Long ago, the Gulon were a race of creatures born at the core of planets. They were often seen as worms of relentless willpower, overcoming isolation by defying what could or could not be their food.

It was not such a rare thing for planets with incredibly short lifespans to be born. During the dawn of the Lost Era, whenever any such place was created, the steady cycle of the Realm would scatter its remnants to assist new life elsewhere.

But sometimes, unfortunately, planets were able to develop a mind. Maybe some were too close to a mana vein for their own good or perhaps they had too many primitive lives on their surface; such things brought sentience to the celestial objects.

Therefore, they possessed a natural drive to survive. However, it was nearly impossible. They had been born imperfect and couldn’t hope to do anything about it without help. In those conditions, an ambition would be made and determination would germinate.

The core of the planet would detach itself from the rest, become an eggshell of its own, and give life to a creature obsessed with survival and sustaining itself. To grow beyond the planet’s lifespan and carry on its memory; that was the meaning of their life.

To do so, they needed resources. So, they would eat the mass of land that birthed them. Eating and eating. Until they knew they could survive long enough to eat more.

The Gulon were born just like that and became a species roaming the vastness of outer space. They swam through the vacuum, and some were said to be bigger than a star. Their forms varied based on what they ate or what they were born from at the very beginning.

But their rough features were consistent; no eyes, red tendrils, mineral-like scales, and a maw that could eat and swallow anything it came in contact with.

Among those creatures, one was born from a very small planet; the weakest Gulon in the whole of Existence. Despite this, he was the one with the most developed sentience. And perhaps out of pity, sadness, or kindness, that Gulon had one personal objective; to give the support his brethren and himself never got to enjoy.

Planets that were sentient but too weak to birth a Gulon; he would visit and grant them respite by devouring them, carrying their memory and spirit with him. Perhaps due to his actions, he one day became able to eat mana and all kinds of energy.

He was still the smallest Gulon to ever live, but the strongest of them all. Attracted by him, others of his kind found him and followed him on his journey. It didn’t take long for him to be called King of Gulons by humans. Led by him, the Gulon remained pacifists and lived in peace.

That is until the End came, preceded by the advent of the Three Enders, abominations of nature that corrupted and devastated the world; The Wailful Nightmare, The Blind Puppeteer, and The Brume Legion.

Stars and planets began to die, mana became poisonous, newborn life didn’t live past infant stages, dimensions splintered, time became erratic, and the external Realms were severed as if banished to exert their influence.

King Gulon survived through it all, eating the dying celestials and even as far as his own followers who diminished over time. When there was ultimately nothing but him, his determination to keep surviving and carry the proof of his species’ struggle allowed him to persevere.

He hibernated in a timeless world until one day, a breath of life woke him up. The resplendent tree that had sprouted at the center of the universe gave him just enough strength to hibernate through a few more billion years.

Then, one day, he awoke for the second time inside an ocean, on some planet that had caught him in orbit during its formation. King Gulon was amazed; he had never been to such a place. The depth he sensed himself to be was greater than thousands of millions of kilometers and he wasn’t even anywhere close to the bottom.

This planet would be known by Existence later as Vathiá, The Boundless Sea, located in the Second Mother Reality where all life is said to be the strongest, and where a baby could be strong enough to kill a grown man in any other Reality.

King Gulon spent thousands of years on that planet, eating his way past the horrors of the deep sea where darkness was the most prominent companion.

Eventually, he reached a platform of soil. It was merely an elevated cliff but he felt quite fascinated by the fact it had taken him that long to even see a hint of reaching the bottom. He wondered what kind of behemoths lived there.

But it was on the second elevated platform that he found something he didn’t expect; humanoid lifeforms that had evolved to breathe and live underwater. He observed them for a few years and eventually resumed his way downward.

Focusing his path vertically, it took him only about a few hundred more years or so to finally reach the floor of this ocean. He expected frightening monstrosities to greet him and, in a way, he wasn’t disappointed in the slightest.

But… all of them lay dead.

These monsters of nature bigger than continents and outright planets were scattered everywhere and dead beyond doubt. His interest piqued, Gulon deployed his senses and located two lives. One was weak, but the other was notable.

King Gulon put in the effort this time and moved at full speed. Quickly, he reached his destination and found a felled creature worthy of being called a leviathan. It was sprawled on the ocean floor with its tongue out and all around it, there were remains of a destroyed settlement like the one he had seen above, made by amphibious humanoids.

He spotted a few corpses of said beings and then approached the two last living ones. Both of them were shark merfolk; a child and a much older man. The latter was sitting against the dead leviathan with a greatsword buried next to him, his body battered and bloody with an arm missing. The child was unconscious on his lap and unharmed.

King Gulon guessed easily that this used to be a village of humanoids that had been raided by sea monsters. He could sympathize with these people who had been forced to stand their ground and defend themselves instead of swimming upward to lesser depths.

This planet had mysterious tunnels of water. On his way down, the pressure weighing on him had changed at least a hundred times. The problem was that it was abnormally random. Sometimes, he would be caught by a layer with incredibly weak pressure as if he was just a few meters under the surface, and at others, it felt like he was lifting planets all on his own.

This bottom area was shockingly tame; a pressure of barely a few tens of kilometers worth, though there was also a massive increase in ambient life force. Comparatively, the previous layer had been far worse and most of these amphibious people would have died instantly there.

