Chapter 304: Meeting Mother Again, The Story Of The Precursors

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A psychic link formed by his mother’s power. It flowed into his tiny hands and then disappeared inside him.

He had felt a strange spark at the time, as if his mother had given him something precious. He never understood what it was and never expected to see or feel it again until this exact moment.

That small spark of her life had been her final gift to him.

Riven fell to his knees and continued crying. Then he saw his mother walking out of the memory and coming straight toward him.

"E-Eh?"

His eyes widened. He clutched his chest tightly while watching her walk closer. She smiled the same way she used to and wrapped her arms around him.

"Riven... your mind and soul... you’ve exhausted them to the point your brain completely shut down..." she sighed. "Your stubborn body and its vitality kept you alive, barely... but you should, by all means, have died."

"N-No... I..." Riven muttered, shaking his head. "Mother... wait, why are you...? Are you not a memory?"

"Through memories we live, through stars we seek, through worlds we experience," she said gently. "Genesis is a cancerous fragment of what we truly are. When I was given a piece of her cells, a unique mutation happened to me. I was able to see the truth behind her kind, and the being she truly was..."

"...Eh?" Riven was still confused, staring at the woman who looked and felt exactly like the mother he had lost so many years ago.

"Our Race are not devourers," Viviane said, her voice steady as she met Riven’s eyes. "The legacy we’ve inherited by purifying her cells is the Legacy of the Precursors. We aren’t devourers, we are endless banks of information... we are libraries of life."

"!!!"

His mother smiled at the shock on his face. Her hair grew longer as she spoke, flowing outward until it resembled a swirling nebula that wrapped gently around Riven. Within the strands of that living hair, countless stars and distant planets flickered into view, each one clear enough to see continents and oceans inside.

"We are people who desire to preserve the beautiful library of life in the universe. We go from planet to planet gathering life, and assimilating it. Every species we can find feeds our banks."

The vision shifted. She showed him a tall, gray-skinned humanoid man standing alone in the middle of a desolate stretch of land. The ground around him was cracked and empty, yet he moved with careful purpose, collecting whatever small forms of life he could find, tiny insects, sparse plants, even single-celled organisms clinging to rocks, and allowing them to become one with him.

The process looked somewhat peaceful, life itself seemed attracted to the Precursors, willingly letting them assimilate them.

Then the man grew a pair of tentacled wings from his back. He spread them wide and flew upward into the skies, heading straight for the stars without hesitation.

"When we reach a habitable planet... our people plant the seeds of life into them, from what we’ve collected across the universe."

"Ah!!!"

Riven stared in disbelief as the scene changed again. He watched every small species that had been gathered appear in new worlds. Planets that once held almost no biodiversity slowly filled with adjusted forms of life, each one carefully altered so they could live together without one wiping out the others. The balance looked deliberate and practiced, building these massive biomes felt almost like an art the Precursors had perfected over eons.

"Life at the beginning of the universe was much more primitive, smaller and weak. We helped them slowly grow larger, through both the gathering of DNA and also through evolution... what was once a desertic universe... slowly bloomed, as we planted countless seeds of life across the universe."

She continued showing him the memory held inside the cells—the same cancerous cells she had purified by chance. She had been the first person among the thousands who received them to actually succeed in purifying them, thanks to the unique nature of her body. Riven watched world after world bloom with life. Every small specimen the Precursors collected went on to evolve into larger creatures that claimed their lands, always under the distant protection and guidance of the ones who had placed them there.

"The Precursors went from planet to planet, doing this, planting seeds of life, to give this universe a ’chance to fight back’ against the Inevitable End of All."

"What’s... that?" Riven asked, his voice was quieter now as the scale of what he was seeing settled in.

Within the visions, an endless black cloud appeared on the horizon of space. Crimson eyes opened inside the darkness and fixed themselves on the Precursors as they traveled between the stars. The cloud moved slowly, but it never stopped.

"The Inevitable End of All is... I don’t know," Viviane admitted. "It has always been there, and it slowly swallows all reality. Life itself is its complete opposite. Life is the way to defend against it. The more life there is in our universe, the more the Inevitable End of All recoils and steps back. Every single life counts, from the largest of beasts to the smallest of bacteria."

"Existence can only prevail with life. That’s why our race took to the stars. We traveled from world to world, planting life wherever we could... but..."

RUMBLE!

The visions shifted. Riven found himself looking at a council of Precursors seated around a large circular table. Among them stood a tall woman with sharp, beautiful features and glowing eyes. She slammed her hand against the table hard enough to crack it, her voice rising in anger as the other members of the Council of Life clearly disagreed with her.

"This was Genesis," his mother said. "She was once one of the greatest among us. She had seeded thousands of planets with life. But after watching so many of those worlds get swallowed by the End of All, she started to lose faith in our mission. Little by little, the End of All whispered to her, and she listened."

"Darkness..." Riven muttered.

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