The old man walked past Silva and moved his hand on the glass of the tube. “I come here every time and place my hands on the tubes, to feel their horror, to endure their pain with them.
But mostly to remind myself that I threw away my humanity. I allowed my drive for a solution to clog my mind. I fell deeper into it until I lost touch with how much destruction I had caused at this point,” the old man said. He leaned his face in and placed it on the glass.
“You did this?” Silva asked.
“A part of it, yes, but there were more before. But their demons got to them, broke them, eroded them, and left them dead, hollow, without souls.
The price you pay for the future of your race—you walk in and never look back,” the man said.
“Who exactly are you, and what are you talking about? Start making sense before I snap your neck,” Silva threatened.
“Oh, you don’t have to do that, Dark Dragon. After all, you are the last hope of this race. I’ll tell you everything,” the old man said. “The Golden Celestial didn’t want to believe that our future would be in your hands, so he fought against it. But I knew it would be, so I knew you would come.
Let me ask you, Dark Dragon, do you know the truth behind the war between the Celestials and the Demons?” the man asked. He removed his face from the tube and faced Silva.
“I thought the war was to see who would wield the power of creation from the World Tree, or is there more to it?” Silva asked.
“There is more to it, a whole lot more. The war arose from the Celestials. Millennia ago, the Celestials lived alongside the Demons. The Celestials were filled with pride, beings that saw themselves even above the Demons and everything else.
During that time, they had no want for the World Tree. They didn’t need it; they didn’t want to create anything, as they believed that they were all this world needed.
The Demons, on the other hand, made use of the tree, wielding the power of destruction as they saw fit. They created other races, getting better with every creation that they made.
There was balance during this time, and no one fought. Well, that was until the Celestials made a move.
You see, we, the Celestials, had an issue, and that was the fact that with every new generation, we were reducing in number. Most of us lost the ability to procreate, and this continued to get worse with every generation.
And that was when I proposed a solution, a way to make us procreate once more, or to save our seed. I said we could create a race with the help of the tree, a race with immense potential carved out of us Celestials but given a very good ability to procreate.
Then we could use them as incubators for our seeds, and they would birth our children, and our race would be able to continue.
Humans were the product of my idea—living, breathing incubators that would help us.
The Demons had no issues with us using the tree. They believed we had the right to do that, so they let us, and we crafted humans. But with each generation we made, they still failed to incubate the babies. Nothing was working, yet we kept going.
We created the first ones strong, but after that, we began reducing their strength and focusing on their reproductive capability.
But then one day, we discovered that the Demons were creating the Dark Dragon race—a race that could rise to become powerful enough to destroy us.
Courtesy of Goddess Ophelia. No one knew why she wanted such a race created. It was a mystery, but we wouldn’t have that.
We were already scared for our lives, the fact that our race was rapidly dwindling, so we would not allow this third race. So we tried to monopolize the tree.
And that was the start of the great war you know—the war began with each side fighting for the right to own the tree.
But what the Demons didn’t know was that the Golden Celestial had gone behind their backs to communicate with Goddess Ophelia.
What he did was propose a way to stop the war. He gave her a solution that would work—that she would seal both races, or make it seem like she sealed both races. The Demons in Hell and the Celestials in a paradise called Heaven.
He said to her that she should take a look at the Demons. Their population was growing extremely fast, and they would be an issue. She needed to lock them away in a harsh place that they would never be able to enjoy and create more Demons.
While the Celestials needed a good environment and access to some humans, as long as we didn’t overdo it, we could find our own way to fix the issue of reproduction.
I don’t know how exactly he used such arguments and points to make the Goddess do it, but it worked, and we were kept away safely, where we would begin to carry out our experiment.
What we didn’t know was that our Heaven would soon be a hell for us. We took humans in large numbers, and we kept experimenting. We couldn’t stop. We wouldn’t stop.
Their damaged souls began raging within the realm from time to time. Celestials died with no known cause. That and many other things happened, but we had to keep pushing. So we did. We pushed through it all.
I bore the horrors of our actions for thousands of years. Many died in front of me because they could no longer take it.
And even after all that time, we kept failing and failing. No matter what we did, we failed to create an incubator. But finally, a few years back, one worked—the only one to have ever worked.
But at what cost?”