Once, the world was the cradle of a civilization enamored with its own brilliance.
The sky was still blue, nights adorned with stars...
Humanity stood at the pinnacle of the order it had built with its own hands.
Power sources were believed to be inexhaustible; machines had ceased to merely assist life — they had begun to replace it.
Knowledge no longer knew boundaries.
Societies had united, cultures had blended, and the longest era of peace in human history had begun.
In time, those days would be called The Catalyst Age.
At the center of this age stood a discovery.
What was first believed to be merely a new energy source later revealed itself as something capable of bending even nature's rules: crystals.
They were not mere stones.
Neither truly alive, nor lifeless.
But somehow —inexplicably— they resonated with the human mind.
Was there some kind of intelligence inside the crystals?
Or were those who studied them merely seeing reflections of their own consciousness?
No one truly knew. But they wanted to find out.
First, they tried to turn them into weapons.
Then, they sought to harness them as infinite sources of energy.
But some desired more.
And in the end, a group of scientists came to believe that the vibrations within the crystals carried traces of alternate realities.
That was when balance was broken.
These interventions, questioning the limits of the universe, shattered far deeper mechanisms of nature.
Dust storms swept across continents.
Oceans collapsed inward; cities withered from thirst.
Within a few years, billions perished — in hunger, in cold, in chaos.
The sky, once brightened by the sun, became veiled in a red curtain.
And that curtain never lifted.
Civilization did not end with a bang, but with the silence of decay.
Humanity fragmented into broken remnants that clung to survival.
Tiny communities rose from the ruins of cities.
People who killed for water.
Who carved flesh for food...
Morality had become nothing more than a luxury of memory.
But the crystals were not forgotten.
There were still those who remembered them.
Some believed the stones to be gifts from gods.
Others, a punishment for the sins of mankind...
And in that darkness, a cult began to rise in the shadows:
The Exo-Cult.
To them, the crystals were not curses, but keys.
Each one meant to be carried only by a "body" to which it truly belonged.
And once the proper vessel was found...
The crystal's true face would be revealed.