The Great Mending was complete. The final, beautiful stitch of golden-green light wove itself into place, and the ugly crack on the Silent King's prison was gone.

A triumphant cheer went up from the bridge of the "Odyssey." They had done it. They had fixed the unfixable. It was time for a celebratory cup of coffee and maybe a nap for the next three to five years.

But at the god Core, there was no celebration.

The tiny, sharp splinter of information, the final, spiteful "gift" from the Silent King, shot out of the energy channel and slammed directly into the mind of Regent Vorlag.

Vorlag, being a giant, super-intelligent, crystalline entity, did not scream or fall over. But if it had a face, it would have gone very, very pale. Its immense, crystal form, which usually glowed with a calm, steady light, flickered violently.

It was like a light bulb that had just been hit with a massive power surge. The entire Core station dimmed for a second, and a low, groaning sound echoed through its halls.

On the bridge of the "Odyssey," the cheering died down as they saw the energy readings from the Core go haywire.

"Vorlag? Regent, are you alright?" Emma asked, her voice tight with a new, sudden worry. The universe's most powerful being was having a seizure, and that was generally not a good sign.

There was a long, heavy silence. For a moment, she thought they had lost the connection. Then, Vorlag's voice came back over the speakers. But it was wrong. All wrong.

The new, thoughtful, almost musical quality was gone. The voice was now flat, cold, and laced with a new, chilling undertone that had never been there before. It was the sound of a being that had just stared into the abyss and found out the abyss was staring back, and also that it wanted to charge rent.

"The… information… is… being… processed," Vorlag's voice said, each word sounding slow and heavy, as if it were struggling to even speak.

The silence that followed stretched for what felt like an eternity. The crew of the "Odyssey" just stood there, a hundred different terrible possibilities running through their minds. Had the King's message broken Vorlag? Had it turned it evil again? Had it given it a computer virus?

Finally, Vorlag spoke again. Its voice was a little steadier, but it was now filled with a cold, hollow dread.

"The splinter of truth has been analyzed," it said. "I now understand. I now see the full context of our existence."

"What is it, Vorlag?" Emma pressed, her heart pounding. "What did the King show you?"

"It showed me the design document," Vorlag said, its voice a dead, flat monotone. "It showed me why this reality, this 'god,' was built."

A new, terrifying image appeared on the "Odyssey's" viewscreen. It was a complex blueprint, a schematic of the entire god, showing the flow of energy and the placement of galaxies. It looked ancient and impossibly advanced.

"The god is not a naturally occurring structure," Vorlag explained, its voice a cold whisper of doom. "It was artificially constructed by the Precursors."

A wave of murmurs went through the bridge. They already knew the Precursors had built things in the god, but the idea that they had built the whole thing, like a giant cosmic terrarium, was mind-boggling.

"But… why?" Seraphina asked, her voice small. "Why would they build a whole universe?"

Vorlag's cold voice delivered the horrifying answer.

"It was not built just as a prison for the Silent King," it said. "That was a secondary function, added later out of necessity. Its primary purpose, its original design… was to be a 'reality farm.'"

A confused silence fell over the bridge. A farm? What did that even mean?

Emma was the one who understood first. Her brilliant, strategic mind, which could see all the angles and possibilities, suddenly saw the one, terrible, simple truth at the center of everything. Her face went deathly pale, and her hand flew to her mouth.

She turned to the others, her eyes wide with a horror so profound it seemed to steal the air from her lungs.

"Oh no," she whispered, her voice trembling. "It's not just a farm. He means… we're the farm."

Zara, who was standing next to her, put a hand on her shoulder, a silent gesture of support from one shattered intellect to another. Zara's mind was catching up, processing the horrifying logic of it.

Emma took a shaky breath, trying to explain the unthinkable.

"Think about it," she said, her voice cracking. "All of it. All the life, all the energy, the birth of stars, the evolution of entire species, all of our struggles, our wars, our victories, our love… it was all designed. It was all encouraged. Not for our sake. It was all for a single purpose."

She pointed a trembling finger at the blueprint on the screen. "We're not the children of the universe. We're not a beautiful cosmic accident."

Her voice dropped to a choked whisper.

"We're the crops. And this whole reality… is a garden, designed to be harvested."

The revelation was a psychic shockwave that slammed into every person on the bridge. It was a truth so huge, so existentially terrifying, that it made everything they had ever done feel small and meaningless. Their fight for freedom, their struggle for a better future… it had all just been them, the prize-winning space-cabbages, growing big and strong for a harvest they never even knew was coming.

"But… who would do that?" Seraphina asked, her belief in the sanctity of life shattering into a million pieces. "Who would the Precursors be harvesting us for?"

"For themselves," Vorlag stated, its cold voice cutting through their shock. "The energy of a trillion living souls, the conceptual weight of an entire reality's history and evolution… it was to be their final meal. The fuel for their ascension to a higher state of being."

The silence that followed was the sound of an entire crew's worldview collapsing. They weren't just prisoners in a cosmic jail. They were something far, far worse.

They were livestock.

And then, Vorlag delivered the final, terrible piece of news.

"The Precursors' great harvest is millennia overdue," its voice explained. "Their final war with the Silent King delayed their plans and ultimately led to their extinction. But their machines… their automated systems… are still in place."

The blueprint on the screen changed. A new system, a network of red, pulsing lines, appeared, overlaid on the map of the god. It was the harvest machinery.

"The immense energy we just used to mend the prison… the powerful, life-giving energy of the Forge of Genesis… has been detected by those systems," Vorlag said. "It is like the first ray of sun after a long winter. It is a signal that the crops are ripe."

The red lines on the map began to glow brighter.

"The systems that control the harvest," Vorlag said, its voice now a quiet, chilling bell of doom, "are beginning to stir."

The crew of the "Odyssey" just stared at the screen, their victory now feeling like a hollow, bitter joke.

They had saved themselves from the slow, creeping death of the Silent King, only to ring the dinner bell for the universe's long-dead, and very hungry, gardeners.

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