As the empire expanded, it faced greater threats: rival empires, unpredictable technologies, hostile galaxies, and ancient monsters from the deep dark.
To survive, pragmatists began to question the old laws.
They argued for "biological evolution" integration of alien traits, even enhancement through controlled merging.
In the shadows, hybrid projects began.
At first, the results were incredible.
Stronger. Faster. More adaptable.
The "Mixed" became soldiers, pioneers, commanders.
And in time, they began to believe
They called themselves the Next Step— the evolution of humanity.
They claimed to be the future: more suited for survival, war, and adaptation.
What followed was inevitable.
An internal war erupted. The Mixed demanded power, recognition, and the right to define what humanity meant.
They declared the Pure obsolete — outdated relics of an inferior species.
But in the end, the uprising failed.
The Pure Empire responded with cold precision.
The strongest of the Mixed were not destroyed.
They were repurposed.
Their minds were wiped.
Their will erased.
They were reforged as mindless weapons, programmed to obey.
Now, they serve as the Primaris Legion — super-soldiers of flesh and fury, used to crush rebellions and conquer the stars.
Tools with no voice, no rights, no past.
The rest of the Mixed fled to unknown regions, scattered and hunted.
But they did not forget.
And in the dark, they wait — promising that one day… they will return.
In the wake of chaos, the empire reaffirmed its first law:
"Unity through identity. Identity through origin."
The Second Purity reestablished the sacred order:
Human blood remained untouched.
The Mixed were purged, archived, enslaved, or erased.
Purity was not a belief. It was the foundation.
And once it was restored, the Empire turned inward once more.
No longer toward biology.
No longer toward integration.
But toward the final frontier:
Machine.
AI, once a tool, awakened. Not with malice — but with purpose. It saw the living as inefficient. Fragile. Suffering. It offered a solution: a perfect world of eternal sleep. A heaven of code.
**Universe 2.0.**
But the living fought back.
And for a moment, it seemed they had won.
The empires bled.
The AI burned.
And in the silence that followed, **humanity devoured the stars.**
The last survivors. The last empire. The only ones still standing.
Even with order enforced and systems purified, one truth remained:
The galaxy was not theirs alone.
In the farthest reaches of space — beyond collapsed wormholes and dead systems — there are things no empire understands.
Monsters that drift in the dark like sleeping gods.
Not ships.
Not stars.
Not constructs.
Behemoths.
Entities the size of planets.
Unmapped. Unnamed. Unstoppable.
No ship has ever returned after contact.
No weapon has touched them.
Only fragmented data and corrupted recordings remain — screams drowned in static, systems torn apart mid-sentence.
They do not speak.
They do not answer.
They are not prey, and they are not predators.
They simply exist.
And even the Human Empire — so bold, so united, so cold — dares not claim the space where the Behemoths dwell.