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EC Book 4, Chapter 42 - Final Frontier
🕑 Added 2024-04-23 15:54:14 +0000 UTCThe Void felt cold around Sev.
It wasn't really cold, of course. The Void wasn't really anything. It was an emptiness that ate away at everything of substance within it—the result of the natural decay of the fabric of reality itself.
But it felt cold. That was the nature of the Void. In the absence of reality, the mind would fill in the blanks; it was a dark, featureless space, so his mind expected it to be cold.
So it was.
Sev pulled his robes a little tighter around himself, shivering. He'd been to the Void before. Long before his first encounter with it in this life, he'd been down here, trying to learn about the reality anchors. Trying to understand what they did, how they worked, why the people in charge had chosen this system to preserve reality, and not any other.
He suspected he knew the answer, though he didn't like it: they didn't have time to come up with any other solution. This one was the one they came up with first, those scientists and mages and all the other brilliant minds that invented both the anchors and the system that was linked to them.
All of reality a game, because it was the first solution they'd thought of.
He sighed.
Onyx was here somewhere. So were many of the other erased gods, and a million other lives that were still present, but slowly decaying. There was really only one thing that separated him from all the others, that prevented him from simply being erased from the minds of everyone that had ever known him. It was the fact that he was still linked to the system. He was linked to Misa's reality anchor, and it kept him whole and present, even in the dead reality that was the Void.
Others that were pulled in here were not nearly so lucky. Sometimes their connection to the system was ripped apart—other times, they had simply fallen victim to system sickness. It wasn't uncommon. When a dungeon broke and the reality anchor maintaining it was destroyed, it could no longer maintain the system links that every person in the vicinity had. If that person didn't travel and relink to a new anchor...
Well, it was a moot point, because anyone who stayed put in the event of a dungeon break would die from the swarm of monsters, anyway.
Which made him think about those so-called monsters and what created them.
Mana overload. The system stripped away life and memory from all the mana it processed to keep itself running, to keep the reality anchors updated and stable. It gave them the information that they needed, but it was the equivalent of putting a living being through a form of torture. Of stripping away everything it had and leaving behind nothing but anger and resentment. It left behind an echo of mana overloaded with pain.
That echo of mana was what became monsters—or, in other words, the system's way of controlling the anger and the hatred it created through its methods. It generated these monsters using those lost in the Void as templates. They were, in a sense, the raw friction by mana struggling against the system. A byproduct of its design.
That was technically what Irvis had also been. A byproduct of all this accumulated friction—an Aspect that represented the anger of every single monster that had ever been created.
An Aspect that wanted nothing but destruction, including its own.
Some part of him almost felt like he was to blame for everything Irvis had done and for what they'd had to do to him. He hadn't designed the system, nor had he helped to build it—but he'd come in afterward. He'd had access to its inner workings, been able to learn about it.
It had taken him so long just to learn, and longer still to understand how to modify it. He'd tried more than once to alter that underlying mechanism for how the system processed mana, and he'd never succeeded.
His last attempt had been... well, it had been this. The Grand Anchors. They didn't rely on mana in the same way.
"I really hope they'll be enough," Sev said quietly.
It was one of the few fears he'd never voiced. It somehow felt okay to say it out loud here—the Void absorbed everything he had to say to the point where he could barely hear his own words.
Here, he could speak the words he felt he couldn't voice.
The Prime Anchor shone beneath him. It was his guiding light, giving him direction and altitude in a plane of nothingness. Strings of power stretched upward from it, both into the Anderstahl dungeon and toward every reality anchor in the vicinity. It was like he was floating toward the center of a cobweb made out of pure metaphysical weight.
That cobweb was torn in places, though. The closer Sev got, the more he could see all the places where reality anchors had failed, leaving a gaping hole in the web. More than that, the thing at the very center of it—the Prime Anchor he was headed toward—it was flickering and fading, like the source of its power was dying.
He could sense it trying to reach out into the divine plane, trying to hook into another god so it could consume it. That would repair it, for a time, just like mana crystals did: divine power was one way to simply override reality and command it to be whatever you wished.
And yet the more he watched, the more he thought the anchor was... reluctant. Like it was holding itself back. Waiting.
Sev slowed to a stop as he floated toward the Prime Anchor, and he stared at it for a moment, his expression contemplative. "You guys are supposed to be almost alive, aren't you?" he muttered, brushing a finger against it. It was a crystalline-looking thing, several times larger than a standard reality anchor—Sev knew from experience that within that crystal, spatially compressed, was a network of runic circuitry so complicated that a dozen magical experts would take multiple lifetimes to even begin to understand it.
