The sprawling, ancient system Ren was currently interfacing with, the supercomputer that had just formally registered him as its administrator, was the physical manifestation of that network.

That desperate effort... It was the architectural battleground of a primordial, millennia-old race between the reconstruction of the Light and the horrifying resurrection of the Darkness.

Ren slowly chewed on the massive, mythological data dump within his expanded mind. And to learn about the space and the size of the sun was something, but there was another something about the entire narrative that deeply bothered him.

He had taken what, supposedly, the ether based form of the Sun Dragon should have taken... Well, he was too late in getting his mind back in order anyway, Purple would have won otherwise.

But what bothered him more was that...

Humans didn’t appear in the historical record.

Or, if they did, they were entirely lumped in with the rapidly multiplying life forms that the dragons completely ignored, casually referring to them simply as the new "vermin".

They were the tiny, insignificant things hiding in the dirt? The pests spread across the globe, stealing microscopic fractions of ether, exhibiting "concerning new attitudes"?

In the entire, sprawling epic of the system’s creation, throughout the apocalyptic, sky-shattering war of the cosmic titans, humans were not actors on the stage.

They were a plague. They were barely even considered background context. They were nothing more than the underlying, irritating symptom that two colossal dragons had used as a convenient geopolitical excuse to wage a war for absolute supremacy over the planet.

A chilling suspicion began to form in Ren’s mind.

Was the dragons’ concern regarding the "stolen ether" and the "vermin" actually the ancient, primordial origin of the modern tamer system?

Was mana, at its absolute biological root, simply the natural, localized energy of the dragons? And had the ancient humans simply evolved to aggressively steal it, using that stolen energy to violently domesticate the most basic, weakest offshoots of draconic evolution, the beasts?

Ren physically shivered, violently shaking the horrific implication from his head.

Mana was fundamentally, biologically toxic to the human body. Ancient humanity absolutely hadn’t possessed a choice if they wanted to live until maturity. A primordial world entirely suffocated by dense, unregulated mana wouldn’t have allowed an ordinary human to survive past the age of fifteen or twenty.

They must have spent centuries living like rats, crushed by the atmospheric pressure, hiding in deep caves, reproducing as rapidly as possible before their bodies broke down. Perhaps that was how they had barely survived. They were forcefully, brutally adapted to that toxic ancient world over hundreds, thousands, or perhaps tens of thousands of years.

The modern tamer system, the way humans utilized mana now, wasn’t a malicious theft. It was the desperate, bloody result of evolutionary survival.

But that logical deduction left an infinitely worse, terrifying question hanging in the void.

If humans were entirely irrelevant to the ancient architects, if they were nothing more than vermin, background context, a nameless plague, then how in the world had he managed to become the recognized, administrative bearer of the system?

And that question immediately branched into a second, vastly more uncomfortable realization.

What did it mean that Selthia, a human actively serving the rotting remnants of the Purple Dragon, was also a recognized bearer?

Ren remained suspended in the vastness of the network. The glowing map of the eighteen ruins rotated slowly in his mind, the sheer weight of the entire draconic mythos settling heavily into his bones. He furiously chewed on the single, massive anomaly that the brain, despite its roaring tidal wave of classified intelligence, had entirely failed to explain.

Had the Purple Dragon’s parasitic system actually accounted for human compatibility from the very beginning?

Had the ancient terror foreseen how the "vermin" would eventually evolve and develop in a world so incredibly toxic to them?

Or worse... Were humans from the beginning what the terror wanted?

And when the panicked elemental dragons hurriedly restructured the system to hijack it, did they simply fail to notice the human compatibility loophole due to their frantic rush?

Or was it all just one massive, incredibly lucky biological coincidence born from the evolution of the tamer system?

The supercomputer did not provide an answer.

That was a terrifying piece of the puzzle Ren was going to have to figure out on his own later.

♢♢♢♢

Ren finally pulled his hand away from the colossal crystal brain.

For him, processing the monumental data dump hadn’t been anything like reading a history book or scrolling through a dusty academy archive. It had been a violent, visceral immersion. He had witnessed the relentless march of time at blinding speed, viewing the birth and death of eras from a cold, terrifyingly omniscient perspective. Every single epoch was compressed into a microsecond, yet agonizingly complete in its detail.

An unfathomable stretch of millennia had paraded through his expanded consciousness in what, to the outside world, had only been a few ticking seconds.

When he finally severed the connection and his consciousness violently snapped back into the confines of his mortal skull, the real world felt claustrophobic. It felt absurdly small and painfully slow.

The cavernous stone chamber, the glowing runes, and the friends breathing quietly around him were suddenly reduced to a fragile, almost endearing scale. It was a jarring, dizzying whiplash, going from containing the apocalyptic fall of cosmic gods within his mind, back to just being a teenager standing in a quiet basement.

Ren aggressively shook his head, physically tossing the phantom afterimages of world-spanning dragons from his vision.

It was absolutely useless to obsess over a past he couldn’t change. If the radiant Sun Dragon had ultimately lost the primordial race, if its divine projection remained shattered across the lunar cores, and if the parasitic Purple Heart had awakened first, that was ancient history.

It was a cosmic tragedy decided eras before he was even born, and no amount of retrospective dread was going to rewind the clock.

The only thing left to do was to ruthlessly exploit the impossible miracle currently resting in his hands.

Whether by blind cosmic accident or deliberate, unfathomable design, Ren had stumbled upon the exact administrative bypass needed to counteract the ancient terror’s advance. He had the keys.

’We still need to stop the other one...’ Ren thought, his eyes narrowing in the dim light. ’The Purple one.’