"It is more information than I thought I would get," Gaia said to herself as she examined the information she had received from Lord 8. Although the packet contained considerably less than she had hoped for, it still provided several useful insights into the organization she had been investigating. Unfortunately, the person who had originally recruited Lord 8 had already died after stepping out of one of the secret realms, which was a considerable disappointment. That meant one of the most important links in the chain had disappeared before she could learn anything about the organization's earliest activities.
As for the so-called plans Lord 8 had discussed with the other leaders, Gaia found very little of value. Their planning sessions had apparently been conducted through an array powered by human sacrifices, a discovery that made her feel sick even though she had already witnessed the horrors these people were capable of committing. The array had concealed their discussions so effectively that she could not simply observe them whenever she wished, and the people using it had taken considerable precautions to keep their activities hidden. It was another reminder that her ability to observe the Earth, powerful as it was, did not mean she could automatically discover every atrocity taking place upon it.
That limitation had become increasingly frustrating as Gaia investigated the hidden facilities she had already discovered. In every case, the most damning evidence had been concealed behind an array that prevented her from properly observing what was happening inside. Worse still, these arrays were designed to make their surroundings appear consistent with what she would normally expect to find in those locations. Rather than creating an obvious blind spot that she could investigate immediately, they blended their concealed contents into the surrounding environment, making it difficult to recognize that anything unusual was happening at all.
The discovery had forced Gaia to reconsider how she monitored the world. She had already begun working on subconscious routines that would allow her to recognize suspicious patterns, such as unusually large numbers of missing people, unexplained concentrations of human remains, or other indications that something terrible might be happening beneath the surface. However, developing such routines was more complicated than simply telling herself to look for mass graves. The arrays could conceal the evidence itself, meaning that she would have to learn how to recognize inconsistencies in the surrounding information instead.
The situation beneath Washington, D.C., had been a good example of the problem. Gaia had not discovered the hidden facility merely because she happened to look in the right place, but because she examined the surrounding clues closely enough to realize that something did not add up. Individual details that seemed perfectly ordinary had become suspicious when considered together, eventually leading her toward the truth. If she wanted to prevent similar atrocities in the future, she would need to develop a more systematic approach to detecting such inconsistencies before they could grow into larger disasters.
Despite the disappointing lack of detailed plans, the information from Lord 8 had revealed something important about the organization itself. There were ten individuals known as Lords who occupied its highest positions of leadership, although they had apparently not yet agreed on an official name for their organization. Their most recent discussion had included another disagreement over what they should call themselves, and they had once again failed to reach a decision. Gaia found the detail almost ridiculous, considering the scale of the crimes they had committed, but it also revealed something about the people running the organization.
The ten Lords did not trust one another.
Their meetings were filled with suspicion, competing interests, and an unwillingness to reveal more information than necessary. Each leader preferred to remain within their own sphere of influence, avoiding unnecessary contact with the others unless cooperation was required. This arrangement explained why Gaia had obtained so little useful information from their discussions, despite having access to the memories of someone who had participated in them. Their distrust had limited the amount of information any individual Lord possessed about the organization as a whole, making it difficult to uncover their complete strategy by investigating only one of them.
To make matters worse, the Lords had divided the world into separate regions of operation. Gaia found that arrangement particularly concerning when she examined the distribution of their territories and realized that five of the ten Lords were operating on the Asian continent. Considering that Asia contained the largest share of humanity, the decision made a certain amount of strategic sense, even if it created a serious problem for anyone attempting to stop them. With so many people living across such an enormous region, effectively controlling every country and investigating every suspicious activity would be nearly impossible.
The danger was not simply that the Lords could recruit followers or establish hidden facilities in those countries. Their plans revolved around eventually opening portals, and they would only need to succeed once for the consequences to become catastrophic. If even one of them managed to establish a sufficiently stable opening, the damage could spread before Gaia or the local authorities had enough time to respond. The possibility that five separate Lords were pursuing their own operations across Asia meant that the danger was not concentrated in one location, but scattered across a continent containing billions of potential victims.
The remaining five Lords had divided their attention across the rest of the world. According to their discussions, maintaining momentum after the destruction of the first city was more difficult in those regions, particularly when the authorities and surviving populations began organizing a response. Gaia did not like hearing that explanation, because it suggested that the Lords had already considered how humanity might react once the scale of their plans became apparent. They were not simply relying on secrecy; they were also thinking about how to sustain their operations after their first major actions inevitably drew attention.
This realization left Gaia with another problem to solve. She needed to establish more subconscious rules that could help her detect the hidden activities of the Lords before they reached the stage where they could carry out their plans. Unfortunately, developing and refining those safeguards would consume time and attention that she had hoped to devote to improving her ability to refine Void energy. She wanted to continue strengthening herself, especially when her eternal enemies were becoming increasingly active, but she could not afford to neglect the responsibilities that came with protecting the Earth.
