Editing Secret of Evolution (section)

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Being that the game is an alternate retelling of the story of ''Dragon Quest IV'', the Secret of Evolution plays a crucial role in the game's plot. That being said, the nature of the occult mechanism is alluded to in greater detail than in the original story.

The secret is first mentioned by Aamon, who appears before Psaro in [[Rosehill Tower]] via astral projection after the defeat of [[Raph]]. He affirms that Psaro is too weak to overthrow his father [[Randolfo]], and asks the estranged prince if he has ever heard of the Secret of Evolution before. He informs him that his subordinate, [[Dr. Helix Helix]], is researching the phenomenon in his laboratory in the Lower Echelon of the [[Circle of Conquest]]. When spoken to, the doctor sends Psaro out to gather [[penteractic crystal]]s from the Lower Echelon of the [[Circle of Caprice]] as he needs them to manufacture [[Sands of Time]] vital to accelerating his research into the secret.
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Much later, when Psaro, [[Duffer]], and [[Eileen]] set out to spy on the [[Hidden Valley]] where the prophesied Hero is said to be raised and witness the massacring of the villagers by [[Dolph]]'s forces, Aamon appears before the group once again. Here he uses fear-mongering and emotional manipulation to trap Psaro into thinking that the Hero and other Chosen Ones will be unstoppable if he does not use the Secret of Evolution to gain power. From here the story unfolds as it did in the original game, with Aamon organizing the kidnapping and murder of Rose while Psaro is occupied in [[Estark's Crypt]]. To insure that there would be enough time for his hired thugs to finish Rose off, Aamon installed a [[succubat]] that had perfected the [[Morph]] spell to imitate Rose. Once she was signaled that the job was done, the mimic revealed herself and mockingly informed Psaro that his lover was dead. Brought to the depths of despair, Psaro dons the Armlet of Transmutation and mutates into an Estark-like form that lays waste to all Nadiria before being killed by the Hero.

However, this sad ending is undone by the timely intervention of [[Toilen Trubble]], who filched some of the Sands of Time from Dr. Helix Helix and pulled both himself and Psaro back far enough to save Rose. The trio then confront and defeat Aamon in [[Aamon's Sanctum|his sanctum]] in the Upper Echelon of the Circle of Caprice, causing the entire Circle to become unstable. It is then revealed that the Circle itself was in fact the Queen of [[El Zetta]], an elf who had been cursed by Aamon to become the landmass he would rule over in the ancient past.

The Queen further explains that her people, the El Zettian elves, had mastered the arts of time and space manipulating magic and were able to condense these energies into physical forms known as the [[chronocite]] and [[travelite]] crystals. These crystals caught the attention of Aamon and he laid siege to the kingdom with a horde of monsters to claim their power. While it is shown that several elves were able to escape with fragments of the travelite crystal in hand, the very same ones that Psaro himself would use through out the game, it is never directly stated what became of the chronocite crystal. What is shown is that the penteractic crystals are the key ingredient to the Sands of Time, and that Aamon had cursed many El Zettian elves into becoming mindless [[stone golem]] slaves he would force into mining the precious mineral. This would be totally pointless and a narrative red herring if Aamon did not see considerable value in the rocks.

From this it can be extrapolated that the penteractic crystals are the remains of the chronocite crystal, which Aamon would have excavated to experiment with to recapture the lost power to manipulate time. Through these experiments he discovered the Secret of Evolution, which is the rapid acceleration of time applied to an individual to generation a tremendous mutation. Aamon saw the potential of this technique to overthrow Randolfo and rule Nadiria unchallenged, but his experiments undoubtedly would have exposed the mind-rendering nature of the secret and he would refuse to apply it to himself. Circumstance would present to Aamon the perfect opportunity in the form of Psaro, whom he would trick into using the secret to kill Randolfo and the rest of the royal family before he and the Chosen Ones would destroy one another. To remove any suspicious of his ulterior motives, Aamon would protray himself as wanting to aid Psaro and had enlisted Dr. Helix Helix as an inocent patsy to support his story.

As it turns out, Randolfo had seen through this plot from the beginning and already conducted his own research into creating the perfected form of the unnatural process, which he would dub the [[Supreme Secret of Evolution]]. Having Aamon killed and taking the Armlet of Transmutation for himself, Randolfo would use this technique to confront his son as the game's final boss.
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