CHAPTER 19
[WITHIN THE CORRIDOR OF OFFERINGS…]
Within the Corridor of Offerings stood countless towering golden statues of maidens, aligned on both sides between the great white pillars. Each statue wept silently—streams of molten-gold tears tracing down their motionless faces.
Their heads remained bowed.
Their arms remained raised.
Each held a massive circular tray above her, as though presenting an offering to something unseen.
But this was no celebration.
This was mourning.
And the entire scene unsettled Norma.
There was meaning here—he was certain of it.
This was not random design.
It was deliberate.
Symbolic.
He approached another maiden statue.
Then another.
And he saw it again.
Etched into the underside of each tray were lines of writing—ancient inscriptions carved with precision and reverence.
The symbols shimmered faintly, glowing with a soft, unnatural light.
The language was unfamiliar.
Yet he recognized it.
Kahlmatek.
And not only Kahlmatek.
As he moved from statue to statue, he discovered something extraordinary.
Each maiden was different.
Different facial structure.
Different hair.
Different posture details.
Different adornments.
They were not copies.
They were individuals.
And beneath each tray was a different language.
Ancient tongues long erased from the modern world.
Languages belonging to civilizations that had once flourished… and vanished.
Though foreign to him, Norma understood every single one of them.
Not partially.
Not vaguely.
Completely.
And somehow—without being taught—he knew where each language had originated.
A quiet horror began to form in his chest.
These were not mere statues.
They were representations.
Each maiden symbolized a civilization.
A nation.
A kingdom.
A clan.
A people.
They were not worshippers.
They were intercessors.
Long ago, those represented by these statues had united. They had cast aside prejudice, resentment, territorial disputes, pride, ancient feuds, and political rivalries.
Not out of enlightenment.
But out of necessity.
Because the world had once faced something that threatened the extinction of humanity itself.
A calamity unlike anything recorded in surviving history.
And these maidens—
They did not exist to worship the entity within the Great Tombs.
No.
They existed to plead.
To intercede on behalf of mankind.
They were known as:
The Statues of the Weeping Maidens.
[THE MYSTERY OF THE WEEPING MAIDENS]
Their origin dated back to an era long lost to time.
An age buried beneath myth and fragmented relics.
An age modern archaeologists refer to as:
The Era of the Dawn.
It was the period when humanity first began forming organized civilizations across the world.
Tribes became villages.
Villages became kingdoms.
Kingdoms became nations.
Each bore its own culture.
Its own traditions.
Its own belief systems.
Its own hierarchies.
It was an age of expansion.
An age of discovery.
An age of fragile peace.
But that peace was like sand within an hourglass—slipping steadily downward.
Inevitable.
Finite.
And once the final grain fell… there would be no one left to turn it over.
While some nations built monuments and pursued knowledge, others waged war.
Empires expanded through conquest. The strong devoured the weak. Political tensions rose. Betrayal became commonplace. Pride overshadowed wisdom.
Resentment replaced diplomacy.
Sentiment overruled logic.
No one was entirely right.
No one was entirely wrong.
Such was the nature of humanity.
And in the midst of mankind's chaotic evolution—
Something awakened.
Something unprecedented.
Something engineered.
The handiwork of a being whose ambition rivaled the heavens themselves.
After countless failures—
After unspeakable trials—
They succeeded.
The Awakening.
The path to godhood.
Six individuals were secretly raised and groomed in isolation, cultivated from childhood for a singular purpose.
To transcend humanity.
To achieve what no mortal was meant to achieve.
The knowledge that made this possible did not originate from human discovery.
It was granted.
Or perhaps… revealed.
By something.
Or someone.
Those six individuals would later be known as:
The Cult of the Six.
But history remembers them by another name.
The Six Gods of Calamity.
In ancient classification systems, individuals who mastered certain primordial arts were given designations based on the magnitude of their destructive capability.
One such designation was:
Calamity Type.
It was a title reserved for those whose existence alone posed a threat to nations.
But the Six—
They were beyond designation.
They were not merely Calamity Types.
They were the origin of the term.
