Chapter 206: The Will of the Earth
[Before the beginning of the cycles]
Evan had wondered several times over the course of those years what the purpose of this entire dream was. Perhaps it was meant to help him recover fragments of memories he had lost, something that proved to be true after what he experienced during the first five years.
Then he thought maybe it was also meant to train him, considering his two new elements were Time and Space, the very same ones his past self had apparently gained before the reincarnation and the cycles began. But now, after nearly a century, he no longer knew what to think. He had reached divinity. He had become a true god.
His mastery over Space and Time had reached a level he could never have imagined when he first obtained them. He was capable of doing things beyond extraordinary, and yet, despite all of that, he was powerless.
The world had almost completely fallen, the few people he had come to know were almost all dead, and even Seraphine, the person closest to him both in this dream and in his real life, had apparently perished in battle.
He was alone on this desolate earth, wondering what more this strange dream could possibly want from him.
Some time passed like that, weeks, maybe months, during which the only thing he did was hunt down whatever gods of the Abyss he could sense. His strength was enough to overpower them, though not enough to kill them, so for a while he used them as punching bags. Then, at some point, he noticed something.
The Earth’s core, the place Seraphine had once told him was where mana originally came from. It had only been idle curiosity at first, but it led him to sift through the planet’s core to see what remained now that the mana had fully escaped and spread across the entire world. What he found caught him completely off guard.
The Earth’s core was alive. And it seemed to be trying to reach him.
Driven by curiosity, Evan pushed toward the center of the world and arrived at the place.
At the center of the Earth, Evan found a vast, hollow chamber where the planet’s core should have been, its walls formed from strange, dark stone that seemed to pulse faintly with life. In the middle of it floated something resembling a massive sphere, beating slowly.
It was the Earth’s core, but unlike what he’d expected, it was dark, black as pitch, barely five meters in diameter.
That wasn’t what caught him off guard, though. What did was the fact that he’d already seen this sphere somewhere before.
His mind had become hazy after spending so long in this place, but his current state allowed him to dig up buried memories, even ones from when he had first been born. So it didn’t take him long to remember where he had seen it before.
"Bruce?" he murmured at the sight of the familiar sphere, the same one he’d encountered in that other dimension, right before it collapsed and he ended up in this dream.
Hearing his voice, as if it had somehow heard him, the sphere gave off a faint glow, and a voice echoed out.
"Bruce? Is that another name you use for a planet’s core?" the sphere’s voice rang out, identical to his friend’s, but tinged with uncertainty and confusion.
Evan was caught a little off guard by that, but he quickly understood why.
This was the dream, the past. Of course this Bruce wouldn’t remember him.
That thought led him to another realization.
’So Bruce was the Earth’s core?’ he wondered.
If he’d managed to come here and find the Earth’s core, then maybe his past self had done the same thing, and had met Bruce right here, in this very place.
That made him even more curious about the whole situation, and for the first time in what had felt like decades, he no longer felt like an empty shell drifting without purpose.
He talked with Bruce, deciding to keep calling him that, since he was used to it by now, and the core itself didn’t seem to mind much. He asked all kinds of questions, and little by little, some of his doubts about everything began to clear up.
Had mana originated from it? Yes, and that lined up with what Seraphine had told him back then. Mana had been discovered inside the Earth’s core, extracted, and used, more and more over time, until things spiraled out of control, leading to the mana apocalypse and the Abyss’s invasion that followed.
Bruce told him that the mana apocalypse was also when he’d first gained consciousness. He hadn’t always been a sentient being, he’d become one over the course of the last few decades.
He explained that he had originally been created as a regulator of the natural laws that allowed life to exist in this world. The faint traces of mana within him were what made that possible.
Apparently, that was how every living planet functioned, they were designed that way. But once mana was extracted and multiplied, that balance shifted, setting off everything that followed.
Between one thing and another, Evan finally asked the question that, by that point, had become the obvious one.
"Since the void designed you to function that way, now that everything’s changed, what will you do? Will you help the Abyss wipe out everything on the planet’s surface?" he asked.
The Earth’s origins raised the question of whether it, too, was still under the influence of the void, the same force that apparently governed the entire universe.
If it was still under that control, then helping the Abyss would be the natural thing for it to do. That was exactly what he couldn’t allow. But the Bruce of the future had tried to help him reach supremacy, so that he could stand against the Abyss. Why had he done that? What had changed over time?
"No, I don’t want to help the Abyss," it said without hesitation, and the answer made Evan raise an eyebrow.
"Oh? And why’s that?" he asked.
"Because that would mean having to give up my life."