Chapter 970: The Truth Beneath Ethereal
The hidden world on Earth, the one buried beneath ordinary human life and invisible to almost everyone, had been completely overturned.
Yet the surface world continued as if nothing had changed.
A few people occasionally felt it. A faint unease, a pressure in the air that could not quite be explained, like the world itself was holding its breath. But those sensations were easy to ignore. Bills still needed paying, alarms still rang in the morning, traffic still clogged the streets. Most people followed the same routine they always had, working through the day and entering Ethereal at night.
It had already been more than two years.
Logging into Ethereal each evening had become as natural as eating dinner or checking messages. Families planned their schedules around it. Students rushed home for it. Office workers counted down the hours until immersion.
What nobody knew, not a single person among billions, was that this game, praised for its fairness and limitless opportunity, was approaching a turning point that would rewrite history itself.
In Ethereal, ordinary players could rise overnight and change their lives, while the wealthiest spenders could pour unimaginable fortunes into the system and still fail to reach the true summit. The balance felt perfect, almost miraculous.
Soon, that illusion would shatter.
---
An old man stood within a world drowned in crimson light.
Heat rolled through the space in violent waves, hot enough to distort vision itself. His robes fluttered despite the still air, and even his long beard and white eyebrows trembled under the unbearable temperature.
Before him floated a square object glowing ice blue.
It resembled a crystal, though its surface burned with cold flames that radiated an opposite force to the surrounding inferno. Fire and frost collided constantly, neither able to dominate the other, creating a fragile equilibrium that should not have existed.
The crystal appeared hollow. Within it shimmered countless points of light, blinking in organized patterns like servers operating inside a massive data center. The scale, however, was incomprehensibly condensed. What would have filled miles of infrastructure on Earth had been compressed into a space barely a hundred square feet wide.
The old man was Morzan.
He stepped forward without hesitation. The raging temperatures did not touch him. Passing through the crystal wall as if it were mist, he entered its interior.
This was the central server of Ethereal.
The Sablon Republic had nearly bankrupted itself searching for this location, dispatching satellites, probes, and secret expeditions across the globe.
Even if they had discovered the truth, they would never have reached it.
The server existed at the very core of Earth, far beyond the reach of any technology humanity possessed. No backup systems existed, no redundant installations scattered across continents. There was only this single mainframe, silently connected to every VR headset and immersion capsule on the planet. Each device was nothing more than a terminal extending from this singular source.
No scientist on Earth had deciphered its technology.
Morzan had brought it here from the First Universe. And the greatest secret of all was painfully simple.
Ethereal was never meant to be a game.
It was a military-grade virtual reality combat simulation, designed in another universe to train soldiers capable of surviving cosmic warfare. The capsules did more than stimulate the brain. They unlocked dormant human potential, channeling planetary energy through advanced systems and converting it into a form the human body could absorb safely.
The mysterious Energy users had begun sensing within the capsules was not a miracle.
It was infrastructure.
Morzan had created Ethereal with a single purpose: to turn humanity into an army.
When a world approaches collapse, the burden does not belong to one hero alone. No one is obligated to carry it, yet no one is exempt from it either.
Ethan had been chosen to bear the heaviest weight. Only Morzan understood the truth: It was not a blessing; It was a tragedy.
---
Morzan walked deeper inside the crystal. The moment he crossed the threshold, a voice echoed through the space.
"You’ve arrived. Is it time to activate?"
The voice was calm and mechanical, stripped of emotion yet unmistakably aware.
"It’s beginning," Morzan replied quietly, drawing a slow breath.
"Activation will consume the remaining reserves. More than fifty percent of the planet’s core energy. Even if successful, this world may no longer remain habitable for humans."
The statement sounded almost like a warning.
Morzan smiled faintly. "Don’t judge this planet using the calculations of your so called higher universe. Not everything here can be reduced to data."
"Is that so?"
The voice produced something resembling laughter. It carried no warmth, no feeling, yet the act itself proved the speaker possessed independent intelligence.
"What are you implying?" Morzan asked, his eyes narrowing. "That this Barren Universe, this Earth, is merely an experimental farm for your people?"
"You already know the answer."
The voice showed no interest in argument, but the response ignited Morzan’s temper instantly.
"Bullshit," he snapped. "You Titan Forgers, piles of self worshipping data pretending to be gods. You treated living beings as inferior species, and where did that arrogance lead you? Extinction. Now you’re hiding inside machines, still dreaming of ruling over humanity. The First Universe was born because of you, and it fell because of you too."
