Forsaken Priest of the Hero's Party-Chapter 25: Interlude 1 - The Ancient and the Primordial

In the distant past, when the sea had just formed and magma roamed the earth, shaping the land,

‘It’ arrived on this planet, traversing the vast ocean of stars.

How it came to this planet among countless others is unknown, but that remarkable coincidence bestowed something remarkable upon this world.

The lifeless planet, Pyros, was a place where even the seas boiled. The first lifeform to land in such a place shook the crust and stirred the oceans, but there were no issues with its abrupt arrival.

With no creatures living on land, what did it matter if the crust crumbled?

With no life to be swept away by the seas, who would care if they overflowed or dried up?

A sole, singular lifeform. The primordial being, immune to earthquakes and tsunamis, floated atop the scorching sea, pondering its future.

It possessed neither reason nor intellect. But it had something akin to thought.

There was nothing here for the Primordial to consume.

This wasn’t a conclusion reached through intelligent reasoning, but an instinct inherent to all life.

Pyros still lacked any organic matter. Only inorganic substances, unable to harbor or birth life, filled every corner.

The primordial being had the ability to metabolize inorganics into organics, but it was not particularly impressive. That massive entity had not evolved in such a way.

In the distant future, the Ancient Scholar, Gellie, who first discovered it, dubbed it the ‘primordial being,’ so it was thus called as such.

The primordial being utilized several sensory organs to realize this planet lacked the organic matter it could ingest, such as proteins.

Energy could be obtained from magma. It could also metabolize nuclear materials, devouring uranium in the outer core to gain power through nuclear fission.

But while that allowed it to survive, it could not grow. Naturally, to grow, it needed the building blocks to construct its body.

Those were things it could barely obtain even by swallowing lava.

Proteins, carbohydrates, nucleic acids, lipids... Those sorts of things. The so-called macromolecules that makeup living organisms.

The primordial being was too large and slow to mass-synthesize complex organic molecules from inorganic ones.

It searched its instincts and found the solution imprinted in its genes. The primordial being began scattering some of its cells across the planet.

Its cells, spreading through the scorching sea, mostly perished, unable to adapt to the environment.

But one in a hundred, no, one in a thousand,

Even if it were one in ten million,

Some cells began to ‘live on,’ adapting to the environment.

Obtaining energy from hydrothermal vents on the seafloor, grasping surrounding inorganics and metabolizing them into organics,

They mutated into primordial lifeforms, just as the primordial being desired. No longer a part of the primordial being, they began living as independent organisms.

At first, there were only a handful, but life multiplies exponentially when conditions are met.

If a single cell divides every 20 minutes, there will be 68.7 billion in 12 hours. Cells soon blanketed the sea, and some ventured onto land. Others drifted through the atmosphere.

But no matter how they changed, it remained true that the primordial being was the origin of all cells.

Some cells devoured others and grew more complex,

Some left behind only self-replicating nucleic acids and perished, becoming viruses. Some evolved to parasitize other cells, while others preyed upon them.

Some, like their ancestors, continued metabolizing inorganics. Some cells harnessed light from the sky as an energy source, producing oxygen as a byproduct.

That oxygen killed countless primordial cells, but allowed even more to flourish. The atmosphere stabilized, the seas cooled, the environment changed, and truly complex lifeforms began to emerge.

But where there is a beginning, there is also an end.

One day, the primordial being awoke. It did not refuse the well-prepared feast laid out while it slept.

Unable to overcome their instinct to return, all cells were devoured by it. They offered up all the organic matter they had accumulated to the primordial being. The first great extinction occurred dramatically and ended dramatically.

Satisfied from consuming its fill of organic matter, the primordial being slumbered, while a few cells survived without merging.

They multiplied again, claiming the seas,

And once more blanketed the skies, evolving in even greater complexity.

Animals and plants beyond the scale of microbes began to appear, and creatures like crabs and snails spread. Occasionally, the primordial being would awaken and devour most of them, but always left some behind. They would multiply again, soon filling in what was reaped.

At times, animals larger than elephants dominated,

While at others, sharks dozens of meters long preyed on even larger whales.

The legends of all those creatures were merely meaningless, empty pasts. They could not record their histories, and as always, their end was the primordial being.

However, cells that continued evolving made a choice even the primordial being did not anticipate.

Some creature, an ancestor of monkeys, by chance was born with a developed brain. It discovered the use of fire and developed a method to cook meat, spreading it to its kin.

As the energy cost to digest the meat reduced, the tribe evolved to invest that energy in the brain.

It was not intentional evolution. Because it was more rational for survival, it evolved thanks to the principle of survival of the fittest.

