The first rays of sunlight to pierce the dense canopy of the island did not fall upon corpses, but upon men transfigured.
As they stirred from their death-like slumber, the eerie silence of the clearing was shattered by gasps of sheer disbelief. Kaylor ran a trembling hand over his chest, his breath hitching in his throat. The jagged, festering gashes torn into his flesh by the island's predators only days ago had vanished. Not a single scar remained. There was no trace of the black infection that had been rotting his strength.
Beside him, Beru, Caelys, Dan, and Emphis stared at one another, dazed. Their muscles, once withered by weeks of starvation, now bulged with a vibrant, restless power. An electric energy hummed beneath their skin, making their fingertips tingle with a phantom itch for action.
"A miracle..." Emphis whispered, slowly curling his fingers into a fist. The sound of his own knuckles cracking echoed like a gunshot in the quiet air. "The Gods... they have touched us."
They couldn't explain it, but they felt invincible. The weight of their heavy iron axes now felt like mere feathers in their grip. Yet, despite the wonder, a shadow of unease did not leave Kaylor's eyes. Toward noon, while his companions ventured into the brush to hunt—discovering with roars of laughter that they could now outrun the very beasts that had once hunted them—Kaylor returned alone to the spring.
The sun sat at its zenith. Its golden rays fell vertically into the circular basin, turning the surface of the water into a shimmering mirror of liquid silver. That was when he saw it.
At the very bottom of the pool, nestled beneath the crystalline transparency, a perfect geometric form glistened. It was no ordinary rock. It radiated a white, holy light, more brilliant than a raw diamond pulled from the deepest mines. Hypnotized, drawn by a pull that felt like gravity itself, Kaylor could not stop himself. He dove.
The moment his fingers brushed the cold, unyielding surface of the Crystallized Meteorite, the world exploded.
Because his body was already saturated with the essence of the water, Kaylor's internal energy entered an immediate, violent resonance with the source. In a heartbeat, his soul was ripped from his physical shell. He no longer saw the island. He saw... Everything.
He witnessed the cataclysmic collision of neutron stars at the far edge of the galaxy. He saw the Gamma Surge strike the meteorite like a divine shield. He saw the Earth fracture under the cosmic impact, and most importantly, he witnessed the birth of the Parallel Dimensions—that invisible, shimmering membrane beginning to sever reality itself.
Seized by a sacred, bone-deep terror, Kaylor breached the surface, gasping for air. His lungs burned. He finally understood. This "miracle" was no benevolent gift from the Heavens; it was a devastating force capable of reducing the entire world to ash if it fell into the wrong hands. In this age of iron and savagery, where men butchered one another for a mere scrap of land, giving such power to humanity was like lighting a torch inside a powder keg.
"We must leave. Now," he commanded when the other four returned, laden with massive carcasses of game they had slain with ease.
"Already?" Beru asked, confused. He hoisted a massive boulder with one hand as if it were a pebble, a wide grin on his face. "We are the Kings of this island now, Kaylor! Why run when we can rule?"
"The monsters are coming back," Kaylor lied, his voice sharp with urgency. "If we stay, we will eventually become just like them. We are healed—this is our only chance to escape this cursed place."
His fear was so visceral, so raw, that it finally broke their resolve.
On the trek back to the coast, the change in them was undeniable. The nightmare-creatures of the island no longer felt like threats; they felt like prey. The five men moved with supernatural agility, leaping over fallen giants of wood and sprinting through tangled vines with the speed of mountain lions.
But a gruesome detail troubled Kaylor as they ran. They passed the sites of their former camps, the places where forty-five of their brothers-in-arms had fallen... and they found nothing. No bones. No scraps of armor. Not a single trace of blood. The island had absorbed it all.
As they finally pushed their heavy ships back into the surf, Kaylor stared at the receding horizon, his gaze dark and hollow. He kept the secret of the meteorite sealed in the deepest vaults of his mind. He believed the danger was behind them, left on that shard of rock in the sea.
He was wrong. The mutation had only just begun. The cosmic energy was now anchored in their very blood, a living tide seeking a way to overflow.
Their return would change the face of the world forever, but not in the way they imagined. They weren't just bringing back survivors. They were bringing back the end of the human race as it was known.
850 years before the current era – 50 years after the Return from the Island.
