Jacob had finally reached the penultimate part of the Virtual Tournament, The Merlaid.  A virtualized Shiver was now in a more human form, with bright but blackest wings and a faraway look in her eye.


    She soon spoke. "Remember Jacob, as Emanuel always says, ''"the world''s many investors are in a dreamscape trading clouds,..Ones wispy and with no staying power or substance but beholden to the whims of fashion and fad."''


    "What?"


    "It basically means they are all greedy, fatcat gobblers who have too much money, that they invest in too many liable-to-fail companies on a whim.  Though mostly I like Emanuel''s metaphor concerning it because it sounds pretty," she replied.


    "Right," said Jacob.  She was trolling him yet again.


    Ignoring her and at least grateful to have some assistance, he set up his plan to end humanity in a bloodless cull.  The only and most obvious solution seemed to him to be a kind of doomsday cult.  Could it work?


    “Perhaps,” Shiver said. “Not on the first try I doubt. The machine, my Monovalent, will mobilize numerous strategies against you.”


    She spoke the AI’s name with a certain affection ringing deeply in her little voice, but Jacob had other things to consider.


    He set up the cult; he made himself as persuasive and handsome as possible.  His voice dripped with passion and persuasion and all the heartiest honey of great charisma so that even the sun could not have outshone its gold.


    He got to just five thousand deaths before the government swept in and saved numerous members.  A former cult follower was televised weeping and wailing and warning of the horror within Jacob’s apocalyptic cult.


    Jacob decided on his next try, to see if he might infuse his teachings into various spheres of influence; the military, politics, and the police.  He managed to recruit many lost-at-sea souls and sad, lonely hearts with a mix of beautiful seductive women, massive donations, and gracious offers of food and shelter in his lovely, little commune. He housed and recruited impoverished families and homeless vagabonds.  He gave them a promise of a few years of riches and feasts soon leading to an afterlife of such glory that it could remove every cloud from the heavens and every shadow from the sea.


    Finally, he amassed enough influence to get his dooming claws into the government of one country. He had all the money he could ever want to fund his paradise compounds and his campaign as he had made himself a young heir to a mining magnate''s fortune.


    Finally electing himself as church leader of the fastest-growing religious order in history and became head of State after repealing any separation of Church and State, from the law.  However, just as he declared they would forgive the debt of a foreign, smaller nation in return for establishing, influential churches in all their states and putting many of their own, cult-members in various positions in their government, the message came through.


    He had been impeached. His numbers had been tanking for some time. Abuses he had not quite managed to stamp out by his higher order toward vulnerable women and children and whisperings about contradictions in his teachings, alongside sheer terror at the planned death required to ascend whitely to Paradise.  No matter how brightly and goldenly he painted the hallows of the afterlife, the reality of having to perish to cross over to its pearly gates always ended him.


    “What about a sudden, genetic mutation brought on by manmade changes to the environment by our pollution which makes childbirth often fatal and so painful and unresponsive to pain-relievers none will endure it?” he wondered.  Desperately.


    This at first seemed promising: birth rates were already low and abstinence and suicide as methods of escaping this fate soon became the norm. Artificial wombs thankfully failed, at least in the short term.  Which was all he needed.  They led to heart malformations in all the fetuses grown in them.


    However, a few brave women endured and survived and were granted almost cult-like status.  Showered with millions of dollars for themselves and their families for their noble sacrifice.  Some women, he realized, were immune no matter how much he attempted to make it universal.  Some women straight up felt no pain at all due to certain genetic markers, a condition that he had been unaware even existed. The population dwindled but survived.


    Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.


    "Genes evolved for millions of years for a reason"; the Ai cheerily informed him.


    "To safeguard against such wipe-outs.  Trying attacking the Y chromosome next; it is a commonly used tactic, it won’t work though."


    Jacob curled his fists in sheer frustration. At last, he again, faced the machine.


    “Show me how Emanuel defeated you,” he said. “Show me his so-called bloodless death of humanity.”


    “Sure,” Monovalent countered amusedly. “Your wish is my dear command.”


    Suddenly Jacob was walking through a city with wiry little plants with just a hint of faded colour at the edges.  they looked like flowers yet they lacked any proper dainty petals.  Just stunted rainbow husks.