To King Gulon, it wasn’t much, but for them, it was a prison forbidding anyone from escaping.

“…you’re a new face…” The dying warrior whom King Gulon suspected had killed most of the sea monsters spoke up, opening one eye to look at him.

“Though… I can’t say you have a face anyway,” he joked with a wry smile.

Gulon tilted his body. These beings wouldn’t understand him even if he spoke, so he kept silent. It was only due to his transcendent nature that he could understand all forms of language.

“Don’t want to answer…? Or maybe you can’t,” he snorted. “If you could… save me, that’d be perfect but… can I ask a favor?” He asked airily and King Gulon growled pensively. He had already finished exploring this planet, so he nodded since he had nothing else to do.

“This is my son…” The man patted the boy on his lap. “His name is Cura Arlan… you’ve come from above, right? If I asked… is it possible for you to bring him with you? Just handing him to the care of another village is fine…”

King Gulon didn’t reply for a moment and nonchalantly swam in circles a bit, looking around a few times, and eventually approaching the sleeping child. He inspected him with his senses and turned back toward the warrior to nod.

“Hah… thank you… very much…” The shark man mumbled. “Please tell him… his dad went off like a true warrior…” He said with a grin, leaning his head back against the leviathan he had killed and the hundreds of sea monsters in his sight. He then slowly closed his eyes; for eternity.

Quietly, King Gulon huffed in respect and used one of his tendrils to grab the child and move him away. Then, he opened his maw wide and swallowed the body of the dead warrior. He acquired his memories and added them to the grand list of lives for which he needed to survive.

He then glanced at the greatsword left behind and at the child as well. After some thought, he ate the weapon and slowly changed his appearance to fit a similar aesthetic. He grabbed the child and then used his full power to swim up and shield the boy at the same time.

* * *

“That’s certainly an interesting story,” Rakna commented as he sat on a boulder of the 75th Plateau whilst watching the sunset. Everything around him was either craters or gravel so he did not really have anywhere else to sit.

He brought a cigarette to his mouth and exhaled a cloud of cyan-colored smoke a moment later. It had been quite some time since he no longer needed them to calm Obsidian Blood, but it didn’t change the fact that it was a perfect concoction designed by his uncle to help its user relax.

“Interesting, huh?” Cura snorted, his body healing from its wounds thanks to a prototype transpith of Harvest given to him by Rakna. “I guess. I just want to be stronger; strong enough to match my father and conquer the place that took my family. I want to dedicate it to them. Apparently, Gul decided to train me because I reminded him of himself.”

“We spent about twenty years in the upper layers of Vathiá,” the shark said. “Most of it was spent moving and Gul occasionally pitted me against roving monsters. There wasn’t much he could teach other than that and he planned to get us out of the planet with his full speed. Normally, we would have reached it after a few more years but…”

“The System, huh?” Rakna hummed.

“Yes,” Cura nodded. “In a way, it was the perfect place for me to grow stronger, and Gul also agreed that this System was a very useful training wheel but that it should have been discarded long ago at this point. We only want to get out now, but Gul doesn’t have the necessary skill set to do it.”

King Gulon growled in annoyance at that.

Cura shrugged. “He’s a creature with transcendental physical toughness and energy manipulation, but he’s incapable of magic or any other technique to cross space or dimensions. He could try and eat time and space, of course, but according to him, that might just annihilate Plateaus more than anything else. This place is too ‘structured’. Break one thing, and the rest collapses too.”

The therian snickered. “Sorry to hear that,” he smiled at the ancient creature. “I guess you can get a ride with me once I get strong enough to exit myself… or more likely when we settle our scores with the Téra and the Phantasms.”

“I suppose,” Cura mused. “If it means a good fight, I’m in anyway.”

On the other hand, Gul grumbled to himself, obviously annoyed at being at the mercy of those mere pests and ghosts that should have normally been way below him on the food chain.

“Though,” Rakna looked at King Gulon. “You’re way stronger than any of us, right? Are you holding back or is the System weakening you?”

“Nothing like that,” Cura shook his head. “Gul bound himself to me. I guess you can say it’s similar to your Soul Weapon. If he wants, he can unseal himself, but right now, he’s equalized to me. That’s the reason we think the System even summoned us. We don’t know what would happen if he were to let loose. Like I said, the intrusion of his full power might harm everyone in the System.”

“I see. It makes sense,” Rakna nodded. “Otherwise, there’s no way the System would intentionally summon a creature beyond its capacity due to the risks it poses… I wonder if Hans was in a similar situation.”

“{I’m also rather curious to know how the Wailful Nightmare became my successor,}” Fray added.

Rakna sighed and threw away his cigarette before standing up. “Well, we can just ask him. Anyway, Cura, accept this,” he said and sent a Guild invitation. “In a month or so, before or after we start the ‘Miracle’ plan, we’ll see, there’s an SS-Class Hidden Quest I’m sitting on that I plan to complete. I’ll ask help from both Throne of Glory and my Guild; I thought you might be interested.”

“SS…?” Cura repeated. “That’s the first I hear that rating,” he replied and Gul hummed in interest.

“It’s been issued to me a while ago, and just looking at the thing almost killed me,” Rakna revealed with a small grin. “It would be quite amazing to defeat the Boss of that place, no? I can’t wait to get my hands on it.”

“On what?”

“Well, of course,” his grin widened viciously. “I’d like to see how its heart tastes.”