The Doctor shook her head weakly, her posture slumping as she issued a bitter laugh at the sheer, tragic absurdity of her own kind. How could an entire global civilization have been so blindingly foolish?
With that sentence, the Doctor's narrative took a sharp, dark turn. The illusion of a sci-fi utopia collapsed instantly, plunging straight into the grim reality of a slow-motion apocalypse.
While it was true that Originium didn't initially leave a visible, toxic footprint on baseline human physiology, it was far from harmless. The true damage was simply so microscopic and slow-moving at the start that by the time the systemic symptoms finally erupted, the entire species was already past the point of no return.
According to statistical data compiled by scholars toward the end, the global diagnosis rate for severe psychological decay and neurological disorders skyrocketed in direct proportion to the widespread commercialization of Originium tech.
Yet, the people of that era completely missed the connection. They swept it under the rug as a natural byproduct of living in a fast-paced, high-pressure modern society. Besides, mental illness had always existed in human history; who in their right mind would look at a revolutionary clean energy source and blame it for a spike in psychological distress?
The standard contamination of Originium was a slow poison that anchored itself into the human genetic code, quietly passing down through generations. The first generation of humans barely registered a change, but as the hereditary cycles spun forward, the resulting conditions mutated into something far more sinister than a standard medical pathology.
"I was a product of that exact era. That's the baseline reason why my own mind is so fractured today. The substance had already saturated the crust of this colony planet."
The Doctor let out a long, ragged sigh as she summarized the bleak timeline. If they had simply left that cursed mineral alone in the dark, would any of this have happened?
"But the absolute worst part wasn't the genetic decay," the Doctor whispered, her eyes dark. "The terrifying reality is that Originium behaves like a living organism. It actively attracts and absorbs human souls, stitching countless fractured informations together into massive, collective entities. And those entities possess a catastrophic, highly aggressive psychic pressure that targets the minds of the living."
The description instantly triggered a memory for Jeanne. She flashed back to her repeating dreams—specifically, those grotesque, shifting horrors she had seen drifting aimlessly across the sky of that ruined world. So those things... were actually the mangled, aggregated souls of the previous humanity, fused together?
"So... does that mean the entities the people of Terra currently revere as 'Gods' are actually just massive collections of souls?" Jeanne blurted out. She wasn't entirely sure what cognitive leap had caused her to link those shifting nightmares to the legendary deities of Terra, but the intuition struck her with total clarity.
Even as the words left her mouth, she worried she was letting her imagination run away with her. Yet, a deep, unshakeable instinct told her she had just hit the absolute truth.
"Exactly," the Doctor confirmed, though she noted that these entities were far less defined during her era.
The Doctor shot Jeanne a fascinated look. She was genuinely impressed by how seamlessly Jeanne had connected the dots between ancient psychic aggregations and the localized deities of modern Terra, considering they seemed completely unrelated on the surface.
As for why these modern entities manifested as singular, distinct beings on Terra rather than shifting, chaotic blobs? The answer was simple: across a vast gulf of nearly ten millennia, the millions of individual wills trapped inside those matrices had been thoroughly eroded and smoothed out by the relentless river of time.
What emerged from that mountain of forgotten souls were the conscious entities the living races now called gods. Because they were born from pure psychic aggregation, they wielded power that completely defied mortal imagination, yet their structural composition remained incredibly fragile.
Their primary vulnerability was a direct result of their origin: because they were still woven from a patchwork of countless disparate souls, it was remarkably easy for them to fracture under pressure, splitting into independent, localized avatars. This structural instability was the exact reason why fragmented shards of ancient deities were scattered across every corner of Terra.
Jeanne sat in silence, completely overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the classified history washing over her. Even as she listened to the heartbreaking tragedy of the Doctor's people, she struggled to find a genuine point of emotional empathy. The concepts were simply too far removed from her own lived experience.
She was a girl who had never even seen a steel dreadnought floating on the ocean; how could her brain realistically visualize massive starships navigating the infinite void of outer space?
