Civilization Chronicles: Rise of the Divine Creator

Lucas was a little tired after his first hunting trip into the Great Western Forest. He was still quite young and had not yet started cultivating, so his strength wasn’t really that impressive. The only advantage he had was that Anna, his mother, had given him some basic Martial Arts training, so he was confident he could at least hold out until they reached town.

Happy and content, though still a bit embarrassed about blurting out his budding feelings for his Big Sister Eris, Lucas was eager to get back home and wash off the dirt and sweat he had accumulated over the past few hours. However, just as they were setting off, he heard a loud rumbling above his head and instinctually looked up to see if a storm was brewing.

Oddly enough, through the canopy of the forest, all Lucas could see was a blue, cloudless sky, much unlike how it would look if a shower was about to begin.

Shrugging it off, the young boy turned his gaze back to his mother, or at least, he tried to.

All of sudden, for some reason, Lucas felt as if he had become stuck in a mire, where moving his arms, legs, and even head had become harder and harder.

Trying his best to lower his gaze, Lucas managed to shift his eyes towards the front, only to be met with an odd sight. There, ahead of him, where he expected to see his mom, all Lucas saw was a distorted image of the forest, with all the trees, bushes, and even the ground around him seemingly stretched out and bent in impossible ways.

His mother, who should have been just a couple steps ahead of him, now looked like she was several hundred paces away. She, too, was staring at him, but because of the distance, Lucas could barely even make out her face.

It was a terribly frightening scenario, the scariest he had ever experienced in his short life, and things only got worse from there.

No more than five steps in front of him, the world itself seemed to split open, accompanied by a thunderous cracking sound that completely deafened him.

Lucas already couldn’t move.

Couldn’t blink.

Couldn’t even breath.

The air around him had become so thick, so viscous, that it felt as if he was drowning in mud.

Now, he also couldn’t hear anything.

The world had simply gone... silent.

Today was supposed to be a joyous day for Lucas, his 9th birthday, where he celebrated together with his family and friends and worried about nothing like any child his age should have been able to.

Instead, he was trapped, locked in place by some invisible force, staring at what he could only describe as a crack in the world.

Lucas watched helplessly as a blinding white seam of light appeared out of thin-air and slowly began expanding.

It was like seeing a bolt of lightning flash across the sky, but instead of blinking in and out of existence, this seam of light split, branched, and silently crackled outwards at an agonizingly slow place.

Seeing one of the cracks of light zig-zagging towards him, Lucas was terrified and he desperately wanted to flee, but no matter how hard he tried, his body refused to move.

In the next instant, the bolt of light reached Lucas, and as if a charging Wild Beast had struck him, he was sent hurtling through the air.

The boy slammed into a tree over a dozen paces away, knocking the wind from his lungs before he fell to the ground.

Lucas had never been in more pain in his entire life. He should have passed out then and there, but for some reason, he remained fully conscious, unable to move, or to faint, all while still feeling every bit of agony tormenting his body.

If Lucas thought his nightmare was over, though, he was terribly mistaken.

With his eyes still fixed ahead, the boy found himself peering into what could only be described as the abyss.

After the white crack in space made contact with the boy, something inside of it had clearly been triggered and it then ripped itself open, revealing an endless, pitch-black darkness.

Nothing could possibly have existed in that void, but from the tear in space, something actually emerged.

It was a mass of black light, indistinct, like a hazy silhouette with no fixed shape or size.

It was oddly beautiful, and it didn’t radiate the same intense feeling of emptiness that the tear did, but Lucas knew it was still incredibly dangerous.

What’s more, it was flying right towards him.

Lucas knew that if was hit by this... thing, he would die.

He didn’t know how he knew, but he knew.

Yet, what could he do?

Even if Lucas hadn’t just been seriously injured, the black light was moving far too fast to dodge.

All he could do was watch in despair as the bolt of darkness arrived before him, then struck dead on.

There was no sound of impact, but inside Lucas’ head, something shattered.

The boy’s eyes already dull eyes went completely blank, his consciousness vanishing as his very Soul dispersed into a million or more broken pieces.

He should have died.

Perhaps he had died.

If the Heavens had their way, this was to be Lucas fate, the same fate all who were too weak to fight back against destiny shared, to die in obscurity and quietly fade away into the annuals of history.

However, today was not going to be the end of Lucas’ story, it would simply be its beginning.

....

Trevor Ashford had, by now, lost practically all his emotions and sense of self, all he could do now was act based on rational thought and the deeply held principles he had so far lived his life by.

Those beliefs, built up over many years of him doing his best to help save humanity, allowed him even in his current state to understand that killing a child who looked no older than 10 was wrong.

Unfortunately for him and the young boy, Trevor was powerless to do anything as he had no control over what he now presumed was the remnants of his Soul.

When his disembodied self crashed into the young boy’s body, Trevor felt a strong impact, but not in the way he had anticipated. Instead of the feeling of one body hitting another, like throwing a punch or tackling an opponent, Trevor Ashford felt a strange combination of being thrown into a lake of water, and through a pane of glass all at once.

While he naturally found the situation odd, he had recently experienced much stranger things, so Trevor quickly accepted it and began checking his situation.

A moment later, Lt. Ashford realized that it wasn’t just whatever he crashed into that had fragmented, even his own ’body’ had begun to break down. It had taken him a moment to realize his current state because he had already grown completely numb to pain and physical sensation.

Glancing around, the dying Terran Alliance lieutenant once more found himself in a black space, but instead of being filled with rivers of multi-coloured light, he now saw a large number of pure-white wisps floating all around him.

Almost unconsciously, Trevor Ashford ’reached out’ to grab one of these wisps of light, and astonishingly, his ’body’, which had so far been quite cumbersome to control, now moved smoothly, easily allowing him to catch his target.

The moment his ’hand’ grabbed the wisp of light, a stream of information flooded his mind; images of an unfamiliar man, and a slightly recognizable woman appeared before his eyes.

Trevor even felt, for some reason, that these two were ’his’ parents.

Of course, he quickly dismissed this notion and reasoned that the two people were the parents of the young boy he had just hit.

Reaching out to grab another of the nearby white wisps, this time he saw a scene where ’he’ was running through a grassy field with a bunch of other children, laughing and playing under the warm summer sun.

There was even one little girl who seemed to stand out from the crowd and drew his eye more than the others.

It didn’t take Trevor long to understand that what he was seeing were the memories of the young boy he had collided with a moment ago. Looking around and seeing tens, if hundreds of thousands of these white wisps scattered about, Trevor figured that just like his current self, these points of light were what made up the ’Soul’ of the boy he struck.

What’s more, after ’reading’ this piece of the boy’s Soul, Trevor felt his own Soul grow a little stronger and a bit less fragile.

Whether this boost was just a temporary thing or a permanent mending of his Soul, Trevor didn’t know, but he theorized that by assimilating the rest of the boy’s broken Soul, he could repair his own and essentially be reborn.

While the whole experience was curious, something else quickly caught Trevor’s attention. The wisps of light around him were starting to grow dimmer, like they would soon be extinguished.

He didn’t know what would happen if all these lights went out, but judging by how he felt his sense of self fading away as his own ethereal form broke down, the little boy he assumed he was now sharing a body with would probably die.