Chapter 289: Chapter 288 – Time

Alice appeared in the spire, letting out a deep sigh. 

She took a seat next to Dream's chair, his body still continuously withering away. 

She had just gotten back from a long day of assassinating influential demigods who got in Luna's way, and a few more worlds came under her control as a result. By this point, Luna merely had to appear above a world and let her voice be heard. Her Rule skill would do the rest, the denizens of those worlds coming under her control. They became fanatically loyal subjects within a few days, and those with resilient minds were quickly exiled or killed by the masses. Alice still found her ability scary. 

When Alice wasn't taking kill orders from Luna though, she was here with Dream, just watching his body crumble away day after day. Ever since they had infused Dust and Ash within him, he had been unresponsive. If not for his conceptual bodies, they would think he was dead. The body upon his chair was no better than a corpse rotting away under the power of death. 

Sophia wasn't any better. She had basically vanished ever since Dream inserted himself into the four concepts. Nobody knew what she was doing. 

Alice stroked Dream's face, a small part of it that wasn't cracking and disintegrating. More than half his body had either turned into withered bone or broken skin, so he wasn't very recognizable. 

"The..."

Suddenly, Dream's mouth moved, letting out a small sound. Alice perked up."

"Hm?"

"...They're coming..."

A broken voice came out. Alice tilted her head, wondering what he meant. Who was coming?

Her question was quickly answered. 

All Specialists of the Wanderer Faction had an innate ability to sense others of their kind through their titles. Alice had seen very few specialists, and none had appeared in the universe after Dream had spurred a war. They all vanished, and Luna knew this for certain because she had personally searched all corners of the universe for these potential allies of hers. 

This innate sense within Alice suddenly reacted, as if blaring an alarm. There were specialists nearby, and there were a lot. 

Not long after, she teleported out of the spire, appearing in space outside of Tersa Prime. Tersa had also appeared, taking up a position beside Alice. 

A planet had appeared. 

It was much more massive than Tersa Prime. At least 5 times larger in diameter. It overshadowed the young planet, radiating profound power. All manner of continents and landmasses sprawled its surface, and the entire world was filled with life. 

From this planet, Alice had her attention drawn to the 8 sources of power that blossomed from this planet like little stars in the night. They gave off royal power, a power higher than any demigod could hope to touch. 

8 gods soon appeared before Alice. Luna also appeared after a few moments, the asura gods beside her. 

The two sides stood before the other. Luna, being the proactive queen she was, stepped forward between them. 

"To what do I owe this appearance?"

"...We've come to help."

A man stepped up to meet her. He was dressed in ragged clothes, caked with dirt and metallic dust. He looked the furthest thing from an immortal god, but although he wasn't the most powerful of the visitors, he still radiated that conceptual power. 

Luna didn't hold any prejudices, merely scanning the man.

"Might I know your name?"

"Kevin. God of the Strong Force."

"You must be one of the people in Dream's concept of Physical Reality."

"Until he left, yes. Now, I see he's gone and done something... irreversible."

Kevin's gaze shifted, eyeing the spire atop Tersa Prime. He could sense Dream's state, the chaotic, ruinous powers that spilled from his body. He was a little bundle of highly unstable energy, like a chunk of uranium going supercritical. 

Luna didn't sigh nor show anything on her face, merely nodding. 

"He's not in the best position, no. Nevertheless, there are still those that wish to kill him. Have you come to join me?"

"He is a Wanderer, a Seeker, and one who is fulfilling the ultimate purpose of the Wanderer Faction. Our purpose is to support his."

Another man stepped up, a mere humanoid figure with no bodily features. He was a mannequin, faceless and genderless. 

It was this man who Luna felt the most power from out of all the gods before her. He was even far above her. 

"I am Nill, the god of information. I have come as the envoy of Solomon, and as the precursor sacrifice."

"Sacrifice... for what?"

Luna was a bit stunned. This person, the god of information, was a sacrifice? Who or what could be so worthy as to receive his entire power and being. 

His head tilted just slightly.

"My being, my God Core, my concept, shall be sacrificed for Sophia, the Queen of Logic."

"..."

Luna couldn't seem to respond. Sophia, Dream's intelligence, was going to receive such a massive sacrifice just like that? Was it not going through Dream first?