"Then... how did your civilization push back against that kind of psychic pollution?" Jeanne asked. She refused to believe a society capable of traveling between stars would simply roll over and die without a fight. They had to have engineered a defensive protocol or left behind a survival contingency, right?
The Doctor offered a slow, deliberate nod. Their researchers had indeed pulled off a desperate, last-minute countermeasure to preserve the species.
"Chimerism," the Doctor revealed, her voice flat. "The psychic pollution broadcast by those entities was explicitly tuned to target baseline human biology. Our geneticists realized that if they spliced non-human physiological traits and animal characteristics directly into the human genetic sequence, the resulting structural shift would cause the entity's psychic frequency to completely lose its lock."
The final piece of the puzzle clicked into place for Jeanne. That single sentence perfectly explained the existence of the countless unique, animal-eared races dominating modern Terra. The entire population was the living legacy of a massive, desperate pre-civilization experiment designed to shield humanity's remnants from psychic annihilation. They were aliens to this planet, and also responsible for creation of Originium.
But an invasive, species-wide genetic overhaul like that was never going to win unanimous global approval. A massive faction of the old population had fiercely rejected the procedure, choosing to maintain their pure, baseline human forms. Their ultimate fate was written across the silent landscape: out of that entire proud lineage, the Doctor was the absolute last one left drawing breath.
Jeanne felt a sudden, heavy wave of grim irony. It was a flawless tactical dead end. If the refugees refused the genetic splicing, they spiraled into catastrophic insanity; if they accepted the surgery, they opened the door for a fatal, incurable crystal infection to ravage their bloodlines—and there was no guarantee their souls wouldn't still carry the scars.
The fact that modern Terrans possessed absolutely zero historical memory of this pre-civilization alien race suggested that the transition had been incredibly violent. The past was a tangled, bloody knot with all its threads cut.
Jeanne had no real desire to become an archeologist or unearth old ghosts; she simply wanted to understand the baseline mechanics of the world so she could grasp why the current era was so profoundly broken.
Just as she opened her mouth to steer the conversation toward their current tactical situation, the Doctor abruptly cut her off, her posture shifting as a sudden, frantic urgency bled into her features.
"From this point on, I need you to just listen and not interrupt. My operational window is closing fast, and we cannot afford to waste a single second..." The Doctor lunged forward, her slender, pale fingers tightly gripping Jeanne's hand as her expression turned dead serious. "Originium isn't a passive mineral, Jeanne. It possesses a highly unique, deeply integrated social structure. What the people of this era classify as 'Catastrophes,' along with the way modern civilizations actively harvest and consume the crystals... it's all part of a massive, self-sustaining life cycle. It is a state of existence that defies standard vocabulary..."
The Doctor rattled off a massive torrent of complex data, her words tumbling out in a desperate rush. The sheer density of the high-level concepts was far too advanced for a girl with Jeanne's historical background to fully process, but one core truth burned through the jargon: Originium was infinitely more dangerous and calculated than it appeared on the surface.
The Doctor didn't even pause for breath, driving her body forward until the final syllable left her lips—and the moment she stopped speaking, her entire presence completely withered. Her energy plummeted instantly, her head dropping as if she had just sustained a severe physical blow, though Jeanne hadn't detected a single trace of an external attack.
"Don't look around... the pressure is localized entirely inside my own consciousness," the Doctor wheezed, her voice barely a whisper as she struggled to keep her eyes open. Yet, a real, unforced smile broke through her exhaustion. "But look at that... you really do possess a passive aura that dampens the strain. Honestly, if you weren't sitting right next to me holding my hand, that data dump would have triggered a total systemic shutdown and knocked me out cold for days..."
Despite her state, the strategist looked triumphant. She had just verified her primary hypothesis: Jeanne was the definitive anchor she needed.
"Why do I get the distinct impression you were just delivering your last will and testament?" Jeanne muttered, her face grim as she stared down at the pale girl. Her heart was beating fast—not out of fear of the secrets she had just learned, but because she had just watched this fragile, white-haired girl nearly let her own soul snap just to pass the message along.