Free Web NovelChapter 594: The Cause Of The Universe’s Coming Death
A long and heavy silence followed after the display’s final image.
Liam stood in front of the holographic screen and said nothing. Lucy stood beside him and said nothing. The display cycled through its last rendered frame — the boundary of the darkness marked in red, still moving, the rate notation sitting in the lower right corner of the image in the array’s clean notation.
Non-zero. Projected terminus: full universal extent.
He had read the words. He had processed the scale. But processing and understanding were different operations, and the full weight of what the array had shown him was still settling through layers of comprehension for him, finding the bottom of each one and continuing down.
847 million dark galaxies. Planets drifting in orbits that no longer made sense because the stars they had orbited were simply gone. Molecules of what had once been living things, dispersing across the void for longer than the Earth had existed, growing more diffuse with each passing epoch. Eleven civilizations out of everything the array had ever catalogued, surviving and escaping a darkness that was still moving.
Somewhere in the settling, something clicked.
It was several of them, arriving in sequence, each one connecting to the next. He felt the connections form and he stood with them for a moment before he spoke.
"Lucy," he said. "Leave me alone for a while."
She looked at him once, then nodded and left the office without a word.
He stood in front of the display alone.
He had never thought of himself as special because of the system. Six or seven months ago, when it first appeared, his plan had been simple and he had been honest with himself about it — enjoy everything the system offered to its fullest before whatever it was disappeared, because things like that always disappeared eventually.
That had been the plan. Enjoy it, use it, prepare for it ending.
But somewhere along the way the plan had changed, and the change had been gradual enough that he hadn’t noticed it happening until it had already happened.
The travel beyond the solar system. The Oort Cloud in the dark. The Voidling. The cultivation universe and the magic worlds and everything he had witnessed and done in the months since.
He had been careful during all of it — careful not to be attached, careful to keep a distance from the people in the other universes, careful to hold the whole thing lightly in case it ended.
The fear that one day he might never get to meet them again had kept him at a particular arm’s length from all of it.
That fear had been fading for months without him naming it. Now, standing in front of an image of a universe with a timeline instead of a future, he could name it clearly and see it for what it had been.
He had been preparing to lose something beautiful. And the preparation had kept him from fully understanding what it was.
Something as vast and intricate and alive as the system, as the Dimensional Space, as the cultivation universe and the magic universe and the Grand Universe and all the layers of existence the array had just shown him — something like that didn’t appear in the life of an eighteen-year-old for no reason.
The array had given him the full picture and the full picture had pointed the same way. freewebnovel.cσ๓
He had one question left.
"System," he said. "What are you exactly?"
The response came after a pause that felt different from the usual instant processing. And when it arrived, the voice carried something he had not heard before in any notification, any prompt, any response the system had ever given him.
[You will find out soon enough when you meet with Lady Tiamat. But you have to save the universe, host. I have failed so many times. I cannot fail anymore. If the Dark Energy Universe is destroyed, the other two will follow. The entire system is codependent. Only the Grand Universe would remain — but what is the use of a universe filled with selfish gods who care nothing for the mortals they are supposed to protect.]
Liam read the response twice.
He had heard the system speak many times across months of use. Notifications, confirmations, descriptions, rewards. It had always sounded the same — clean, precise, mechanical in its consistency.
But this was not that voice. This was something else. Something that had been sitting behind the mechanical consistency the entire time, held back by necessity or by design.
Liam felt the weight of the pain and heartache in its words.
He closed his eyes briefly and exhaled.
Then he opened them and looked at the display and allowed himself to arrive at the conclusion he had been approaching from the moment the array’s survey footage began.
"And here I was thinking I could relax in a couple of decades," he said quietly. "Get humanity to a tier where they could take care of themselves. Hand things off gradually. Disappear into the some part of the cosmos for a century or two and let the universe do what it was going to do." He exhaled again. "Now I have to add saving the universe to the agenda."
[With great power comes great responsibility. It is perhaps the most repeated principle on your planet for a reason.]
Liam made a sound that was not quite a laugh. "Noted." He looked at the display for another moment. "How exactly am I supposed to go about this. What is wrong with the universe, specifically. The darkness is the symptom. What is the cause."
[The laws of the universe are failing. One of the entities leading the invasion succeeded in interfering with the fundamental laws in a bid to resolve the incompatibility between the invaders and the universe. But making that interference permanent — making it take hold at the level of the laws themselves — required the Book Keeper to rewrite them as they exist in the Akashic Library. But the entity didn’t have enough power to make the Book Keeper do such a thing and them forcefully trying to change the laws produced what you saw.]
Liam processed this.
The laws of the universe had been messed with and broken by force.
"So this isn’t just entropy," he said. "This isn’t the natural end of things accelerated by damage. This is the laws of the universe being wrong. Operating on instructions they were rewritten to follow, instructions that are slowly consuming the thing they were supposed to govern."
[Yes. If it was just entropy, the universe has laws to restrain its progression. That law was also what causes the incompatibility with other universes. It was what was messed with and the consequences for the invaders was that 90% of them died.]
"Then fixing it isn’t a matter of power," Liam said slowly. "It’s not a matter of building something strong enough to push the darkness back. You can’t fight a rewritten law with force. You have to rewrite it again."
The system did not respond immediately. When it did, the response carried the same weight behind it.
[That is correct.]
Liam looked at the display for a long moment. At the red boundary, still moving. At the eleven trajectories that hadn’t stopped. At the rate notation that said non-zero and meant something far larger than the clinical language suggested.
"Who was the entity that had messed with the laws? Which one of them?" Liam asked.
