Dei drove them through the desert on his Leviathan, finding the defenses rather… lacking.

He saw some Lunar Spawn down in the sand, each one firing off a ball of green goo that somehow tracked their flight, but they weren't really threatening. The attacks fell short, the enemies had incredibly slow reaction time, and they didn't even try to coordinate with one another.

He'd been warned about this by The Champion, as The Mother had already been dealt two soul attacks when she lost The Dream and Daniel in quick succession. She was already very unstable, so the remaining defenses wouldn't be enough to stave off a truly dangerous invader.

Eventually, the horizon showed something new- a wall of greenery, and not in the metaphorical sense.

The trees looked like oak, but were as tall as redwoods, with an incredibly dense underbrush to match it. When he got closer, he could see that the greenery was expanding too, and not slowly. It was encroaching upon the desert at around a foot every second, and he could see the saplings shooting upwards to match the brethren behind them.

Inside the forest itself, there was little to no light, all of it drowned out by the tall oaks.

He wanted to observe the phenomena more thoroughly, but found that… ill advised.

When he was within a mile of the wall, he felt pinpricks start hitting his skin, leading to discolored splotches appearing on it, like small cancerous growths. Homeostasis fought against it, and was currently winning the battle, but if he closed the distance, he was sure he would perish.

'It seems to be some kind of… hyper radiation of sorts, with odd effects. Whatever it is, it's making the plants grow at insane speeds, and expanding in tandem with the forest, if the frequency of harmful beams is any indication. Is this a soul defense of The Mother? It can't be, it's simply too effective for her soul to actively maintain with how it is right now. This must be a memory, and the damage is because of her subconscious experience with the effect of the forest.'

To reinforce this, his compass didn't take him any closer to the forest- but parallel to it.

Keeping his distance, he followed its directions until he finally saw what he needed to. The Mother, though much younger.

She wasn't the core of a planet, nor was her head the size of mount everest. She was large, but perhaps only the size of New York- two or three miles from tip to tail.

She twisted through the sand, swimming as quickly as she could away from the expanding forest. Dei saw that her back half was covered in disgusting cancers, many popped and bleeding. She was gaining distance from the forest in her current state, but he saw her tire quickly, her massive size not meant to actually move.

When she was exhausted, the veritable sea of Lunar Spawn around her carried her as quickly as they could, but most were crushed in the effort. Even an inch further seemed to be more than enough for them to consider it an accomplishment though, and even now she shed her skin to hatch more underlings.

She was building distance with the calamity behind her, but he wasn't sure what the eventual end goal was. Why didn't she dig down? Did it also expand into the ground, or did she think she wouldn't have enough time to do so, and simply wanted to build space before diving?

Ultimately, it didn't matter. She was the gateway in this memory to a deeper layer, so he drove the Leviathan closer.

She never paused in her run, but he felt her blast information outwards in an unskilled attempt at speaking.

"YoU! I eAT YoU. I cOnSuME"

He sensed confusion and request, yet no aggression despite the words themselves. She was trying to convey something, and didn't know how.

'This version is rather young, is it not?'

He didn't try to parse through the words, simply driving the Leviathan into her skin, her soul, and memories, taking him deeper down into the next layer of The Mother.

When they emerged, something told him they were in the same location despite the dunes changing shape and the mega forest nowhere to be seen.

"I think she was trying to say that she has already eaten you," Perumah told him.

"Really? What makes you say that?"

"She was learning how to think in concepts. I remember a time when I was like that, so it was easy for me to understand the underlying intent."

"Okay, do you think she's referring to the Leviathan? Like, she's eaten a Leviathan before, and just assumed it was the one and only?"

"I don't know, who can say?"

"Ahh fair, it'd be odd to expect you to extrapolate that much from just a few words."

She hummed in agreement, then they returned their view outwards.