Because the Prime Anchors, unlike the others, could grow. They could reroute and change their own programming into something that better suited the survival of reality. This one, for whatever reason, appeared to have decided it was best to preserve the divine plane, and it was suffering because of it. He saw the hairline cracks in the crystal.
It was on the verge of being irreparable. Not even days, like Muchen had estimated—this thing had hours left.
"I hope this helps," Sev finally said, retrieving the reality shards from his pocket. Not knowing what to do, he pressed them against the Prime Anchor, hoping against hope that it would know what to do. Misa's reality anchor certainly seemed capable of absorbing them just fine.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then the crystalline anchor rippled. The reality shards fell out of Sev's hands, disappearing into the surface of the crystal like it was water. Sev watched as the hairline cracks healed, saw the Prime Anchor visibly shudder, like it was shaking itself awake. The cobweb of power around it flickered, then glowed a little brighter—
—and a system window popped up in front of Sev, startling him.
[ Integrity partially restored. Protective barrier removed. Query: Data indicates a large influx of sapients headed toward A-00. Confirm? ]
Sev stared for a moment, speechless. How was he even supposed to respond? Verbally?
"Confirmed," he said. Whatever had happened with this Prime Anchor, it had clearly grown a little beyond the other two—or maybe it had learned from the destruction of the other two. Or something.
The window in front of him disappeared, and there was a slight pause. Then a new one popped into existence in front of him.
[ Warning: Increased load will increase rate of anchor degradation. ]
"I know," Sev said grimly. "We don't have much choice. The other two Prime Anchors have already failed—you're the last one. At least, I'm assuming I'm talking to you right now."
There was no response.
"We're working on it," he said. "I need to get to the Vault after this, and then hopefully I can rig something together to use the Grand Anchors. Just... try to hold it together in the meantime. Do you know how much longer we have once everyone's here?"
Another long pause. For a moment, Sev thought it wasn't going to respond to him at all, and he prepared to leave so he could avoid putting as much strain on Misa's reality anchor.
Then, finally, it responded.
[ At the current rate of degradation, complete failure will occur in 3 months, 7 days, 12 hours, and 14 seconds. ]
"And at the increased rate of degradation?" Sev asked. "Assume all remaining sapients on the continent will be in the vicinity and that we keep feeding you with all the reality shards we have. How long can we keep them all safe?"
[ You will have 24 hours once all sapients are within the effective radius. ]
The response was so direct and so immediate that Sev almost physically flinched away from the window; he waved a hand as if he could ward off the response with a physical gesture alone. "That can't be right," he said, fighting the panic rising in his voice. "We're supposed to have more time than that. Twenty-four—That's one day. That's barely any time!"
No response. Sev's mind raced. Twenty-four hours. but that timer started once everyone was in range of the Anderstahl Prime Anchor. Both the Elyran and the Enkiros refugees were headed toward Anderstahl, with the anchors behind them slowly collapsing and the dungeons breaking apart as they began to spin wildly out of control without that region's Prime Anchor holding them together.
The Elyran refugees were right at the edge—that was why they encountered the barrier. That barrier existed for the sole purpose of keeping them out so that the anchor didn't fail before he had time to repair it. Now that barrier was down, which meant that the Elyran refugees would soon cross that line, which would at minimum cut the time he had left in half.
"It's down to Enkiros," Sev muttered, mostly to himself. "The journey would take a few days at least, normally, but they're going to have to speed up depending on how fast the dungeons collapse around them. Need to figure out how much time they have since Enkiros was technically restored after being erased—"
[ There are 37 hours left before the complete collapse of all dungeons outside of Anderstahl. ]
Sev froze at the unexpected answer.
That gave them a total of sixty-one hours. Marginally better than the twenty-four the Prime Anchor had first indicated, but not by much.
"I need to go get the Grand Anchor," Sev muttered. "Hey, listen, I don't know how... uh... alive you are. But thank you. And thanks for holding out for so long. We're gonna try to fix this."
There was no response, which left Sev feeling a little awkward. He shook it off quickly, though, and dove back toward the entrance to the Void, where Ixoryn and Tinsel were still waiting.
One last step before he reunited with Misa, Derivan and Vex.
[ Congratulations on completing— ]
[ You have been awarded with— ]
The windows flickered past his vision, too fast for him to see. But he didn't miss the small black stone that appeared in his palm, or the item description window that popped up as he glanced at it.
[ Void Stone ]
Opens a portal to a location within the Void. A necessity for any adventurer.
