Ian floated in the cold metal workshop, watching the giant mechanical Demon King methodically execute its inhumane production process.
Anger burned in his heart, but Ian did not act directly.
Destroying it would be easy, taking only a single thought.
But Ian wanted more than just destruction.
He wanted an answer. He wanted to trace the source of this ultimate malice.
He slowly closed his eyes, no longer using his divine sense to perceive the scene before him.
His consciousness broke through the illusion of time, tracing upstream along the planet's deepest memories.
Rumble—
He saw and heard the agonizing groans of the earth's crust as the continental plates tore apart.
Finally, at a certain coordinate in time, his consciousness stopped.
The image became clear.
It was an incredibly brilliant civilization.
The city skylines were elegant and majestic, anti-gravity vehicles weaving silently like schools of silver fish through the steel forests of skyscrapers.
The people's faces beamed with an almost naive confidence and pride.
They were the masters of this star system, calling themselves the Star People.
They had completely conquered the planet beneath their feet, colonized surrounding planets, and practically turned the galaxy into their own backyard.
Their gaze had already turned toward the even more distant sea of stars.
It was a golden age, full of hope and infinite possibilities.
Ian quietly watched, yet a trace of sorrow welled up in his heart.
He knew this beauty was destined to be crushed.
The next moment, disaster struck.
There was no warning, nor a declaration of war.
Rather, it was a kind of absolute crushing from a higher dimension.
The blood-red sky was replaced by an indescribable shadow.
A fleet so massive it blotted out the stars appeared in the planet's orbit.
Their warships were not metallic constructs, but rather living, hideous space behemoths.
Locust-like carapaces, mantis-like limbs, and four massive wings as thin as cicada wings yet capable of distorting space.
Qu was the name of this race.
This name, accompanied by an uncontrollable fear originating from the depths of their genes, was branded into the minds of every Star Person.
They had arrived.
The gardeners of the universe, the gods who took supreme pleasure in modifying and twisting other intelligent races.
War, if it could even be called that, broke out.
The fleet the Star People were so proud of charged at the starry behemoths.
Repulsion shields, positron cannons, gravity torpedoes... the highest technology humanity could imagine was as fragile as a child before the Qu.
A cloud of colorful smoke swept past, and the metal structures of the entire fleet began to disintegrate at the nanoscale.
An invisible sound wave swept past, and all life on the planet was instantly dissolved into biomass, yet their consciousness was preserved.
It was an asymmetrical slaughter, a mockery of mortals by gods.
The confidence and pride of the Star People were utterly shattered in the face of absolute power.
Afterward, the surviving humans continued to resist, but the war met a disastrous end in an entirely inevitable manner.
However, for the Qu, destruction was never the goal.
Humiliation and torture were the essence of their art.
A modification process lasting several years began.
Ian's consciousness was forced to spectate this long and ultimate torture directed at a single species.
He saw it.
The Qu completely scrambled the genetic chains of a portion of humanity, stripping them of their intelligence and erasing their limbs.
They were turned into Worm People who could only wriggle in the dirt.
He saw it.
Another portion of humanity was stripped of their bones and internal organs, their bodies stretched and flattened into living carpets bearing human faces.
He saw it.
The Qu preserved human intelligence in some, yet imprisoned their bodies within small, limbless blocks that could only squirm.
These Block People possessed extraordinary memory and computational power.
They were forced to watch helplessly as their family and friends were treated like brick-shaped chunks of meat, stacked together.
And their brains were tasked with calculating how to build the temples even more majestically.
Ian's consciousness traversed this hellish landscape.
Finally, his gaze fell upon the ancestors of the mushrooms he was so familiar with.
Those were the Fungus People modified by the Qu.
They lost the ability to move independently, their limbs degenerating, forced to aggregate like fungi to form symbiotic colonies.
Huddled together, relying on each other's body heat, they barely survived through the long years.
They lost the ability to create, the strength to resist, and even the right to be angry.
The only things left were memory and thought.
In eternal, deathly despair, they recalled the brief and brilliant glory of human civilization's past over and over again.
The Qu grew bored.
They left this planet to seek out the next civilization that dared to defy them.
But before leaving, they left a final gift.
A tireless robot, that mobile factory, and a storybook found in the ruins of human civilization titled *Grimm's Fairy Tales*.
The Qu programmed the robot with a final directive.
Using all the modified human descendants on this planet as raw materials.
Using that fairy tale book as the script.
To eternally perform this never-ending, twisted play.
This was the most vicious mockery and curse upon human civilization.
Forcing their descendants to use their deformed bodies to repeatedly act out the beautiful stories created by their ancestors.
To experience the agony of hope being born and then crushed in an endless cycle.
Ian's consciousness returned to the cold factory workshop.
He opened his eyes; all emotion had faded from them, leaving only an icy chill.
He looked at the giant robot still flipping through *Grimm's Fairy Tales*.
He looked at the actors being thrown into the blender.
He looked at the genetic puree in the petri dishes, about to be molded into the next batch of tragic protagonists.
Everything connected.
The rabbit butler, Rapunzel, Snow White, the mushroom villagers...
"So it was..." Ian murmured softly, his voice devoid of a single ripple of emotion.
"All Tomorrows."