Fourteen hundred centuries of light away, a young star drew seven planets along in its wake, its light and heat giving all things a chance to thrive.
On the fourth planetary orbit in this system lay a life-bearing planet twenty thousand kilometers in diameter.
The tallest mountain on this life-bearing planet reached thirty-eight thousand meters.
A blue sky hung overhead, and white clouds blanketed the mountainside. Atop the snowy peak that pierced the clouds stood a white temple.
The white temple stood on the white summit, its thousand-meter-long, thousand-meter-wide structure supported by a stone only a few meters across. It occupied the mountaintop in defiance of the laws of physics.
Tall, thick white pillars supported eaves like white crystal. Beyond the open doors, nearly a hundred meters tall, everything changed.
Multicolored rivers of stars flowed across the floor, walls, and ceiling. Astonishingly, a human woman dressed in white gauze, looking barely twenty, stood within the hall.
The skin exposed beyond her white gauze was snowy and luminous. The impossibly beautiful woman crouched barefoot on the floor, her black eyes fixed on a multicolored cluster of light within it. She pouted. "We already warned it. Why did it still swallow the Scavengers?"
"Sure, coaxing a newborn civilization into becoming Scavengers is easy, but they spent countless years racing around to maintain the universe's balance. They wiped out over a million carbon-based civilizations. Even if that doesn't count as merit, surely their hard work counts for something!"
Crouching on the floor, the woman murmured to herself with some regret, "But the dead are already in the past. Do I really have to create a carbon-based scavenging civilization...?"
Just as the woman hesitated over whether to act herself, another voice, a man's, suddenly rang out. "Perhaps it could become the new Scavengers itself.