The design of the system was as elegant as it was unspeakably cruel.

It was designed to aggressively connect to all "irrelevant" life forms on the planet, anything ’inferior’ to a dragon. Specifically, it targeted the new, rapidly multiplying plagues of tiny creatures that were beginning to become a minor, irritating nuisance to the planet’s natural ether flow.

The excuse the massive dragon offered the fractured elemental rulers was hollow, yet convenient: It claimed the system would painlessly purge the world of the vermin hiding inside the dirt without destroying anything else.

It argued that these tiny, rapidly spreading pests were beginning to exhibit deeply concerning behaviors, actively stealing microscopic amounts of the dragons’ sacred ether and acting in ways that grossly violated their assigned place in the natural order.

But the Light Dragon and the Wood Dragon refused to kneel.

They looked upward, and they desperately begged the Sun itself, their true father, for salvation with energy signals.

They were seen...

But the Sun Dragon was simply too massive, too impossibly radiant, to directly intervene on such a tiny, fragile planet. Its sheer physical presence in the atmosphere would have instantly incinerated the world it was trying to save.

So, it executed a different strategy. It aggressively projected its consciousness into the ether, materializing its divine will onto the planet’s moon.

This was only possible because, for countless eras, the Sun Dragon had bathed the satellite in its radiant light, unknowingly priming the celestial body for this exact, desperate moment.

From its lunar foothold, the Sun Dragon took physical form and violently attacked the Purple Dragon, the ancient terror that had been born in the orbital space just above the small world would not block his light anymore.

This had to end here...

The initial, catastrophic clash of the two titans was so violently devastating that the shockwave tore a second, massive fissure into the planet, the small dragons had yet again to avoid destroying the crust ecosystems by draining their power.

But this new crack was fundamentally different from the first.

The wound caused by the Purple Dragon’s initial descent had been dark, necrotic, and empty, a parasitic theft of the world’s lifeblood.

This second crack, however, overflowed with blinding, radiant energy and fed the ’smallish’ Dragons back to full.

And when the Sun Dragon’s divine, surplus energy flooded into the world’s battered ether, it acted as a planetary adhesive. It stabilized the fractured core crystallizing it from the absolute center of the world outward, physically saving the cracked earth from disintegrating in 4 parts into the void, granting the planet vastly more stability and structural resistance.

Then the Golden one pursued the Purple one back into the near space... The cosmic battle raged for a long, grueling time.

And while the two titans violently clashed in the heavens beyond the sky, the common elemental dragons seized their opportunity. They aggressively rebelled. They systematically restructured the sixteen ruins they had been forced to build. They severed the global network, dividing it into separate hemispheres. Then, utilizing the massive new fissures tearing across the planet, they violently subdivided the initial half again.

Using the architectural knowledge they gained from dismantling the Purple Dragon’s engine blueprints, the elemental dragons had secretly constructed the cradle for a brand-new entity. It would operate similarly to the Purple Dragon’s system, but its fundamental origin would be entirely different.

It would be a Child of the Light.

They utilized the most advanced, highly efficient light-absorption architecture they possessed, one biological ether and one physical ether to ensure the new entity’s final form could securely anchor the Sun Dragon’s projection and actively protect the world.

The desperate rebellion’s plan was clean: The Light entity only needed to successfully connect to a single one, the physical body or an ether-based life form on the planet and eat both activators. Once anchored, it could forcefully hijack the Purple Dragon’s entire subterranean network.

It would still utilize the energy siphoned from the multiplying vermin that were stealing the ether, but instead of violently draining the world to feed a tyrant, it would correctly channel that energy back into the planet’s core, maintaining and nurturing the natural cycle.

Everything was in place. The elemental dragons possessed absolute faith that the Father Sun would win the cosmic war, and that he would utilize their newly built cradle to project his divine presence directly onto the world as an eternal, benevolent protector.

And their faith was rewarded.

The Sun Dragon won.

The ancient, world-spanning Purple Dragon was utterly obliterated. Only a single, shattered fragment of its dark core survived the cosmic detonation, a fragment that after a long time ended plummeting like a dying meteor toward the earth.

The Dragons welcomed the Sun to their world, first letting him enter the physical body.

However, the cost of the victory was vastly more devastating than anyone had calculated.

The Sun Dragon’s projection on the moon had been critically shattered by the catastrophic damage sustained during the fight. The lunar surface was cracked into several massive, floating fragments. And with his mind fractured, the physical body fractured too, falling and sending the body parts all over the world.

Desperate, the weakened elemental dragons unanimously decided to channel their own remaining power, sending energy directly from the glowing, radiant fissure to stabilize the shattered moon.

But the fourteen divided, exhausted elemental dragons simply lacked the raw strength to completely reform the celestial body. Instead, their desperate energy stabilized the elemental alignments within the largest lunar fragments and they became elemental moons. They accidentally forged a sprawling network of fourteen distinct nodes orbiting the world, each dragon duo having successfully repaired two new, smaller moons that now revolved in perfect synchronization with the dominant elemental dragons below.

But the Sun Dragon’s primary consciousness remained fractured and separated from the world.

It would require a massive amount of time to slowly gather its scattered divine will and successfully descend to the planet. It had to meticulously utilize the exact system the elemental dragons had built for it: then it had to painstakingly reconstruct the moon first, and only then could it safely return to its main body in the sun.

Knowing this process would take eras, and acting out of desperate precaution, the elemental dragons agreed to hunt down and permanently annihilate the final remnant of the Purple Dragon. They needed to destroy that defenseless core fragment before it could ever take root.

But they immediately discovered a horrifying problem.

The cosmic battle had violently warped the planet’s ether fluctuations in localized ways. The fourteen weakened dragons could no longer physically travel too far from the radiant, life-giving fissure. If they did, the ether network sustaining them became so agonizingly thin that they could no longer maintain their physical forms; they would literally begin to rapidly degrade and rot. Furthermore, actively maintaining the life-support systems for the fourteen new lunar nodes of the Sun Dragon constantly drained a massive portion of the energy and intense concentration they could otherwise redirect to the hunt.

And the heart of the Purple Dragon had ended in the absolute worst possible location. It had synced its orbit to hide into a sprawling, desolate region where the ether had been almost entirely vacuumed out. It was a massive, geographical dead zone. No elemental dragon could even approach the place without crumbling.

They were trapped. Their only remaining option was to aggressively accelerate the feeding process of the Sun Dragon, desperately hoping they could facilitate his descent before the Purple Dragon’s core could gather enough ambient energy to resurrect itself.

The race had officially begun.