After defeating the Goddess of Scarlet Rot, the surviving Nightfolk and the Ancestral Spirit people continued searching underground for a new place to live.
Before long, they reached the bottom of the Siofra River Well and once again built themselves a royal city and an altar. It wasn't long before the third Eternal City was complete, and the Nightfolk named it Nokron.
After the Nightfolk tribes split apart several times, only those who worshipped the night remained in Nokron. Yet the "Lord of Night" they worshipped never appeared, leaving Nokron's Nightfolk in an awkward position.
At some point, some of the Nightfolk began to think: Since their lord hasn't appeared, why not make one themselves?
And so, the Nightfolk once again turned their thoughts to their artificial life technology!
After that, they naturally began to redouble their efforts to explore the creation of artificial life.
Unlike the Nightfolk aboveground—the flawed Albinaurics of Caria and the Academy—the Nightfolk underground made much faster progress, thanks to their isolation. They had even reached the point where they could create lifeforms that perfectly mimicked the way humans fought.
As their campaign to create a lord gathered momentum, the Two Fingers—the Greater Will's agents in the Lands Between—made contact with them.
That was because the Two Fingers didn't approve of artificial life!
In the eyes of the Two Fingers and the Greater Will, life was supposed to cycle from the Crucible of Life to Destined Death, something only the gods could control. They ordered the Nightfolk to stop their research into artificial life.
However...
The Nightfolk clearly had no intention of taking the Greater Will and its envoys seriously. After all, neither the Greater Will nor the Two Fingers was their faith or their god. So, to fight back against the Two Fingers, the Nightfolk