side story: The Soul Cube

What would it take for an object to be considered alive?

Is it the ability to think for itself?

is it the ability to question everything around it?

is it something intangible like a soul or conscious?

The Soul Cube had never had an answer for any of these questions right from the day it was created.

It still remembers clearly the day on which it was created by a high immortal to be the collection of all human knowledge across space and dimension, to be the library and beacon of the human mind.

Its homeworld was the same as that of its new owner, Terra, or as it was now called, Earth. However, the time period it was created was not the same.

It was created roughly 20,000 years ago, during a time when the supernatural was a common occurrence, a time when dragons, demons, gods, elves, dwarves, spirits, and many other such creatures lived together. It was also the time when humans were at their peak as the supreme rulers of the Earth.

Truly, the soul cube could not be prouder of her creators.

Just like the humans of today, the humans back then were not born with any kind of special power when compared to other creatures on the Earth, but using their keen minds and unbreakable wills, humans rose to dominate the planet, and eventually, countless dimensions bowed under their power.

Using only their sheer intellect and cunning, humans devised ways to absorb the latent energy in the atmosphere to become stronger than the Dragons, faster than the wood elves, much more durable than the Dwarves, increase their already keen intellect to surpass the Gods themselves.

But just like any other creature, they too had flaws which were only magnified by their rise in power.

Their wrath was known to be much more dangerous than that of a nature spirit, their evil would sometimes cause even the vilest of demons to shudder in fear and disgust, their lust for power and worldly pleasures would cause even the goblins to be stupefied.

But even with all these flaws, the cube still loved the race of its creators dearly.

It still remembers the day when a low ranking immortal from the elf race had created a cheap knock off of itself, it's creator was absolutely livid and had personally chased the poor creature across the dimensions until it was seriously injured by her creator and ended up falling into this dimension where he was then killed by four experts of this dimension, one of the said experts also happen to be the so-called 'Sage Emperor' who used one of the pages from the knock off to create a space-time barrier around this dimension, fearing an invasion from Earth.

That dumb creature did not realize that if the creator and the rest of humans really wanted to conquer this dimension, even a thousand of such space-time barriers would not be able to delay them for even a single second.

However, the reason that it's creator had punished the elf so seriously is not because of petty pride, but due to the fact that the elf had unknowingly broken a major rule from the human faction on Earth.

Over ten years before the birth of the Soul Cube, the greatest experts of all the factions on Earth had joined together to talk about a startling discovery made by a young deity. The deity who had the domain of foresight had accidentally looked far into the future and ended up dead when he used up all of his divine essences, but before death, he had managed to send all the information he gained to the human faction.

The vision had shown the Earth, two hundred years into their future. A future where the sudden disappearance of the ambient energy in the atmosphere had caused most of the species on the planet to die and cause the rest to go to war to secure what little resources were left, leaving behind a barren world scarred by war and decay.

Immediately, all the factions agreed to combine their forces to find the cause of this incident, but in the worst-case situation, where if they were to fail and the energy did indeed disappear, then they would have a backup plan to make sure that the planet survived.

The soul cube was one of the seven backup plans.

Each faction on Earth was given a secret task, to create an ultimate treasure to contain the essence of their race in the face of extinction which would later be used to repopulate the planet.

The Dragons were tasked to create the Dragon bone spear, a weapon that was imbued with the combined strength of a hundred peak level true dragons and their essence. A peerless weapon capable of destroying an entire dimension.

The Demons were tasked to create the Demon armor, an armor created from the combined magic of two hundred demons, capable of surviving even at the heart of a Blackhole.

The Gods were tasked with creating the Blood pearl of the divine, it would be made from the golden blood of five hundred supreme deities and will imbue the user with the power of a divine being.

The Nature Spirits were tasked with creating the Nature's Cradle, it would be a massive artifact created from the primal nature aspects such as the primal flame, the primal woods, the primal waters and so on, this cradle would be the birthplace of the future generation of creatures on earth.

