Music for today:
Music to Become Evil - Unbound Purpose
https://youtu.be/Kw1-B9FGYTA
Chapter 462: ...
??? - ??? : Year ??? : ???
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It was a hole in the universe—a void within the galaxy that devoured everything it touched as if it were a black hole without an accretion disk.
The closer we got, the more time bent, and the wider the void seemed to stretch.
Yet somehow, like a the dangling light of an angler fish, the star at its center shined brighter than anything else in the sky.. and met my eyes with a shade of blue I only knew to come from mana...
Extremely.. thick.. mana...
The first time I saw it, it was like a shard of sapphire glinting in torchlight—an instinctive flicker meant to short-circuit the mind and make prey lunge toward it.
But I wasn't so keen about it.
Stopping at the edge of the expanse, looking in and watching as the blinding glow of the star flickered with inconsistencies that couldn't have been right, my mind spread through my aura, weaving a net tens of thousands of kilometers across before.. in a blink.. catching every single photon to pass through it.
In an instant, a wall of white flashed my mind.
Every curling flame from a star. Every planetary reflection. Every trivial explosion and wandering ember of light.
Recorded.
Then, in a moment of calculation that dilated time with its will, each dot drew a line, and each line mapped the universe.
At first it was chaotic and incoherent.. but the longer I watched, the more I cut.
Distant galaxies, nebula, and lone stars in the expanse of space vanished in a blink, and with every moment, the map shrank and sharpened.
Until finally, when I was left with nothing but the void before me, I began mapping things I couldn't see, from celestial bodies passing around the star seemingly thousands of times a second.. to those that seemed to almost.. wander...
Within the dark expanse, there was only one circular orbit... One planetary body with a single moon amidst a sea of scattered paths...
Paths most would think we're errors.. miscalculations from scattered light that'd give them the ease to unknowingly venture to their death.
It was a hive.
Known as 'abyssal hives' by Dagr and I, they were the breeding grounds of cosmic horrors—stretches of space where abyss eaters were more common than space debris, and the most horrific creatures in the cosmos gathered to multiply like oversized bacteria.
They were rare.. exceedingly so.. but never were they random...
Like any other lifeforms, they too gathered around food.
Just in this case, rather than nutrients, it was mana.
Without exception, abyssal hives had thousands of times the mana density of other star systems, and while still only hypothetical, I attributed it all to their host stars having abnormally large black holes as their cores.
Able to convert matter to mana, black holes were nothing short of the hearts of the universe. The more mass they were fed, the more mana they spewed, and so, the larger the star, and the larger the black hole it contained, the more mana would be produced...
To the point that the mana generation could eclipse all but the cores of galaxies.
A world in such a star system would be the ultimate paradise.. a land where Dagr and I could remove the limits we set on our growth, and grow as much as we wanted.
Hell, with enough mana supply, I could have created a world myself.
But regardless of that mouth watering appeal, we never once dared venturing into such a system.
Even for our current selves, hives of any size were beyond dangerous. Places where we weren't only outnumbered, but power crept by hulking, endlessly regenerating freaks of nature.
Although I had indeed killed them before.. quite a few, at that.. I had no confidence fighting more than a few at once... -Let alone thousands of them around a star that endlessly feeds them...-
Even outside of that star's orbit, just one of those things could wipe out the strongest world we came across like crushing a pebble, and here, there were so many their bodies blotted out the sky.
But that unimaginable danger was exactly what made Dagr fixate on it.
"We're crossing." In the empty vacuum of space, his voice echoed through our auras like a monarch's command—his gaze set on the distant, flickering glimmer of a star swamped by flesh like he didn't care whether the world beneath it all was a lifeless rock or not.
The place was ridiculous, but just the same, it was a barrier something semi-sentient like The System would logically never cross...
And that made it his paradise.. regardless of whether or not it'd become his grave.
"You know that's a hive, right?"
He nodded without a breath...
...And silence followed.
I should have disagreed... I should have challenged him...
But in that moment, as I looked into the infinite darkness surrounding that star.. my mind wandered...
It was a death sentence to go in there.. most certainly so...
