Universe's End

Chapter 215: The Climb Pt. 3

Rinse and repeat, the duo spent over a year climbing the spire, focusing on their own internal projects. Zoey continued her attempts at fashioning her own mental palace, and Rory continued his analysis of what would be required for some form of floating fortress.

Or ‘technically,’ he was focusing on his floating fortress idea, but he’d been sidetracked with the thought of an always active pneuma refiner that itself didn’t require more input than output. Pneuma refinement was primarily a question of density. With pneuma that had a high base-energy yield, the less dense it needed to be made to increase in grade. Neutral pneuma, for example, was the most ‘basic’ pneuma affinity, and therefore also had the lowest energy to ‘unit’ ratio. Inversely, high-yield pneuma was also harder to make denser. Even if you didn’t need to make it as ‘dense,’ it was also far harder to move the needle.

All of that was the basis of Rory’s conundrum. Using intent, A.K.A. doing something manually, allowed one to bypass some of the ‘costs’ that would be required if something were to do the refining automatically. It was the costless nature of manual intent that made the grade step-up processing of pneuma an energy-positiveeffort; ten ‘units’ of grade one pneuma could be turned into ten ‘units’ of grade two pneuma, which were worth as much as thirty ‘units’ of grade one pneuma.

Technically speaking, there isn’t a hard rule regarding the mathematical principle, given the many varying affinities and concepts.

Problem number two, aside from the energy yield equation losing potency when done automatically, was the actual issue of how to create something that could handle his little concept of constant pneuma refinement. Or more accurately, the refinement into liquid pneuma, automatic refinement of lower-grade pneuma, was something that pneuma crushers had been doing for decades now.

“When you think about it,” Rory said, observing the massive whiteboard he envisioned within his mind palace any time he worked on an extended concepting phase. “I’m basically taking a crack at building a super-duper pneuma crusher.”

It reminded him of a bit of a joke from Earth. That no matter how advanced technology seemed to grow, in the end, it always reverted to boiling water to turn a big ole turbine.

Which sort of lost some significance after we’d met aliens with crazy energy technologies that didn’t revolve around archaic turbine turning… Anyway, getting sidetracked!

There was a theoretical method he’d hashed out that technically should work.

The problem was that he needed a Bound Space. Sure, Rory could handle manifesting Bound Spaces himself, but that went against the point of it needing to be automatic. Bound Spaces were effectively perfect isolation spaces from external reality, at least from a conceptual point of view -one could still cross through a bound space if they hit containment walls hard enough. What that meant is that things couldn’t be easily moved in and out as was possible with bound circles.

But otherwise, the theory was relatively simple. Much like regular pneuma crushers would drag in lower density pneuma like a whirlpool dragging in sediment, the lower-grade pneuma would, under a state of constant pressure and conceptual heat, grade-up into a higher energy state where it would then be capable of escaping the tidal pull of the pneuma crushers, releasing some of the higher-energy pneuma back into the wild, and in the case of Ehkorrus, the rest would be siphoned off into the monster core that served as the heart of the city.

A Bound Space would trap the pneuma perfectly, all the potential energy, both literal and conceptual, turned into actualized energy with zero excess vent.

Plus, when I put this into practice as a mobile construct, it also has to be built to account for varying pneuma types, since it won’t be isolated to a single area.

Drag the pneuma into a crusher space, erect a bound space around the crusher, process the pneuma until liquid, lower the bound space, and presto, job well done.

Easy on paper, hard in practice.

I’d need something that could continuously construct and deconstruct bound spaces, if that’s the case, but that itself isn’t easy to do.

So many conundrums, so little time.

Or that would have been the case back in Ehkorrus, but with a year of literally nothing to do but walking up a stupid winding path?

By the time he was finally drawn from his mental palace by Zoey poking his shoulder, Rory had figured out several different ways it was theoretically possible.

Theoretically, given he had only his mind palace to work within, and it only understood as much about how things worked as he understood. In that sense, it was inferior to working and testing stuff in good old-fashioned reality.

“Good morning,” Zoey said as Rory’s eyes focused, no longer on autopilot.

“Good morning? That’s the best you could come up with?” Rory snickered.

“Oh shut up,” Zoey rolled her eyes as she pointed. “Gate.”

“Yes, that’s a gate; we’re moving onto the object permeance stage, it seems,” Rory snickered again as he teased Zoey.