At the end of that evolution, the flower of intellect bloomed. Lifeforms that walked a path the primordial being could not, did not possess, began to appear.

‘Why must we merge with that thing?’

Being started to resist the cycle. The miracle that shines, resisting instinct. Lifeforms possessing intellect.

The primordial being recognized this.

In its view, the advent of intelligent beings was merely a kind of error.

But errors can be fixed. In the next cycle, things called harvesters appeared.

Enormous creatures that the primordial being directly shaped, like its own organs that nothing on earth could touch, devoured those that resisted. Yet once the light of intelligence emerged, it did not go out.

Even if a civilization perished, intelligence survived, and so it continued. Even if intelligent beings of one era were wiped out, new species with intelligence were born in the next.

“Ah.”

This terrifying secret hid deep within the curtains, never revealed,

But someone, for the first time, slightly lifted this immense secret.

“The North Pole... was not a continent.”

The one who discovered that the vast snowy fields, the North Pole, larger than continents, was actually a single organism.

More precisely, the one who realized it was merely ice and snow clinging to the back of that creature.

Gellie, a scholar shuddered upon realizing that amazing fact.

The North Pole was not a continent, and the ocean was even less so. It was a nightmarish truth that surpassed all common sense he knew.

*****Long,

Long ago,

In a time before time itself.

In an era before every other era.

There was a man who suffered an unjust fate.

By the standards of this age, he would be an Ancient.

-It wasn’t me. I didn’t do it.

He was falsely accused, betrayed by his colleagues, and abandoned by all.

He fell from the highest heights into the abyss. No one believed him.

By the time it was revealed that all he was accused of was a lie, the man had already become a demon.

-Now you come to apologize? When I begged, when I shouted, you did not take my hand, and now you extend your hand and speak of forgiveness and mercy. What am I to say?

-Gellie. Please, please don’t. It’s all our fault. Kill us instead.

-Gellie? He’s dead. I am Grimudo now. Your doom.

The most promising and great scholar.

Yet, this scholar died, and in his place the Demon King Grimudo was born. Taking an ancient word meaning ‘end’ as his name, he borrowed the power of the being he discovered to bring civilization to ruin.

-Intelligence is a prison. Thoughts are curses. Thinking is a betrayal.

The power of a creature that existed before the dawn of civilization, which he himself named the primordial being.

-So only by abandoning thought, ideas, and even personality to return to being mere beasts, will humans no longer give birth to evil and all the tragedies of this world will end. I will make it so with the power of the mother who birthed us all!

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All life came from the Primordial. And will one day, return to the Primordial.

The Ancient scholar took note of this fact and betrayed intelligent beings to side with the primordial being. Even without such awareness himself, he ended up becoming the traitor in the long, drawn-out great war called history.

In the end, the origin of all cells and nucleic acids in this world belonged to the primordial being, and applying this fact, he developed a method to turn intelligent beings into non-intelligent ones.

The polymorphic curse utilizing the primordial being’s cells turned all the ‘humans’ of that era back into beasts. Some became dogs, some became fish.

“Behold, this beautiful world. A world without a shred of malice, honest in its savagery!”

The Demon King spread his arms wide and worshipped the new world he had created.

When he realized it was nothing but meaningless madness, Grimudo fell silent.

As he wished, all intelligence was exterminated, and an era of beasts that could not even be called savage began. He had succeeded, but all that success suddenly collapsed one day.

The primordial being reclaimed its cells once more. Apocalypse befell this world.

Something he himself could not achieve despite painstaking efforts. The Primordial did by simply awakening.

As the Primordial fell asleep after consuming life, a new cycle began.

The surviving cells evolved once more, and intelligence sprouted again.

-We...Were not the first.

Grimudo shuddered. And despaired.

-And we won’t be the last either...

He thought he was using the primordial being,

But in reality, it simply had no interest in him.

He does not know how many civilizations have risen on this planet.

But even if a civilization developed for thousands of years, the years that followed were powerful enough to erase the traces of those civilizations.

Everything crumbled before time.

-This meaningless cycle... Just how many times has it been repeated? Hundreds of millions of years? Billions? In that time, how many creatures... were born, and vanished? How is this world so cruel?

The Ancient Scholar, who took the mantle of Demon King, Grimudo, was appalled at the power of the Primordial, which was neither good nor evil.

He who prided himself on becoming a powerful being was less than dust compared to the primordial being.

The Demon King knelt and despaired. From that day on, he no longer called himself the Demon King.

A Demon King who has lost his purpose is no Demon King,

So only a single despairing scholar remains, wandering in darkness.