But with the thought of all that mana.. my soul, grown unfathomable through the absorption of countless worlds' reincarnation centers.. it stirred with greed.. and wonder...
'What if...'
...Then.. as if the thread keeping me sane had finally snapped, I brought us into the void.. only to exit when we were about to kiss the surface of the solar system's last remaining moon.
Knowing what to expect, I braced myself more than I ever had before, mustering every chemical or spell that could give me an edge.
*Vwoop* But the moment we were released, the planet I was watching zip around the star thousands of times a second snapped to a halt, and our bodies, used to the emptiness of space, were slammed with a volume of mana we had never experienced. *WOOOOM*
It was so thick it broke every wall of mental preparation I had—swamping my mind in a fog that scattered thoughts and blurred memories.
As if my body had been starved of air, in that mana dense space, it gasped, and my reserve, left half empty for eons, practically liquified in order to fork mana into itself like a rabid dog that didn't know when its next meal would be.
That feeling.. that moment of my body gorging itself.. was intoxicating...
However, I knew I couldn't lose myself to the euphoria.
As the mental fog began settling.. I passed a heavy breath, forcefully steadying myself while shifting my focus to the mountainous presences littering my rapidly dissipating aura.. only for the sharpening of my senses to never stop, and for my eyes to adjust to the black reflections behind the bright lunar surface below us.
At first, it looked like stars, sparse and scattered, but still many in number...
But then they blinked.
Eyes.. thousands.. no, tens.. hundreds of thousands in number were aimed at us... Starved... Hungry...
And yet despite everything experience told me to expect.. none of them moved... -What the...-
They weren't afraid.. but despite the solar system having not only a planet, but a moon they would typically devour in a heartbeat, they refused to even approach...
And that was when I looked up...
From the outside, I had expected the planet to be a lifeless, half molten rock we'd have to rip from the grasp of an abyss eater—a snack the creatures of the hive would savor as time passed.
However.. above me, the planet wasn't just devoid of such scars, it was vivid with life, emitting mana of its own like the universes most tantalizing bait while somehow maintaining a clear path to its star as if its light had carved a tunnel through the congealed bodies... -W..why..?-
It was beautiful... Green prairies, and greener forests... Blue oceans, and bluer skies...
It was the embodiment of paradise... An oasis at the center of hell.
But that was the moment my soul churned, time bent, and my divinity fed me the answer I wasn't ready for.
*Vwoom...* The planet wasn't left spotless by chance.. it.. was occupied...
Like an egg, the planet held life.. it had a heart beat...
And like a protective mother, the moment my eyes landed on it, the star it orbited pierced my mind with a gaze meant to cleave my body in two.
*WHOOOM* For the first time, I didn't probe the presence.. but rather.. it probed me...
...And the feeling it carved into my soul made every instinct in my body scream. My fur stiffened, my skin prickled, and even the marrow in my bones ached as if trying to crawl away from the pressure.
I had felt predators before, even carving away a section of a star just to test the limits of The System, the strongest being I had ever known.
But this.. this wasn't a predator. It was like the raw, unfiltered reflex of the universe itself—like the cosmos opening its throat to expel an infection.
In that instant, my divinity spun so fast the universe froze, splitting space before me into the branches of a vast tree, hoping to use foresight to escape the inescapable grasp of death whose hand was reaching for my neck.
But.. I never saw anything... The next moment time ticked.. nothing happened.
No collapse. No cataclysm. No annihilation.
Just silence.
-W..What...-
Dagr never felt it... As time resumed its march, dictated by the being at the heart of the star, he kept his focus aimed at the mass of flesh encompassing everything.. anxious but ready...
But the fight we expected never came...
The longer we stood over the surface of that moon, listlessly floating, finding it had to move beneath the suffocating stares, the quieter it got.. and the more we eased...
However my mind never escaped... As if drilled into my skull, I was trapped by the gaze that ceased the moment I flared my divinity.. suffocated by the calculations to figure out its intent...
I wasn't ready.. and 'she' knew it too...
But that gaze I felt wasn't a threat.. it was a test...
A cry for help from a being who knew naught what it was...
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