When the Earth breathed. It was a Tuesday, unremarkable, a billion lives caught in the quiet hum of a morning commute, the stillness of a pre-dawn slumber, the bustle of an afternoon market. In classrooms, offices, fields, and homes, 7.1 billion souls spun their intricate, ephemeral webs of existence, blissfully unaware of the cosmic thread about to snap. There was no warning, no celestial omen, no trembling of the sphere. Only the now, and then… the not.
The transition was not a passage but a cleaving.
One moment, a child laughed, a pen scratched paper, a prayer was whispered. The next, an unutterable violence tore through the bedrock of every consciousness. It was not physical, not a sensation the nerves could scream about, but a deeper, more fundamental violation—a soul-rip, instantaneous and absolute. Imagine a tapestry of 7.1 billion lights, each a universe of experience, simultaneously extinguished only to be reignited, scattered like embers from a shattered star across the cold, alien dark of an unknown reality.
Disorientation was a mercy too profound for most. Instead, there was raw, unfiltered existence, a bombardment of the nascent self. For some, awareness returned in a gasp, lungs—new, strangely configured lungs—filling with air thick with the scent of unknown pollens and damp, primordial earth. Eyes, sometimes two, sometimes more, sometimes slitted against unfamiliar suns or peering into bioluminescent twilight, opened to landscapes painted in hues no Earthly spectrum contained. Gigantic, crystalline flora pulsed with internal light; mountains floated like islands in an ocean of mist; alien skies roiled with constellations that mocked remembered stars.
Bodies, too, were instruments of terror and wonder. Skin that was scaled, furred, chitinous, or bark-like met tentative, horrified touch. Limbs, too many or too few, ended in claws, talons, or delicate, multi-jointed digits. The human template was a forgotten memory, replaced by an impossible, random bestiary. An elderly woman might awaken in the lithe, powerful form of an elven youth, a hardened soldier in the frail body of a pixie, a philosopher as a hulking, tusked orc.
Small clusters of souls, rarely more than five, sometimes awoke together, their shared, nightmarish genesis the only common ground in a universe of variables. Others found themselves utterly alone, the silence of their isolation pressing in, broken only by the skittering of unseen creatures or the groan of the alien world around them. Fear was a baseline, a thrumming undercurrent to every new sensation. The immediate, crushing weight of absolute loss—family, friends, history, future, self—bore down, a psychological trauma etching itself onto every transmigrated soul. Trust, in these first moments, was a concept as alien as the ground beneath their new feet.
Then, as the first wave of shock began to crystallize into a million different desperate struggles for comprehension, the Voice came.
It was not heard with ears, but felt—a pressure, a resonance within the core of every reincarnated being. It was genderless, toneless, yet utterly commanding, a divine will made manifest in the shattered silence of their minds.
"You have been given new life in a new world," the Voice declared, its pronouncement echoing with the weight of creation itself. "This is your Genesis. Your past is dust. Your future is to be forged. Grow. Expand. Conquer."
A pause, pregnant with unspoken power.
"You are the seeds of new races. Cultivate your kind. Establish a settlement. From that, a barony. Then a viscounty. Let it grow to a kingdom, and then an empire. Your progress will be marked, your dominion ranked. This world is boundless, ever-expanding. Claim it. Rule it. Fail, and be consumed."
When the Voice finished speaking, new information became present to them. For many, this appeared as:
[Status: Displaced]
[Race: Unconfirmed/Nascent]
[Territory: None]
[Civilization Rank: Rudimentary]
[Global Mandate: Grow. Conquer. Reign.]
Across the measureless expanse of this new, ever-growing world, 7.1 billion souls, encased in forms both wondrous and horrifying, looked out upon alien horizons. The old Earth was a dream. This violent, magical, and demanding reality was their only truth. The Cataclysm was over. The Crimson Genesis had begun. And the game of gods, played with mortal souls, was afoot.