Kane walked toward the dark sphere. Every step felt like he was dragging his soul through broken glass.
As his fingers touched the surface, a vision hit him.
He saw Earth. Not the shifted Earth, but a version of Earth that had never seen the System. He saw his mother, his sister, his friends—all living long, boring, beautiful lives. And then he saw the Hegemony arrive.
They didn't "Shift" the world. They didn't give out Ranks. They simply deleted the timeline because Earth's "Soul-Yield" was too low. They erased forty billion lives as if they were a typo in a spreadsheet.
The "System" wasn't an invasion. The System was a Defense.
The "Shift" was the only way to make humanity "Relevant" enough to avoid being deleted. The God-Feeder gene was a desperate gamble by a dying Creator to make a weapon that even the Hegemony couldn't erase.
"The Shift didn't destroy my world," Kane whispered, tears of silver fire running down his face. "It saved it from something worse."
The Librarian bowed its head. "The Hegemony is not 'Evil.' They are 'Efficient.' They delete what they cannot use. You are the only thing in the universe they cannot use. And that is why they fear you."
[LEVEL UP: RANK 9 - PEAK STAGE] [TRAIT EVOLVED: THE TIMELINE-VIRUS] (You can now 'See' the deleted timelines. You can pull 'echoes' of what was lost into reality.)
Kane pulled his hand back from the sphere. His body in the physical world began to glow with a light that blinded the Citadel's sensors.
"Sully," Kane's voice rang out in the soul-space, cutting through the Librarian's logic. "Wake me up. I know what we have to do."
"What is that?" the Librarian asked, its diamond-head spinning in curiosity.
"The Hegemony wants a clean Garden?" Kane smiled, a jagged, terrifying look. "I'm gonna give them Infestation."