Greed: All For What?



The Shikis didn't wander around for their short, one-year lifespan and die like they used to. Instead, they searched for a location with a lot of mana and took root there.

They knew those locations through the memories of their predecessors, so they didn't search for long. They just went directly to the place in their memories and planted themselves in the ground.

Their form changed from the balls of light into a ball of filaments. These filaments spread throughout the soil like roots and absorbed mana into it.

No one knew what caused this drastic change in the race. Maybe it was because the Shikis were born from seeds in the first place and needed the soil to grow. Whichever reason it was, no one was worried about the change because the Shikis led to an increase in the fertility of the soil. This is because they were still mana-to-vitality converters.

Even though the Shikis could grow stronger and live longer by fusing with the soil, they were still dying little by little. Their existence was unraveling, so the vitality they synthesized with all the mana they absorbed was still leaking into the environment and nourishing the world.

So people still liked the Shikis and wanted them in their lands. But the Shikis were not content with their fate.

The rate at which they were unraveling had to be slower than the rate at which they were growing for them to live. So the Shikis needed more and more land to survive. However, this also spurred their deaths because the rate at which they unraveled was directly proportional to their size.

So growing didn't completely solve their problem. Still, expanding could starve off death for a while. So they covered a large area of the realm and prospered as a race.

Problems ensued when they were living near another Shiki. Shikis couldn't stand being close to each other. Competition for land slowed down their growth, which eventually led to their death.

no matter how much they grew, most of them still died and produced two seeds to continue their mission to find longevity.

Unfortunately, they couldn't change this outcome until they became transcendents. It was then that the Shiki race became capable of infecting and growing in other living things.

They transformed from the lovable land spirits people thought they were into parasites. Every living thing in their domain could be infected.

The ground stopped being their major source of life. It became a boundary to mark the things they could infect. It became a sort of boundary. Every living thing in that boundary became their property.

This change granted them a source of vitality that could substitute for the vitality they lost as a result of their unraveling. They didn't need to convert mana to vitality anymore. They could just take it directly from other living things. They also didn't need a large territory, so their rate of unraveling remained slow. This made them capable of almost living forever.

But it wasn't good news for the people of the realm because a single Shiki could infect millions of hosts. Only the Shikis celebrated because the need for vitality had become a thing of the past. They stopped trying to expand their domain and focused more on power.

The Shikis managed to use parasitism to prolong their lifespan, but at the expense of the inhabitants of their lands. A shorter life span, reduced fertility, increased susceptibility to disease, constant tiredness, and insomnia made the victims of the Shikis hate them. Unfortunately, the infection couldn't be cured.

Things changed again when the Shikis grew strong enough to comprehend the law of life and awaken their divine ability further as titans of law. They became able to grant their hosts the ability to wield world power. So each host became a weak titan of law.

The larger the land of the Shiki and the more hosts they infected, the more world power they could grant their hosts. This effectively turned the Shikis from parasites into symbiotes.

Their thirst for power also turned them into conquerors. They didn't need to expand their land for vitality anymore, but they did so to grow stronger so that other Shikis wouldn't be able to take over their domains.

Their quest for more power made them clash with the Amotekun race. This is also another race that likes to expand. But the Amotekun race had another reason for it.

The Amotekun race originated from the bones of a powerful creature that was worshiped and came to life. So the original Amotekun was a heroic being. This remained so even when Amotekun became a heroic spirit. Unfortunately, this heroic spirit made a massive blunder. The faith of its believers helped it become the god of death. He had a child with a mortal, whose offspring became the Amotekun race. The Amotekun race liked to kill. This is because, just like their father, they could enslave the dead.

Their father didn't kill them when they were young and weak. This mistake gave them time to become stronger and undefeatable. They would massacre people and raise them into an undead army. The more undead they had, the more powerful they became, so they were always matching ceaselessly and tirelessly to massacre cities and nations.

The Amotekun were another paragon race that thrived on enslavement. But unlike the Shikis, they enslaved the dead. They were called undead lords because of this.

Their hearts were as black as their black, shriveled skin. They were ugly and thin with little physical durability, so they could be killed if one got close enough to them and struck them.

But they were not weak physically, as they could rip mountains apart with their small, fragile hands, and they had a large army constantly protecting them, so it was difficult to kill them. Soon their threat became too big, and they clashed with the Shikis, who were also on the path to dominating the world. One race grew stronger with the dead, while the other grew stronger with the living.

A/N: Do you see where I am going with this?

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