Calamity Type individuals were exceedingly rare anomalies—humans who had evolved beyond conventional limits. Their existence alone posed a threat not only to humanity… but to the heavens themselves.
There was a reason they were both revered and feared.
They were the closest thing humanity had ever produced to a god.
Ironically, it was the heavens who had first bestowed upon mankind the knowledge of the Ancient Arts.
Not as a gift.
But as a necessity.
The Ancient Arts—manifested through what would later be called a Release—were granted as a countermeasure. A defensive practice. A desperate solution against the Six Gods of Calamity.
The heavens had never intended to share such power with mortals.
Especially not with a species that, at the time, seemed far more committed to finding creative ways to destroy itself than to coexist in peace.
War was humanity's most refined craft.
Cruelty, its most consistent tradition.
But the heavens' hand was forced.
Because the war that followed was unlike any conflict in history.
It was not nation against nation.
Not tribe against tribe.
Not clan against clan.
It was humanity united.
For the first—and perhaps only—time.
A singular front against a threat so overwhelming it defied logic itself.
Reality became an unending nightmare.
Nations that had once slaughtered each other stood shoulder to shoulder. Ancient enemies fought side by side as though bound by blood. Pride dissolved.
Resentment lost meaning. Oppressors and oppressed raised their weapons together.
All against six individuals.
The Six Gods of Calamity.
The war consumed everything.
Countless lives were lost. Entire populations vanished. Resources depleted. Cities crumbled into ash. Kingdoms that had taken centuries to build withered before their creators' eyes.
Valor proved meaningless.
Courage proved insufficient.
Men, women, children—none were spared.
The world's population shrank by the day.
It felt less like war…
And more like slaughter.
Some began to believe it was divine judgment.
That the Six were heaven's executioners—sent to purge humanity for its sins.
Looking back at their own history, the thought did not seem unreasonable.
Nations had conquered weaker ones, slaughtering their men, enslaving their women and children, torturing those who resisted until death became mercy. Violence had been indulged in not for survival—but for dominance. Debauchery thrived where power went unchecked. The list of atrocities was endless.
Perhaps this was retribution.
Perhaps this was deserved.
But the truth was far more unsettling.
The Six were not heaven's messengers.
They were not instruments of divine justice.
Humanity fought with everything it had—manpower, steel, fire, strategy—yet they fell like insects beneath a storm.
And still, no one understood the Six's true objective.
It reached a point where humanity nearly surrendered to extinction.
And that was when the heavens intervened.
Not out of affection.
But out of observation.
They saw humanity unified under a single cause. They saw them resist annihilation with primitive weapons against beings who had transcended mortality.
And so, reluctantly, the heavens bestowed the Ancient Arts.
The Release.
Power enough to level mountains.
Power enough to challenge gods.
Humanity adapted quickly.
But not quickly enough.
The Ancient Arts did not turn the tide.
They merely prolonged the inevitable.
The war continued.
Years passed.
Then decades.
Perhaps centuries.
Humanity's goal shifted from victory to endurance.
If they could not defeat the Six—
They would delay them.
Push them back.
Hold the line for as long as existence allowed.
And time, as it always does, moved forward.
New generations were born into a world defined by war.
But evolution does not remain stagnant under pressure.
Among the newborn arose rare anomalies—individuals whose awakenings surpassed the standard Release. Their evolution was abnormal. Accelerated. As though the war itself had forced humanity to adapt.
These rare beings were designated:
Calamity Types.
Their power approached that of the Six Gods of Calamity.
Not equal.
But close.
Close enough to instill both hope… and fear.
And just as humanity had done with every gift ever granted to them—
They politicized it.
Even in the middle of extinction.
Even with the world collapsing around them.
Power became territory.
Calamity Types became assets.
Assets became leverage.
And leverage became division.
Because even at the edge of annihilation—
Humanity remained human.
The war did not end in a year.
Nor in a decade.
It stretched across generations.
Children were born into battlefields and died before ever knowing peace. Entire bloodlines vanished. Histories were erased. The number of recorded deaths became meaningless—too vast to comprehend.
It felt endless.
As though the heavens had abandoned them.
