eventually in the digital hymns of the post-industrial age. It was the promise that carried civilizations through collapse after collapse
the belief that even when everything was lost, something could begin again.
Yet, as history would reveal, humanity had never truly understood what beginning again meant.
It was never prepared for the day when the universe itself would decide to start over.
What came next was not salvation.
It was not renewal.
It was annihilation.
The desire to begin again became something else entirely when the event now known as The Blank Nexus erupted into existence.
No one knew how it began.
There were theories, of course. There were always theories.
Some believed the Nexus was a divine correction, a response from the cosmos to the accumulated weight of humanity's existence. Others claimed it was the consequence of an experiment conducted by civilizations so ancient that even their names had vanished from history.
Scientists proposed the collapse of fundamental physical laws.
Religious orders called it judgment.
Governments classified it as an extinction-level anomaly.
No explanation survived long enough to be proven.
The Blank Nexus tore through the observable universe with merciless force.
Reality convulsed.
Star clusters collapsed beneath forces that defied every known law of physics. Galaxies folded inward as immense waves of energy passed through the fabric of space. Light bent where it should have traveled straight. Gravity became unstable. Matter itself began behaving in ways no instrument could explain.
The universe humanity had spent millennia studying was coming apart.
Order died.
And chaos took its place.
Our solar system was caught within the expanding phenomenon.
The planets suffered first.
Worlds that had survived for billions of years were torn apart in moments. Their atmospheres were stripped away. Their surfaces fractured. Mountains became clouds of debris. Oceans rose into the heavens before falling back as boiling storms.
Then came something humanity had never encountered.
Energy.
It moved through space like radiation, yet behaved unlike any known form of radiation. It passed through matter while altering it. It interacted with living organisms. It changed molecular structures without following predictable physical laws.
The surviving scientists gave it a name.
URA.
At first, URA was treated as a new form of cosmic energy.
That assumption did not last.
URA was not simply energy.
It was transformative.
It did not merely destroy what it touched.
It changed it.
Across the solar system, fragments of shattered moons and planets became saturated with URA. Dust, ice, metal, and stone absorbed the phenomenon until entire celestial bodies became unstable.
Then gravity pulled the debris inward.
Earth stood in its path.
The first impact fractured the planet.
The second altered its atmosphere.
The third began the end of the world.
Continents split apart beneath waves of molten rock. The oceans rose into the atmosphere. The crust ruptured as enormous quantities of URA poured into the planet's interior.
Civilization disappeared almost instantly.
Cities vanished.
Satellites fell from orbit.
Communication networks collapsed.
The world's great nations ceased to exist.
And billions of people died.
But humanity did not disappear completely.
Not yet.
Some survived beneath the surface.
Deep underground facilities designed to withstand nuclear war and planetary disasters sealed themselves shut. Military bunkers, research complexes, industrial shelters, private survival installations, and experimental laboratories became tombs for those who had escaped the initial destruction.
Others survived through technologies that had never been intended for an event of this magnitude.
Cryogenic systems preserved human bodies.
Advanced medical facilities maintained patients inside artificial life-support environments.
Some orbital habitats survived long enough to descend.
Others were buried beneath layers of newly formed rock.
The survivors had no idea how long they would remain underground.
For many, it was years.
For some, decades.
For others, centuries.
Above them, Earth died.
The planet became a furnace of fractured crust, molten oceans, and violent storms.
Yet deep beneath the surface, another transformation had begun.
The URA pouring into Earth did not remain in the crust.
It descended.
Deeper.
And deeper.
Until it reached the planet's core.
There, the energy accumulated.
The metallic heart of Earth began to change.
The core absorbed enormous quantities of URA until it became something fundamentally different from anything humanity had ever encountered. Its density increased. Its gravitational influence expanded.
The planet itself began to transform around it.
The crust expanded.
The mantle thickened.
The atmosphere changed.
Earth grew.
What had once been a familiar blue planet became an enormous world with a core burning with impossible energy.
The old Earth was gone.
But the planet remained,
Changed.
Surrounded by four new moons.
And so did humanity.
Eventually, the Blank Nexus moved beyond the solar system.
It left behind a universe that no longer obeyed the rules humanity had known.
The Sun had changed as well.
Nexus radiation had caused its outer layers to expand to an unimaginable scale—more than seventeen hundred times its original size.
Yet the star did not die.
Instead, the solar system settled into a new equilibrium.
The surviving planets found new orbits.
Some were destroyed.
Some were transformed.
Some became worlds unlike anything humanity had ever imagined.
Earth drifted far beyond its original orbit.
Its oceans were different.
Its continents were different.
Its atmosphere was different.
Its gravity was different.
And somewhere beneath its surface, humanity waited.
The transformation was believed to have occurred near the end of the year 2834.
The exact date was never recovered.
The surviving records were incomplete.
Most of the archives of old Earth had been destroyed.
But not all of them.
Humanity had already spread beyond its homeworld long before the Blank Nexus.
Colonies existed across distant exoplanets. Some were small mining settlements. Others were immense cities capable of supporting millions of people.
Those colonies became the witnesses.
From worlds light-years away, they watched the place humanity had originated disappear.
Then the transmissions stopped.
One by one, Earth's signals went silent.
The colonies waited.
Days became weeks.
Weeks became months.
Eventually, Earth was declared lost.
Humanity had survived.
But its homeworld had not.
The people who remained on the colonies carried on without knowing whether anyone had survived the catastrophe.
Some continued searching for signals.
Others moved on.
Generations passed.
