Floating within the depths of the mysterious space, Skygnaw felt a distant, faint inkling that something had altered in the physical world outside, though he couldn't pinpoint the exact nature of the change.
Knowing that the only entity left on the surface of the well was the deactivated chassis of Ultra Magnus, he pushed the distraction aside. He locked his focus entirely onto the shifting vision, which was now beginning to display fresh movements after several seconds of static delay.
In the projection, countless Cybertronians roamed across the metal plains like swarms of mechanical locusts, harvesting the planet's natural resources with absolute disregard for the future.
During this frantic industrial expansion, several more of those massive, semi-organic leviathan dreadnoughts arrived from the deep cosmos, anchoring themselves in upper orbit.
Together with the original vessels that had landed during the first cycle, these colossal ships regularly departed Cybertron packed with heavy cargo, only to return empty after a set duration, repeating the sequence in an endless loop.
---
Eons seemed to slip past within the automated playback until the rapidly shifting images abruptly froze, settling onto a single, perfectly clear panoramic view.
Recognizing the shift, Skygnaw carefully studied the landscape, which appeared to be the final record stored within the node.
Judging by the distinct architecture, the location was unmistakably Kaon, the historic site of the Well of All Sparks, though the surrounding city was far from the broken wasteland it was today, displaying a completely foreign engineering style.
A large congregation of Cybertronians stood in a tight circle around the absolute rim of the Well, backed by a fleet of massive heavy engineering vehicles.
Strangely, these ancient workers looked completely vacant, their blocky, sharp-edged armor configurations lacking any of the expressive, fluid mannerisms found in modern Cybertronians.
They looked less like living mechanical organisms and more like automated blocks of cold iron operating under a basic script.
---
Before he could calculate what these primitive machines were attempting to extract from the depths of the Well, a bizarre entity hovering near the bottom-left corner of the display captured his absolute attention.
The creature floated a few feet off the metal ground, displaying a compact, cylindrical chassis crowned by five distinct, interconnected heads.
"The Quintessons."
The historical title flashed through Skygnaw's thoughts the exact millisecond he laid eyes on the creature.
At this moment, the final pieces of the puzzle clicked together in his mind, bringing a profound sense of absolute clarity, like a mathematician who had spent cycles agonizing over an impossible equation only to have the baseline formula dropped onto his desk.
Everything made perfect sense now.
The mysterious references to the five-headed monsters recorded within the High Council's thirteenth session minutes back at the Iacon archives were an explicit match for the creature floating before him.
A single textual log could be dismissed as a historical anomaly, but with visual data confirming the profile, the reality was undeniable.
---
Although the entity possessed five distinct heads, the skulls were fused together onto a single central axis, appearing as a solitary braincase bearing five separate faces.
Restricted by the directional perspective of the recording node, Skygnaw could only view two of the visages clearly.
The first was a stark, slate-grey face with rigid, human-like features and large optics that burned with a predatory red light.
The second was a deep, cyan-skinned face anchored by bright blue optics, its lower jaw stretched wide in a grotesque, exaggerated yawn that exposed rows of razor-sharp alloy teeth.
The grey face radiated pure, unfiltered fury, while the cyan visage twisted into an expression of profound cunning.
Both countenances carried an incredibly unsettling, repellant aura that left no room to doubt their malicious nature.
---
Skygnaw analyzed the visual profiles in silence.
The standard cinematic records he held from his past life contained no active footage of the Quintesson race, but given the vast, multi-million-year timeline of Cybertron, the presence of an ancient stellar empire was completely logical.
An interstellar race that had previously only existed within the deep background archives of the old universe had officially materialized on the board.
The true origin of the Quintessons remained entirely hidden from modern databases, though ancient myths claimed their five faces represented Wisdom, Anger, War, Judgment, and Death.
Their physical structures were an intricate fusion of complex mechanical frameworks and highly advanced biological elements.
A long, prehensile tentacle capable of precise physical manipulation extended from the base of each face, while the entire central pod utilized localized anti-gravity beams to glide smoothly across the terrain.
They harbored an insatiable, ruthless obsession with the accumulation of scientific knowledge and political authority, showing absolute zero regard for the collateral damage their experiments inflicted on other species, occasionally sterilizing entire inhabited worlds simply to collect data variables for a live test.
Cunning manipulation and cold, calculated cruelty were the defining traits of their entire species.
---
Having parsed the historical records, Skygnaw initiated his wake-up sequence to return to the physical world.
The transition was effortless this time; with a brief shift in his consciousness, the surreal landscape vanished instantly, mirroring the exact moment a lucid dreamer decides to open his eyes.
The reassuring sensation of absolute physical control flooded back into his systems.
But the moment his optics online, Skygnaw found himself in a thoroughly baffling situation, realizing his massive frame had automatically risen from the floor.
He was suspended high in the empty air of the vault, his entire chassis enveloped by a dense, crackling web of raw electrical energy.
Rings of brilliant blue lightning snapped across his armor plates in a spectacular display of power.
---
A sudden, rhythmic pulse throbbed within his chest compartment. Skygnaw looked down at his torso before briefly closing his optics to run an internal diagnostic.
When he opened his eyes again, his expression was remarkably strange, carrying a heavy wave of pure disbelief.
