Chapter 1: Prologue: Cosmic Human Civilization
420 million years.
That’s how long it’s been since the Humans of Old first tore themselves from the gravity of their little blue planet in the Milky Way—since they looked up at the stars and decided they would belong to them.
In the beginning, their reach was humble: colonies on barren rocks, slow ships crawling between stars, the hope of survival resting in fragile machines.
But time—time was their ally.
They conquered the Milky Way, then the neighboring galaxies, then the rest of the observable Universe.
Wherever there was resistance, they crushed it.
Alien empires rose and roared—but like villains in an epic that had already chosen its protagonist, they only served to refine humanity’s hunger, sharpening its will against the whetstone of adversity.
And one by one, they all fell.
It took only ten million years for the last known alien race to kneel or vanish.
But humanity did not stop.