    He passed by a boy just a little younger than himself, he made to smile at him but soon recoiled. For despite there being a certain gratifying sweetness to his soft brow, it could not allay the horror of his blackened lip.  Shaped like a thorn.  Though his right, drooping eye was earnest and expressively human, his left, made up of death and where only half a lid existed, forced Jacob to repress a shudder.


    His lovely, scaled, languorous tail trailed across the ground and had all the beauty of some otherworldly, green rainbow.


    He opened a pitcher’s carnivorous, dark maw; and below that most terrifying, gaping, plant-like mouth, he had a twisted, banded torso. A hound’s elongated head had been mingled with a boy’s stubbier features.  His iris glittered bloody yet with a darting yellow hint, sweet and sun-flowered.


    Hello, have you seen my sweet, betrothed Forlorn?” he asked.  Revealing the opening of the maw was no threat but a mere greeting.


    “She loves to play here in the sunlight, where the trees sing.  Or did.  Their engineering has fallen apart and their voices have been forever silenced since.”  He sighed.


    He seemed awfully young to be looking to marry but Jacob had no time to ponder this; he needed to figure out what had happened here and pressed on. He guessed someone or something had altered their genetic makeup turning them into great beasts and pitiful monsters.


    "Surely twisting their DNA and purposely genetically engineering people into body horror monstrosities is against the rules?" He asked.


    Shiver in response, spoke up, as several metallic beings with tired eyes made up of half-dead irises and whose broken metal gleamed upon their slowly shuffling limbs, passed by. They looked like they were in tremendous pain and misery etched itself across all their shadowed forms.


    “Yes. That definitely constitutes harm; to warp a man’s body against his will,”  she murmured.


    The AI spoke up too.  “There is a clue there Jacob,” it informed him helpfully.


    Jacob did not see how.


    As Shiver skipped prettily beside him with her tresses darned fierily-yellow, he passed by some bird creatures with eagle and raven bodies but little human faces. Tiny, maiden’s hands were straddled to their summery wings.  Sometimes their lips had been forsook for great, golden beaks or their ivory hands forsook for talons.


    Their lovely, piping chimeric voices seemed like a perfect mingle of man and beast yet their dead bodies littered a cracked, leafless ground with beautiful, cold white cheeks, feathered talons, and blackened fingers in an amass of old, cobwebbed finery and putrefying decay.


    Yet from the ones still living, he heard cheerful chatter, babbling brooks of laughter and mating calls.  As to their songful callings, they contained a pleasance indescribable.


    As he walked by they trilled bittersweetly.  Within the longest, prettiest, silver-leaves of trees with dark branches, they whistled and sang Godly hymns. Some piped old, forlorn folksongs, others sang a symphony of orchestral and operatic melodies. Still more pumped out rock and wailed the blues.


    They at last reached a city where he saw a luminous little girl embedded with gems and with drifty octopus legs. Something smashed a bear-like fist into an already crumbling wall nearby.


    Creatures moved about with no more than a solitary, burnt-out wick of humanity between them, upon all these hillsides haunted. Burdened with the unforeseen ills of helical transmutations and all shambling about on slippery feet; snails on snowed-over roads.


    crystal, chimera hares bounded blind and lost to some beautiless land; unable to see any of the glittering, rainbow shades that shone out of their own gemmed eyes. A plant girl hobbled past with unsettling moth movements. Once incompatible genetic strings had seemingly been cobbled together to overlay golden wattle upon otherwise dark, human hair; metallic, pale-blue armours had been burnt brightly into the fleshes of her limbs and feet.


    "Hurry up Folly, Forlorn, or we will be late," he heard a young female voice shouting out to the wide-eyed, plant-girl; who was almost pretty, with her gilded wings and snowiest-white antenne.  She blinked her fair feelers and flew right past Jacob.


    He and Shiver saw a series of monster men walking as giant as Goliath yet with spirits half-cast.  Saw girls with their hands yellow-grey; covered in early primroses that were dying.


    “Who did this to them?”  Jacob whispered at last.


    “No-one.  They did.  Don’t you get it? They chose this.  They bored of their human forms.”


    “What?? I get wanting to look different and have a more interesting body but why are they failing,” Jacob asked.


    “Not all things work as we envisage them; not all technology is progress,” Shiver answered.