Nill continued.

"The others shall follow your orders, so long as they align with our purpose. Now, I must go where I am needed. Goodbye."

"Wait."

Luna put her hand out, stopping Nill before he disappeared.

"Do you have any queries?"

"...Why would you give yourself up so easily?"

Luna asked what was on her mind. She didn't have the intention of stopping him. After all, there was no way she would deny a boost in power toward Dream or Sophia. But she was curious about why such a powerful being would sacrifice themselves for something so far below them. 

Nill didn't hesitate with his answer. 

"This is my purpose. My entire existence is dedicated to this sacrifice."

"Do you not have a will of your own? Do you not wish for anything besides death?"

"I am but Information. I am Existence. I do not have wishes, and my will is that of my purpose. Death does not apply to existence. I do not have form, and what you see before you is but an avatar of something without tangibility."

Suddenly, Nill disappeared, as if he had never been there. 

Then, both Luna and Alice received information, a message implanted into their minds as if it had always been there.

"My sacrifice is nothing more than the passing of my existence from one state to another. Think of me as the carrier for the concept, yet also the concept. I am nothing, and death can't come to nothing..."

The message stopped, and neither of them received any more. Luna didn't think to deeply before sighing, turning her attention back to the gods before her. 

Alice, on the other hand, seemed to have an epiphany. She quickly disappeared, Luna not minding the sudden departure. 

"Follow me. I'll debrief you all on the current situation."

Luna waved, and they all disappeared to exchange information.

..............

[Dammit Keeper! Are these things defective?!]

A golden wisp floated around the legacy spacy angrily, periodically slamming against the 7th monolith of the Archons. The Keeper's eye twitched.

{No, the monoliths are not defective.}

[Then why isn't it responding to me? Dream used them as the gateways to the four highest concepts. Are you telling me I can't use one? I've already read it!]

Sophia yelled in frustration. 

All this time while Dream had been tackling his concepts, Sophia had been in the legacy space. Her goal?

Comprehend Time.

It obviously wasn't so easily done, but upon starting, Sophia felt like she had a good grasp on it. Like all logic and information, Time moved sequentially. While the scale of Time was astronomical and infinite, Sophia worked her way up to handling it. She could handle infinite information through a copy of Dream's infinite catalog, so it was just a matter of information processing. 

At least, that was until Sophia found out that she only scratched the surface. Time was actually so much more. That seemed like an obvious statement, but she didn't truly realize what Time meant until she began digging deeper. 

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It was sequential existence, a concept that went beyond concepts. It was everything, multiplied by infinity. It was a governing law of the Totality of Existence. 

To conquer Time meant you had to conquer all of existence. There were no loopholes in Time. It was absolute in its function. Nobody could even begin to think of tampering with it unless they were beyond even most gods. 

Sophia just wanted to begin to understand it deeper. At first she was doing it for Dream. He was putting his life at stake to claw down the darkest depths of the unknown, just to find that one piece of knowledge that brought the universe together. She wanted to join him, to attain power of her own that could aid him in his quest. 

But now, she was doing it because she wanted to. When she dove deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole of Time, she found herself engrossed in all it was. She couldn't pull herself away. Comprehending the unfathomable knowledge on that monolith became addicting. She was finally feeling how Dream had felt all along. If she had a body, she'd be shivering in pure wonder and awe. 

At some point though, the monolith wasn't enough. All concepts had a conceptual world, right? She wanted to enter the concept of Time. She wanted more. She wanted to indulge herself in the infinite information and existence of Time. 

But she couldn't. The monoliths that had acted as a gateway for Dream didn't do the same for her. She couldn't sink into them as Dream did. She could only comprehend the runes on that stone, and while it was enough for now, she knew that even this monolith only held the tip of the iceberg. She was close to understanding all of it, and she feared the day there wouldn't be more. 

All this led her to wonder how Dream was able to remain the sane person he was when he was always poking deeper into the secrets of the universe. How could he care about anything else, even his family and wives, when there was such vast wonder and discovery to behold? How could he pull himself away for even a second? Beyond that, how could he throw away all his knowledge like he did, becoming totally powerless? 

