At the final moment of the mass extinction 10,000 years ago, the safety protocols in some of the Seeds of Origin suddenly began to force the out-of-control First Borns into sleep. Hence, a small part of the races in the universe survived. The residents of Holletta were one of those survivors. Although Hao Ren had not seen more survivors yet, he thought there had to be more planets that survived the First Born like Holletta. They could be hiding somewhere in the universe, waiting to be discovered.
However, the security protocol was not an inbuilt mechanism, or homemade, self-help measure created by the mage emperors. Instead, the giant and some of its siblings were the safety protocol. These guardians—who watched as their mother was killed by the mortals, and whose hearts were still filled with hatred—were the ones to initiate the safety switch at the core of the Seeds of Origin in the centre of the universe. This safety protocol managed to protect a small part of the mortal civilisation from extinction.
In the eyes of the guardians, the phenomenon of the 'mortal race' was the culprit that caused the death of their mother. They could no longer believe in the loyalty and morality of any mortal species, nor were they willing to distinguish between the good people and the bad ones. This was the reason that caused all guardians to fall into madness and transmutation. But the last commandment of the Goddess had forced some of the guardians to remain in their sanity—even though they were filled with anger and grief, they still took the mother's order as first priority. So there was it, the sane giant that had survived before Hao Ren.
This was the truth of ten thousands of years ago. The truth was unexpectedly astounding despite all the wild guesses earlier.
"No mortal races deserve to be saved," the giant lowered its head and its voice seemed to be coming from his chest. "But this was the last instruction before mother's death. We must carry it out without question. So we started the security protocol. After the Star of Creation was pushed into the darkness by the big bang, all Seeds of Origin and their first generation of offspring entered into sealed status. Our mad brothers remained in sleep since then. But at that time, there was not many lives left in the universe."
Hao Ren speculated that the Star of Creation that was pushed into the darkness by the Big Bang was supposed to be the red nova. It was the instant when the treacherous children killed the Goddess of Creation. All event timelines had now perfectly aligned.
"After that?" Vivian looked at the giant curiously. "How did the sane guardians survive all this while?"
"We were all separated," the giant shook its head. "Some of the guardians wanted to find mother's body. They set out to search in the darkness but there had been no news from them ever since. Some of them were sleeping in various corners of the universe, as a mean to burying themselves. Mother is gone, most of my compatriots have also mutated, and the rest of the guardians have realised that they have lost their purpose of existence, so we all fall apart..."
The giant slowly recounted the last days of those guardians and mentioned the reason they came to Holletta. After bidding farewell to its siblings, it drove its spaceship, which had been badly damaged in the war, drifting aimlessly in the universe for thousands of years. It had originally thought that it would die in the aimless drift. It would wait for the spaceship to lose its control before he would find a star and end its own life. He believed that many guardians who were as clear as it must have chosen the same route. But just before he was about to reach the end of the drift, he discovered a planet: Holletta.
The giant had realised that when the safety protocol of the Seeds of Origin was started, not only the 'innocent' who did not know what had happened but also the treacherous aficionados who refused to help the mother had survived. So, it changed its plan.
Since the enemies of the day had not all died, it was necessary to continue the revenge.
"When I first discovered this planet, the entire world had not recovered from the blood-tide catastrophe," recounted the giant whose mood seemed to be calmer. It told of its story of its first arrival in Holletta, in an emotionless voice. "There were tentacles of the First Guardians and the ruins of human kingdoms everywhere. Even so, there were still many mortals surviving in the world. They survived in the ruins and the wilderness. The civilisation had fallen back to the primitive era. Anyway, they were still alive and shamelessly covering up their sins of the past. I had been observing in the orbit for several years, watching them burning down their religious scriptures, teaching the new-borns with a twisted version of history, and constantly killing the remnants of the introspectionists in the society, even completely burying the memory about the Goddess of Creation, as if they would be able to wash away their sins this way. They were living in fear and guilt. I lurked on the planet by the cover of a meteorite impact. I needed time to repair the weapons on the spacecraft and I needed to recover from my injuries…"
"So you have waited it out for thousands of years," Hao Ren could not help but say, "You have witnessed the reconstruction of the Hollettan civilisation."
"There are a lot of things that I have witnessed with my own eyes," said the giant with a sense of ambivalence in its voice. "Yes, this is the root cause of my hesitation. I didn't expect them to regain their faith in the Goddess of Creation; neither did I expect them to be able to recover so many things from the thin inborn memory and historical fragments. The early executioners had died one by one. The psychological pressure and curses from the origin of the world made those who could have lived a very long life died prematurely. After they died, their offspring inherited this world and began to worship the Goddess of Creation. I soon discovered that the world of the mortals was changing faster than I expected, and before I could take the revenge to them, the entire era had passed."
"So after you have fixed the spacecraft, you became very embarrassed." Hao Ren could not help but sigh for the giant. He looked up, but he saw endless contradictions, entanglement, and confusion in the massive figure of the giant. The giant was struggling in the countless shadows of its past, judging anything and everything relative to it purely based on right and wrong. It did persist in destroying the civilisation on Planet Holletta, but he had abandoned the idea at the same time. He had spent thousands of years to prepare the weapons and destruction plans, but these actions seemed more driven by pure mania than anything else did:
The giant knew that now revenge had made no sense, but without doing so, it would lose its purpose of existence.
Lily wanted to break this uncomfortable silence. So she raised the question about the Cult of Origination. "Were you the one who set up the cult?"
"I didn't actively organize any cult," the giant shook his head. "They spontaneously set it up. I had slept for a short time to recover my energy when I first landed on this planet. It was during that time some humans had discovered the cavern where I was hiding the spacecraft. The thoughts that I leaked out from my mind during my dreams had affected the minds of these humans. They knew about the Goddess of Creation and the treacherous children. Their becoming of Cult of Origination fanatics had even surprised me. I had never expected that even human beings would become as angry as the guardians would after they learned the truth, and they would even be willing to kill their fellow compatriots for this. Anyway, I did feel happy for their action, and I did not stop them. I had even opened up part of the structure in the cavern for them and their descendants, and taught them some knowledge so that they could help maintain my base... This is all."
There was no need for the giant to lie now. Its words were highly credible. It appeared that the giant was indeed the mastermind of the Cult of Origination, and more like a symbolic spiritual leader. The faith of the Cult of Origination arose spontaneously after they encountered the mind of the giant. This also explained what the Cult of Origination was like in terms of the biological transformation between magic and technology: the giant should have no intention to study the biotech stuff of the tiny mortals; the believers must have sussed it out themselves in the course of thousands of years. Naturally, their technology could never match the one in the giant's warship and base.
"The Cult of Origination had tried to use a type of scroll to assassinate the pope." Hao Ren took out the fragment of the divine scroll from his dimensional pocket. "This is it. Did you give them this?"
The giant looked down and said, "Yes, but what I gave was just raw material. This material was created on a satellite of the Star of Creation and blessed by mother. The Cult of Origination used this ancient material and made it into sacred item. I don't know the specific usage. I don't pay attention to these things."
Hao Ren looked at the scroll fragment in his hand. "No wonder this thing has a divine characteristic..."