God Crafter

Thousands of miles away from civilization, from human settlements and dungeons, the sea looked peaceful. Sunlight shimmered across its surface, catching the rays and creating a stunning kaleidoscope of color. A tranquil mask hiding the nightmare beneath.

But thousands of kilometers down, where no gate-checkpoint had ever been built because no one had ever thought to build one, there was only darkness.

Total, absolute, crushing darkness.

And in that darkness lived things that would make a seasoned Awakeners or cultivators cry for their mothers. Their auras crushed anything weak enough to come near them. They were the monsters that haunted the nightmares of monsters — ancient horrors that had never known the light of day.

But even those horrors feared something worse than themselves.

Something old enough and strong enough that they would be mercilessly destroyed the moment they tried to invade its territory. It was the horror that other horrors were horrified of. The unofficial king of the sea. The first of the monsters to enter this world.

The colossal beast opened its massive eyes for the first time in over a century.

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It did not dream the way the surface-dwellers dreamed. It had no need for dreams. Four centuries of consolidation and silent accumulation of power had given it something better — time, in quantities the short-lived things above could never comprehend.

It remembered the first gate.

It had crossed over from its own deserted planet, arriving on this world that had barely a strand of mana. It used its divine sense to scan the vicinity and discovered that the most intelligent and strongest lifeforms on this world were barely at the awakening stage.

It became elated.

It started slaughtering them in droves. The streets ran red with blood. It tore through their civilization just for amusement. When the entertainment began to thin, it used its space law to tear into the weak spatial laws of this world — laws that had just been introduced to mana and had not yet fully stabilized.

It opened tears in space and called forth its underlings. Orcs. Goblins. Ogres. All the monsters it had subjugated during its long life flooded the world in the thousands. Millions died by their hands. Some were slaughtered. Some were taken for sport. Some were gutted like fish.

Some where even taken to be used for procreation.

It was absolutely pleased with their screams. They felt very satisfying to its ears.

Then it began to do something even more jarring.

It began to devour the humans it killed, both by its own hand and by its minions'. It absorbed the essence of this species for the first time — and felt its strength increase by a significant level.

It was astonished. Fascinated. Its strength had begun to stagnate long ago, and it had grown frustrated that it could no longer advance. Discovering that devouring some insects could break that stagnation was probably the most blessed thing that had happened in its entire existence.

And then more creatures — not its own — started coming out of new tears in space, massacring the humans even more. It grew annoyed and began sending its minions to kill the intruders, sparking another war between all the invaders.

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But as fate would have it, this world was not meant to be destroyed.

An existence so high up the power chain that it could not be described with words was passing through the nearby galaxy. It saw what was happening. This world had just awakened its will — the number of intelligent and powerful lifeforms had reached the criteria for it to achieve consciousness. As a result of this awakening, it had met the threshold to evolve. Mana started entering its atmosphere, permeating its structure, strengthening its laws.

But before all this could be completed, the world experienced its first invasion. It had no time to prepare its inhabitants.

The existence — made up of laws, formless and incomprehensible — took pity on the newborn world. And used it's vast powers and sealed the invaders in a separate space, grouping them according to their strength, making the first dungeons.

Seeing the overwhelming power that was sealing both his minions and the new invaders, the beast quickly gave up and ran in the opposite direction. It pushed its space law to its absolute maximum, fleeing the power that was trying to lock it up like the others.

It landed in the sea. Seeing the power catching up to it, it gambled and dove deeper. Using its law to dive faster, it poured more energy into compression, moving faster than it had ever run in its life.

It finally crossed an invisible threshold.

"Hmm. A bug escaped my notice?" The existence used its powers to scan the last place it had felt the beast vanish. "I've hit a wall I cannot pass through. Interesting. Looks like this world has secrets even I cannot perceive."

The existence considered for a moment.

"Well, I've sealed the others for at least five centuries. That should be enough time for the world to reach maximum saturation before it evolves. The lifeforms here will need to clear out the pests infecting this world. I could do it for them, but this will serve as a rite of passage."

The existence turned and departed, having finished what it needed to do.

---

The beast had finally escaped. It thought it was safe for now.

But as they say, no rest for the wicked.

The things that lived down here had not been disturbed for centuries. Things that came into being the moment this world was formed. Things that could have killed the beast immediately.

But out of desperation and fear, it attacked first.

It killed the first horror and devoured it. Its strength climbed again — significantly.

Then it started hunting from the weakest, growing its power to insurmountable levels. The horrors noticed it immediately and began to attack in droves, using their numbers to try and smother it. The beast fought through the brutal assault, killing and devouring and growing stronger and stronger, until it became the strongest.

