Light crossed the boundless sky and reached the heart of darkness.
The ceaseless chewing stopped abruptly.
Corpses lay everywhere: half-insect, half-human creatures, tree spirits, unicorns, snake women, and fire dragons. None had rotted. Branches still grew from their bodies, as though they had become one with nature.
A faint light entered the eerie woodland. Beneath a towering ancient tree, a few figures still moving gazed toward the sun in the distance.
The fierce midday sunlight that should not have been there.
Since setting foot on this planet, they had never seen light like it.
"Those natives who call themselves gods again?" An old man set down the branch in his hand, and in an instant, he looked twenty or thirty years younger. "How I miss their flesh and blood. That taste..."
The muscles of his back suddenly contracted and swelled, their contours sharply defined. Two pairs of wings unfurled and sprouted feathers.
"The dust-dwellers of Veles are urging us to share the Sky Mulberry's gifts again," said another figure with two wings on his back as he emerged.
"The Sky Mulberry needs watering, not that useless light," the four-winged man said. "More blood, more wretched folk, and those powerful natives... If not for the Antimatter Legion and those resisters, the dust-dwellers of Veles would have lost their value long ago."
"The Wing Emperor's dying command ordered us Wing-Makers of the Skyguard Species to plant Sky Mulberry shoots on alien worlds. But how many years has it been since we lost contact with the Peacock Angel Legion and the Sky Mulberry?"
They were Wing-Makers with a singular mission. They roamed the universe, seeking primitive planets not yet connected to interstellar routes and planting Sky Mulberry shoots to revive their regressed civilizations.
Though they and the Veles Army Group were both Abundance's