Chapter 1: The Fall of the Hero
The world had grown darker over the years. Forests, once vibrant with life, had begun to rot, rivers ran sluggish with slime, and the skies carried a faint green haze that never fully disappeared. Villagers whispered in fear of creatures that had once been harmless, creatures now twisted into monsters by some unseen force. And so the kingdoms turned to a hero.
He was a man of legend: clad in shining armor that caught the sunlight like a beacon, a sword at his side sharper than any blade ever forged, and eyes that held both wisdom and unyielding resolve. He had faced dragons, demons, and warlords, yet he was called to this battle not by ambition but by duty. The slimes, they said, were multiplying at an alarming rate, consuming everything in their path. If left unchecked, the world would be swallowed whole.
The hero's journey led him deep into the Forest of Lament, a place the locals avoided. Here, the ground squelched underfoot, trees were slick with a strange, viscous coating, and the air smelled faintly of decay. At first, the forest seemed empty, almost tranquil. But as the hero ventured further, the silence was broken by soft squelches and the faint, eerie glow of countless eyes reflecting in the shadows.
Then came the attack. Slimes, hundreds of them, of every size and color, surged from the underbrush. Some were small, barely the size of a fist, while others had grown monstrous, their gelatinous bodies pulsing like living water. The hero swung his sword with precision, each strike slicing through the creatures with ease. Yet for every slime he destroyed, two more seemed to take its place, multiplying faster than any human could count.
Days passed. The hero fought tirelessly, barely stopping to rest. He set traps and burned swathes of the forest, yet the slimes adapted, changing shape and forming horrifying combinations. And then he saw it: the Slime King. Larger than any building, its translucent form glimmered with eerie, multicolored light, and inside its body, he could see countless smaller slimes writhing in unison. Its presence was suffocating, a living mass of hunger and chaos.
The hero charged, his sword raised high, determination burning in his heart. He struck true, plunging the blade into the Slime King's core. For a moment, it seemed the battle was over. But as the creature began to dissolve, a strange crystalline shard fell from the sky, spinning through the air like a star fallen to earth. The shard radiated an almost hypnotic glow, capturing the hero's gaze. He reached out, instinctively, to grasp it—but in that instant, disaster struck.
A tiny slime, almost insignificant in size, lunged toward the shard and swallowed it whole before the hero could react. Its body shimmered and pulsed with a strange energy, and then it dashed into the forest, faster than the hero had ever seen a slime move.
The hero's hand froze on his sword. The world seemed to hold its breath. He had fought countless battles, slain countless monsters, yet he had never felt such a gnawing sense of helplessness. "No… it cannot be," he whispered, watching the glowing dot of the tiny slime vanish into the shadows.
Around him, the remnants of the Slime King's army scattered. Their defeat felt hollow, almost meaningless. The hero sank to his knees, armor caked with slime and blood, chest heaving with exhaustion. His mission, which had seemed so simple at the start, now felt like a cruel joke. In a single moment, the scales of fate had shifted, and the creature that would one day rise to unimaginable power had already been born.
The hero could not know what the slime had become. He could not know that the crystal, ancient and mysterious, carried with it a force capable of transforming even the weakest creature into a being of power beyond imagination. For now, the world only knew one truth: the hero had failed. And in that failure, something far greater, far darker, had awakened.