All that glitters is gold, but on Chang’E, that gold had long since been tainted by chaos. It started with one coin, minted and passed from person to person in the bazaars so that nobody could track its origin. Then one became two, each coin slipping into the massive flow of exchanging currencies without notice at first.

It was hard enough for the senshi of Chang’E to keep up with along side his other duties, always busy traveling from world to world to strike trade deals and organize routes through the universe. Things slipped through, nothing dangerous, but those chaos-minted coins drew no scrutiny. A single one felt no different than others of similar style and weight and at first, they stayed spread apart and bided their time.

Into the households they went, part of the wide variety of metal coins each inhabitant carried to trade among the various market shops. But soon the coins whispered, they drained energy from the people of his world and became the only thing that the people wanted. Everything started behind closed doors, far from where the senshi could see, far from where he could help.

By the time the tingling of chaos had grown, it was too late and he couldn’t reach out. The mauvians and off-worlders had long since left. Routes were closed off, his world locked down as the government and people hoarded the treasure, and fighting broke out—jealousy over how many of those coins people had brought them to each other's throats.

How they multiplied with the world closed off was beyond him and try as he might he couldn’t find the source of the coins, they avoided him like the plague and never seemed to linger when he was near. The closest he had been to seeing one was movement out of the corner of his eye in the dark but the things were somehow crafty even if they were coins. Something drew people to them and he couldn’t understand it. Nobody could explain it in a way that made sense to him and they would get more aggravated as he questioned and tried to understand.

As people started to starve, not willing to use their coins to buy food, the coins would drain them until they passed. Once each household was empty of life and energy, the now-strengthened coins manifested legs of chaos energy to scuttle across the ground and search for new sources of energy.

It wasn’t a quick decline, it took years and years while Shānlóng kept searching, he found himself blocked at every turn. The people who once listened to his advice turned him out, too influenced by the coins and the chaos present within them. At first, food wasn’t scarce for him given how the people had long since stopped buying up the longer-lasting goods.

But as larger cities started to fall and he had to keep migrating, it became harder to find food that hadn’t spoiled. Crops had been long neglected and as the coins wandered further from the cities to the villages which had been isolated in their own ways, the last sanctuaries untouched by chaos soon fell as well. Each empty place he visited had the withered and drained corpses of the people of his world. At first, he did his best to either bury them or move them to a much more dignified position but as the bodies stacked up and his energy waned with the lack of food, he would just lay a blanket over them and quickly move on.

After two hundred years, most of the planet had been tainted by the chaos-infused coins. They began to burrow into the soil, and get moved around by the whipping winds and oncoming storms that no longer had people preparing to protect against. Still, they avoided him and he wandered and tried to find any signs of life or food. They were efficient at it, allowing themselves to float down the many rivers and streams of the world to make it further faster. They got to places unreachable by walking alone and much farther than their little chaos legs could bring them.

Days passed into months, then years, then centuries as everything died off. The dirt dried and became cracked even when storms would dump water until the plains flooded. The trees dried out and fell, not even rotting and becoming food for fungus or any other plant life to grow. The weather became more unpredictable but at least it remained the same temperature as always. That tropical warmth that kept the people of the world awake and aware now baked the ground without the seasonal rains to make up for it.

Shānlóng couldn’t remember the last time he had eaten, the last time he had spoken, or the last time he had seen any signs of life. It was a still world and even as he wandered until his feet bled he had no idea what to do anymore. Everything he’d been raised to do and all the backup plans for things such as economic collapse or trade issues had no way to account for this.

All he could do was walk, long after he could even remember why he had started walking in the first place. His once beautiful clothing was shredded and tattered from use, his hair dulled along with his scales, and his skin paled from lack of nutrition.

What could he do? What could he have done differently? Sometimes those thoughts bubbled up in the moments of lucidity that came between his endless wandering. It felt like a curse that he was left because what if someone else could have done something better? He hadn’t even gotten a glimpse of what had caused this, only heard and surmised through following the paper trail back in the beginning.

It felt like a dream when something broke through, something alive and new tugging at him with a promise to escape. There was more than a little doubt that it was real but he reached out and let it pull him from the endless walking over the wasteland of his world. Nothing glittered anymore, not even those cursed coins that brought this all upon Chang’E.


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