The Ancients had been living peacefully on the planet O’Ree-Jin for millennia. Despite all, stagnation brought a new way of thinking about the Ancients’ development as a species: the Path of wonder. The followers of the path of wonders exploited O’Ree-Jin’s essence without care for its consequence, and the Ancients tried as peacefully as possible to control that imprudent behavior.

The situation deteriorated as the more the traditional Ancients tried to halt the rampant misuse of the primal substance, the more challenging and transgressive the younger generations became. At some point, the conflict started being more about a fight for power and self-determinism than a philosophical debate about how to tackle knowledge acquisition and science. As tends to happen with those types of conflicts, violence followed. Aggression was something new to Ancient society. In that sense, most of the aggressive acts were akin to those of a child against a father, those that arise from the frustration of believing oneself in possession of truth and, at the same time, being incapable of imposing that truth. The followers of the path of wonder started disobeying publicly, rioting and destroying property.

This public disobedience was met with a non-aggressive response by the dominant Ancients, and that, in the end, allowed the escalation of aggressive behavior.

Year after year, decade after decade, positions got more and more radicalized. An extremist group started the acquisition of the substance through live tissue extraction. That meant snatching Ancients and extracting the essence directly from them. This aberrant behavior had its rewards, as it was demonstrated as the most efficient way of substance acquisition (1000 to 1, compared to normal unearthing and atmospherical capture). That method had a precondition, the more accumulated substance the tissue had, the more it could be extracted. This discovery ended up being the demise of the Ancient people. The practice became quite standard among the clandestine experimenters and the more extreme groups among the followers of the Path of wonder.

The practice was a capital fault in the eyes of the sages. The tradition stated that one must choose when to end its current physical form, and the process should entail returning the “life energy” (the essence) to the planetary ecosystem. That was the pre-condition of all mingling with the substance: in the end, it should always return to the typical flux of the ecosystem. The sages believed that by containing the essence of Ancients and processing it, they were effectively killing them forever. That was the tipping point for the sages that announced harsher measures and the creation of a prosecuting militia.

It all ended quickly after that announcement. It is not clear what happened, as the Ancient life as it has been described ended abruptly. Despite all, some pieces of information and recordings have been recovered from the debacle. Not long after the sages announcement of the recent measures, a terrorist attack took place during an assembly. The attack killed most of the sage caste to end their rulership and, it seems, gathering their accumulated essence. Imagine close to two thousand sages that had on their bodies 50% of the accumulated substance on Ancient society during millennia. Now imagine all that power, all that energy and all that knowledge destroyed in an instant. That act, the consumption of all those bodies for the gain of a few, is nowadays called The First Harvest.

That seems to have created a chain reaction on the planetary ecosystem. Some people believe that, as the sages said, they were connected to the planet, and the trauma was so immense that O’Ree-Jin’s reacted against it, scarred for eons to come. Other people believe that the sudden expulsion of all that energy in a contained space, and when entered in contact with the atmosphere, created the first of the energy storms that we see on the present day, and it created a feedback loop that made the whole planet “explode” on energy.

At some point in their history (not much before their extinction), a schism in their form of life happened. It seems there had always been divergent ways of thinking around the scriptures and the role of the Ancients as the dominant species of O’Ree-Jin. Most of the time, those dissonant voices didn’t get enough traction to create a significant debate among the Ancients. At some point, one of these voices gained enough following to challenge the dominant way of thinking. They summarized these beliefs with an apostate pamphlet named The Path of Wonder that contradicted basic precepts of the Ancients culture:

• One realizes his potential by means of consumption.
  
• One is able to consume because he is able to produce.
  
• One produces as much as he needs.
  
• One’s needs must be contained by his ability to grow.
  
• One shall grow through diligence.
  
• Diligence is learned by providing to the community.
  
• The community's ultimate goal should be to realize its potential.

Everything we do must rely on this spiral as the power of our people depends on the growth of said people.

This radical change of view proposed a more proactive way of thinking about systemic growth on O’Ree-Jin. It is mostly attributed to the feeling of some of the Ancients that they were wasting precious time and resources just by not acting on them.

The schism tends to be attributed to a natural flaw in the way the Ancients devised growth. The Ancients were capable of amazing biotechnological feats, the like of which has not been seen in other places of the galaxy. At the same time, these technological applications of the essence were always focused on expanding community boundaries, not as raw growth, but as how they related between themselves and the planet. As more applications for the substance were found, more impatient and wondrous the Ancients turned.

The followers of the Path of Wonder advocated for a conjoint effort, policing and regularizing the means of production and the populace's work effort. This could not abide by the majority of the Ancients as it would hinder people's autonomy and freedom. From an outsider’s point of view, it seems the Ancients found their own kind of decadence. Decadence in the Ancients society came through a visceral fear based on the idea of inaction waste: 'if we do not take advantage of the current opportunities, we will face later consequences.' Some portion of the populace started making exaggerated exploitation and use of the essence for growth, experimentation, and knowledge acquisition.

This was achieved mainly through the use of Harvesters. A sophisticated technology that extracted the essence from O’Ree-Jin’s bedrock, fracturing it in the process. This began to impact the environment creating residuals and subproducts of the substance treatment that were quite dangerous to the ecosystem. Moreover, these phenomena created other problems akin to the ones inherent to globalization and worker exploitation. These phenomena were entirely novel in Ancients society.

At some point, the sages tried to bring the debate to the public, expand the assembly, incorporate new participants, and reach a mutual consensus between these two ways of thinking. The popularity of the sages helped sway public opinion their way. Most of the activity of the Path of wonder became clandestine as it became somewhat shameful.

The crisis was averted for the moment...