The Light's Embrace Swarm Is Watching You

—Become human.

At first, Ian did not understand, but he quickly and keenly grasped the meaning behind the Twin Popes' words.

To become a person and to become human were different concepts on Terra.

This world held far too many extraterrestrial and otherworldly lifeforms, and "person" was the self-designation used by all intelligent species for their own kind. Humans were merely the classification they gave to their own race—thus, in a sense, all intelligent life was human, all were the "primates" of their respective ecosystems.

But on Terra, humans alone referred specifically to "Terran humans."

Light's Embrace had displayed far too many inhuman traits and peculiar aspects in the past. If the Twin Popes told Ian the next moment that they were not humans at all, but some hyper-intelligent AI, a protective machine left behind by the Star God, a powerful Void Realm Mech-God, or a lost maintenance system of the Pre-Epoch Civilization... even something more absurd, Ian would not have been surprised.

Why would such beings wish to become human? That was clearly abnormal. Although Ian himself had developed the Arcane Path and dabbled in cultivation, Terra was not some immortal-hero fantasy world. There was simply no need for nonhumans to transform themselves into people.

Thus, the "person" in the Twin Popes' words surely carried a deeper meaning.

"The person you speak of—is it some kind of spirit, or perhaps an ideal?"

After a moment of silence, Ian thought of a possibility and said softly, "The essence of why humans are people rather than beasts?"

Humans were the shells possessed by most of Terra's people today: higher animals. Even after undergoing all manner of modifications, if they wholly obeyed their instinctive desires, they remained creatures that were nothing more than pure beasts.

But "people" were different.

A pure person