The Legacy of Calsorn
Long ago, there existed an ancient empire known as the Calsorn Empire.
For reasons still unknown, that empire fell before the galaxy's many races ever reached for the stars. Several joint research institutions place its collapse somewhere between the first and third centuries CE by Earth's calendar. Scholars have tried to reconstruct what the Calsorn Empire truly was, but so many records were destroyed that the cause of its downfall remains a mystery.
What is certain is this: they fought something — and were annihilated so completely that not a single survivor remained. As for who that enemy was, countless theories still circulate, though most amount to little more than hearsay and rumor.
Regardless, the mere existence of the Calsorn Empire left an indelible mark upon the entire galaxy.
First: every intelligent civilization in the galactic system.
The vast majority of races alive today were artificially evolved by the Calsorn Empire — intelligence forcibly injected into suitable species so they could serve as slaves. Machines would have been more convenient, of course, but the upper classes wanted to enjoy the privilege of commanding living beings. As an empire that ruled the entire galaxy, their wealthy elite and ruling class were numerous, and so they needed slaves in equally vast numbers and varieties.
That is why the overwhelming majority of intelligent life in the present universe takes humanoid form. The reason is simple: hands and feet offer superior versatility.
Once these species became the intelligent life of their respective planets, they built cultures, formed societies, and developed in ways suited to their worlds. According to surviving records, the Calsorn Empire planned to harvest them as slaves once their populations reached suitable numbers. By Earth's timeline, that harvest was scheduled for roughly the seventh to ninth centuries CE.
But the empire fell before that day arrived — and every race continued to advance until they, too, could reach for the stars.
Even the language they injected into me is the language of the Calsorn Empire.
The Calsorn Empire had artificially implanted their own tongue into their slave races simply because differing languages would have been a nuisance. Naturally, once the empire collapsed, that language diverged across each planet. Even on Earth, a land as small as South Korea has regional dialects, doesn't it? With the empire that controlled language gone and countless ages passed, planetary languages were bound to diverge.
That's why the early space age was chaos. Then they discovered Calsorn ruins and unified the language once more.
The reason so many spacefaring civilizations unified under the Calsorn tongue is as follows.
Second: military technology.
The most ubiquitous humanoid combat weapon in the galaxy — the Mecha — was the Calsorn Empire's primary war machine. Even now, no civilization has managed to replicate even half of that technological prowess.
As a side note, the intelligent beings artificially evolved by the Calsorn Empire carry a genetic-level fixation: that robot-form weapons — Mecha — are the ultimate armament. They accept this without question or dissent. Indeed, even during Earth's Second World War, primitive bipedal robots fought alongside tanks.
Though the Calsorn Empire vanished, their technology still sleeps scattered across the galaxy — in places now called ruins: military installations, record vaults, and the like. Every advanced nation in the galaxy rose to power by discovering and exploiting Calsorn technology.
The Zabalcan Empire was no exception.
Though Zabalcan entered the space age later than most, fortune smiled upon them: they found an intact Calsorn military facility nearby. Armed with Mecha technology rivaling that of the advanced powers, the Zabalcan Empire used that strength to dominate neighboring states and expand its reach. Naturally, nations that resisted Zabalcan's aggression formed alliances and struck back with sheer numbers.
Beyond that, the experiments the Calsorn Empire had conducted spawned problems of every kind — leaving galactic diplomacy in a state of pure chaos.
"Huh? Mister, you're still up?"
At that moment, as dawn broke, Kunlo woke and came out into the living area.
"Once you learn martial arts, Inner Qi lets you get by on far less sleep. Right now, two hours of rest for me is the same as ten for an ordinary person."
Jincheon, seated on the sofa and gathering information through his Bio Device, answered lightly.
"Too much information is its own problem. Cross-checking what's real and what isn't ate up quite a bit of time."
Even Earth had so much information that verifying the truth was a job in itself. Now that scale had expanded to the entire cosmos — how much worse could it be? At first, when he'd opened the galactic network, the sheer volume of portal-site advertisements had nearly given him a headache.
"Your leg injury will need more time to heal. What do you want to do? Want me to treat it?"
"No. I want to start now."
Having lived as prey on the bottom rung — never knowing when he might be hunted — Kunlo's hunger for power ran deep.
"Come here and sit comfortably."
Kunlo scurried over to where Jincheon indicated and sat carefully so as not to aggravate the wound on his leg.
I'll teach him the fast way — the unorthodox path.
True martial arts were meant to be built from the foundation up, through patient, layered training. That was the righteous path. But Jincheon intended to teach him the heretical way — accelerated and ruthless.
I don't have time to waste on some man.
Though age had mellowed his temperament somewhat, the Lust Emperor's nature remained unchanged: beyond himself, men held no value whatsoever. That said, he had no intention of churning out some Third-class scrap of a martial artist. He was the greatest under heaven — even half-hearted instruction from him wouldn't produce mere Third-class trash.
While Kunlo had slept, Jincheon had gathered stones from the surroundings and drawn blood from the corpses stored in the freezer, laying a formation around the building. All the earth's energy within a fifty-kilometer radius was now flowing toward this place, creating an environment where Inner Qi was easy to sense and gather. The areas being drained would struggle to grow crops — but there were no farms anywhere near here anyway.
"First, I'll explain what martial arts actually are."
Kunlo had no knowledge of the Murim world. Talk of natural energy and the like would mean nothing to him, so Jincheon framed the explanation in terms a resident of this world could grasp.