Even as humanity's mastery of the Ancient Arts evolved exponentially, it made little difference against the Six Gods of Calamity. Their power remained absolute. Humanity was locked in a perpetual state of survival, unable to advance beyond warfare.
Civilization stagnated.
Progress halted.
The dream of a greater society became a fading illusion.
And slowly, humanity realized something unsettling.
The heavens were not responsible for the Six.
They had not created them.
They had not sent them.
Which meant the true question remained unanswered:
Who did?
Who possessed the knowledge to create beings that rivaled divinity?
Why were they created?
What was their objective?
What justified generations of unprovoked slaughter?
And if the heavens themselves did not know…
Then did that mean the architects of the Six stood above the heavens?
That possibility terrified humanity more than the war itself.
Then scholars and archivists noticed something.
The massacre mirrored an older legend.
A myth whispered long before the Era of the Dawn.
An incident so ancient that it predated recorded civilization.
A catastrophe that had once wiped out more than half the world's population.
It was said to have been carried out by a single man.
A man who wielded a blade known as:
The Talisman of Annhul.
Yet the legend held a strange inconsistency.
No evidence of the man existed.
No artifact of the blade had ever been recovered.
No ruins. No burial site. No inscription verifying his existence.
And yet—
The story endured.
Preached like gospel.
Passed down through generations with unwavering conviction.
Something had happened.
Of that, there was no doubt.
But it was as if every trace of the truth had been deliberately erased from history.
And the Six Gods of Calamity had, over time, surpassed even that ancient massacre.
Humanity continued fighting.
Not for victory.
But for survival.
Hoping that one day, somehow, the tide would turn.
[THE SUDDEN PEACE]
Then one day—
It stopped.
No warning.
No grand battle.
No final confrontation.
For the first time in centuries, an entire day passed without slaughter.
Then another.
And another.
People did not know how to react.
Peace felt foreign.
Unnatural.
Like silence after years of screaming.
They believed the heavens had finally intervened.
But once again—
They were wrong.
The Six Gods of Calamity had vanished.
Disappeared without a trace.
No bodies were recovered.
No battlefield marked their end.
No evidence proved they had been slain.
All that remained was a single sacred site.
A monumental structure believed to be their resting place.
Though none could confirm it.
Many were skeptical.
But peace had returned.
And after generations of despair, people no longer cared about details.
Peace was enough.
[THE GREAT TOMBS OF CONSTELLI]
Nations, kingdoms, clans, and societies from across the world journeyed to the sacred site.
What they found was beyond imagination.
A colossal temple-like structure of impossible scale.
Modern archaeologists would later name it:
The Great Tombs of Constelli.
Its construction defied explanation.
Who had built it?
When?
How?
Humanity had spent centuries barely surviving—so who had the time, the resources, the power to erect such a monument?
No answer was ever found.
Yet treasures from across the world were gathered there.
Not as tribute.
Not as worship.
But as symbolism.
The Great Tombs became a memorial.
A sacred site to commemorate humanity's survival.
The offerings placed there were not meant to honor the Six—
They were a collective prayer.
A plea.
That such a calamity would never rise again.
That whatever force governed existence would spare humanity a second annihilation.
And thus, the Statues of the Weeping Maidens were erected.
They represented the collective cry of mankind.
Their bowed heads were not acts of worship
—
But of humility.
Of surrendering pride.
Of acknowledging vulnerability.
Their near-nakedness symbolized the stripping away of national arrogance. The deliberate abandonment of dignity, superiority, and prejudice. It represented humanity laid bare—without deception, without ego—pleading for survival.
Their golden tears symbolized two truths:
The mourning of countless lives lost across generations.
And the overwhelming relief that peace had finally come.
Grief and gratitude intertwined.
And the massive trays they held aloft represented the offerings of every nation, kingdom, and race.
Not offerings to a god.
But offerings of sincerity.
A gesture of unity.
A promise.
A hope that mutual understanding would define the future.
A silent vow that humanity would not repeat its past.
And above all—
A desperate prayer that the Six Gods of Calamity…
Would never rise a second time.