Chapter 58: Letters II
Miles moved to the next letter.
[The world you live in now.]
[Anomalies. I am sure those of you reading this have met them. They are but a symptom of the true catastrophe befalling your species.]
[Your reality has been disrupted. It’s been broken out of its delicate equilibrium, creating chaos that feeds itself, creating a self-sustaining cycle of conceptual entropy. An entropy that will spread like cracks through your fabric of reality, expanding until all laws shatter beneath their own weight.]
[During my initial analysis, I was unable to determine the exact cause of this madness. The likeliest scenario is a pre-contact event, but even that is mere speculation.]
[All the speculation in the world won’t save you now, child. So I did my best to analyze all I could about the symptoms of this entropy, these anomalies you now face.]
[Anomalies are a direct result of the collapsing laws of reality. Like entropy, they all seek and have the ability to grow endlessly.]
[Based on these characteristics, I have classified them into five ranks and three sub-ranks based on the current state of their maturity.]
[Soma]
[Oikos]
[Polis]
[Ethnos]
[Kosmos]
[I have chosen the Greek language for this purpose, as it is the basis of my name.]
[Each rank represents a step in the power and scale of their anomalous properties. This in itself is not a sufficient system to classify them, so I have further demarcated each rank into three sub-levels of maturity: Larva, Pupa, and Imago.]
[Even this will likely prove not to be a sufficient yardstick for measuring them. As anomalies, they are designed to resist classification. But it is a system that should work well enough for now.]
[I would love to go into more detail, but time is against me once more. So I shall leave you with three things:]
[All anomalies, regardless of how they appear, are fundamentally misanthropic. They seek to eradicate humanity, to eradicate you who are the very manifestation of the balance they wish to destroy.]
[The only way to get rid of an anomaly is by completely destroying it, or else it will simply recover, grow stronger, and continue whatever it is that it was doing.]
[Finally, the seemingly infinite snowstorm, the ghouls, and any variations of them all belong to a single Kosmos-ranked anomaly: Niflheim.]
The letter ended there. Miles kept his gaze focused on that last word.
’Niflheim.’
It sounded familiar. While he couldn’t quite put his finger on what it meant exactly, it certainly wouldn’t be anything good.
Besides that, this Gaia was beyond a doubt the entity that had appeared in his status at the start. All the talk of disrupted reality, entropy, and chaos seemed so large and abstract that they barely even felt real.
But regardless of how real they were, there was little point in worrying about it now. Just like she’d said, speculation—even all the speculation in the world—would get him nothing.
It wouldn’t deal with the principal, and it certainly wouldn’t deal with [Niflheim].
The ranking system largely matched with all the kills he’d gotten so far. But he couldn’t for the life of him make sense of what those Greek words meant. Besides Kosmos.
He sighed mentally before moving onto the final letter.
[Farewell.]
[Hello, child. I believe I have introduced myself in another letter, but I feel it is necessary to do so again.]
[I am Gaia, what you could call the Earth’s soul, and by the time you’re reading this, I’ll be dead.]
[My purpose, as designed by my creators, was to gather strength quietly and wait until Earth crossed the required threshold for integration with the universe. Then I would be able to create and manage a well-balanced system using the resources I acquired.]
[Unfortunately, something else seems to have happened now. For whatever reason, Earth has been exposed to the supernatural without going through integration.]
[As a result of that, I barely had enough resources to create a system to help you, much less a decent one. You rely on pylons to increase your strength, the overall design is strange, and I even relied on the chaos currently ravaging your world to make some parts of it. It is for these reasons that EGO holds its own risk towards you now.]
[I will admit, I am a failure of a planetary soul to leave you with just this. It is nowhere near enough. Not when the chaos will only grow worse and worse with time.]
[There might be only one Kosmos-ranked anomaly at this moment. But in due time, there will be more of them, and they will twist the laws of this beloved planet so thoroughly that it becomes unlivable for you.]
[This is an almost inevitable fate.]
[Perhaps it would be better if I had told you to enjoy these last few months you have left, and make as many memories as you can before your reality shatters.]
[But I can’t just do that. Perhaps the passage of time has only made me grow more foolish, or maybe I’ve finally run mad after watching humans charge arrogantly into the unbreakable wall that is fate for millennia upon millennia. Whatever it is, I cannot bring myself to leave you without any hope.]
[There is a path. A single shaky path that could save you. The chances of it failing are likely higher than it not, but it is the only method I can think of now. Upgrade a Pylon to Level 5 and there might be a chance for you then.]
[This might all be a pointless endeavor. The system, the pylons, and even this letter. But I must try regardless. It is this arrogance, this stubbornness of yours that I have made into mine.]
[And if I am to die inevitably in the end, then I shall choose when and how, and spend every last second of it raging against the dying of the light.]
[Forgive me, once again, for my incompetence. I have made my choice; I hope you will make yours.]
[Sincerely, Gaia.]
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AN: Hangman here, I know these can be intrusive so I’ll try to keep it to a minimum. I’m implementing bonus Chapter goals to boost the novel.
Every 300 stones = 1 chap
100 golden tickets = 1 chap
Super gift = 1 chap
I can currently only do a max of 3 extra chaps a week, any additional goes to the next week.