There was, however, another revelation that Gaia should have recognized much earlier. She had spent considerable time wondering how the Void had managed to contact humans so early in their development, especially when the Universe itself was still young. The answer, at least in part, had been hiding in plain sight within humanity's own stories. Lovecraftian tales had always described incomprehensible beings from beyond the known world, entities whose existence challenged the assumptions upon which human understanding was built. Gaia now realized that those stories had a much more direct connection to reality than she had initially considered.
Humans had long wondered why the System and many of its features resembled concepts from popular media. Some had even questioned whether those stories had somehow predicted the existence of the System, or whether the System itself had been influenced by the things people had written. The truth was that both explanations contained a portion of the answer, although the actual process was far more complicated than either possibility suggested. Humanity had not simply invented every concept that later appeared in the System, nor had the Universe blindly copied everything it encountered in human culture.
Dark matter had existed long before the Universe reached the stage at which mana could become available to living creatures. In its earlier state, it represented a form of potential energy that could eventually be transformed into something life could absorb, allowing creatures to grow stronger and extend their lifespans. Because that potential had always existed, it had influenced the subconscious minds of humans and numerous other species in subtle ways. Ideas about mana, qi, cultivation, and supernatural power had therefore emerged repeatedly across different cultures, even when those civilizations had developed without direct contact with one another.
However, a world in which individuals could grow overwhelmingly powerful through cultivation was not necessarily conducive to the development of a stable civilization. Humanity had advanced by learning to cooperate, creating stronger weapons, developing better medicines, and relying on collective effort to overcome challenges that no single individual could solve alone. If one person became so powerful that the rest of their tribe could no longer threaten or kill them, that individual could easily become a tyrant who obstructed progress. Even a rebellion might accomplish nothing if the ruler could survive every attack, leaving the people beneath them with few ways to change their circumstances.
For that reason, mana had remained locked away in the form of dark matter rather than becoming directly accessible to living creatures. It would not be released until the Universe had officially been born and reached the appropriate stage of development. In the meantime, the underlying concept of supernatural power continued to influence the imaginations of humans and other species, occasionally appearing in their myths, legends, and stories. The ideas existed in their minds because the potential behind those ideas had always been part of reality, even though they could not yet experience it directly.
The Universe, meanwhile, absorbed the cultural energy generated by the civilizations developing within it. Every story, belief, and concept contributed something to that vast accumulation of energy, allowing the Universe to draw inspiration from the collective imagination of the species living inside it. When the time eventually came to transform dark matter into mana, it used that accumulated cultural energy to help shape the systems and mechanisms that would govern the new power. In doing so, it replicated the concepts that seemed most useful or efficient, drawing upon ideas that civilizations had already explored through their myths and stories.
That explained why so many familiar concepts had appeared once the System became active. The Universe had not necessarily copied individual stories word for word, but it had used the accumulated ideas of countless civilizations as inspiration for the structures it created. The similarities between popular media and the System were therefore neither entirely coincidental nor proof that humanity had somehow predicted every detail of what would happen. Instead, they were the result of a complicated relationship between the nature of reality and the collective imagination of the living beings within it.
Lovecraftian tales, however, were different.
Gaia had already considered the origins of those stories and understood that their inspiration had not come solely from the subconscious influence of dark matter. The Void creatures had begun noticing that the Universe was being born, and they had attempted to gain an early advantage by allowing knowledge of their existence to reach the developing civilizations within it. By introducing those ideas into the minds of living beings, they had effectively planted seeds of awareness long before humanity possessed the means to understand what those stories truly represented. Unfortunately, their attempt to weaken the newly forming Universe had succeeded to some extent, even if the consequences had not unfolded exactly as they might have intended.
What Gaia still did not know was how the first contact had actually been established. Lord 8 had been too damaged mentally to provide a reliable answer, because his memories unrelated to the Void had been erased almost completely. He had been recruited by someone who was already dead, and his rise through the organization's ranks had apparently depended on his own actions rather than any special knowledge of its origins. Whatever information he might once have possessed about the first contact had been lost long before Gaia gained access to his soul.
Still, she had learned more about her eternal enemy, as she had begun to think of the organization. Perhaps one day, she would finally manage to wipe it off the map, eliminating its leaders and dismantling every hidden facility they controlled. Yet even if she succeeded, she doubted that the problem would disappear permanently, because human greed would always create opportunities for new organizations to emerge. There would always be rotten apples among humanity, people willing to sacrifice others for power, wealth, or the promise of immortality.
And the Void itself would never stop trying to consume any Universe it could reach.
That left Gaia contemplating a conflict whose potential duration was almost impossible to comprehend. She might be facing an enemy that would continue returning for billions of years, assuming she survived long enough to witness even a fraction of that time. The Universe might endure for such a span, but Gaia was not certain that the same could be said for Earth, especially now that its inhabitants had gained the potential to grow extraordinarily powerful. With every new discovery, she found herself facing questions that extended far beyond the immediate crisis, forcing her to consider not only how to protect humanity today, but also what the future might look like for a world whose people were no longer bound by the limits they had once known.