Staring at his empty servos and reviewing the data from his internal scan, he finally understood the transformation that had occurred while his mind was trapped in the trance.
While his consciousness was locked within the historical vision, the Matrix of Leadership had triggered an automated protocol. The ancient relic had bypassed his physical grip entirely, migrating into the deep interior of his chest cavity to fuse its data matrix straight onto his living spark core.
"So, the moment that colorful orb entered my chassis, my signature began emanating the exact biometric frequency of Primus himself."
"The energy met the strict systemic requirements of the artifact, triggering an immediate resonance loop."
"And the Matrix automatically executed its seeking function, locking itself into my lifeforce core."
---
The Matrix of Leadership was known to hold an automated ownership lock, so discovering that it possessed a companion seeking protocol to locate its creator was entirely logical.
The mysterious light orb had emerged from a historic monument anchored to the very floor of the Well of All Sparks, making it highly probable that the energy was a fragmented piece of Primus's own core architecture.
It was a critical piece of the creator's system. Without that specific biometric validation, the Matrix would have kept its databases permanently dead to him, but the presence of the orb had tricked the relic into identifying him as Primus, initiating a complete hardware integration.
The lack of hard data surrounding the phenomenon left the process looking completely unscientific, forcing Skygnaw to rely on basic logical deductions to map out the sequence.
First came the sudden eruption of the light orb, followed by the historical data stream, and finally the spontaneous integration of the faction's greatest treasure.
The sheer volume of critical variables occurring within such a tight window left his main processors temporarily overwhelmed.
---
Yet while his thoughts were disorganized, the structural evolution occurring within his chassis moved with absolute precision, the internal energy surge growing more intense by the second.
"You have got to be kidding me," he thought.
Before he could determine whether this hardware rewrite was beneficial to his survival, a familiar sensation of heavy data pressure slammed into his mind once again.
Skygnaw's head tilted back, the crimson glow in his optics dimming into absolute dark for a second time.
However, the freeze lasted for only a few brief minutes before the light returned to his eyes, burning with a wave of intense excitement.
His consciousness hadn't been locked out or suppressed by an external force this time; he had simply been pulled into a secondary interface to download the consolidated knowledge logs stored within the Matrix.
The transmission wasn't a primitive power dump designed to artificially inflate his combat specs, but a massive library of empirical data.
By filtering through the raw code, Skygnaw finally identified the true nature of the original multi-colored light orb: it was a core vector segment, an independent node of **Vector Sigma**.
---
Vector Sigma was an ancient, grand title, but the database highlighted a secondary name that clarified its function: the Mind of Primus.
If the AllSpark served as the literal heart of the creator god, Vector Sigma was his mechanical brain, or at least a highly specialized section of his central cortex.
The system was comprised of countless individual nodes distributed across the subterranean layers of the planet, acting like clusters of neural cells that linked with other hidden structures to form Primus's global nervous system and central processing core.
The layout was infinitely complex.
The single orb that had integrated with his chassis was merely an ordinary, standard node chosen from a vast planetary network.
However, when a system relies on a massive network of identical nodes, the data architecture is highly uniform.
Every single node of Vector Sigma carried the exact same structural coding, meaning they held identical processing permissions.
Consequently, capturing a single node grant him indirect access to the fragmented memory logs distributed across the entire global brain.
---
Skygnaw's mind had been pulled directly into the node's local database earlier, and the historical scenes he had witnessed were the literal memory logs of Primus himself, captured after the god had entered his prolonged stasis.
These logs were directly managed by a secondary system operating at the deepest terminal of Vector Sigma, known as **the Oracle Network**.
The Oracle Network existed as a vast, non-physical quantum consciousness woven directly into the deep-layer data grids of Cybertron, possessing advanced predictive algorithms designed to track the long-term decay of civilizations and run complex decision-making models.
Its analytical processing served as a perfect counterweight to Vector Sigma's data logging systems, working in tandem to maintain the baseline life functions of the planet.
In simple terms, the Oracle operated as a grand caretaker appointed by Primus, serving as an absolute emergency failsafe for the world.
But because it lacked a physical frame to interact with the material world, this caretaker was reduced to a silent observer, entirely unable to step in and alter the chaotic development of Cybertronian society.
It spent the ages monitoring the events on the surface while tracking the energy fluctuations of the AllSpark to calculate the trajectory of the future.
---
"So Primus didn't leave his body completely defenseless," Skygnaw mused silently.
When the ancient civil war among the Thirteen Primes broke out and the Oracle Network detected that the AllSpark's fuel reserves had dropped past a critical safety threshold, the system automatically initiated its singular defensive protocol: **the Great Stasis**.
The Great Stasis was exactly what the title implied, a planetary command that forced every mechanical system and living organism on Cybertron into an absolute, timeless freeze.
The protocol was designed to completely eliminate energy consumption across the globe, allowing the planet's core to enter a recovery cycle and naturally replenish its fuel over time.
This explained the long, mysterious era of total darkness and absolute silence he had witnessed within Vector Sigma's memory logs, a period of planetary slumber that lasted for uncounted ages before the heavy organic ships of the Quintessons finally discovered the dead world.
30+ chapters are available now and daily updates!
@patreon.com/AgentTwilight