My Talent's Name Is Generator

Chapter 1316: Birth Of The Generator

I followed her gaze and immediately noticed the figure depicted at the beginning of the mural.

It was a child.

The artist had deliberately left his features indistinct, showing him only as a small silhouette standing in the middle of a barren landscape, but there was one detail that stood out with absolute clarity: engraved upon his chest was the familiar emblem of interlocking gears.

My eyes narrowed.

The same symbol covered my own chest.

We moved slowly along the wall, following the story as it unfolded. The child was shown growing up in a world filled with danger, initially relying on crude weapons and physical strength simply to survive.

He fought enormous beasts, crossed hostile lands, and repeatedly found himself facing opponents far beyond his level. In some scenes he was victorious, while in others he was shown collapsed beneath mountains or lying wounded among the ruins of destroyed cities.

Yet every time the mural returned to him, he had changed. His weapons became more refined, his body grew stronger, and the enemies surrounding him became increasingly monstrous.

What struck me most was that his strength did not seem to come from a single miraculous inheritance. The mural portrayed a long struggle in which every battle, every injury, and every narrow escape gradually pushed him forward.

He travelled through countless regions, encountered civilizations whose names had long since disappeared, and fought beings whose forms were so strange that I couldn’t even guess what races they had belonged to.

As his power increased, however, the scale of his conflicts increased with it, until entire armies were being depicted beneath his feet and worlds seemed to become nothing more than battlefields on which he continued searching for something beyond his existing limits.

Then, for the first time, the violence disappeared from the mural.

The man had grown into an adult, and beside him stood a woman.

Their relationship was obvious even without words. They travelled together, fought together, and eventually built a home of their own. Other figures appeared around them as well, including children who seemed to belong to them.

For several sections, the mural depicted something remarkably ordinary compared with everything that had come before: the man returning home, his family waiting for him, and the group travelling together through peaceful landscapes between his battles.

For someone who had spent his entire life fighting, he had apparently found something worth protecting.

But the peace did not last. The woman eventually disappeared from the carvings.

The children followed.

The man was shown standing beside a collection of stone markers, his head lowered as he buried the people who had once filled his world. I could almost feel the weight of those scenes despite the fact that they had been carved into stone countless ages ago.

The mural then continued, showing him growing older while the people around him continued to disappear. Friends became graves, companions became memories, and entire generations passed while he remained.

Yet he continued walking. He continued becoming stronger.

Perhaps that was the cruelest part of the story.

His strength had allowed him to survive, but it had never given him the ability to stop time.

The mural gradually became emptier as we moved farther along it. The civilizations that had once surrounded him vanished from the scenes, leaving behind abandoned cities and ruined landscapes.

At one point, he was shown walking through an enormous settlement that appeared to have once housed millions of people, yet there wasn’t a single living figure anywhere around him. In another carving, he stood beside an ocean whose waters had disappeared entirely, while the next showed him sitting alone beneath a mountain that had been reduced to ruins.

By then, he had become something far beyond the young man depicted at the beginning.

He possessed unimaginable strength, yet the mural no longer showed him fighting anyone. There simply seemed to be nothing left capable of standing against him.

Eventually, even his home disappeared.

He was alone.

The final stages of the mural showed him abandoning the worlds he had once travelled through and entering an endless darkness. There, surrounded by nothing but an enormous black hole, he sat cross-legged and closed his eyes.

I stopped in front of that section.

The man was no longer trying to become stronger through battle. Instead, countless streams of energy were being drawn toward him from the surrounding darkness, disappearing into his body before emerging again in completely different forms. The process appeared to continue for an extraordinary length of time, with the mural depicting the same figure surrounded by increasingly complicated patterns of energy and symbols.

Then I noticed something familiar.

The gear-shaped markings began appearing around him.

At first there were only a few, but they gradually multiplied until they formed an enormous network around his body. The man then raised both hands toward the space before him, and the countless streams of energy that had been circulating through the black hole began converging between his palms.

Something was taking shape.

The first indication was a tiny point of light, followed by another and another, until hundreds of points were connected by thin lines. Those lines gradually formed an intricate structure, with each section locking into the next until an unfamiliar rune emerged before him.

I stepped closer.

My Generator Core suddenly trembled.

The reaction was so violent that I instinctively placed a hand over my chest.

The rune was different from the gear emblem on my body, yet the relationship between them was unmistakable. It was as though I were looking at the original blueprint from which my own Generator had eventually descended.

The man continued working.

The rune wasn’t complete.

He added one final connection, and the moment it locked into place, the entire structure erupted with light. The ancient symbols surrounding him resonated with the newly formed rune, causing the black hole itself to tremble as if the darkness had become part of the creation.

For the first time, the mural showed the man smiling.

Not the smile of someone who had defeated an enemy, nor the satisfaction of someone who had gained greater strength, but the quiet expression of someone who had finally succeeded in creating something that had never existed before.

The image that followed showed the rune floating alone before him.

The man sat beneath it in silence.

And then the mural ended.

I remained there for several seconds, staring at the final carving while the implications slowly settled inside my mind.

"So this is where it began," I finally said.

Lyrate looked toward the rune and then back at me. "You mean the Generator?"

I nodded, my fingers still resting against my chest.

"I don’t know what that man was trying to accomplish when he created it, but whatever he made eventually became the foundation of my talent."

The ancient hall fell silent around us.