Karma is everywhere. It’s in everything. And everyone. Some, who declare themselves as fully aware, state that it has no limits, unlike mana, and that it can exist wherever the time, matter and energy meets.

Some, wiser than I can ever hope to become, have created pathways through which this entity can flow freely, absent of obstructions and limitations. They have also created gateways to places where different flows can meet, where different worlds can rub against each other, different realities can collide, and selected creatures from all corners of known and unknown universes can come together to mingle and share in information, goods, and services.

These whole networks… They called them by one name, the Core. And who serves them are the highly trained agents of different classes and abilities, some with tasks to only observe, others with tasks to save, or destroy.

I’ve been one of those agents.

The rules to govern the Core were carved in the Marble of the Foundation, strict rules, not to mess around with if you fancy breathing, or eating, or fucking, or anything for that matter. Not many cases are known of those that broke the rules. Maybe the Story of Eertan the Fool served as a good deterrent. Maybe I’ll tell it to you one day, and then you be the judge.

It used to be that access to the Core was given on the most selective basis.

A few millenniums ago, I did screenings for a while, so I can tell you that unless your karma ranking was over a thousand mark, you should not have harbored even an iota of hope of even being placed on the watch list. But nowadays, time is different. It flows on and on, too fast for my taste. And I have not been in the administration for a very long time to be able to give my word on how things run now…

I prefer to remember the old. The stories that are worth remembering. Some that I have witnessed with my very own eyes. Some that I have heard from as reputable sources as myself.

I’m telling it all to you, fully knowing that breaking the code of silence might imply my permanent disbandment and termination. Maybe I’m just tired of fucking and eating and breathing… Maybe we all have an expiration date after all.

The only problem that I have is where do I start. So many stories, so many millenniums have come and gone. So many heroes and all the countless ones who failed to become ones.

Maybe, maybe I should start with the present. Well, my the most recent experience I had with the Core. My last job. When we first noticed a few of our worlds going dark, when we first accepted the disease was spreading…

Some might even blame me for it…

Maybe, they would not be wrong to do so.

So, I’m telling it all, hoping that by letting out what I had buried inside of me, I can somehow find the sense of the craziness that governs my mind, find a way to rain in on my own madness. By speaking out, maybe I am just trying to vent out and ease the pressure and pain.

Sure, I could say that I’m doing this to spread the word in order to save the Core, as I know the darkness covering it grows darker and thicker even as I write.

I could say that I’m hoping after you finish reading this all, you will be able to comprehend how truly valuable the Core is, how if there is only one thing worth fighting for, this one is it. How… it is worth everything. Even more.

I could say how the present administrators grew intolerant to changes and ignorant to the fact that the Core needs not only agents but soldiers, those with the purest of hearts and bravest of souls. All the soldiers it can find. The whole army of them.

I can say how I’m hoping that one of them might be just you.

But I won’t say any of that. For I know the truth. What I'm to say I need to say it to make it easier on me, to let it all out so it stops suffocating me inside, to put it all out and maybe find out if I can make any sense of it all.. for I want to save my own self.

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Additional Notes - You may also be interested to know…

What is the Core, they asked me once... It's the light that pushes the darkness away, a bastion of justice, and a safe keeper of life. It grooms love and tolerance, embraces science, fights ignorance, and sentences it to die a slow and tragic death. The Core... it's something that can't be destroyed for destroying it is to terminate the time and space itself.

The origin of the Core is not fully known and documented, at least not to my knowledge. Some hypotheses I heard before state that it was created and crafted by the higher-awareness living organism to promote life in the dark corners of the ever-expanding Universe. The first traces and evidence of its existance I found in The Book Of Derran, but I know it existed long time before the occurances that happen inside those writings.

I have also never seen the exact numbers, if they exist at all, of how many different worlds and living species it encompasses. What I can tell you is that, according to some experienced administrators I met, it has over ten million connecting points, the number that would suggest it has access to over ten million worlds, scattered over what should amount to thousands of galaxies.

Most of these worlds are stuck in dark ages where ignorance, superstition, and magic reins, while some are progressing as their inhabitants embrace knowledge and science, sometimes developing the capacity to expand beyond their own home planet.

In over four thousand standard years that I have transversed through the Core, I have personally witnessed over two hundred of these worlds, sometimes repeatedly returning to the same ones as the job required. Through that time, I had a wide variety of jobs and responsibilities, ranging from an apprentice observer all the way to a lord executioner.

How I became involved in the Core is a whole story all by itself, its details sufficient to fill the volume of a few books all on its own, the subject best delayed for some other occasion.

The rules of the Core vary depending on the job classification and tasks.

However, some are pretty standard. I might not recall the exact wording as they were carved in the Marble of Foundation, but they go something like this:

1. The Code of Silence - No agent can reveal the existence of the Core. Its existence and functionality can be revealed only to ‘selected’ individuals or races.

2. No Religious Interference - No agent can interfere in the religion of the visiting world or try to form its own, overexerting himself over the gullible subjects unless he is given prior authorization from the Central Core Authority to do just that. Such authorization cannot be given to any agent of less than the ranking of a Prophet.

3. No Knowledge or Technology Transference - No agent can transfer the knowledge or technology from one world to another unless he is given prior authorization from the Central Core Authority. Such a transference might not only jeopardize the agent’s lifeline but the existence of the whole planet as well.

4. The Karma Rule - If during a mission, the agent’s karma decreases before the minimum threshold, the agent permission to return to the Core might be denied, his status as an agent might be revoked, and he or she might have to live inside the foreign world for the rest of their natural lives.

5. The Life Extension - No life extension is offered to anyone who is not an agent or a client of the Core.

Naturally, there are a lot more rules - but instead of remembering and listing all of them now, we will probably go into them as they become relevant to the underlying story.