Even after two thousand years, the Abundant Shrine stood in the Wild Area, weathered but intact, one of the most visited sites in the Galar Region. Travelers came from every corner of the world to see it.
"Did you hear? The King of Abundance once lived in this very shrine!"
"Calyrex? The one who could ripen crops instantly? They say if you pray to him sincerely, you'll have a bountiful harvest."
"Is he still here?"
"No. The legend says he rode away on his horse many years ago. Nobody knows where he went."
"What a pity."
The voices of tourists drifted through the shrine and faded.
Lucien stood before the statues of Calyrex and Spectrier, Hoopa floating beside him, and looked up at the two carved figures in silence.
The events of that year had become legend here. The story told in Galar went like this: more than two thousand years ago, the region was locked in constant warfare. A benevolent foreign king arrived and joined with Calyrex to fight against the ruling power on behalf of the suffering people.
The war swept through all of Galar, and civilians and Pokémon had joined the King of Abundance's army. Peace had been restored, and the people who had been starving gradually became prosperous. In gratitude, the people of the Wild Area had built this shrine. Calyrex and Spectrier had lived here together until, thousands of years later, they departed, their destination unknown.
"I've heard the Calyrex legend in Kalos too," a tourist nearby was saying. "And Unova farmers pray to Calyrex for good harvests. If only I could see him in person."
Lucien smiled quietly to himself.
The original course of events would have had Calyrex forgotten and alone on the Crown Tundra, its memory lost, its power faded. That was not what had happened.
Now Calyrex's accumulated Power of Faith, spread across multiple regions over two thousand years of genuine reverence, had grown to something that Lucien suspected put it comfortably beyond Eternatus in terms of raw capability. He no longer needed to worry about Galar's protection.
"Let's go," Lucien said to Hoopa.
Hoopa grinned and opened a ring, carrying them out of the Abundant Shrine and into a deep, mist-filled forest.
In the pavilion near Slumbering Weald, Zacian and Zamazenta were resting with their eyes closed. The moment Lucien and Hoopa arrived, both opened their eyes simultaneously.
Hoopa darted forward. "Zacian! Zamazenta! We came to visit!"
Zacian and Zamazenta rose, their eyes turning to Lucien with something that was recognition and something that was older than recognition.
"My friend," Zacian said. "It has been a long time."
"It has," Lucien said. "How have you been?"
"Well enough." For those with lifespans that did not end, a thousand years was not a burden. They spent most of their time sleeping in Slumbering Weald, waking occasionally to see what the human world had become, then returning to rest.
"I'm going to visit Calyrex," Lucien said. "Will you come with us?"
Zacian and Zamazenta exchanged a glance, then nodded. There was nothing keeping them here, and it had been too long since they had all been together.
Hoopa opened the ring. The pale mist of Slumbering Weald folded away, and a moment later the group stood before a temple on a snow-capped mountain.
The Temple, in the Crown Tundra. A place where very few people came. After leaving the Abundant Shrine centuries ago, Calyrex had brought Spectrier here and been reunited with Glastrier as well. The Crown Tundra was having one of its rare clear days, the sky above the temple bright and cold.
Calyrex was tending to Glastrier and Spectrier when it heard something and turned.
It saw Lucien. Then Zacian and Zamazenta. It went still.
"Lucien? And Zacian and Zamazenta." Its tone carried a faint note of disbelief. "Are you real?"
"Not an illusion!" Hoopa flew directly to Calyrex's face and beamed at it. "We came to visit!"
"It's real," Calyrex said, its voice slightly unsteady with something it was trying to contain.
Lucien looked at Calyrex's expression and felt a mild concern that he could not quite name at first. Then it settled: Calyrex, the great King of Abundance, protector of Galar, worshipped by millions across multiple regions — standing alone in a cold mountain temple, visibly moved by the arrival of visitors.
"It's been too long since we were all together," Hoopa declared, spinning happily. "Kyurem, Calyrex, Zacian, Zamazenta, everyone should be together!"
"Agreed," Lucien said.
He looked around the Crown Temple. It was austere to the point of bareness, not a place of rest, just a place of residence. He made a decision.
"Hoopa, let's go back to the Tree of Beginning. All of us, together."
Hoopa lit up. "Yes!"
The ring opened, and the group stepped through.
The Tree of Beginning had changed considerably from its early days.
The small wooden house had been expanded and renovated over recent years into a two-story structure with balconies, a proper garden growing beside it in full health, the ancient tree's light filtering down through the canopy and touching everything with warmth.
Wild Pokémon had been drawn to the Tree of Beginning over the years and often gathered here to play in the garden and the branches.
Calyrex looked around with open curiosity as the group arrived. "This is where you live now?"
"Here, mostly," Lucien said. "I go to the human world occasionally and stay for a while."
Calyrex nodded slowly, his eyes moving through the space. Mew was there, and Hoopa, Victini, Kyurem, Melmetal, and Golett. But Dragonite and Serperior and Volcarona were nowhere to be seen. Calyrex was perceptive enough to understand immediately what their absence meant. For ordinary Pokémon, however long-lived, time eventually ran its full course.
