"Desire, greed, antipathy, hatred, envy, and pride—
the six elements that always open the gateway to human nature.
Yes, humanity is forever at war with itself.
A battle that can never be won completely."
5 billion years A.D.,
The end of a beginning.
The Sun began to run out of fuel,
slowly collapsing into a white dwarf.
Long after the last humans were sent to Proxima Centauri,
only a handful remained on Earth:
Those who failed and were left behind,
or those who chose to stay.
Beneath the surface,
from the remnants of science and technology,
they built the final civilization.
Harnessing the dying star's last energy.
The Sun, now a massive red giant,
had devoured all life above.
Then, it shrank
becoming a white dwarf,
leaving the world in silence.
(Total silence.)
---
Then, what had long been predicted finally arrived.
The universe kept its promise.
In a darkness that lived,
beyond all calculations,
the Andromeda Galaxy collided with the Milky Way.
A cataclysmic cosmic collision shattered space and time.
And from the explosion,
a strange new matter was born—
a material unknown, unmeasurable,
incomprehensible to the human mind.
At speeds beyond the reach of any law of physics,
this matter spread across the galaxy
reviving what was dead,
and destroying what was alive.
As if the universe was rewriting itself.
At the center of emptiness,
the dying Sun seemed to awaken again.
Not with the orange light of before,
but with a blinding violet glow.
And so, this is the end of a new beginning—
The beginning of a story called "Kokoro no Tetsu."
(To be continued...)