"So, you're saying you want to work with me?" Xerneas asked.
From the moment it glimpsed the virus's source, it knew, this world and the infection were inextricably linked.
As the Life Pokémon, Xerneas was especially attuned to the essence of life. It was immediately clear that this planet's life force had reached a dangerously low ebb. If it drained any further, the world would become a dead star.
"That's right," Lucius replied with a smile. "But before we formalize our cooperation, there's a little process we need to go through."
"Process?" Xerneas suddenly sensed an unfamiliar energy coalescing beneath the ground.
The rock under its hooves softened into a sludgy vortex, pulling all four limbs deep into the muck.
Its body erupted in a radiant burst of silver light that lit up the sky for hundreds of miles in every direction. Yet no matter how hard it struggled, it couldn't break free from the swirling mire.
Worse, the sludge coiled upward like serpents along its legs.
"What is this?!" Xerneas gasped. "What kind of power is this?"
In all its eons of existence, it had never encountered a force so alien, so utterly binding.
Lucius, now clad in his Leviathan Form, let out a booming laugh.
"This is the power of this world itself," he said.
It was the power of the Dominator.
As the will of the planet, Lucius could rewrite its very parameters—gravity, matter, even the structure of reality.
The sludge beneath Xerneas's hooves wasn't ordinary mud. It had been fused with the planet's entire gravitational mass. It was as though the full weight of the world had been tied to Xerneas's legs. How could even a Legendary Pokémon hope to break free?
This was home-field advantage.
This world might have only been a Tier-1 backwater, but here, Lucius could bend reality to his will.
"You said you wanted my help! Why are you doing this?!" Xerneas cried. Its once-divine face now twisted in confusion and pain as a tide of madness began creeping into its consciousness.
"But you did agree just now, didn't you?" Lucius chuckled. "This is helping me."
He already had a plan forming in his mind, a blueprint for reviving the world.
To build an ecosystem capable of supporting life, you needed more than just living organisms. Heat. Radiation. Air. Soil. Microbial life. All were essential.
But thanks to the viral presence, he could replace the microbial component entirely. So if he reconstructed the other base conditions, he could begin seeding life.
The first step? Restoring the land's vitality.
Just like planting a seed, without fertile soil, there'd be no growth.
And who better to act as the battery pack for recharging the earth than Xerneas, the god of life?
With planetary energy backing him, Lucius's invasion of Xerneas went more smoothly than with any other Legendary. He didn't even need to struggle against its will; compared to the world's own will, Xerneas's divine presence was no more than a flicker.
Silvery and iridescent threads of energy streamed from Xerneas's hooves into the ground, spreading across the landscape.
Ten miles.
A hundred miles.
A million miles.
Before long, Xerneas's life-giving power had blanketed the entire continent.
True to its status as a Mythical Pokémon, wherever its power flowed, the once cold and barren land began to shimmer with a faint glow.
That glow danced joyfully, alive with newfound vitality.
And Xerneas stopped struggling.
Because as its life energy flowed into the earth, something else was flowing back, the virus. It infected it in turn. Bit by bit, the balance shifted. The divine creature's body and mind fell.
Lucius glanced at his task log. The "Devour the Primal Gene" quest now showed 6/10.
Past the halfway mark.
At this point, nearly all of the Mythical Pokémon not aligned with Lugia had been claimed. The rest were all on Lugia's side.
But things were different now. Lucius finally had the power to stand against them head-on.
He released the virus across the now-energized continent, using Xerneas's lifeforce-charged land as a growth medium. At the same time, he injected plant genes stored within the Hive, his viral repository, into the mix, allowing the virus to incorporate and stabilize those foreign genomes.
Because the virus shared the same origin as this world's core, it was naturally the most adaptive lifeform here. If Lucius had simply spread unaltered plants from the original world across this alien ecosystem, they would have failed. Only through viral integration could they survive.
To cultivate viable species, he fused each plant genome with multiple virus strains and tested their survivability, planting only those that showed promise.
The success rate was under 50%, but it was the most comprehensive approach.
For example, he had combined the genome of the Spicy Sakura plant with strains like the C-Virus, T-Virus, Progenitor Virus, and Ouroboros Virus. The C- and Progenitor fusions produced entirely new hybrid species.
Thus, a single genetic seed from the original world could yield two new organisms here.
The early fusion success rate was barely 10%, but even that was an encouraging figure.
Following this method, Lucius spent nearly a month cultivating over 10,000 new plant species across the continent.
They sprouted chaotically, tangled together in a wild, unorganized mess.
He hadn't bothered mapping out ecosystems during the experimental phase.
But it didn't matter. He was the Dominator. He could guide the natural growth patterns afterward, allowing the land to sort itself into balanced regions over time.
This was only the beginning. Each new organism could be fused again, with other viruses, or even with other species. The success rate might be low, but not zero. All it took was time.
Building a planet wasn't a one-day project. Rushing would only backfire.
Because these new lifeforms hadn't grown gradually but were force-grown using Xerneas's power, the drain on the Life Pokémon was immense.
Watching the divine blue stag's glow begin to dim, Lucius halted the extraction process and allowed Xerneas to enter a recovery phase.
If he drained it dry in one go, it would end up like this planet's original god of life, a dead husk.
Killing the golden goose was never smart. Rechargeable batteries were always better than disposable ones.
And besides, Xerneas was a Mythical Pokémon. A combat asset. Letting it die would be a waste.
Now that life energy had been restored, the next step was rebuilding the natural order.
To do that, he would need help from the other Legendaries.
During the month he had spent obsessively refining new organisms, strange things had begun unfolding in the original world, events that diverged sharply from canon history.
The first was the cancellation of the Silver Conference.
It had been moved to the Indigo Plateau.
After all, many Trainers had spent years collecting all eight Johto Badges. Canceling the tournament would have invalidated all their efforts, and that was simply unacceptable.
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