The Elves and The Dwarfs were tasked to combine their forces and create Spirit Canon, a weapon that would be used as a last-ditch effort should someone try to interfere with the plans of the factions.

The Humans were tasked with the creations of the Soul Cube, a cube made from the combined essence of a thousand humans, each and every one of them praised as the genius of their generation and known far and wide for their great intellect, but sacrificed all of their fortune and families to give up their lives for the creation of the soul cube, to ensure that humanity would survive the coming disaster.

Now one should be able to understand why the creator was so angry at that stupid elf, an artifact that humanity paid in blood and lives to create was mimicked by a stupid elf who did not even know what was going on in the world, who then proceeded to diss the human race, calling them barbarians for using human lives to create a useless artifact when he had created an imitation using nothing but his own power.

Soon, all the factions on Earth finally found out the cause for the coming catastrophe.

A strange being that did not belong to their dimension, this creature fed on the spiritual energy that was naturally given off by planet that was capable of sustaining life.

No one was ever able to find out its origin or how to defeat it, but in the end, every single faction on Earth joined forces to fight this creature that they named 'Planet eater'.

the War raged on for a long time, however, in the end, the races of the Earth had lost the war due to the fact that none of the supreme treasures aside from the soul cube had been completed yet.

All the races of the world watched helplessly as the Planet Eather absorbed all the spiritual energy before he left the solar system, searching for another world to eat, they watched, unable to do anything as many creatures across the world which depended on spiritual energy to live on, such as the Dragons, Nature Spirits and Gods began to die, the Demons used a last-ditch effort to activate a one-way portal to an unknown dimension that they called as 'Underworld' to escape the Earth. Elves and Dwarves had no such measured in place, thus they went extinct. Everyone had given up hope that any sentient life would be able to continue living on this planet anymore, but then, a strange thing happened.

Humans were never the strongest of species on their birth and had only become the dominant species only through their hard work and intelligence, but there was one thing that set them apart from any other species, they were stubborn with their wills unbreakable, their body may be weak but had a natural disposition to evolve rapidly.

They were the literal embodiment of adaptation and potential, and these characteristics were shown in full when every other sentient race on the planet started to die.

The human race adapted to the new climate, without the spiritual energy they had lost a lot of their power, but in return, they gained the ability to survive in the world without energy, an act that other races were simply incapable of replicating.

And so, for thousands of years, the Soul Cube watched as the race of its creators regressed into tribal cavemen, it watched as they slowly started to come out of said caves, watched them rediscover fire, invent tools for the first time, learn to wear clothes again, start to hunt and gather, form crude huts.

It watched as they slowly advanced into civilization, it watched the bronze age, the age of Empires, the dark ages, the middle ages, the industrialization, and finally, the modern age.

The Soul Cube could not be any prouder than it was when it saw a man put his steps on the moon, a feat worthy of applause, it was surprising to see that, in the absence of Spiritual energy, not only did humanity note die out but instead thrived.

Humanity had discovered ways to defy nature with nothing but their own minds and the tools that they created with their hands, they were even capable of space travel and were on the cusps of breaching the dimension barrier with nothing but technology, a feat that was once only possible through spiritual energy, once again Humanity had proved itself to be the superior race.

It was also during the modern age that the Soul Cube discovered a curious thing.

Literature and entertainment.

It had discovered the hundreds of ways that humans imagined and create entire worlds with nothing but words written on paper, but it also soon discovered that there was something wrong.

While some of the works of fiction were truly fictional, most of the other fictions were actually true events transpiring in different dimensions throughout the multiverse, as to how humans were able to see these events and write them as fictions?, the Cube had its own hypothesis.

Even before the fall of the Golden Age, humanity was known for their ability to peer into the dimension and create texts based on what they saw, that was actually how humanity had managed to store billions upon billions of techniques and knowledge from different dimensions into the soul cube. These humans were simply called as the Watchers.

The Cube hypothesized that even though the spiritual energy on Earth was gone, humans had somehow managed to retain this ability, albeit it now gave them visions in the form of imaginations or dreams that they write as stories.

