As we stepped closer to the metal door, I could feel something thrumming, just on the other side of the door.

  I closed my eyes and listened to the beating of the alteration essence in the air. Unlike most other alteration essence I had seen manipulating the laws of reality, which simply hung in the air like a dead cloud, the pustule of spatial energy on the other side of the door sounded like a second heartbeat.

  It was terrifying. It was beautiful. It was hard for me to understand in any meaningful way. But the pulsing of alteration essence had a certain strange allure to it, in addition to the rising fear I felt.

  I looked at the dragon, and for a moment, I thought I saw the dragon twitch slightly. It was a very subtle movement, and one that would be hard to detect if I hadn’t been paying close attention. I wondered if the dragon was twitching in fear or anticipation, and hoped that it was anticipation.

  If even the dragon couldn’t win here, we were completely screwed. After seeing the dragon casually demolish several hallways with eighth-circle spells, I realized that the four of us were basically supporting roles here. If we were even needed at all.

  On top of my increasing nervousness as we grew closer to our destination, I was increasingly uncertain what else lay on the other side of the door. The pulses of alteration essence were so engulfing and massive that it was hard to focus on anything else at all. And somehow, the door was blocking everything besides the beating alteration essence. I had no clue what was inside of the room - I couldn’t see any souls, but I also couldn’t see a lack of souls, either. It was simply blocked from my sight, somehow. On the other side of the door, there could be dozens of hostile outsiders stuck and waiting to kill us, or guard dragons, or basically anything else I could imagine. And I had no way of warning the group about any of it.

  I suspected that the alteration essence from inside of the room was blocked too - it was simply so massive that, despite being blocked, huge amounts of alteration essence were still leaking out of the room.

  Once we opened the door, there would be no turning back, either. Whatever was in the room wasn’t currently aware of us, but I seriously doubted that would remain the case once we opened the door.

  I took a deep breath to steady myself, and looked at my friends, Sekundyrr, and the dragon.

  If we could shut down the connection to the world of the black sun, we could save this world. If we figured out how it worked, and could find Sekundyrr’s home, we could return it to its former life.

  We just needed to win against whatever was in this room.

  “Let’s go,” said the dragon, after a few moments of hesitation. It leaned forward, and chomped on the door.

  The door, being made of metal, disappeared down the dragon’s gullet within the span of a few seconds.

  I looked inside of the room, activating my soul sight again as I looked for threats.

  Inside of the room was a massive soul, surrounded by dozens of smaller souls.

  The biggest soul in the room was nearly the size of the dragon’s, and the smaller souls were all almost as large as ours.

  The room was alive. The air inside of the room was alive. The specks of dust were alive. The stacks of research notes, the pens near them, and the ink that had long since dried inside of the inkwells were alive.

  And in the center of the massive room, there was a single, black scepter. Cords of metal connected it to the walls, and floating on top of it was a hole in reality. On the other side of that window, I could see something I had never seen before - the ocean of souls.

  We were looking directly at a giant, narrow corridor that passed directly through the ocean of souls. I had no idea how the black staff had managed to make the ocean that literally traversed reality move aside, but somehow, the black scepter was keeping the ocean of at bay.

  On the other side of the ocean of souls, I saw another dimension.

  And inside of that dimension, there was a soul.

  One, singular soul.

  It was only one soul, but it was such a large soul that it made every single other soul I had ever seen in the course of my life seem tiny in comparison.

  The size seemed millions of times stronger than the dragon. Hundreds of millions, even. It wasn’t staring at us, and didn’t seem aware of us at all - it simply existed, encompassing the entirety of the other world.

  A deep, echoing terror inside of my mind told me exactly what I was looking at, as if words and meaning was being forced directly into my mind.

  I suddenly knew that I was looking at the void between stars.

  The living, walking embodiment of the void between every single world, every single star, every single speck of reality in the other dimension was simply sitting on the other side of the portal, completely indifferent to the little window in reality that the black scepter had created..

  I had seen the research notes in the Dimensional Habitat Facility, and they had noted that almost everything exposed to the atmosphere in dimension 6 would come to life after a while. I had known that, but I hadn’t realized that the void on the other side of the portal would be ONE SINGLE CREATURE. In my head, I had imagined dimension six to be filled with various chunks of living, walking space, perhaps fighting each other for food or drifting through the void as planets and their immediate surroundings also splintered into smaller, recognizably sized entities that fought or ignored each other.

  That was dead wrong.

  The void between stars wasn’t made up of hundreds of thousands of smaller living chunks of void.

  Every single centimeter of space between stars was one massive entity.

  Even our entire planet was barely a speck of dust in comparison. The life force required to extinguish the thing was so ludicrous that I couldn’t imagine ever extinguishing it. Even if I had ten thousand times my current essence reserves, the creature probably wouldn’t even notice a full-powered attack from me.

  The chime of the system brought me out of my daze.

  TIER 16?!!!!

  “Fuck,” said Felix, staring at the patch of air in front of him as he presumably read through his own System notifications.

  I felt something strange start to happen to my body a few moments later.