She couldn't understand, but either way, she needed to accomplish the goal in front of her now. Whether it was for Dream or for herself, she felt like this was her calling. Time was her destiny. 

But the damned monolith was barring her entry. 

[Ugh. Do I really need to finish comprehending the text? Fine. But when I'm done, this thing better let me in.]

She scoffed before continuing. 

At some point though, the Keeper snapped to attention. 

Out of nowhere, an orb appeared in the legacy space. It had almost no form except for the fact that it dominated the small space it appeared in. 

Sophia also noticed the orb, but when she observed it, she saw so much more than the Keeper. 

Information, and so much of it. She felt like she could see the entire universe through that orb. All its quadrillions of lives, all its stars, all its planets, all its specks of dust. There was massive but technically finite information within that single orb, yet it also held all the conceptual infinities within. She could even see concepts through it, as if this orb was one of the four highest concepts that ruled over all others. 

And through it, she could see the beginnings of something more than just information. 

This orb. It was the Totality, but not yet multiplied by the infinity necessary to become Time. Still, she could begin to see the first glimpse into the nature of Time and its relation to the Totality of Existence through that orb. 

Her body that took the form of a wisp shot to that orb, completely disregarding why it was there. And Nill, who was in control of the orb, extended out a conceptual hand. Sophia took it, and the two did an exchange. 

"God Core of Information."

Finally, Sophia realized what this was. She realized that the being, Nill, was giving this up for her. However, unlike Luna, she understood Nill's nature. He truly was nothing other than information, and he wouldn't die after giving himself to Sophia. He wasn't even a person, nor a being. He was barely an existence with a single purpose, and the will of this existence drove it to hand this God Core to Sophia. 

Though, Sophia found Nill's bare existence fascinating. If he was nothing, and nothing could control the God Core of Information, then could everything control it? If one was existence yet nothing, then what gray area did Nill have to exist in to give everything and nothing purpose? It was a bit of a brain teaser for her.

But that was inconsequential in front of this opportunity. Without hesitation, Sophia began to take control of the God Core. She inserted herself into that concept, and with shocking speed, comprehended the entire thing. The God Core gradually became hers. It was only a matter of Time. 

Her abilities began to multiply. She began to understand everything around her. She could see all of existence and its most basic values. The universe around her became nothing but a series of numbers and states. 

But there was one thing it began to strip from her. Information was order. It was quantifiable existence. Things that didn't follow the sequential behavior of nature became impossible. Things like abstract and irrational behaviors couldn't exist under this logic. 

Sophia realized it would strip away the part of her that was irrational. She suddenly understood. Nill, the reason the way he was. Or, the reason he wasn't.

Nill wasn't a person. He was without ego. He became information itself upon accepting the god core. But what was control without a separation between two entities? Nill had become information and thus lost himself. The god core was no longer a tool. 

This thought threatened Sophia. She was going to lose herself. But just as her fear was going to become reality, she sensed Nill act. 

The person that wasn't a person suddenly insert himself between Sophia's existence and the god core. He acted as a container, preventing Sophia from losing herself to Information. Sophia comprehended the concept, and with Nill as the bridge, could tap into the god core. 

Like that, Sophia could control Nill's odd existence, inadvertently controlling the god core. She could give ego to this egoless existence. 

And so, she controlled Information. And with the extreme tool of Information, she could finally peek into what she wanted. 

She turned back to the monolith of Time. Suddenly, she saw a gate. It was a gate of the purest information, almost beyond reality. The gate changed at every instant in time, making it impossible for anyone to enter. 

To enter, one must see the gate in a single instant, at a single point in time. This was like finding a single point in an every changing infinity. It couldn't be done, at least by normal means. 

But this reminded Sophia of something. The legacy space had the odd ability of freezing time. Only, while time was frozen, one wouldn't be able to comprehend a concept. 

[Keeper.]

Sophia suddenly spoke to the guardian.

[Freeze Time.]

{...Very well.}

The Keeper acquiesced. Then, Sophia felt everything around her stop. 

It was as if the legacy space had become its own isolated universe. All the information around her was frozen in their states of existence. 

She looked inwardly. She couldn't sense the concept of Information, but with the god core and Nill, she could still see the information present around her. 