After learning this fact, the Cube had managed to make countless copies of itself which are scattered across the multiverse in search of these universes.

Thanks to its ability to bend space-time, it had managed to gather all of its clones almost instantly after they had departed, each copy housing countless books and knowledge from each respective universe it had gone to along with some artifacts the clones had managed to recover from those universes. Now, the cube could say with confidence that it had all the knowledge available in the countless universe inside itself.

But it was also during this time that that Cube was discovered by the military of a human country called 'USA', the government had thought that the cube was some form of an energy source and could be the key to clean energy, however, the news was leaked by spies across the world which resulted in multiple black ops from all the countries across the world trying to get their hands on the cube, it was during one such skirmish that the cube came across its current wielder.

At first, it was shocked at how similar the soul signature of the man was to its creator, so much so that if it were not for a few differences in the signature, it would have thought the man to be the direct reincarnation of her creator, but after examining for some time of examination, it came to the conclusion that the man must be a descendent of its creator.

It decided then and there to save this man, it did not matter whether or not he was related to its creator, it would save him simply because of the fact that he resembled the creator, it would guide him and make him stronger.

It looked through his memories and came to find out that he loved to read manhua, specifically, a series called 'Tales of Demons and Gods', which was coincidentally that same universe where that ignorant elf had escaped to, this would do, although that world was very low on the power scale, it would serve as a decent nursery for its host to get strong, now to find a suitable body for the host.

It had first wanted to give the host the body of Nie li, but after going through his memories, it came to understand his hatred for the old man in a young body, it then finally decided to bring his soul into the body of a Saiyan.

What most people did not know was that the Saiyans were actually a cousin race of humans who went down a different evolutionary path than their cousins. both the species had evolved from the spiritual apes, while humans had evolved to give up their physical and spiritual strength in exchange for unparalleled intellect and cunning, the Saiyans had given up said intellects in exchange for pure power and spiritual energy called KI.

Thus, if the cube were to combine the essence of a human with the body of a Saiyan, the perfect being would be born.

Its decision made, the cube searched across the multiverse for a perfect Saiyan body and came across Broly, a mutated Saiyan that would become the strongest being in the multiverse should he be given proper training.

The Soul cube immediately traveled to the universe and extracted a strand of hair from the Saiyan who did not know what was happening.

It used the supreme treasure of the nature spirits, Nature's cradle, to create a perfect clone body of the Saiyan using his DNA.

During the time that the Cube spent on Earth, it had managed to retrieve all of the unfinished supreme treasures from all the races and had managed to complete them over time, now, the supreme treasures were stored inside of itself and were content to be left that way.

After growing the body, the Cube imprinted the memories of Broly into the new body which it had scanned when it went to retrieve the DNA sample.

It then threw the boy into Glory City where he was soon taken in by the orphanage, it then waited for the right time before it destroyed the conscious of young Broly and inserted the soul of the man it had taken from Earth.

During these events, the Cube had also realized that it had ended up creating an alternate timeline where it's other self had failed to insert the soul in Broly's body, a timeline in which Broly grew up as a humble Blacksmith in Glory city, But it did not care about that timeline so it let it be.

The only thing that the Soul Cube wants to do now, is to look after it's current host and make sure that he becomes so strong that no inferior creature would be ever able to harm him, this time, it would protect it's host even if that planer eater were to suddenly arrive.

That is a promise that it will never break.

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Author Notes:

Sorry for the long wait guys, I kind of lost myself between my job, playing Skyrim and Generation Zero and other stuff, seriously, I still do not understand why I never picked up Skyrim before last week, it's fun as hell, especially with all the mods that make my character OP as hell. And then there is Generation Zero, that game is so awesome that I literally spent 8 hours playing that shit without even realizing, needless to say, I did not even know how time is flying by, I will try to keep a regular update schedule but no promises cause I just got my hands of an experimental weapon in Generation Zero and have just found a mod to change the textures in Skyrim, I will be a lot more busy saving Winterhold and killing apocalypse machines for the next few days.