  I realized that my bones were… alive. Not just my bones. My skin, my flesh, my blood, my organs… every single piece of me was rapidly awakening as completely foreign life and souls sprung into existence inside of my body.

  My Fortitude stat and my Willpower stat fought to keep my body under my control. It was the most overt feeling of my attributes that I had ever gotten - normally, I could see the effect of stats like Strength as they made my body stronger, but I had never before felt an attribute actively resisting something quite so vividly.

  I looked at Anise, Sallia, and Felix, and realized that they were choking in horror as miniature souls sprung up all across their body, like a wildfire in slow motion.

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  I tried to bite down on the connection between our world and the black sun’s world, panicking as I tried to keep the bodies of my friends under control. I failed to sink my teeth into anything at all - I clearly hadn’t bitten on quite the right thing.

  Anise started to scream in agony.

  The creatures inside of the room finally noticed our presence, and started turning towards us. I felt prickles of fear and danger crawl across my spine as I realized that we might very well be screwed.

  The dragon roared, an expression of rage and frustration, and then fired a quick seventh-circle spell into the room to buy itself time to form a higher tier spell. Most of the smaller souls in the room died on the spot, winking out of existence like little lights.

  I immediately started altering my fifth rune ability, trying to boost it as much as I possibly could by overcharging it with every drop of alteration and absorption essence I had in my body.

  Then, I turned towards the dragon.

  “Throw me towards the portal!” I screamed, ignoring the giant soul present in the room where the air had come to life. I prayed that this would be enough.

  The dragon’s tail wrapped around me and tossed me towards the portal like a slingshot, just gently enough that I wouldn’t splatter on impact with the wall.

  First, I reached towards the black scepter. My first idea was simply to rip the black scepter away, hopefully ending all of this.

  I collided with the black scepter and realized it was hopeless. The black scepter was rooted into the ground like a billion-ton asteroid.

  I tried reaching into the black scepter and flooding it with alteration essence, trying to force it to shut off whatever it was doing.

  It felt like I had slammed like alteration essence into a steel wall. Nothing budged at all - I was way too weak to force the scepter to shut down.

  I focused more on my fifth rune. It was my last idea. I powered up my spatial manipulation-deleting bite a little more, forcing my ability to lock on to the connection between this dimension and the other one, and then bit down as hard as I possibly could.

  It felt like I had bitten down on a diamond. I wasn’t even close to breaking it - I hadn’t even dented the connection at all.

  The black scepter started looking at me, the soul inside of it starting to glow with manifestation essence. I realized that I was about to die, and turned towards the dragon, praying that it had a way to save us.

  The dragon finished its eighth circle spell, and the air inside of the room suddenly died. I felt a strange sense of suffocation as the air was plucked out of my lungs.

  Sallia appeared out of thin air and swung her gravitite-empowered sword at the black scepter, as if trying to distract it. Even if she couldn’t see souls, she must have felt the manifestation essence building up inside of the item and tried to help me.

  The gravitite sword bounced off of the black scepter and did nothing whatsoever.

  Then, I felt something settle on me.

  It was the weight of eyes.

  Thousands upon thousands of eyes, looking at me like the tiny, insignificant creature that I was. Every single star in the sky of the other dimension, every single planet, every single piece of physical matter, all opened their eyes and looked at me at the same time. I could feel my Fortitude and Willpower stats instantly lose their battle to keep control of my collapsing flesh. My bones started ripping themselves out of my flesh, fleeing as my blood started corroding my internal organs. My brain started trying to free itself from my skull, and every pound of flesh on my body started to unravel and flee.

  But that didn’t matter, because they were looking at me.

  THEYWERELOOKINGATMETHEYWERELOOKINGATMETHEYWERELOOKINGATMETHEYWERELOOKINGAT-

  Before I could read the System notification, another System notification came.

  I died.

  RIP Miria and company.

  This volume went on a bit longer than I meant it to. Volume 1 was about 60 chapters, and this one was about 80. I was thinking the volumes would SHRINK as I got further into the story, not extend. Hmm… I wonder if there was a way to shrink some parts of Miria’s second foray into the wastes? I did think that the exploration of what other dimensions COULD form was interesting, though, so idk if cutting that would have actually improved the story. Hmm…

  Well, anyway. I double-checked the math for all of the Achievement a few times while doing the death statistics report. The first time I did the calculation, I got 18,483 Achievement for my total, and was 99% sure I did something wrong. My beta reader did the math and got 19,383, which made me realize I must have dropped a 0 out of one of the thousands I added to Miria’s Achievement total when I was double checking everything. Given that she had 18,328 in chapter 138, her having 18,483 before maintenance didn’t make sense.

  I also suspect I must have made some sort of addition error in earlier chapters, since Miria’s total jumped up about 60 more points than they should have once I double checked the math. I feel like I even remember someone mentioning that, and meaning to double check it… and then forgetting until now.

  Ahem.

  Anyway. I’m just going to have the correct numbers here, and we’ll accept that I did a math oopsie sometime in the past 40 chapters before fixing it. Okay?

  There is one more chapter in this volume, since there is still an epilogue. It might be a bit shorter than the last epilogue…

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