Eclipse: Crest Born

(Disclaimer: This is chapter is just the genesis of the world. Feel free to skip or read)

A Scholar’s Account of the Crested Age

By Archivist Veiran Thale, Former Geneticist of Noctra Academy

Preface of the Scholar

• They warned me that curiosity was the first contagion.

I did not listen.

I have dissected gods in the name of science, and all I found beneath their ribs was humanity’s Imperfection, frightened, and desperately reaching for immortality.

What follows is not revelation. It is confession.

The world of Eidrix was not born; it was manufactured. Every continent, every vein of soil, every crest upon human flesh is the scar tissue of a design long forgotten.

The people worship Crests as blessings. They are wrong.

The Crest is a wound that never healed, a genetic echo of an experiment that sought to rewrite the essence of man.

I record these findings not to enlighten, but to warn. Knowledge is a venom that feeds on faith, and I have drunk too deeply of it.

** On the Nature of Eidrix **

Eidrix is a dying organism pretending to be a world.

Our scholars once described it as “planetary decay,” but the deeper we dug, the more we realized the land itself remembers its origin. Beneath the crust lie layers of synthetic structures, carbon-spine networks, memory alloys, and hollow conduits that hum faintly at night, as if the world still breathes.

It is said that the first civilizations were born around these ancient veins, mistaking their glow for divine light. They built their cities upon the remnants of laboratories, worshiping ruins that once housed the architects of our genome.

Over time, the science became myth. The term “Crest” replaced “Gene Strain.” And thus the age of engineered evolution was sanctified into religion.

** The Genesis of the Crest **

I once believed Crests were the next step of life, a miracle of nature.

I now know they are the fragments of the Origin Genome, a synthetic code implanted into humanity in an age predating recorded history.

Each human carries a dormant strain of it, hidden within their DNA.

When triggered by trauma, emotion, or experiment, the strain awakens, rewriting the body.

Some survive. Most do not.

The awakening manifests as markings, luminous lines or sigils that crawl beneath the skin. These are not symbols of divinity but seams of instability.

In rare cases, the rewritten host achieves full stabilization, becoming what the Academy calls a “Perfect Crest.”

Yet perfection is the cruelest myth of all.

The human body was never meant to house the code of gods.

** Of Crest Beasts **

The beasts that roam the outer districts are not animals; they are symptoms.

They are what happens when the Crest gene awakens in the wild, unchecked, uncontained.

Their bodies mutate endlessly, searching for equilibrium they will never find.

We call them Crest Beasts, but in truth they are our predecessors. The first subjects of the old experiments, organisms twisted by unfinished code.

To hunt them is to murder our own reflection.

To study them is to risk becoming them.

The Black Vein

The government denies the existence of the Black Vein, but their denial is too precise to be innocent.

I once worked among them. Geneticists who whispered prayers over microscopes, as though faith could steady the hand of science.

Their creed is simple: Humanity must be purified back to its original code.

They see Crests not as curses but as promises unfulfilled.

In the name of the Origin Gene, they dissect the living to reconstruct the divine.

They control the Academy, the courts, the military . Their veins run through every system of our society, invisible but pulsing.

Their symbol is a branching mark like dark roots, has been found burned into the spines of students who disappear from Noctra Academy without record.

**Closing Statement**

 The Academy believes knowledge is light.

I have learned that it is fire.

And fire, once kindled, demands to burn something.

If these writings survive me, let them serve as an autopsy report for the world we were too afraid to bury.

— Archivist Veiran Thale

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Archivist Veiran Thale

Former Geneticist of Noctra Academy

Veiran Thale was once a quiet man, known in the halls of Noctra Academy as a brilliant but difficult researcher. He never smiled much, and he never joined the evening gatherings of other scholars. People said he spent too long in the archives, staring at old genetic codes as if they were holy texts.

He wasn’t born in the Capital. He came from one of the southern districts, where Crest mutations were frequent and poorly understood. As a boy, he watched his mother’s body break apart during a failed Crest awakening. That sight haunted him, and it shaped his obsession: he wanted to understand what truly made a human cross that line between life and transformation.

By his early thirties, Thale had become one of Noctra Academy’s leading bio-archivists. He was responsible for maintaining the “Living Records,” a vault of preserved human samples from students and soldiers who had undergone experimental Crest procedures. That was when he started noticing patterns, mutations that appeared in people who had never been experimented on, similarities between students and the wild Crest Beasts found outside the Capital.

He started writing his private journals