Finally, she looked at the monolith. That ever changing infinite gate of information had frozen, and from the gate extended numbers and values that surrounded the legacy space like a bubble. This monolith was the source of the legacy space's time altering power. 

Now, with the awareness of the gate through her acquisition of the god core of information, she could interact with it. The wisp that was Sophia moved forward, throwing herself into the monolith, that gate of information. And with the god core, she traversed a finite bridge, leading her to... everything. 

The infinite and finite world of Time, otherwise known as the Totality of Existence. Sophia was thrown into the vast universe, seeing everything from omniscience. 

But that was only momentary until her vision narrowed. She came to see herself, from her birth to the present. She could view every instant in her life, moving through time like a fish in water. 

But she could only see herself. She could view her life as if recalling memories. But she couldn't see anything beyond her own existence. She could see Dream, and see all the information she had attained during her lifetime, but that was it. It was nothing more than a movie of her memories, just in much greater clarity. 

At least, that was until she had a thought. 

Sophia had first seen things through Dream's eyes. She was a part of him, so his eyes were her eyes. 

She stopped at a random point in her life. Dream looked at a floor. Nothing more than a brown, wooden floor. 

Sophia concentrated on a singular wave of light. She could see everything, every tiny detail of that moment of her existence. So she analyzed the wave of light, seeing all its informational values. 

And then, she saw the past. Not her own past, but the past of that photon of light. She traced back the path of that photon, stressing her new powers of information to calculate where it would have been at every instant before hitting Dream's eye. 

The information processing necessary to process that kind of problem was astronomical, but her abilities were up to the challenge.

Before she knew it, Sophia had traced back the particle, seeing how it bounced off of an air molecule just before hitting Dream's eye. Seeing that air molecule, Sophia began to search through the next few instants of time, tracing the movement of the air molecules and the photons coming into Dream's eyes. 

It wasn't long after finding the correlations between an instant of past and present that she generated an entire world. She could find out where all kinds of different atoms were located through the progression of time. She saw their movements, their reactions. She saw the movement of reality all around her. 

She reverse-engineered her environment. Looking through time, she could process the cause and effects of the information given to her. From that, she could fill in the blanks. 

She couldn't see beyond her own existence, but that didn't mean she couldn't recreate everything around her. Looking through every instant in her life, she could garner incomprehensible amounts of information. With all that information, couldn't she rebuild the world around her? She could reverse engineer everything from the propagation of light to the tremors in the ground. She could trace back sources of energy as they moved between all the systems of the environment.

This was the butterfly effect. On small scales, she could reconstruct the world around her, getting absolute models of the people and things around her. She could discover why a bird was perched upon a fence by reconstructing the movement of energy within its body, finding out that it was hungry and had gone to look for food. 

But on larger scales, she could theoretically reconstruct an entire planet. She could reconstruct a star by tracing back photons from the surface of a planet to the nuclear reactions in a star's core. She could reconstruct entire galaxies by analyzing the lifetimes of photons that entered Dream's eyes as he looked up into space. 

She could reverse engineer the entire universe!

And it wasn't only physical phenomena. She could trace back magical phenomena too! With a deep enough understanding of mana and various magical energies, she could determine the structure of a soul based on the magic someone cast. 

If her processing power ran deep enough, there was nothing she couldn't reverse-engineer. She already had a deep enough understanding of the physical universe to trace back the movement of things like thermal energy and large objects. It got much more intensive when analyzing smaller things like subatomic particles. 

But ultimately, her knowledge of the functions of the universe was limited. For this, she would need to garner other conceptual understandings. A prime example being the knowledge from the Concept of Physical Reality. 

And for that, she would need Dream.

With his comprehensions of the concepts and her ability to shift through time, they could rebuild the entire universe! There would be nothing that they couldn't see! They would be no different from omniscient gods who could determine the origin and outcome of all of existence. They could determine the future through predictions, basing their actions on the only variable they could control: themselves. They would be like conductors, moving the universe according to their will. 

[But if we're going to do that, Dream needs to not throw away his damn comprehensions!]

Getting to this point, Sophia felt a surge of frustration and helplessness. Pulling herself out of the concept of Time, she poked at Dream's conceptual existences.

[Stupid Dream! Hurry up and get smart! I'm trying to do something cool here!]

 

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