420 million years.
That's how long it's been since the Humans of Old first tore themselves free from the gravity of their fragile blue cradle in the Milky Way.
Since they looked up at the stars… and decided they would own them.
At first, their reach was pitiful.
Tiny colonies clung to barren rocks.
Primitive ships crawled between nearby stars.
Every step forward was bought with blood, failure, and fragile machines barely capable of keeping their creators alive.
But humanity possessed one weapon greater than any technology.
Time.
Given enough of it, they could turn impossibility into inevitability.
The Milky Way fell first.
Then the neighboring galaxies.
Then the rest of the observable Universe.
Alien empires rose like storms against them—ancient civilizations that had ruled the stars long before humanity ever learned to walk upright.
But storms always pass.
And humanity endured.
Like villains in a story that had already chosen its hero, those alien powers served only one purpose: to temper humanity's resolve. To sharpen its ambition. To remind it that the cosmos did not belong to the weak.
One by one, they all fell.
In only ten million years, the last known alien race either knelt… or vanished.
And still, humanity was not satisfied.
With enemies gone, they turned their gaze inward.
Armed with technologies that defied imagination, they began to cultivate something new.
Humans who could extinguish stars.
Humans who could collapse nebulae.
Humans who could tear open wormholes with nothing more than a thought.
Forged through science, willpower, and ruthless experimentation, these beings became living weapons—gods born from human hands.
Yet even then…
Humanity hungered for more.
Beyond the edge of the observable Universe, they discovered something impossible.
More.
Trillions upon trillions of galaxies.
Uncountable worlds.
Civilizations yet unborn.
An endless frontier of power and conquest stretching into the unknown.
An ocean so vast that no species should ever have been able to chart it.
But humanity did.
They mapped it.
They conquered it.
They devoured it.
And still… it was never enough.
No victory was final.
No conquest complete.
They reached farther.
Clawed deeper.
Consumed without hesitation.
Until finally—after hundreds of millions of years—they arrived at what they believed was the final threshold.
The penultimate frontier of existence itself.
But beyond it…
There was no wall.
Only an abyss.
In the year 52,300,000 of the Cosmic Human Alliance, the greatest illusion in history shattered.
The "Universe" humanity had conquered was not the whole of existence.
It was not even close.
It was merely one bubble in a boundless Primordial Sea—a vast cosmic ocean filled with countless other universes.
A place where multiverses drifted like plankton.
Where ancient horrors swam between realities.
Where beings so old and colossal that time itself bent in their presence regarded entire universes as little more than dust.
Humanity renamed their once-great domain the Deep Sea Universe.
Because compared to what lay beyond…
It was microscopic.
They were not the first to reach the Sea.
Other civilizations had done so long before them.
Empires that had conquered their own universes.
Races that had believed themselves eternal.
Each had arrived with the same arrogance.
Each had believed they stood at the peak of existence.
Until the Sea reminded them of the truth.
There are always bigger predators.
And now, nearly 400 million years later, the mighty Human Race—the species that once ruled a universe of its own making—
Lingers near the bottom of the food chain.
Because in the Sea, there are things far worse than rival civilizations.
There are Cosmic Horrors that swim between multiverses.
Nameless deities older than reality itself.
And forces so vast and incomprehensible that merely understanding them is enough to erase entire civilizations from existence.
In this endless ocean, there are only two kinds of beings.
Predators.
And prey.
For the past four hundred million years…
Humanity has been the latter.
But in a year no different from any other…
On a world that held no special significance…
A child opened his eyes for the very first time.
And the tides of the Primordial Sea began to change.