Eons upon eons ago.
We are a species who has been forged in hell. Millions of years ago when humanity had just crawled out of its cradle, that’s where our story began.
In the same way you look at the lizards of the past, we look at you as relics. We ponder how a species so pathetic and weak could evolve into what we have become.
Perhaps that is the secret behind our success or maybe it was all just luck.
But the fact is… You were our ancestors.
Chapter 1
We’ve come to the conclusion that it must have been a war that caused your downfall. No natural disaster can cause such long lasting destruction to the point where entire continents were deemed uninhabitable for hundreds of years. Your atmosphere indicated that some sort of nuclear weapons had been used.
If it wasn’t for this, we would likely never know if you in fact were an intelligent species or not. But due to this discovery we now know that humans had at least reached a post industrial society and were likely on their way to a fully automated world.
But when the bombs fell, all of that was stripped of you. You; the gods of your world, turned into nothing more than cavemen walking the planet you had now destroyed.
While today it might seem like something to be expected, we found it peculiar how quickly your cells became immune to the high levels or radiation, or at least how you survived long enough for it to fall.
The first step towards us was your own destruction.
“Reborn in the ashes of war.”
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
At roughly 25 000 circulations around your star, the real evolution began. We speculate that due to the scarcity of resources your species couldn’t rebuild or even group together during the first stages after the war. This led to isolation and a significant stagnation in social behavior.
It also created a necessity for each individual to survive without the aid of others.
Despite this, humanity would on average become smaller and more nimble as all large prey died out in a few hundred years after the first mass extinction.
Body mass shrank to about the size of a 12 year old as larger animals required larger sums of food, which was made increasingly scarce by almost the 90% reduction in plantlife.
But life always finds a way and it wouldn’t take too long before your planet was thriving with trees, plants, flowers and berries, making nature able to wake up from its starvation-induced hibernation. Slowly but surely, animals began to grow in size as they now could afford the high food demands.
For an unknown reason, it seemed like your oxygen levels had skyrocketed during this time.
We speculate that during the highest points of radiation, plankton, algae and other sources of oxygen had become so resilient to stress, that when the gamma levels had cooled off, surviving in this new and less hostile climate became a joke.
The increase of oxygen became apparent in many ways to humanity. Your muscles evolved to become stronger and tougher but so did your prey… And predators.
“When the door opened, they thought that no one else would follow.”
There are many differences between a mammal and a bug. But the primary one during this era would be the fact that bugs can breathe through their skin. And while humans had seen small increases in both size and strength, the bugs and insects experienced growth unlike any other species on earth.
These beasts would grow to the size of a horse with strength to match. For the first time in eons, humanity had to band together again out of pure necessity to fight off the bugs.
However this interspecies war would not be a grand multigenerational conflict.
One must understand that a united human race, equipped with strength and endurance like never before, would breeze past this little bump in the road. And as humanity hunted these giants into extinction, you once again claimed the title as your planet’s apex predator. Thus taking another step towards us, your final destination.
“Their progress was reset, yet they started their journey to the finish line once again”.
