Lore & Universe

Prologue: Ashes and Neon

Era: A.C. 13 (After Collapse Year 13) / A.D. 2046

• Prologue: The Dance of Ashes and Neon

  If someone had prophesied half a century ago that the human population would be halved overnight to less than four billion, they would have been called a madman. But now, under the night sky of 2046, when you look up, apart from the cold glimmer of the Martian sanctuary known to us as "Mamre," the whispers of Earth are more desolate than ever.

  The collapse began thirteen years ago.

  In 2033, the global conflict historians call "The Great Fracture"—the Asian World War—erupted. Initially a silent slaughter over quantum computing power and global trade networks between the U.S. and China, the conflict instantly devolved this data war into a visceral meat grinder. Humanity witnessed the ultimate backlash of technology. Nuclear power plants turned into blinding stars of death under cascading strikes, and advanced biochemical weapons stained thriving metropolises into inorganic ghost towns. Over a hundred million lives evaporated in the smoke, and twenty million remain nothing but missing, garbled text in corrupted databases.

  Yet, when the warring nations finally called a ceasefire amidst the devastation, the true despair had only just begun.

  Before the embers of war could cool, an unknown mutant virus emerged from the ruins of India and Europe, sweeping the globe at an exponential rate. The "New America" government, newly formed from the merger of the U.S. and Canada, dedicated its entire national computing power to developing a cure. However, amidst the shattered logistics and bureaucracy of the post-war era, the golden window for rescue was lost. Six hundred million people died in agony, waiting for salvation.

  The low birth rates prior to the war, compounded by these two cataclysms, utterly shattered human pride. When people crawled from the mountains of corpses, they found themselves surrounded by deformity. The erosion of nuclear radiation, the corruption of biochemical weapons, and the irreversible sequelae of the virus left the Earth with hundreds of millions of survivors missing their original limbs. The friction of metal gears and servo motors became the background noise of the new world. Mechanical prosthetics were no longer sci-fi artifacts, but basic necessities for survival.

  Learning from their agonizing pain, humanity finally abandoned military force as a bargaining chip. With "human survival" as the supreme principle, nations reshuffled the geopolitical map.

  In the East, after the war, "New China" sublimated the communist system into a near-miraculous "Human Civilization System" through an ultimate institutional evolution. There, the word poverty was completely erased from the dictionary. The government implemented extremely strict yet flawlessly perfect spatial and demographic regulations: every household must possess a minimum of 56 ping (approx. 2000 sq. ft.) of indoor living space, mandatorily coupled with a 20-ping natural ecological zone for buffering and purification. Combined with apex genetic medicine, New China's disease rate miraculously plummeted by 70%. It was a utopia devoid of dust and hunger.

  Moreover, New China conquered the realm of the gods. They pioneered the "Lifespan Calculation System." Through omnipresent VR glasses and AI monitoring physical data around the clock, the system could calculate a citizen's remaining lifespan with 98% accuracy (excluding accidents), instantly providing a perfect lifestyle regimen capable of extending life by up to 30 years. In the East, even death was digitized and delayed.

  Japan, an island nation surviving in the crevices, chose a radical path. They completely "corporatized" the entire country, becoming human history's first permanently neutral Earth Conglomerate Nation, pushing its technological and commercial prowess back to the pinnacle of the world. Meanwhile, amidst the wave of seeking spiritual solace after such immense suffering, the global Muslim population experienced explosive growth.

  But on this seemingly reborn Earth, the Western world plunged into another abyss.

  In the territories of New America, the middle class—once the cornerstone of social stability—went completely extinct. Above the clouds lived the absolute minority of oligarchs, mastering apex AI and dwelling within sterile force fields; on the surface lay an endless expanse of wasteland and slums. To manage this massive, ever-volatile underclass, global governments reached a final consensus: the universal implementation of Universal Basic Income (UBI). Simultaneously, a law named the "Robotics Act" was hastily rolled out, explicitly stating that robots "may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm."

  But in the wasteland, the law was merely a piece of scrap paper. This loophole-ridden act only allowed violence and crime to run rampant in the gray areas.

  At the bottom of the Western wasteland, the meager credit points from UBI were barely enough to buy metallic-tasting synthetic nutrient paste and triple-filtered, slightly murky drinking water. The people here could not afford the seamless, neural-integrated "Neon-Sync Strips" woven into high-end clothing. To connect with this world utterly dominated by AI and VR, the poor developed a brutal, masochistic survival aesthetic. They bought cheap, primitive sync strips flickering with dim blue neon, violently wrapping them tightly around their scarred flesh or rusting mechanical prosthetics.

  Every glowing wire wrapped around their arms was an umbilical cord to the virtual world. And in this land of despair, the only thing that made them feel alive was a civilian pastime hidden deep within the neural network: "NFTs Battle Crypto Arena" (NCA).

  This was no gentle game for high society; it was a virtual gladiator arena gambling brains and survival.

  As night fell, the scavengers, mercenaries, and hackers of the wasteland would don their fraying VR glasses and boot up the neon strips on their arms. In the virtual space of the NCA, the dilapidated reality was replaced by a holographic, neon-drenched arena. With every swing of the glowing strips in reality, "Holographic Data Cards" radiating digital light materialized in mid-air.

  These were not playing cards. They encapsulated combat algorithms from the old era, execution codes for illegal weapons, or even stolen fragments of tactical AI. Players wagered their meager UBI or crypto, engaging in wildly lethal clashes of computing power and strategy. Winners could trade their tokens on the black market for top-tier filtered water and new prosthetic parts; losers often burned out their brains from neural network overdrafts, becoming just another nameless cyborg corpse in the wasteland.

  This is the daily grind of 2046. A world thoroughly ossified by steel, neon, and despair.

  The Western oligarchs high above believed they held every string of code. The super-AIs of the East believed they had calculated every variable of human existence. They all assumed this new order, built upon the ashes of world war and plague, would remain cold, precise, and impregnable.

  But they were wrong.

  In the most desolate abysses of the Polygon blockchain, an ancient, undecipherable sequence of code has begun to quietly pulse. It is a "Genesis Memory," forcibly sealed within the rifts of spacetime by a power transcending the current order, just before the collapse of the old world.

  The winds of the wasteland are shifting. Untraceable ciphertexts have begun to circulate through the underground NCA arenas. They feel like a whisper, like a countdown. The only certainty is that this seemingly perfect illusion of the 2046 new world is about to face its first, and final, total collapse.

  The tremor is so massive that it transcends Earth. Millions of kilometers away, orbiting the digital oaks of Base Mamre, the impregnable mainframes of Station XVIII suddenly light up with an unauthorized, ancient signal. A silent revelation has descended, broadcasting a single string of text across all frequencies:

  O·PEREGRINE·QVI·DE·VIIS·SAECVLI·VETERIS·DESPERAS·ASCENDE·ET·SVB·VMBRA·ROBORIS·MAMRE·REQVIESCE...

  Deep within the ashes, the ember remains.

  And the true survivors are only just beginning to open their eyes from a long, temporal hibernation.