'This really is such a barren place… I wonder where I am? Is this actually still Earth? We have to be in the super universe by now, but I wonder if this is before or after its shattering, as that is an ongoing thing, there is a good chance it's already happened. And this is just this version of The Mother's memory taken from this snapshot… if that's how it works.'

* * *

Several hours of sand later, they finally hit a change in scenery as the terrain took on a more rocky view, dark brown spikes jutting out from the sand with various sinkholes leading down into some cave systems.

'Early signs of The Mother, perhaps? Or just normal caves.'

The assumption of normal terrain disappeared quickly though, when some of the spikes started taking on more… defined shapes.

Humans.

Petrified people, encased in stone, running along the sand of this part of the desert, many of them half buried. When he saw a patch of the desert without any visible Lunar Spawn, he took them down closer, jumping off the Leviathan and seeing Perumah follow after him.

Touching the brown stone, he felt that it was tough, incredibly so even for his strength. Despite that, there was clear erosion taking place at the backs of the people, indicating they'd been here for a long time.

When he looked at their faces though, he saw only frozen terror.

Looking around, each statue told a story. The majority ran in the same direction, away from some far off thing that no longer existed, but there were a few standouts. A large man stood facing the direction everyone else ran from, arms splayed out at his sides, attempting to shield the two small figures behind him.

A hunched and wrinkled elderly person dropping to his knees, holding his face in his hands.

The statue of a mother that'd fallen to its side, still carrying the babe in her arms.

They all saw the same thing, had just enough time to process what it was, then were cut down without even the chance to blink.

The most horrific part of it for him, though, was the utter lack of soul signature. He didn't have much mana stored, able to scrounge up around fifty in a combination of Soul, Wrath, and Kindness, but a casting of Identify of the Stout Protector yielded nothing. It insisted that these people were stone, and nothing more. They'd never been people, despite the clear shape of them.

'That can't be true…'

This was only a memory, but something Dei had realized was just how accurate the soul was even if one lacked the proper senses. The Mother may not have been in this particular location or studied their life force at this time in her life, but her soul knew what it would look like, on every level.

'This might be the natural state of karma. All affinities came from some pre-existing concept, perhaps Karma stems from the soul's ability to record even the details unknown to the person.'

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The end result was the same. Dead people or hyper realistic statues, he didn't know, and he would only find out from going further back.

When he turned to leave on his Leviathan though, he saw Perumah studying one figure in particular closely, and walked closer.

"Found anything?"

This person was one of the anomalies, the ones not running away. It appeared to be wearing some kind of robe, raising its arms to the sky and seeming to cry out not in pain, but joy.

"The palms, look at them."

Dei was in his original eight foot tall form, towering over everyone here and letting him see the raised hands easily

What he saw were… tiny pinpricks. The most minute of holes.

"The holes?" he asked.

"Indeed. They go through the entire body."

Surprised, he asked "You can see that?"

He'd refrained from casting a Pulse, as he didn't want to display their location to The Mother's entire soul.

"Yes. These statues all have perfectly detailed organs within them, down to the very blood vessels. This is the first one with an oddity. In his brain, there is a second cerebellum beneath the frontal lobe. The holes in the hands lead to tubes that extend all along the entire body, like a second cardiovascular system, but all of them meet back up with the mirrored cerebellum… he has the endocrine system, cardiovascular, digestion, nervous lymphatic, and everything else… plus one. A new system."

"Can you divine its purpose?"

"Not completely, but we can tell that it has something to do with the petrification. In every other person, there are no holes or cavities in their bodies or blood that aren't supposed to be there. Based on the slight convex angle of his skin, we can also extrapolate that there was some sort of chemical in this new system, it was simply pulled out of the man during petrification, ruling out that he had some kind of wind ability and simple let wind course through his body to account for this mutation."

"Since it starts in the brain, lets call it the false nervous system, or the false system for short. Do you think the false system is the source of the petrification?"

"I can't say for sure but… do something for me? Shatter this statue."

He reached out to one of the extended arms, crushing as hard as he could and… failing.

