The Martial Unity

His eyes widened with shock as his body quaked where he stood as he gazed into the depths of Gaia from within that cavity.

He saw the core of Gaia itself.

The innermost sphere at the epicenter of her depths. He saw the core of Gaia.

It was not blindingly bright.

It was not made of lava.

No.

It was black.

And translucent.

He could see the light of the magma from the other side of the core peer through it in an ephemeral fusion of light and dark.

It was the negatron core of Gaia. What was truly astonishing was the fact that there was a large gap between the inner core and the mantle. A gap so large that it allowed him to see the core in its entirety from the point of maximum fear, which opened up towards the core.

The truth quickly dawned on him.

It was a gap created by the repulsive gravitational force from the negative mass of the negatron core. It further explained why Gaia had the gravity that it possessed despite being as large as a star. It wasn’t just the negatron core pushing outwards. It was also the presence of a gap between the negatron core and the other layers of Gaia.

But that wasn’t what shook him.

That was what paralyzed him to his very core.

What made his soul freeze was the shape of the negatron core.

More specifically, the surface.

It was not even.

It was not a perfectly spherical surface.

It had regions of uneven elevation and regions of uneven depression.

It had continents and what would have been oceans.

Continents that were reflexively familiar to him.

Not the seven supercontinents of Gaia.

But the seven continents of Earth.

“Asia…” he whispered with a horrified expression, identifying them one by one. “Europe. The Americas. Antarctica. Africa. Australia…”

It had been more than a century since he uttered those names. After having spent ninety-nine years in Gaia, those names were nothing short of alien. Those continents… that world… it was nothing short of an alien world to him, who had grown up and had spent more time in Gaia than on Earth.

And yet, they were faintly nostalgic.

They reminded him of his life before Rui.

It had not been nearly as fulfilling as his second life, but it was a life that he had lived to the best of his ability, given the short stick he had been dealt with his health.

It wasn’t just the continents he recognized.

He could visualize the nations that had been carved up from those continents by man. He could recognize distinct mountain ranges. The Alps. The Himalayas. What shocked him was that he could even see the Great Wall of China.

It was Earth.

Without even the slightest shadow of a doubt.

It was the Earth that he was familiar with.

BADUMP

His heart began beating harder and harder as he felt a rare surge of horror overwhelming him from within its depths. His breathing began growing strained as he struggled to maintain his focus; his mind exploding with countless thoughts and emotions.

“Why is the core of Gaia the shape of the Earth?”

He couldn’t even fathom the answer to that question on first thought. But there were several things that could be deduced from it. “There is a connection between Gaia and Earth.”

Previously, he had assumed that the only connection between Gaia and Earth was himself, who had traversed worlds. But now he realized that there was a much deeper connection between the two worlds.

What kind of connection would make the core of Gaia the shape of Earth, right down to the finest details?

What kind of connection would allow the alien entity to have all of this information when it came to Gaia?

“Where did it get this information from if not for—”

He froze as he made a chilling connection.

The alien virus had wiped out all information of the past in the world when it arrived upon Gaia. Human-made information. Natural information in the geological record. In archaeology. In the environment. It had absorbed that information entirely to deprive people of the truth of the past so that they wouldn’t realize just how much had gone wrong.

“What if the information that it had absorbed was… the information of Earth?”

That left one and only one inescapable conclusion.

“Gaia is Earth.” His eyes widened with horror. “The planet that the alien entity had come to was Earth.”

The weight of the truth was almost too much for him to bear. It pushed down on him like a mountain resting on his head, making him feel an overwhelming flow of emotion.

Horror.

Terror.

Shock.

The concentration that he had spent half a day cultivating had completely shattered in the face of such a mind-boggling revelation.

Gaia was Earth.

That meant that the solar system they were in was Sol. It meant that the galaxy they were in was the Milky Way.

“But…” A shaking whisper escaped him. “But how? How is that possible? Our suns are completely different. Our solar system is completely different. How could everything have changed so much?”

Then again, how could Earth have changed so much?

His eyes widened. “The alien entity. It is responsible for everything. It changed everything.”

Chills crawled across his skin as he began to understand the true scale of this cosmic horror story. Had it terraformed the entire solar system? If it could terraform an entire solar system, had it terraformed more? How much could possibly be safe from such an entity if it could cause changes on such an enormous scale?

This was not a non-living phenomenon.

This was the intention.

This was by design.

By a mind.

A mind of alien origin.

A lifeform more unfathomable than anything Rui could even begin to comprehend.

One that was across the entire solar system.

Everywhere.

“The Divine Doctor was right…” Rui’s voice quaked. “It isn’t just Gaia.”

The realization struck him like a meteorite.

They weren’t dealing with a singular, discrete entity.

They weren’t dealing with a single specimen.

They were fighting against… everything.

In that moment, he was struck with Fear.