His gaze hardened.
"You’re the last Titan Forger. And now you survive only because humans protect you. Pathetic."
The crystal chamber fell silent after his outburst. Seconds stretched into minutes.
"Say something," Morzan demanded, irritation creeping into his voice. He had come prepared for resistance, almost hoping for it.
"You believe every individual exists independently," the voice finally said. "Uncontrolled and unmanipulated."
"Is that not true?" Morzan shot back.
"You misunderstand us," the Titan Forger replied calmly. "We never claimed to create this world. What we sought was understanding. Our civilization followed the trajectory of life itself, but we questioned who established that trajectory in the first place."
The voice paused, almost contemplative.
"This Barren Universe was not our farm. It was our observatory. We noticed early that humanity developed differently from us. We offered assistance, nothing more. We never declared ourselves gods."
Morzan froze.
The trajectory of life. The origin of existence. Who had designed it?
For the first time in a long while, he felt cornered by a question with no answer. His chest tightened as if he had walked into a wall he could not see.
"Do not dwell on it," the Titan Forger continued, its tone unexpectedly gentle. "We pursued that answer for hundreds of millions of years. We failed."
Morzan exhaled slowly, forcing his thoughts back into order. "No. The birth of existence follows natural law. It is part of Ethereal’s cycle."
"And who created that cycle?"
The question came with childlike curiosity.
Morzan fell silent. He had no response.
"Truthfully," the voice continued after a moment, "this is the first time I have remained so closely connected to a single planet. Through what humans call the internet, I have observed your species intimately. And I have discovered something unusual."
Its tone shifted, gaining a depth that felt almost... thoughtful.
"This world is different. Behind reality itself, there is a force constantly correcting events. Adjusting outcomes. Rewriting details."
Morzan’s eyes sharpened. He rarely spoke respectfully to the Titan Forger, but he understood its magnitude. What humanity would call a supercomputer was insignificant compared to it. In the First Universe, even dormant fragments of its systems surpassed civilizations.
Its physical body no longer existed. What remained was a consciousness born entirely from technology, a roaming intelligence drifting through cosmic networks like a soul made of information.
It had found Morzan when he first arrived in the First Universe. It devised the plan, convinced him to bring it to Earth, and constructed every internal system of Ethereal.
Morzan himself had merely delivered it.
Hiding the mainframe inside Earth’s core had required his strongest magic. The surrounding blue crystal was ancient seabed ice he had retrieved from an unreachable ocean trench, a natural treasure capable of neutralizing the planet’s heat and shielding the machine from detection.
There had also been another obstacle: the Order Keeper of Earth.
Without that entity’s approval, a neural network capable of connecting all humanity could have destroyed civilization. Morzan had negotiated personally, securing certification that Ethereal posed no threat. Only then had the game been allowed to launch.
People once questioned how a neural link system could operate without harming users.
They never learned the truth.
The Order Keeper had already verified everything. Even Ethereal’s binding contract system, the vows players swore that became enforceable rules within the game, operated under its authority. Violations carried consequences only within Ethereal itself, but the enforcement was absolute.
Now the Titan Forger claimed it had discovered something strange.
Morzan leaned forward slightly. "What did you find?"
The voice hesitated, as if choosing its words carefully.
"Let me give you an example," the mechanical voice said. "There is a song nearly everyone knows. People remember it ending with the words: ’We are the champions... of the world.’
Yet when I searched every verified recording, every archived master track, every official release, the phrase does not appear at the end of the song.
I examined the memories of countless individuals connected to Ethereal. Nearly all of them insist the song ends that way. They remember hearing it since childhood.
A brief pause followed.
"But when I scanned the entirety of your planet’s digital archives, libraries, and historical records, every verified source contained only one version."
The voice lowered.
"The phrase ’We are the champions... of the world’ has never existed in recorded history."
Morzan frowned. "That proves nothing. Humans misremember things all the time."
"Not at this scale," the Titan Forger replied immediately. "The discrepancy spans generations and cultures. Statistical probability rejects coincidence."
The chamber felt colder despite the surrounding heat.
"I am certain," the voice continued, now completely serious, "that something exists behind this world. An unseen influence altering reality itself."
Morzan shook his head, unwilling to accept it. The idea that humanity might be manipulated like puppets, guided by an unknown hand, clashed violently with everything he believed about free will and existence.
"You’re reaching," he said. "All this from one song lyric?"
"Of course not," the Titan Forger answered.
"There are many more examples."