With both hands, he pulled as hard as he could, until the statue started to uproot itself. Dei put a foot on the shoulder, and pulled with all his might.

Only when he was pink in the face did the arm finally break off, sending him sprawling to the ground.

Huffing, he said "That's some tough rock."

"Indeed… much harder than the rest. I think we can assume that the false system is responsible for the source of petrification, though we need more information to figure out how. Ready to go?"

"Yea, let's get out of here."

* * *

The patch of stone people were not the only ones, and the terrain became more rocky, with more people, as they went along. There were clear lines where settlements had once been, but not even the remnants of a single building survived, only the bodies of the people.

There were more of the mutated humans as well, each with hollow tubes running through their bodies, though it was clear that they each had different levels of the mutation. Some had a false cerebellum the size of a pea, with incredibly thin tubes, while an outlier on the opposite end of the spectrum had a false cerebellum almost a quarter the size of his actual brain, with the tubes up to an entire centimeter wide.

Those with the false system always responded differently to average folk. None of them ran away, though not all of them praised or accepted their fates. Some collapsed to their knees, others met their fate with a drawn sword and a roar on their lips. A rare few seemed to hold a book in one hand with the palm of their other extended out, perhaps attempting archaic forms of magic to shield themselves.

None worked.

Though… maybe a few did, and they were only seeing the failed attempts.

The closer they got to where his compass told him The Mother would be, the more densely packed the groupings of people became.

In the distance, they finally saw something which shook Dei, making him lean forwards

A flying Leviathan… variant. Sort of.

Instead of the aquatic look regular Leviathans had, this one was covered in rough scales that seemed to match The Mother's skin, with two massive antennae directly behind its eyes. At the top of its head, there was a crystal ball that glowed in the swirling colors of purple, white, and orange. It was small as well, only four times larger than Dei's own.

His focus was drawn away from the Leviathan's appearance to the entire scene before him though, as he recognized there were people sitting on the back of the ancient Leviathan as it flew as quickly as it could.

Nine figures, nine humans wearing an assortment of robes and armor, some carrying staffs, others metal weapons, and all of them tense. Chasing behind them was an army of Lunar Spawn unlike any Dei had ever seen, and numbered in the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, stretching as far as the eye could see.

'This must be before The Mother was sealed away… if she could produce THIS many at any given moment, I can see why the other Primordial Children would join hands to put her down.'

They weren't the small worms he'd grown used to seeing either, but varied and dangerous. Some flew on wings, others were hundreds of feet long, leaping up to try and take chunks out of the fleeing Leviathan, but Dei could tell they were failing. The Leviathan was getting away, outpacing the Lunar Spawn.

He noticed that none of the beings in this memory acknowledged him, letting him get closer. He noticed a strange phenomena, as the eight of the nine figures appeared… non descript, for some reason. He couldn't make out their faces or even what gender they were, also taking on a transparent and ghostly nature.

The ninth figure though, he shone with crystal clarity, taking the appearance of an imposing, heavily tanned knight.

He was big, only slightly shorter than Dei, perhaps around seven feet tall, and wore an opulent suit of gold armor, an embellished scabbard and bastard sword at his hip with a shining gold shield on his back. Dei noted his armor was covered in green goo, and he suspected it was that of Lunar Spawn. From what he'd found in The Mother's dream, Lunar Spawn had acid for blood, explaining why gold plating might be a preferable trait for armor to have in this current age, as gold didn't often react with acids.

The small group of people appeared to congratulate one another, going around with smiles on their faces, pats on the backs of those not covered in blood, and a generally uplifting mood for some job well done, but Dei was suspicious with the shade people compared to the singular real person.

His fears were proven correct when he spotted a figure moving through the swarm of Lunar Spawn, faster than any of them individually.

It was humanoid, with two arms and two legs, each bone-thin. The feet had three claws, two in the front and one in the back. Its right arm was a massive spike, and its left arm was a long pole with spinning blades that made a whirring sound, even from his current location.

