420 million years.
That's how long it's been since the Humans of Old first tore themselves from the gravity of their little blue planet in the Milky Way—since they looked up at the stars and decided they would belong to them.
In the beginning, their reach was humble: colonies on barren rocks, slow ships crawling between stars, the hope of survival resting in fragile machines.
But time—time was their ally.
They conquered the Milky Way, then the neighboring galaxies, then the rest of the observable Universe.
Wherever there was resistance, they crushed it.
Alien empires rose and roared—but like villains in an epic that had already chosen its protagonist, they only served to refine humanity's hunger, sharpening its will against the whetstone of adversity.
And one by one, they all fell.
It took only ten million years for the last known alien race to kneel or vanish.
But humanity did not stop.
They turned their gaze inward. With technology that surpassed even imagination, they cultivated beings—humans—who could extinguish stars, collapse nebulae, or rip open wormholes with the twitch of a finger.
These individuals, forged in the crucibles of science and soul, became weapons of divine scale.
Yet still… they were not satisfied.
Beyond the edge of the observable Universe, they found more.
Trillions of galaxies. Trillions of worlds.
Each teemed with unknown life, lost civilizations, or untouched potential.
An ocean of opportunity so vast that no race could ever hope to chart it.
But the Humans did it.
And still—they yearned.
No feat was ever enough. No conquest final.
They reached, clawed, tore, consumed.
Until at last… they reached the penultimate stage of their short-lived lives.
However, what they found beyond was not a final wall, but an abyss.
In the year 52,300,000 of the Cosmic Human Alliance, the illusion shattered.
The "Universe" they believed they had conquered was not unique. It was not infinite. It was just one bubble in a boundless Primordial Sea—a vast ocean teeming with multiverses, ancient horrors, and beings so vast and old that time itself bent in their presence.
The Common Universe—renamed the Deep Sea Universe—was not the apex of existence.
It was plankton.
Others had come before. Others had conquered their own universes. And like the Humans, they too had believed themselves supreme—until something in the Sea reminded them of their place.
And now, nearly 400 million years later, the mighty Human Race that once stood atop a cosmos of its own making… remains near the bottom.
In the Sea, there are predators.
Cosmic Horrors that swim between multiverses.
Deities without names.
Forces so incomprehensible that to know them is to vanish.
Humanity—the prey—survives by clinging to scraps of power, whispering of a future where they might rise again.
But then, in a year that seemed no different than any other, and on a day that wasn't particularly special, the tides of change began to churn—as a boy who would overturn everything opened his eyes for the very first time.