Chapter 98: Fate: Book 2 Prologue

From the same spot on the white and barren moon, Timelord Chronos watched, unmoving, the small blue planet and the billions of humans inhabiting it. It was genuinely fascinating how quickly these tiny people, mostly untouched by the laws of the universe, would come up with new and inventive ways of solving their problems.

Without any cosmic energy to strengthen their bodies, diseases were once considered a serious threat to their survival. Now, any such ailment could be cured as easily as ingesting a medicine and resting for a few days. Their next course of action was to find ways of slowing down aging and prolonging life, to the point where the average human could expect to live well past the hundred years of age.

When he first discovered this planet, Chronos had gazed back in time through its history. For millions of years, these humans lived as dispersed nomads, their whole population unable to fill a moderately sized city. Then, a little more than ten millennia ago, they discovered how to cultivate the land and began to settle down. The discovery served as a turning point and now, ten millennia later, here they were.

Ten millennia.

Chronos' mind wandered back to his own homeworld. In this same timespan since their creation, his fellow humans had already spread out throughout that planet. Done with that, they slowly improved their cultivation methods, discovering new and better ways of absorbing and manipulating the cosmic energies.

Finally, one and a half million years after the first humans being created, Lightbringer Hemera cultivated far enough to achieve true immortality. Unmatched in strength, she then proceeded to unite the world’s hundreds of disparate kingdoms under a single empire before ascending to the heavens, never to return.

When Kostas was born, that empire had long been fractured into thousands of petty kingdoms, was briefly reformed for a couple of decades only to be fractured even further, time and time again.

It became a fact of life. Whenever someone reached true immortality they would use their newfound powers to make everyone else submit to their will. Unfortunately, these same powers would make them unable to remain on the planet for long, and they would eventually be forced out into the cosmos.

It was a strange pattern. For hundreds of thousands of years, kingdoms would rise and fall while dynasties fought for supremacy. Then there would be a few decades of stability when the next immortal would come along, impose their will, and ultimately leave, allowing the world to fall into chaos once again.

This pattern seemed to repeat throughout the known history. As such, would it continue repeating itself into the future? This question served as the spark that lit up the young scholar Kostas’ interest in the concepts of time.

After arduously studying divination and cultivating for three millennia, Kostas reached true immortality, taking the title of Timelord Chronos in the process.

With his new condition, he could very well have followed the example of his predecessors, bending the world to his will. But it all felt so pointless knowing how it would eventually end. No matter what he did, how much effort he put into it, it would all fall apart as soon as he left.

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So instead, as soon as he became an immortal, Chronos quietly ascended into the cosmos, his homeworld none the wiser. Worldly affairs are always as fickle and ephemeral as the mortal's lives. Nations crumble while loved ones die. Only personal cultivation followed an immortal into eternity, the only thing that truly mattered.

Or at least, that was how Chronos once felt. The discovery of this little blue planet forced him to change his mind. Mostly unaffected by the laws of the universe, these people were able to do truly marvelous feats.

Growing up, starvation was always a constant threat to Chronos and his family. These humans had the opposite problem, with most death causes being related to eating too much. They created weapons powerful enough to kill lesser cultivators and, yet, wars had become the exception rather than the rule.

By comparison, all other worlds seemed stagnated in time, their current societies not unlike those of millions of years ago.

The lack of cosmic energies forced these people to be much more inventive, else they wouldn’t be capable of surviving.

Knowing this, Chronos found himself thinking more and more about what would happen if they suddenly gained access to cultivation. Some of their brightest minds already had enough knowledge about the basic laws of the universe to reach immortality, only lacking the cosmic energy to cultivate.

If Chronos intervened by helping some of these people to reincarnate into other worlds, there could very well be a new batch of immortals being born in less than a single millennium. He had already done it once with that promising child a few decades ago. Such a force would be a huge asset in the war against the Godking and his minions.

And yet, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Rather, he regretted his interference with each passing day.

Few things ever happen by chance. It could very well be the workings of Fate or Karma that led to these humans remaining uncultivated for so long. And if that was the case, what would be the consequences of Chronos’ meddling?

It could very well have little to no consequences, but he couldn’t say for certain. After all, the Godking himself had once been just a child fated to die until a well-meaning immortal came along and changed his destiny. Now that child had become a tyrant that threatened the whole universe.

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