Seeds of Life

Facing extinction on their homeworld, the First Ancestral Race dispatched seven Seeds of Life toward chosen planets scattered through the galaxy. Each Seed was tasked with founding new life built on the Race's own genetic material, preserving its makers long after they were gone. The Seeds traveled inside colossal spheres called moons or eggs, and every one shipped with a companion Spear of Longinus, a seemingly living weapon capable of shutting a Seed down should the need arise.

The original series presents two kinds of Seed. The first carries the Fruit of Life, the Super Solenoid or S² Engine, granting bottomless energy and tremendous physical power; Adam belongs to this line, and its offspring, the Angels, inherit that raw might. The second carries the Fruit of Knowledge, the faculty of reason and scientific thought; Lilith is of this kind, and its children include humanity, physically frail beings who reshape the world through technology and build civilizations instead of relying on strength.

Any single entity holding both Fruits would approach the godlike capability of the First Ancestral Race itself. To forestall exactly that, the Race decreed that no planet may host more than one Seed. Should two ever share a world, the Spear of Longinus is to incapacitate every Seed except the first to arrive, leaving that one as the sole wellspring of the planet's life.

Only two Seeds are known, and both came to Earth. Adam, carrying the Fruit of Life, was the Seed actually meant for this planet and touched down in the White Moon beneath what is now Antarctica. Lilith, bearer of the Fruit of Knowledge, arrived by accident when the Black Moon carrying it slammed into the future Hakone region of Japan, a collision remembered as the First Impact.

Lilith's own Spear was lost or destroyed in that crash, so enforcement of the Race's law fell to Adam's Spear, which sealed Adam away despite its rightful claim to the planet. With Adam in suspended animation, Lilith's blood, LCL, became the primordial soup of the planet; across billions of years that broth gave rise to every line of Lilith-derived life, ending in a sentient species, the Lilin, humanity. Adam slept beneath Antarctica until the year 2000, when the Katsuragi Expedition roused it and unleashed the cataclysm known as Second Impact. Strictly speaking, neither Adam nor Lilith qualifies as an Angel, since Angels are by definition Adam's progeny bearing the Fruit of Life.