Zacian had also noticed. Zamazenta, more direct by nature, asked before catching himself: "Where are Dragonite and the others?"
"Zamazenta," Zacian said quietly.
Zamazenta realized what he had done and went silent.
"It's all right," Lucien said.
"Lucien..." Zacian murmured.
"Don't be sad," Lucien said, and smiled, though what was behind the smile was more complicated than the expression showed. "It's not as though we'll never see them again."
Hoopa's eyes went wide. "We can see Dragonite and the others again?"
Lucien did not answer immediately. He looked down at the interface that only he could see: the long technological pathway he had been following for years, and at the end of it, a recently unlocked item.
Life Solidification Equipment: A revolutionary invention that breaks the boundary between life and death. It can materialize and contain Life Energy, rebuilding a deceased Pokémon's body and consciousness. Exchange required: 999,999,999 Satisfaction Points.
The Pokémon League had been generating Satisfaction Points for a very long time. The exchange had been made. Lucien had entrusted the technology to Colress, the leading scientist now working within the Unova League.
The principle behind the equipment was not unlike something Lucien had encountered in records from another world: the idea that a being whose physical form is essentially a high-density energy entity does not truly cease to exist when the body is destroyed. The energy disperses, but the pattern of it, the consciousness, the memories, the self, can be preserved if the right equipment is applied in time.
Pokémon were energy entities in exactly this sense.
Lucien had understood this possibility long before Dragonite and the others died. He had spent the intervening years preparing.
Using Terapagos's Tera energy, which had the particular property of condensing and sealing energy patterns with extraordinary precision, he had stored the souls and consciousness of Dragonite, Serperior, and Volcarona at the moment of their passing. The essence of who they were was still present, sealed within Terapagos, waiting.
What remained was the technology to rebuild the physical form from that preserved pattern. Colress was the right person for that work. But it was technology that did not yet exist anywhere on this planet, and developing it would take time that could not be estimated.
"Of course," Lucien said to Hoopa.
Hoopa lit up. "When?!"
"It could be soon, or it could take a long time," Lucien said. "The technology is unlike anything that has been attempted here before."
The room was quiet.
Calyrex had been watching Lucien intently since the subject arose. He had lived through more cycles of life and death than he could count. He had understood, for longer than most things had existed, that the departure of a living being was final. And yet here was Lucien describing preparations that had begun the day his companions died, a plan held across a century of waiting.
"You had already made arrangements," Calyrex said.
"From the day they left," Lucien said. His gaze moved to the canopy above. "Even knowing that, watching it happen was still what it was."
Minccino and the others had been gone for roughly a thousand years. Dragonite and Serperior for over a hundred. The grief had not simply faded with time. The waiting had its own particular weight.
Terapagos settled quietly onto Lucien's shoulder, its body shimmering with quiet, shifting light. The energy sealed within its shell had been held there with complete stability, consciousness and memory intact, the essence of each companion preserved in perfect stillness.
"Terapagos's Tera energy can condense and lock soul energy," Lucien explained to Calyrex and Zacian. "Consciousness and memories, sealed against dispersal. Their essence is fully preserved, held in Terapagos's keeping. On the human side, a scientist is working toward the technology required to rebuild from that preserved pattern. It will take time. The science does not yet exist at this level on this planet."
Silence.
Zacian's grip on its sword hilt tightened slightly, the golden pupils shifting. As a Legendary Pokémon, Zacian understood the laws governing life and death as deeply as anything alive understood them. What Lucien was describing was not a bending of those laws. It was a deliberate and prepared-for dismantling of a boundary that had always been considered absolute.
Zamazenta stared at Lucien with its enormous head, something moving in its expression that was bewilderment and something past bewilderment. It had believed, the way all things believe when someone they love dies, that leaving meant permanently gone. The understanding that this was not necessarily true was difficult to absorb all at once.
"They could... come back?" Zamazenta asked, its rough voice careful.
"Yes," Lucien said.
Hoopa spun in the air. "Serperior! Dragonite! Volcarona! Everyone comes back, and we live together like before?!"
"It's a matter of time," Lucien said.
Kyurem descended from the balcony and landed on the ground, the cold it carried somewhat softened in this place. Its eyes rested on Lucien with an expression that was, for Kyurem, something close to feeling.
As the Dragon of Truth, Kyurem perceived the laws of energy in the world with a clarity that few things could match. It understood precisely how extraordinary what Lucien had said was.
"Overcoming the boundary of death to rebuild Life Energy," Kyurem said, its voice low. "If successful, it breaks the cycle of reincarnation that governs this world. That may attract attention from forces that govern such things."
"I'm not trying to break the world," Lucien said. "I want my companions back."
He turned the question over in his mind. This world had a Ghost World, the place where souls passed after death, where the cycle of reincarnation turned. Every being, human and Pokémon alike, eventually went there. And the Ghost World, in the deepest records, was connected to Giratina.
Would pulling souls back from that place draw Giratina's notice?