The battle lasted at least a century. An unsupervised hundred-year culling that no checkpoint guard and no guild record had ever logged, because no checkpoint guard had ever dared to come this far down to log it.

The remaining four hundred years were spent consolidating its power.

---

There was no name for what it had become. The surface-dwellers, if they had known to look for it, might have reached for the word King, the way small things always reached for grand words to describe things they couldn't otherwise hold in their minds. It found the word adequate. Not because it needed a title — titles were a surface concern, a thing built by creatures who required hierarchy to make sense of a world too large for any one of them to rule alone.

It found the word adequate because it was, in fact, true.

Every horror in these waters answered to it now. Not through fear exactly — fear implied the possibility of resistance, and resistance from anything beneath it in this ocean had stopped being a meaningful concept three centuries ago. They answered to it the way water answered to gravity. It was simply the condition of existing down here.

Above, on the dry skin of the world, small intelligent things had spent five hundred years killing its minions and calling it progress. Counting cores. Measuring ranks. Building little towers of accomplishment out of the corpses of creatures that, down here, would not have survived their first decade.

It had watched some of this, in its way. Its divine sense spread across this new civilization, observing their struggles, their petty conflicts. It had been aware of the world's surface conflicts for centuries the way a sleeping man might register a storm through the walls of his house. Present. Distant. Irrelevant to anything that mattered to him directly.

Then, this morning — though morning meant nothing at this depth — something had moved through the entire ocean at once.

Not a sound. Not a current. Something deeper than either, a ripple through the fundamental medium the way a struck bell rippled through the air around it, except this ripple had moved through everything — every gate, every trace of mana in every drop of water across the planet's entire hydrosphere, all at the same instant.

It had not received whatever message had apparently been sent.

It understood, the way it understood most things down here, by inference rather than direct address — that whatever had spoken had spoken to the small intelligent things on the surface, not to it. It was not the kind of thing such a message would be written for. It had grown too far beyond the categories that governed the small things above to be measured by whatever was measuring them.

But it had felt the ripple.

And in the ripple, it spread its divine sense again and tuned it to pick up what the little insects were saying.

Time remaining.

Eradication required.

Or culling.

It considered this for a long while — long, by its own internal clock, which moved differently than the clocks of things that died in a handful of decades.

The surface-dwellers had spent five centuries believing they understood the scope of what they were fighting. They had built their checkpoints and their guilds and their neat little systems of rank, all of it organized around dungeons they could see, gates they had mapped, beasts they had learned to predict and farm and convert into resources for their own advancement.

They had never once looked down here.

It found this, in its way, almost amusing. The small things above had spent five hundred years assuming their war was being fought on a battlefield they could see the edges of.

They had no idea what slept at the bottom of their world. They had no idea how many of its kind had been growing in silence in places no checkpoint had ever reached — beneath the ice at the poles, in trenches deeper than any gate-mapping expedition had ever bothered to chart, in caverns under the crust that had never seen a single human eye.

They had no idea that eradication meant something different down here than it meant in a tidy land-based dungeon with a registered exit and a guard checking classifications at the gate.

The ripple had said time remaining.

It considered what time remaining meant for a creature like itself, which had already outlasted every clock the surface had ever built.

Then it considered what time remaining meant for the small things above, who apparently now understood — for the first time in five centuries — that they were being measured, and that the measurement had a deadline, and that the deadline assumed every beast across every environment had to be found and ended for them to survive it.

Including those not yet discovered.

It had caught the entire transmission. As if whatever had spoken understood, somewhere in its vast accounting, that there were things down here it had not yet properly counted.

It moved, for the first time in over a century, the great slow shift of something that had not needed to move because nothing down here had ever required its direct attention.

The water around it responded the way water always responded to it — not parting exactly, simply acknowledging, the pressure redistributing itself around a presence too large for the ocean to treat as merely another object within it.

It thought, in the patient and entirely unhurried way it thought about everything, of the small things above. Of their towers and their ranks and their five centuries of believing they had a complete map of the war they were fighting.

It thought about what would happen to that war, and to those small things, and to whatever fragile cooperation they were no doubt scrambling to build above the waterline right now in response to their ripple — once the thing they had never counted decided that two years was, in fact, an interesting amount of time.

Not for surviving.

For deciding whether the surface was worth claiming before the deadline made the question irrelevant.

It began, slowly, to rise.

---

Far above, beyond the weight of three kilometers of dark water it had called home for five hundred years, the small things were still arguing about what the message meant.

They would find out soon enough.

It had always intended to come up eventually.

The ripple had simply told it when.

To Be Continued…

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