Dust-Sealed History

Boundless and endless, without beginning or end—the primordial Void had been destined, from the moment of its birth, to nurture all things. The God Race created many worlds, but even more worlds were born spontaneously from the Void. They condensed from this source of all things, drew order from chaos, gained form from nothingness, and became vibrant oases in the Sea of Chaos. This was an infinite reaction whose beginning no one knew and whose end would never come. Yet where worlds were born, worlds would inevitably perish. Most worlds within closed systems returned to equilibrium through heat death, becoming tombs that the Void would dissolve at some unknown time. Worlds in open systems, meanwhile, disintegrated as their internal laws gradually drifted, descending into chaos and murk from within before eventually assimilating back into the Void. For any single world, the journey from birth to destruction was immensely long, perhaps long enough to nurture hundreds of millions of generations of brilliant civilizations. But for the entire Void, worlds were being born and destroyed every moment.

It was said that, in the eyes of those eternal God Race members, the densest regions of the multiverse resembled starry skies, with countless worlds that might harbor intelligent civilizations glittering like stars. In an instant, thousands upon thousands of lives, deaths, creations, and destructions took place.

—Naturally, I hadn't come up with such a pretentious opening myself. The original text above was excerpted from Interviews with Former Shilin Emperor Bellavella, "The Destruction of the Empire." Any copyright issues were to be fully explained by the already-disbanded Ministry of Culture. I accepted no responsibility.

On the way back to the Resistance Army's gathering point, the silver-haired girl, still retaining Bellavella's personality, recalled those ancient years and slowly recounted a history buried beneath the dust.

"Greed