The vast Inner World that Dan had spent thousands of years constructing was inhabited by three intelligent races that shared its immense territories, coexisting or clashing across its countless regions.
The first race was humanity. The second was the Hand Lizards. The third was the Gray Dwarves, although that name no longer suited them in the slightest after the dramatic transformation they had undergone since entering the Inner World. Having adapted to an environment overflowing with abundant resources and extraordinarily dense natural energy, their bodies had grown tremendously in size.
Some of them had even reached gigantic proportions compared to humans. Even so, Dan still preferred to call them the Gray Dwarves, despite recognizing that the title Gray Giants had become far more accurate and better reflected what they had become.
Alongside these three intelligent races lived countless other creatures and beasts that had either evolved naturally within the Inner World or had been introduced into it. Over the years, some of these creatures attained genuine wisdom, their intelligence steadily increasing as they mastered the use of the natural energy permeating every aspect of their environment. Some even established territories of their own, resembling the Three Sacred Lands that existed in the outside world.
Humanity, however, occupied a very different position from the others. Dan had introduced humans into the Inner World long after the Hand Lizards and the Gray Dwarves. That enormous difference in timing gave the older races a tremendous advantage, allowing them to adapt to the world's natural energy, exploit its resources, and evolve for countless generations before humans ever arrived. As a result, humanity began from a far lower point on the ladder of power and had yet to catch up to the other races.
The obvious question was where these humans had come from.
The answer was simple.
The first generation consisted of criminals and prisoners sentenced to death whom Dan had gathered from the outside world. He considered it a fair exchange even from the perspective of those who had been brought into the Inner World against their will . because the only alternative awaiting them had been certain execution. Instead, they were transported into a completely new world, one unlike anything they had ever known, granting many of them lives that extended well beyond a hundred years.
But that gift came at a price.
The Inner World was fundamentally different from the outside world in every respect, even at its most basic biological level. It contained microscopic life unlike anything found elsewhere, originating from thousands of different planets whose materials had been used in its construction. There were viruses that no human immune system had ever encountered, along with microbes and microscopic organisms that had evolved under planetary conditions radically different from those of the human homeworld.
Had those humans entered the Inner World without assistance, they would have died almost immediately from poisoning or unfamiliar diseases simply by breathing its air . a death far quicker and far more agonizing than the execution that had originally awaited them.
To prevent that outcome, Dan injected each of them with an enormous quantity of healing chakra before their arrival and continued to do so during the earliest stages of their lives there. The healing chakra remained active throughout their entire lifetimes, constantly working in the background without interruption.
Its purpose was twofold.
First, it protected their bodies from immediate death upon exposure to an environment their biology had never evolved to survive.
Second, it gradually helped them adapt by strengthening their immune systems and providing them with the resources necessary to develop resistance against the countless biological threats surrounding them.
This medical intervention if it could even be called that was the only area in which Dan actively assisted them.
Everything else, including their pain and illnesses, was left to follow its natural course without any attempt to lessen or cure it.
Although he settled them in relatively safe regions of the Inner World where food and water were plentiful enough to prevent starvation or dehydration, they nevertheless spent their lives plagued by chronic illness and constant pain, neither of which Dan ever sought to alleviate.
In his eyes, this was an appropriate punishment.
After all, the overwhelming majority of them had been condemned criminals who had earned their death sentences through genuine crimes. The long lives they received instead of execution were not gifts freely given, but opportunities purchased at a cost.
Yet Dan had another practical reason for allowing those chronic illnesses to persist.
Constant pain and lifelong sickness gradually suppressed the violent and aggressive tendencies that had once defined many of those criminals. As a result, the earliest human settlements within the Inner World became far more stable than they otherwise would have been. Despite their different backgrounds and histories filled with violence and crime, they succeeded in building relatively stable primitive communities with enough organization to survive, reproduce, and slowly lay the foundations of an emerging civilization.
Thus began the lives of the first generation of humans in the Inner World: condemned criminals whose punishment had been transformed into a mission they had never chosen, one that granted them long lives filled with abundant food and resources, but at the price of pain and disease that accompanied them until the very end of their days.
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