It jumped from Lunar Spawn to Lunar Spawn, each creature exploding in gore beneath it as it kicked off them, bouncing around and getting closer with each movement. All the figures were unaware of its approach, except the one in gold.

Seeing it out of the corner of his eye right as the humanoid thing made its final leap, leaving the swarm behind on a collision course for the Leviathans back, the gold knight didn't hesitate to draw his sword, jumping straight off the Leviathan to meet the monsters charge.

A female voice cried out "Vy'vex!" from the remaining eight blurred figures, but two of the others held the woman back as Vy'vex met the Lunar Spawn, his sword meeting the whirring blades and becoming shredded, his left arm catching the spike plunging for his heart.

The Lunar Spawn attempted to leap off Vy'vex, but the man was already resigned to die. He dropped the remnants of his lustrous blade, his right hand instead gripping the Lunar Spawn's neck as it tore through his side.

Its legs kicked through his stomach, but he held on, both of them falling to the desert below, Vy'Vex rapidly consumed by the oncoming horde, with the fleeing Leviathan slowly becoming more obscured as the memory ended, and it faded from relevance.

He'd never known Vy'Vex, but this memory was important to The Mother somehow. A keystone to her identity, and one where she lost.

History was composed of forgotten heroes, and Dei felt like he'd glimpsed one of the more important ones right now. The man was all but forgotten to time, beneath the notice of most Primordial Children, yet a savior to who knew how many… at least eight, and one Leviathan

With the end of the memory, most of the Lunar Spawn disappeared as well. The sea of monsters replaced by a scant few figures, tiny with most already injured.

He followed the direction they were coming from in the memory, a gaping sinkhole miles across in the desert revealing itself.

This place was almost entirely devoid of life, except for the familiar humanoid Lunar Spawn, that'd fallen to its knees in front of the dark opening.

Dei blinked, and realized it was now night, the land altering itself according to the new memory he set foot in.

The Lunar Spawn still had Vy'vex's blood on both its blades, so he knew it was only shortly after the battle, but the Lunar Spawn was different than before. Despondent.

Only the anchor of the memories- The Mother- and her natural soul defenses could interact with Dei. The memories were simply pieces of a set.

To back up his point, as he took a step off the Leviathan and stopped next to the Lunar Spawn collapsed to its knees, it didn't acknowledge him in the slightest.

Glancing over the rim of the opening to see what caused such a behavioral shift in the thing he saw…

A corpse.

The corpse of The Mother, four miles long, splayed out, its organs spilling from within with flies picking over the remains.

His eyes widened, 'If that's the corpse of-'

A blade pierced him, slipping between his ribs, tearing apart both lungs, and stopping only at the bone on the opposite side.

His eyes widened, looking at what he'd assumed was a simple Lunar Spawn yet… feeling a resonance. This wasn't a Lunar Spawn.

This was The Mother.

He coughed blood onto her faceless head, somehow knowing that she looked at him with a burning rage so intense it made his own Wrath seem like a child's tantrum. The faceless head split where its mouth should be, not to bite him, simply to release a guttural, feminine scream directly into his face, her pure hate of him profound enough to deal minor soul damage from simply hearing her voice.

Perumah still sat atop Wild Chains, stunned, but he immediately commanded his spell to dive through the gateway The Mother presented. He flicked the switch of his own at the same time, diving into the next layer through the blade that was a part of her body.

He found himself on Wild Chains' back, falling to his knees and coughing blood.

His supernatural healing using Homeostasis was already in effect, but Growing Rage had no Wrath mana to fuel it. It couldn't help, and blood was filling his lungs too quickly for Homeostasis to keep up.

He fell into a long unused spell, Disconnect, letting his body drop as his heart rate slowed to a crawl, entering pseudo hibernation

Blood stopped filling his lungs, and his regeneration finally outpaced the damage dealt. He was at no risk of dying any longer, so he surrendered himself to unconsciousness.

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