The return of the five survivors had been more than a mere legend whispered around campfires; it was the genesis of an irreversible mutation of the human species.
For half a century, Kaylor, Beru, Caelys, Dan, and Emphis watched as the world withered and changed around them. Their own bodies defied the laws of mortality; at seventy years of age, they still possessed the raw, rippling vigor of twenty-year-old warriors. But the true upheaval lay in their progeny. Every child born of these five men inherited the Cosmic Flux—a celestial energy signature that elevated them far above ordinary humanity.
In a society still ruled by iron and primal aggression, this gift quickly curdled into a curse.
Wherever the lineage of the Five settled, oppression followed like a shadow. Gifted with herculean strength, lightning speed, and supernatural perceptions, the descendants of the survivors began to treat "normal humans" as nothing more than cattle. They declared themselves Living Gods, ruling with blood and whim, convinced that their divine blood gave them the right to enslave the weak.
From his secluded domain, Kaylor watched this descending chaos with a growing, bitter rot in his heart. He alone knew the true source of this power. He alone had "connected" his soul to the heart of the Meteorite. That connection granted him faculties that even his four brothers-in-arms could not fathom.
Deeply troubled, he summoned Beru, Caelys, Dan, and Emphis to a secret assembly.
"Our lineages are tearing this world apart," Kaylor declared, his voice resonating with a gravity that made the torches in the hall flicker. "The inequality we have birthed will lead to the extinction of men. We must withdraw. We must go far away, to a place where our power can no longer poison the earth."
But the venom of grandeur had already infected his old friends.
"Why should we hide in the shadows?" Beru retorted, his voice dripping with arrogance as he crushed a golden goblet in his bare hand. "We are not a poison, Kaylor. We are Evolution. The weak were born to serve the strong. It is the natural order of the stars."
The other three nodded in cold agreement. They were kings of flesh and bone, and they had no intention of stepping down from their blood-stained thrones.
Kaylor realized then that he stood alone. If his peers refused to leave, he would have to force them through an act of creation unprecedented in the history of the universe.
Drawing upon his unique link to the Crystallized Meteorite still pulsating on the hidden island, Kaylor tapped into the cosmic wellspring to manipulate the very magnetic field of the Earth. He did not simply move people; he tore the fabric of reality itself.
In a colossal deployment of power that turned the sky to a shimmering violet, Kaylor generated a Second Parallel Dimension.
Instantly, a resonance wave surged across the planet. Everyone who carried the Cosmic Flux—the five survivors, their wives, their thousands of descendants, and even the Island of the Meteorite itself—was literally sucked out of the material world and pulled into a new plane of existence.
The world splintered.
On one side, normal humans remained in a dimension devoid of cosmic energy, suddenly liberated from their superhuman oppressors. On the other, the mutants found themselves imprisoned in a vibrant, high-frequency dimension saturated with Flux.
To perfect his masterpiece, Kaylor enacted one final, mercy-filled technique: he erased the memory of the mundane humans. In a single night, they forgot the atrocities they had suffered, the "Gods" who had ruled them, and the very existence of supernatural power.
The planet now consisted of three superimposed dimensions:
The Human Dimension: Stripped of magic, devoted to material progress and the slow march of technology.The First Parallel (MEL): Populated by the descendants of the Five, bathed in the eternal glow of the Cosmos.The Second Parallel (TENROS): Where the Takin, who had arrived a century earlier, wandered in exile, unaware that a new world had just been born beside their own.
Behind the shimmering membrane of the new dimension, the fury of Beru and the others was tectonic. They were trapped. Kaylor stood before them, one man against four, empowered by his legitimacy as the Lord of the Zenith.
"There is no turning back," he said simply, his eyes glowing with the light of the stars. "Here, we will build a world in our image. But the Island shall remain under eternal watch. Never again shall a single man touch the Meteorite alone."
Constrained by the new reality, the five Lords divided the world of MEL into five Great Realms: the East for Beru, the South for Caelys, the West for Dan, the North for Emphis, and the Zenith for Kaylor—the center point, the guardian of balance and the Sacred Island.
Thus began the Era of the Gleaners, elite warriors tasked with guarding the secret of the Meteorite, never suspecting that through the veil of dimensions, other eyes were already beginning to watch them from the dark.