The memory of Earth faded.
But on the planet itself, the survivors emerged from their shelters.
They stepped into a world they did not recognize.
The sky was unfamiliar.
The land had been reshaped.
The Sun looked impossibly large in the heavens.
And everywhere, URA permeated the environment.
The first survivors struggled simply to remain alive.
Their bodies had been designed for the old Earth.
Atheris—though they did not yet know that name—was different.
The gravity was stronger.
The atmosphere was altered.
The environment was hostile.
Yet Anomalously the human body adapted.
At first, the changes were subtle.
Muscle density increased.
Bones strengthened.
Organs became more resistant to environmental stress.
The descendants of the survivors began adapting to the world around them.
URA accelerated those changes.
It interacted with their biology in ways no scientist from the old world could have predicted.
Some humans developed heightened senses.
Others displayed unusual physical abilities.
A few began demonstrating an ability to interact directly with a form of URA.
The survivors realized that humanity was changing.
evolving.
Generation by generation.
Century by century.
Humanity was becoming adapted to the world it had inherited.
The survivors rebuilt.
Old shelters became settlements.
Settlements became cities.
Cities became civilizations.
And the knowledge of the old world became the foundation of the new one.
The first generations still remembered Earth.
They remembered oceans that had once been blue.
They remembered forests that had covered entire continents.
They remembered the old cities.
They remembered the Moon.
They remembered humanity's first steps beyond the atmosphere.
They remembered the age before the Blank Nexus.
And some remembered the event itself.
These survivors became invaluable.
The New age Scientists taught their descendants how the old machines worked.
Engineers rebuilt lost infrastructure.
Historians preserved what remained of humanity's past, foretold relics.
Linguists protected ancient languages, some of which are spoken to this day.
Archivists gathered whatever records had survived.
The old world was not forgotten.
Not yet.
Some survivors even possessed technologies that allowed them to live far beyond the natural human lifespan.
Cryogenic preservation, advanced cellular treatments, artificial organs, genetic therapies, and URA exposure itself allowed a small number of individuals to survive for extraordinarily long periods.
They became living witnesses to humanity's lost age.
They remembered what no archive could fully capture.
They remembered Earth.
As centuries passed, however, the number of these original survivors dwindled.
Their descendants inherited their knowledge.
Then those descendants passed it to others.
Stories became histories.
Histories became traditions.
And traditions eventually became myths.
But the records remained.
Deep beneath the cities of the new world, ancient archives preserved photographs, scientific databases, historical documents, military records, engineering designs, and fragments of the civilization that had existed before the Blank Nexus.
Humanity had not forgotten where it came from.
It simply no longer lived there.
Eventually, the survivors gave their world a name.
Atheris.
No one agreed on where the name originated.
Some believed it had been preserved within an ancient archive.
Others claimed it came from one of the first surviving languages.
Some believed the name had been discovered independently by several settlements.
Whatever its origin, it remained.
Atheris.
The world born from the death of Earth.
And the people who inhabited it eventually came to call themselves Unveli.
The name meant the Unveiled Ones.
To the earliest generations, it represented what humanity had learned through catastrophe.
The universe was larger than they had believed.
Life was more adaptable than they had imagined.
And humanity itself was capable of becoming something beyond what it had once been.
The Unveli were still human.
Their bodies, minds, cultures, and civilizations carried the legacy of their ancestors.
But thousands of years of evolution had changed them.
URA did not affect every population equally.
Different environments exposed different groups to different concentrations and frequencies of the energy.
Over generations, those differences became biological.
Humanity began to diverge.
Four major branches eventually emerged.
The first became known as the NeoHumans.
Their ancestors developed a strong resonance with URATSU, a URA frequency associated with kinetic potential, transformation, and adaptation through endurance.
NeoHuman physiology remained the closest to that of ancient humanity, but their bodies were considerably stronger and more resistant to Atheris's environment.
Their connection to URATSU eventually produced what became known as Augments abilities that enhanced existing biological functions or allowed entirely new physical capabilities to develop.
The NeoHumans became builders, explorers, scientists, soldiers, and inventors.
They inherited humanity's oldest instinct:
to overcome what stood in its way.
The second branch became the Elves.
Their ancestors developed a strong resonance with RANU, the harmonic frequency associated with life, balance, the elements and renewal.
Their evolution made them exceptionally sensitive to biological systems and the natural flow of URA through living organisms.
They became closely connected to the ecosystems of Atheris.
Their civilizations developed around the preservation and understanding of life.
The third branch became the Sparians.
Their ancestors were shaped by UKAI, a resonance associated with aggression, motion, survival, and physical force.
Their bodies adapted toward strength and resilience.
Their bones became denser.
Their muscles became more powerful.
Their ability to recover from physical trauma became extraordinary.
The Sparians evolved in some of the harshest environments on Atheris.
Survival shaped them.
And survival became central to their culture.
The final branch became the Yukari.
Their ancestors developed a strong connection to NINUDAI, the cold spectrum of perception, memory, preservation, and control.
Many adapted to the deepest and most hostile environments of Atheris.
Their bodies became exceptionally dense and resistant to extreme conditions.
Their nervous systems became highly sensitive to URA.
Their connection to NINUDAI eventually produced abilities associated with perception, memory, preservation, and control.
Four races.
One ancestry.
One species divided by thousands of years of evolution.
The NeoHumans.
The Elves.
The Sparians.
The Yukari.
not the creations of gods.
They were humanity.
Humanity after the end of Earth.
Humanity after thousands of years of adaptation.