1529 Last Of His Kind
Deep inside Paradise, beyond the reach of myriad worlds, lay a special realm.
The space was folded and compressed, causing the area to distort and look like a glass house. Black mists pervaded the entire space, coming together and drifting apart as they pleased.
The mists carried with them a scent of depravity and the muffled wailings of souls that died in Paradise.
These souls shone white in the black mists, like stars in the night sky, as if they were trying to escape the imprisonment. Bright was their light but the darkness was darker.
All struggles, of the largely unconscious souls and the few barely conscious ones, were futile in front of a power that far eclipsed them.
Bubbles popped from these souls, colorful bubbles that contained wisps of the most essential memories of the individuals—the few moments they held as irreplacable in their centuries old lives.
The darkness swallowed these bubbles before transferring them to a large collection where new stories would be selected for the new worlds to be made. Unpopular worlds would be demolished and a new story world would take its place.
The 'providers' of these stories, the souls in the black mist, however would meet their end as they would eventually reach the giant being asleep in the center of the realm.
Fabricator. The Sleeping Creator. Demon of Dreams.
He was a giant wriggling mess of blue and brown flesh with thousands of tentacles—each long enough to reach earth from sun—moving incessantly, folding and unfolding.
There were millions of tiny portrusions on his horrific body, emiting the black mist which filled the realm.
The giant mouth of the creature always remained wide open, large enough to devour a hundred suns.
The stream of dark mist carrying the souls eventually entered the mouth of Fabricator and the souls would be digested, allowing Fabricator to 'experience' their life as if it was his own.
The talent came from his racial composition, one that made them a formidable species across the Alliance.
The race of Fobia.
By absorbing the lived experience of other creatures despite not being in the path of 'Soul', Fobians had grown stronger, not only in terms of divine path but in experience.
One move.
The leader lasted only move, perhaps because Keman blocked the attacks of Demon of Order and Punisher Aridam who tried to intervene.
With the second move, the Fobian leader was gone. Like all his fellow beings, he turned into ashes and scattered into the dust.
The Fobian race should've ended then. But one particular creature took birth at the exact moment.
It was a stillborn child, delivered seconds before the sliver destroyed its mother.
The death of its mother ended up releasing a lot of pure soul power—built up from the vast living experiences she absorbed— which poured a new life into the baby.
Even though it was born a Fobian, it was distinctly different.
Due to the distorted soul power from which it was created, this Fobian's unending obsession turned into having more and more 'living experiences'.
But it could not go out and devour others. Fobians weren't supposed to be alive anymore.
So, Fabricator was born, a mysterious being who didn't participate in the wars, showed no interest in faction conflicts and stayed away from resource conflicts.
He created Paradise, drew people and used them to satiate his unending thirst.
The reason he's alive today—that corrupted soul power—was the reason he lived the way he did.
'I want to know about the creator of Paradise. Fabricator.'
Along with a billion other messages from the Paradise System, this one too reached him.
Fabricator remained in sleep but his dreams turned a bit more interesting, amusing and curious.
'I want access to the place he lives. 10 billion should buy that. That's the deal for me to stay.'
Varian's voice sounded sincere but sharp. The tentacles of the sleeping creature halted for a brief moment before they resumed. The sleeping god laughed in his dreams.