The cultivation method was fuel. Martial techniques were the weapons that ran on that fuel. The meridians were the electrical circuits inside those weapons.
With that analogy, Kunlo understood easily.
"Since your leg is injured, while it heals I'll teach you the cultivation method that serves as fuel, and how the meridians move."
"Yes!"
"From this moment, I'm going to pour Inner Qi into your body. Don't resist it — accept it."
Jincheon placed his hand over Kunlo's solar plexus and pushed in his Battle God Power.
"Ugh…"
Sensing that strange energy from yesterday, Kunlo did not reject it. He took it in.
"Can you feel this energy?"
"Y-yes…"
"What's it like?"
"It's like… a small bead… warm, and… foreign, but… familiar…"
"Correct. Your senses pass."
Jincheon's Battle God Power was something any living being's body would joyfully accept. Refined clean from the energy of the great natural world, Battle God Power was a panacea to any living creature.
Having withdrawn the power, Jincheon stepped back slightly.
"From now on, focus your mind and try to feel that same energy again."
He added further explanation for Kunlo, who knew nothing of martial common sense.
"To use martial arts, you must operate the cultivation method yourself and gather Inner Qi. If I plant Qi in your body, you could display superhuman strength immediately — but once you burn through it all, you'd be an ordinary person again. You need to learn how to gather it on your own."
"Yes."
"Then concentrate from this moment on."
I've stimulated his meridians to activate his senses, making natural energy easier to perceive. Normally this takes about two hours — I'm curious how long this kid will take.
Having artificially stimulated the meridians to awaken Kunlo's senses, Jincheon waited with interest to see how long it would take him to feel Qi.
I'll need to teach martial arts to my women eventually. Might as well use this chance to experiment with a few things.
He had originally planned to half-ass it because Kunlo was a man — but for the sake of the future, he decided to take this a little more seriously. He would accumulate experience adapting cultivation methods and martial techniques for aliens whose meridians were similar to humans, yet different. Of course, the women he would claim later wouldn't be of Kunlo's race — but there was a world of difference between having experience and having none.
In the meantime, Jincheon activated his Bio Device and continued exploring this world's information.
This galaxy held countless races and countless nations. Naturally, with so many states, diplomacy would be a mess — but thanks to the Calsorn Empire, the diplomatic landscape was far worse than one might imagine.
Everything up to this point about the Calsorn Empire had merely reshaped the face of war. What came next concerned the "experiments" that had twisted the diplomatic relations of every race.
They got drunk on absolute power that no one could challenge.
Jincheon's assessment of the Calsorn Empire: beings who had lived as invincible for so long that they developed the arrogance of gods.
He would explain using Earth as a reference.
Earth had countless myths. And in those myths existed creatures that were not human — goblins, Medusas, harpies, cyclopes, centaurs, fairies, and countless other beings of legend. These creatures had been kidnapped by the Calsorn Empire from other planets' races or wild animals and scattered across Earth. The primary purpose was a sociological study: how would primitive civilizations react when confronted with life-forms beyond their frame of reference?
As a side note, Earth humans had also been kidnapped and scattered across other planets — for the exact same reason. Earthlings dumped on other worlds were mistaken for monsters, becoming the "mythical beasts" of those planets — hunted, ostracized, and left to die alone.
If only it had stopped there. In worse places, they were outright domesticated as livestock.
The Earthlings of planet Quireon were the unfortunate protagonists of that fate. The inhabitants of Quireon found the meat of the Earthlings the Calsorn Empire had seeded quite to their taste, and after great effort, succeeded in domesticating them. After more than two thousand years of livestock breeding, Quireon's domesticated Earthlings looked quite different from ordinary humans — yet the Quireon people seemed to instinctively recognize the two as the same.
When the Quireons first encountered the Terra Federation, they tried to eat the Terrans, who resembled their livestock in so many ways. Naturally, the Terrans fought back — and relations between the two nations were a disaster from the start.
Once the Terra Federation learned the truth through this incident, they demanded that the Quireons stop domesticating Terran-kind. But for a people who had used humans as livestock and food for over two millennia, such a demand was unacceptable. From Earth's perspective, it was like a pig-shaped intelligent being demanding that the domestication of pigs be stopped.
The issue sparked several wars, and Terrans and Quireons came to hate each other. The greater problem was that this situation was not unique to Earth and Quireon — it applied to every other nation that had reached the stars. Hatred and hostility born of these experiments erupted everywhere, turning an already vast universe into a diplomatic nightmare of extraordinary complexity.
As a footnote: the gods appearing in Greek mythology and countless other legends were all researchers of the Calsorn Empire. Their original mission, under the name of "gods," was to serve as catalysts that would push cultures to the next stage of development. Instead, they used their overwhelming technology to treat Earthlings as entertainment. When the Calsorn Empire discovered this, they were recalled to the homeland.
That covered the fundamental information about the Calsorn Empire — the root of this entire galaxy.
And Earth?
Having confirmed all the critical information on the Calsorn Empire, Jincheon turned his attention to Earth next.
The fine details differ, but the broad strokes of history match the Earth I knew.
Fortunately, if he ever met Terrans, they wouldn't talk past each other over historical discrepancies.
The current year is 2215 by the Earth calendar. That aside, I keep calling Terra "Earth." It's getting annoying.
About thirty minutes passed.
"Um… Mister."
"Even if you're bored, keep going."
"No. It's just… like you said, I'm starting to feel something."
"…What?"