The corruption spread from Varcessa’s hand, cracking flesh and bone up the arm, revealing Balor’s soul matter. He shed the corrupted soul matter off his form, which looked like Varcessa’s skin melting off her flesh.

  Balor knew right then his time as a silent spectator was over. This whole planet was doomed, and his plans were dead in the water.

  The crystal erupted with soul matter from elsewhere, spacetime tearing at the center. The erupting soul matter warped and materialized into flesh without shape, growing scaly skin, eyes, claws, and teeth at random. It decimated one of the king’s guards in a split second, his flesh collapsing in on itself

  Balor instantly concentrated his unaffected soul matter, growing to his full bipedal serpent height. He towered above all others as the red crystal connected with the other red crystal inside the scholar’s lantern.

  Bloodstone sought other bloodstone, each one acting as tears in spacetime for a dragon to seep through. At the rate it was coming out, it already had enough soul matter to rival him.

  Balor took the initiative. He needed to get to his stellar core as soon as possible, which was idling on the moon. He walked past Haelbrad and Carther, who were both staring at him wide-eyed.

  They were doomed no matter what he did.

  He swiped his hand, cratering the ground beneath his feet in a single stroke. The palace fell apart around him as the bloodstone fell through the crack into the darkness below. Haelbrad disappeared under a falling pillar. He swiped his hand again at the bloodstone on the red lantern, which was now covered in a sphere of flesh with scales and eyes.

  Carther, along with all the scholars and mice, got atomized as the swipe parted the ground, collapsing the palace foundations several stories below.

  Distancing the blood stones didn’t really help. The tears in space time only widened, more soul matter guzzling out of them to complete a ghastly Dragon.

  This process is irreversible. I should get out.

  Balor dashed out of the falling palace, landing on open ground outside amid a crowd. His landing impact crushed some of them. In their eyes, this would’ve looked like a nightmare. The palace had turned to rubble, with its king inside, within seconds.

  The Dragon wasn’t far behind him, and the corrupted soul matter burst from the cracks on the ground like sentient smoke clouds. In the distance, soldiers warped and melted inside their armors as the red fog blanketed the area faster than they could even react.

  The screams only started a few seconds later as the stunned hominids realized this bizarre destruction was now their new reality.

  Balor punched the ground to propel himself out of the range of influence of the red fog. Hovering or terrestrial flight was too inefficient to outrun it. Thousands died in the shock wave as he flew thousands of feet into the air with the explosive force. Long red tendrils chased him all the way, twisting and weaving like vines made of flesh.

  He used a series of explosions to increase speed as he darted across the continental surface. It took six jumps, each one destroying more land than the last. The final leap flattened a forest, and he ballistically reached the low planet orbit.

  Flesh tendrils grew even then, having followed him from the valley of the first civilization all the way across the world. The tears in space were growing exponentially, spilling more of the corrupted Dragon’s soul matter.

  Things on the ground level seemed cataclysmic, the entire valley being turned into a spherical distortion brimming with red soul matter that rippled across the continent and spilled into the sea.

  From space, it looked like a volcano with the black hole at the top, except instead of sucking matter in, this was expelling matter at an unbelievable rate. He saw the ghost serpent shed its dark lord guise to escape the planet, albeit a minute or two too late to succeed.

  In their escape, they collapsed the stellar core that was wrapped around Veilthorn to draw all the power to themselves, but the Dragon had more soul matter than the ghost serpent and Balor combined.

  The ghost serpent never made it more than a few thousand feet before the red tendrils corrupted and absorbed their soul matter.

  This slowed the Dragon down a bit because it seemed to realize what it just assimilated was something it had already assimilated once. The ghost serpent was a projection of the world seed in this iteration of Veilthorn because Balor started it with the previous step count intact.

  That dragon exists outside of the world seed!

  It was clear now how Veilthorn was a graveyard of serpents. Everyone had been assimilated into one predatory Dragon that was stronger than any individual Dragon. This was a threat that even Balor’s progenitors would’ve found challenging.

  His decision to see this for himself had been the right move. This would’ve been a nasty surprise to happen out of nowhere if he were engrossed in the typical world-making process.

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  The continent ripped in half as Balor pushed himself into a far orbit, calculating his trajectory to the moon. A gigantic eye peered from the crack in the planet, looking directly at him.

  It spoke in serpent tongue, directly into his brain.

  YOU ARE THE REAL SERPENT?

  It asked, flesh tendrils still growing in outer space towards him. The planetary crust became scaly, oceans shifting in cataclysmic waves as the soul matter consolidated into a dragon the size of a moon, poking out of a hole the size of a continent.

  YOU CANNOT ESCAPE ME.

  The corrupted dragon said, a hand the size of a new continent emerging from beneath the crust. It pushed out into outer space faster than Balor’s ascent. It was uncanny to witness something so huge moving so fast.

