The Nebula’s Civilization

Sung-Woon tried to unravel those words.

The world of the ancient Wizards would have been simple. Those with power dominated those who were weaker. However, this domination was not firm. The fact that the Wizards' magic was unstable meant that their control could always be shaken. Even though the Wizards were powerful, they could still be threatened by the subjugated classes. He guessed that, despite being stronger than expected, they couldn’t escape the anxiety about their control.

'The concept of Divinity makes sense now. It's a structure designed to ensure that those below can never oppose those above.'

The rulers wanted to hold onto their power and strength at all cost. Therefore, they created Divinity and completed their domination.

'Though, it's more…oppression than revolution.'

Aldin said, "And thus, we became gods, and Avartin was at peace."

"At peace?" Sung-Woon questioned. "When we arrived, Avartin wasn’t peaceful."

"70,000 years."

"What?"

Aldin pointed accusingly at Sung-Woon. "Look at your world. Look at the world you created. Remember the outcomes reliant on the power of external space. In your world, not a single day has passed without war since time immemorial, and people have continually died.

And now, your world possesses bombs that could destroy it several times over. But the power of inner space is different. 70,000 years. I won't say there were no disputes, I won't say there was no suffering, but conflicts were overcome, and everyone was satisfied with their place in life until the end. And that's not all."

Aldin said gravely, "We didn't kill anyone."

"Didn't kill...anyone?"

Aldin exclaimed, "We created an afterlife!"

"Ah."

"There was no death even after death."

"I see." Sung-Woon realized that despite the circumstances, he had misunderstood Aldin. "You didn’t just want to be rulers."

"That's right."

"You didn’t want to kill anyone."

"Yes. Do you understand our feelings now?"

"You wanted not slaves who vanish with death, but eternal slaves."

Aldin lunged at Sung-Woon.

Sung-Woon found the move abrupt and, not being as skilled in moving within the realm of mental imagery as Aldin, the two became entangled and fell.

Aldin grabbed Sung-Woon's collar. "Don't speak like that!"

Sung-Woon thought Aldin would throw a punch, but they didn’t.

Surprisingly, Aldin was choked up. "...Don't speak like that. Back then, we really, really didn't want death. We wished no one had to."

"...."

"Do you like death? If so, it's because you're not thinking straight. If you're tired, just sleep endlessly, and promise to meet at the end of eternity. Death isn't like that. Death is the end. The technology of external space is always unstable. Even the adventures in inner space, the last secrets of magic we found, couldn't solve the problem of death. We didn’t want to kill anyone."

"...."

"70,000 years! Can you even imagine? We now only remember it as if it were a dream. It was almost an eternity. We maintained peace for 70,000 years. It was a miracle. I don’t have the audacity to claim that everyone lived a life they were satisfied with, but we were definitely happy… No, let me be more honest. It was okay. We lived an okay life. It would have been okay even if life continued like this. Sure, there were times of anger, dissatisfaction, but sometimes we were happy. There were good times, and we learned to be patient enough to wait for the next good time. Not just us, the old gods, but almost everyone in Avartin felt that way."

Sung-Woon felt something drop onto his mask. It was a tear.

'Do the old gods cry too?'

Lying down, Sung-Woon said, "Then why...? What was the problem? Why not 80,000 years, or 90,000 years, or eternity, but only 70,000 years?"

Aldin wiped their eyes with their sleeve. Peering inside the hood, Sung-Woon saw a face, and he was momentarily surprised but chose not to dwell on it.

Aldin said, "There was a fundamental flaw. Magic is unstable. The system wasn't perfect."

Aldin slowly got off Sung-Woon.

Turning around, Aldin continued, "Every piece of information needs a place to be stored. Even though it's inner space, its foundation needs to be in external space. We might dismiss the hostile, barren space of external space as worthless, but we cannot escape it."

"Was there a problem with Rasdasil?"

Aldin looked at Sung-Woon, seemingly surprised by Sung-Woon's level of understanding, but didn’t ask further.

Aldin replied, "Yes. All the information values of Avartin flows into one space. We built a system at one point in Avartin. We believed we had secured enough storage space. But...70,000 years was a long time."

“It was a bad sector."

"Yes."

Even if an old storage space claimed to have sufficient storage capacity, it could still be prone to physical or logical damage. Such damage was difficult to recover from and tended to proliferate, eroding the storage space.

"Rasdasil was damaged. It wasn't fatal on its own, since we had prepared ample storage space. Each sector, each space, could be separated, and it wasn't technically challenging to protect the system. The issue was elsewhere."

"That place being the storage space means..."

