Before the Hjivin even became the Sphere, they'd established themselves as exemplary monsters. When conceptualising them, a way they were described in my technical channel was the following: Industrial Revolution style working class downwards spiralling into people are property, enforced with tailored genemods that were spread via plague vectors.
Some of this was already present in monoculture that the Hjivin people existed in before unlocking the Secrets. Imagine a world where workers rights, civil rights, pretty much all rights for those below a certain bar never got off the ground. An extreme focus on efficiency over everything produced the foundations of a very socially static society, that was well past the point of seeing certain 'classes' of people as property unless they could somehow prove otherwise.
When the Hjivin ruling class got access to the Secrets they dived deep into the Second, seeing it as the final answer to all the problems they'd been facing in constructing their perfect ideal of society. They also dove so far into personal optimisation and genengineering for their ruling class that in some ways they left even the Shiplords behind. There is a reason that they proved capable of building such a capable empire before first contact with the Shiplords, even when the Shiplords were far less hands on then they are today.
With every upgrade and optimisation of their capabilities, they found ways to apply more, and this didn't stop at ruling class enhancements. They designed and released gene-plagues that forcibly implanted tailored biomods into their own population, allowing them to track them, manipulate their emotions, and reaching far past even the most invasive forms of biohacking utilised by the Shiplords. They turned their entire civilisation into an enormous theatre, where free will outside of a relatively tiny ruling class had been utterly eliminated. They tailored themselves for higher efficiency and fewer scruples, with every step making the next one easier.
They'd turned their own species into entirely self-aware puppets long before they even met their first conquest. And they didn't even bother hiding the fact, because that would have taken effort that wasn't worth making. Where this leads feels self-evident, but I'll make it clear: their rulers turned themselves into paperclip maximisers and, in doing so, broke their own souls in a way just as profound (if not more so) than the wounds the Shiplords have taken or inflicted on their own.
So then these incredibly intelligent, brilliant, genetically engineered superbeings started to find other species. And all they cared about when looking at them was how to make those beings help them acquire more. More what, you might ask? More everything. Resources, technology, anything you can think of. They seeded worlds with the same sort of bioplauges that they'd used on their own people, re-engineered to function on the target species, and then just took them.
They were very much like a plague, but one with a brain. Incredible intellect, all of it focused down by a culture that had ended up in a place where all that mattered was more. And fully capable of adapting to any threat to those goals.
When the Hjivin met the Shiplords, it wasn't a lack of understanding on their part that started the war. To them, the Shiplords could not be what they said they were, because a race that old would have to have realised the same things they had. And if they hadn't? They just weren't smart or strong-willed enough to make the sort of decisions required to attain their goals.
The Sphere at the time of contact with the Shiplords had subsumed - and there are few other descriptors - dozens of races into the enormous biological factory that their society had become. They'd gotten a bit better at hiding what was actually going on behind the curtain, but only for long enough to get close enough.
They made people be happy, be obedient, be anything they wanted to make them be. And none of it mattered, so long as they could see their influence, their territory, their power grow. It wasn't even a desire to dominate, at this point it was as implicit to their existence as breathing is to us today.
And then the War of the Sphere happened. The number of races eaten by the Hjivin almost doubled by the time they'd cut a path to Shiplord space, but it was only when they started to lose that it became truly nightmarish.
But Snowfire, this already is nightmarish. Yeah, you'd think so. Strap in.
There have been some guesses across the course of the quests that the Second Secret has some interaction with the Soul, and that's certainly the case. The process of becoming an Uninvolved is ultimately a choice of the race to become one, it's not one that can be directly forced - which is why Uninvolved movements have to be constructed slowly and using more conventional cultural manipulation by the Shiplords. There is, after all, a difference between influencing someone's choices and taking that choice directly away from them.
The Uninvolved that the Sphere was trying to make was the result of some fairly horrific experiments and theoretical delvings into the underlying mechanics of how the Hjivin had somehow done something to their own souls. They then set out to apply this to other souls and succeeded sufficiently to essentially bootstrap the Uninvolved process.
This is touched on in the
A Warning Scar threadmark, but to strip the semantics the Hjivin weren't capable of making the sort of decision that is conventionally required for an Uninvolved to take form. So the rulers of the Sphere found a way to build people that could supply the souls they needed. A particular line from the unnamed Uninvolved who ended them is particularly important here when talking about that ruling class: The only ones who you could recognise as having souls, instead of possessing them.
They fed hundreds of billions of lives, some of them essentially newborns, into a mechanistic abomination of the Second Secret that started constructing an Uninvolved around the Sphere's rulers. And they kept doing it, flash-fabbing life only to snuff it out, until they could tip the scales far enough for the process to become self-sustaining.
The reason that the nascent Uninvolved in Warning Scar is communicating the way it is is because those are - at that point - the only remaining motivations for the Hjivin. The feeling of hunger, for everything, and the need to feed it.
The Uninvolved who gridfired them was absolutely correct to do so.
So when comparing death tolls between the Shiplords and the Sphere, it's closer than you might think, even with how much longer the Shiplords have been around. And the Shiplords have stopped
well short of the limits of what they actually could do with the Second Secret. The Hjivin…didn't.