  Balor diverted his orbital plans to avoid it, and he barely dodged a clawed swipe and the red soul matter curtain that followed behind it. It looked as if Veilthorn was erupting in red, fleshy solar flares.

  YOU CANNOT DEFEAT ME.

  The dragon said, a second hand launching off the ground even faster than the first one. Balor lost a chunk of his soul matter trying to dodge it. He shed the corrupted soul matter before it could spread through him.

  YOU CANNOT HIDE FROM ME

  The long hands and tendrils chased Balor all the way to the moon on his orbital trajectory, even when he used three-quarters of his soul matter for propulsion. The dragon could grow faster than he could utilize his own powers. He landed on the moon in a wide arc, cutting across the barren landscape like a blade. The dragon’s hands stretched to the moon, chasing him across the surface, shattering the surface as they clawed through.

  His stellar core was on the dark side, and Balor dodged and hopped across lunar mountains and craters towards it as fast as he could.

  He didn’t have the time to wear it elegantly; he simply darted through the idling dragon form like a projectile, quickly gathering it all behind him like a meteor traveling parallel to the ground.

  His stellar core wrapped around him, some chunks getting corrupted on their way out from the moon. His dragon form was nowhere near as good as the real dragon on Veilthorn, but he was faster.

  His stellar core morphed into the shape that was fit for interstellar travel, and in three leaps across the moon, Balor darted off into the stars, leaving Veilthorn behind. As he left, he saw the corrupted dragon fully peering out from the crack in the planet as if it were being born out of an egg.

  The first seams of world seed’s reversal appeared across the crust, matter shifting and snapping in place as the planet collapsed in on itself. The dragon’s soul matter had tripped the world seed’s failure thresholds, and it was now undoing everything that it had done up to this point. Continents sank below the oceans, and the oceans disappeared along with the rest of the surface, collapsing inwards towards the molten core.

  The corrupted dragon prevailed even then, their soul matter separated from the reversing planet. Balor dashed out of the whole star system just to avoid another confrontation. The dragon wasn’t going to venture too far from the world seed. It needed the world seed to grow stronger, to keep absorbing new serpents until the end of time.

  Eventually, it sank back into the gyrating core of the planet as the World seed formed itself at the planetary core. Once everything was undone, it shot out of the planet in a thin golden line, leaving behind a barren planet devoid of everything, no atmosphere, no water, no life.

  Balor dashed back into the system once it was safe. He passed by the barren wreck of the unnamed planet that had once been habitable. The world seed remained locked in its orbit like a meteor-sized moon.

  He grabbed it and landed on the scarred surface of the planet in terrestrial form with claws for feet. He didn’t need wings anymore, because there was no air to beat with them. The planet had essentially been sucked clean of any worthy resources that it had.

  Balor detached from his stellar core with the world seed in his hand.

  Veilthorn, 997.

  It hadn’t even gone down the same steps as before. His presence on it had ended this experiment way earlier than it should’ve been. The ghost serpent would’ve remained Dark Lord for decades and centuries. Bloodstone magic would’ve developed as a branch of magic until they could harness it, and eventually it would’ve led to a moment where it touched the Dark Lord’s soul matter. The corrupted Dragon had lurked beneath his feet the entire time, A moon-sized mass of crystallized soul matter hidden inside the planet itself.

  It is part of the seed’s process. There is no other explanation for it. The seed creates that Dragon every single time in the form of bloodstone.

  The dragon remained in the form of bloodstone until it met its assimilation target: the soul matter of another serpent. It had existed in parallel with the magics that the ghost serpent invented.

  Balor hadn’t gotten to find out where bloodstone came from, but it had to have similar origins to the magics. Some early hominid had discovered it, kept it hidden through a long lineage, and it took Carther to uncover it with a group of scholars after the establishment of a school of magics.

  The sinister part was that if everything went well as expected, the ghost serpent wouldn’t have activated the dragon. The ghost serpent was a projection of the world seed. The corrupted dragon had already assimilated them in the last iteration.

  If Balor spent a few more decades watching the fall of the dark lord, he would’ve seen exactly what he wanted to see. The dark lord would’ve been defeated with a magnificent weapon made of red crystal, wielded by a heroic hominid. The dragon would’ve remained hidden because it wouldn’t even register the contact with a projection.

  The dragon needed a meal that it hadn’t had before. A projection of soul matter that it already assimilated wouldn’t have done anything. Balor would’ve been misled at that point, because Veilthorn would’ve gone merrily beyond step 1389, where he expected to see the ghost serpent’s death.

  The civilization would’ve advanced using magics based on an illusion. Magics that depended on a world seed’s projection.

  The question remained what kind of Dragon slept in the dark heart of Veilthorn. It was a Dragon that could make a world seed create itself without fail. A Dragon that devised a mechanism to persist through cataclysmic cycles.

  That was no Dragon at all.

  That had to be a Seedmaker.