Millions of years ago the Eternal Architects built the Eternal Core from the eight fundamental forces of the universe. Before they could finish the vessel to house it, one of their own — Nector the Conqueror — attacked. Their civilization fell. In their final moments they sent the Core to Earth, where it waited millions of years until the Qythovral Empire found it and came twice to take it back.
After the second invasion, scientist Michael Kaimx discovered what the Qythovral were really looking for. He spent eleven years studying the Core then made the most consequential decision in human history — he built the vessel the Architects never finished, using his own DNA. The child was named Shawn.
Shawn grew up in Nuvana, South Africa — loved, trained, educated in cosmic forces alongside his older brother Richard, who watched his father's attention drift consistently toward the project and away from him. Then Shawn was seven. A training session. An energy spike. Eleven seconds of lost control. Michael died moving toward his son rather than away. Richard told Shawn to leave. Shawn flew into a forest and cried until a boy named James Khosa sat down beside him.
Eighteen years later Shawn is twenty-five — a paramedic, carefully ordinary, always holding back. Then the city forces him into the open. Phenomenal is born. The threats begin arriving. And somewhere in a workshop, his brother Richard — brilliant, broken, furious — waits in a suit of armor built from grief and genius.
The story has only just started.
A flashback to the beginning of it all. The Architects and the creation of the ETERNAL CORE. The way it found its way to Earth, the birth of Phenomenal.