"Yes. All the data...the foundation of the afterlife was there. The erosion came from a source we hadn’t anticipated."

Sung-Woon, not fully aware of Avartin's past and the workings of its afterlife, couldn't grasp a complete picture from Aldin's explanations, even though they were fairly specific. It simply sounded like inexplicably strange or creepy occurrences had been happening repeatedly.

"We call it erosion, or an erosion event. It’s an attempt for another inner space to interact with our world when we should never have come into contact with it to begin with. The inherent threat to Wizards was precisely this erosion."

Sung-Woon was aware. Magic was a baseless power. It seemed borrowed from another world or simply extracted from within oneself. But no explanation quite fit.

'Erosion or not, it would still be dangerous.'

Aldin said, "There were signs of erosion starting from 50,000 years, and solving it became our main task for the next 10,000 years, but we were helpless in the following 10,000 years. Our core, Rasdasil, eventually became cursed. Countless pieces of information couldn’t be properly accessed, the afterlife fractured, existing beings vanished, and death reemerged. Above all else..."

"Above all else?"

"The evil gods and their children appeared."

Aldin said coldly, "You know of them, don’t you? Those despicable species."

Sung-Woon recalled the Werewolves, Vampires, Deep Ones, Fairies, and finally, the Greys. But according to the explanation, it wasn’t just them. There was an overwhelming amount of many evil gods and their children, the ancient evils.

Aldin continued, "Strange and macabre events kept happening, and they established themselves in Avartin. Our kind was transformed. In addition to the erosion, the system structure kept malfunctioning. They weren’t accounted for in the system."

"And that’s why you had no choice but to fight."

"That's right." Aldin nodded. "We couldn’t coexist with them. Either we had to die, or they had to."

That must have been the Ancient War.

"The Wizards, the Dragons, and all living beings plunged into the struggle. The rules we had created were broken. Those who looked down on us, the old gods, appeared. Most importantly...they stopped believing in faith."

When belief in the only way to avoid death began to wane, the old gods would have felt doubt with the structure they had created. Furthermore, as belief in the gods weakened, their power would have diminished as well.

"It became burdensome. We realized we couldn't fight with our power alone and turned our eyes to the technology and science of external space. That was our only competitive edge."

Therefore, the second moon, Loom, was constructed. Of course, Sung-Woon knew there was more to the story. Aldin was merely telling a simplified narrative from the perspective of the old gods.

'Evil gods have their story, and old gods have theirs.'

Aldin said, "We won the war, but there wasn't enough leeway for the aftermath..."

Sung-Woon, sitting up, interrupted, "Hold on."

"What is it?"

"I know you didn't just win. You put a huge strain on causality to construct Loom."

"...."

"What about that responsibility?"

Aldin turned to face him and said, "Did you talk to them?"

"Yes."

"...They must have spewed nonsense."

Aldin hesitated. They were about to lie.

Sung-Woon, ready not to fall for any lies, faced Aldin. Aldin realized this and chose not to lie immediately.

"That’s true. We constructed Loom as a last resort to win, and we severely violated causality."

The system was stable. Since it was difficult for the system itself to violate causality, Sung-Woon guessed the old gods must have resorted to more aggressive magic from their past as Wizards. Indeed, the science and technology used on Loom were astounding, but something didn't quite fit. Parts of it were used simply as weaponry.

"If we had taken the full impact of that strain, we would have faced a fate worse than annihilation, but fortunately, we had another plan. We hid in the Demon World. That alone..."

"No."

Sung-Woon slightly furrowed his brow. Aldin was about to lie.

"Causality can't be so easily deceived. Even if you didn't bear it directly, someone else surely had to."

Aldin remained silent for a moment.

Then they said in starts and stops, "So, others bore it."

"Others?"

"All beings of Avartin." Aldin explained, "Since we, the old gods, couldn't bear all the pain, every life in Avartin endured it. They lost their gods and the knowledge to build civilizations. Wandering the wilderness without an afterlife, they died. They left nothing behind. They died of fever from diseases and infections, drowned in water, or fell from mountains."

"How long did this last?"

"About 40,000 years, by our calculations. We knew that would satisfy causality."

Sung-Woon closed his eyes for a moment. He recalled the desolate landscapes when the Lost World just started. Only a few beings capable of speech fought over scarce resources. The weak, sick, and elderly died first. The survivors only prayed that they wouldn't be next, but no prayer was answered.

Then Sung-Woon couldn't help but think of one person.

'Lakrak.'

He remembered that young Lizardman wandering the wilderness. His name carried the meaning as follows.

‘The Wounded.'

Sung-Woon now knew where those wounds had originated from.