“Ass,” Zoey sighed. “Alright, do your thing.”

“Do my thing? Why don’t you try for once?” Rory asked, pointing at the gate as well.

“Fine, be a baby,” Zoey said as she pressed her hand to the gate. Instantly, her eyes widened as she withdrew her hand.

“What? Did something bad happen? Does the Great Gate God possess you?” Rory asked.

“No, and what the fuck is a Great Gate God?”

“No idea, I made it up on the spot,” Rory said. “So, what’d you learn?”

“You’ll understand if you give it a go.”

Curious, Rory stepped forward, pressing the palm of his hand against the gate. For a moment, it was as if the world was shaking as time froze, but Rory instinctively realized it wasn’t the world but his sense of vision. The shaking continued until suddenly Rory felt himself ‘elsewhere,’ existing within an intangible body. It wasn’t the first time he’d experienced such a phenomenon; the Trial of Space had put him through similar experiences long ago.

Like an incorporeal god, Rory overlooked a barren, magmatic planet, shrouded in smog, gas, and smoke. Looking at the planet, Rory instantly recognized that he was supposed to terraform the planet using the power of the volcanic activity. Seeing no reason not to start, Rory began to shift the flows of magma, time passing in a blur, but before he could make any real progress, Rory was met with a surprise.

The entire god damn planet was torn apart, the chunks blown upward before hanging upside down, at least from Rory’s perspective, like a planetary field of upside-down mountains.

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The reason for the destruction was simple: A god damn monster had hatched from within the planet, a beast made of dripping magma-

No, World Ichor. That’s World Ichor.

In Rory’s ‘godlike’ state, he instantly was able to parse such a detail, helped by the fact that he had also seen World Ichor in person.

The monster was made of dripping world ichor, bones fashioned from tectonic plates, and giant wings of space dust.

It was a mother fucking cosmic dragon.

Flaring its wings and roaring once, Rory’s vision shook apart as Rory found himself back in reality.

“Whoa,” Rory said as he glanced at Zoey.

“Right?” Zoey said.

“So, elephant in the room,” Rory said as something about the image stuck out to him.

“The fact that when the planet was torn apart, everything was suspended upside down in the outer atmosphere of the former planet. Oh, and that a planet-devouring dragon appeared? Oh, and that the King is God damn wyrm?” Zoey said, listing the obvious things on her hand. “Hmm, it’s almost like there is a theme going on. Should we pretend that we can’t put two and two together for E.O.N’s sake?”

“Could also be Aelia,” Rory pointed out.

“Her too.”

“I feel like Aelia would be annoyed if we ruined the ‘surprise’ of what lives within the hidden center of this region,” Rory laughed before frowning a moment after. “Alright, elephant addressed, I’m going to try again.”

“Be my guest,” Zoey waved at the gate.

Pressing his hand against the gate, only a second later in real-time, Rory was ejected.

“That’s a fail, I take it?” Zoey asked.

“Is the gate allowing us through?” Rory snapped.

“That’s a fail,” Zoey confirmed with a chuckle.

“Stupid,” Rory sighed. “Stupid little test thingy wouldn’t let me interact with the dragon at all. Oh sure, I could split my attention as much as I wanted to other things, but it's like the hatching dragon was strictly off limits.”

“So…. Cooperative then?” Zoey asked. “Two of us entered this place together. The first gate was cooperative; one person solved the puzzle, and the other held the monsters back. Second gate, we both had to clear the challenge, though without actual team effort.”

“So, this third gate would follow that trend of cooperative, except proper cooperation,” Rory snapped his fingers. “Yeah, that makes sense.”

“Ready to give it a go then?” Zoey asked as she waved her hand at him, pointing at her waving hand as if Rory somehow didn’t notice.

“Sure,” Rory agreed as he hovered his hand an inch from the gate.

“Three,” Zoey started to count as she hovered her hand over the gate as well.

“Two,” Rory alternated.

“One,” Zoey said.

“Go.” Rory finished as the two pressed their hands against the gate in tandem.

Instantly, Rory’s world began to shake before he once more found himself above the magma world. What was different was that he could sense another presence.

“Earth to Rory, can you hear me?”

“Yeah,” Rory said, the words transmitted through their minds given the lack of actual bodies. “So, game plan. I do the planet terraforming. You handle the would-be world ender.”

“How exactly am I supposed to do that?” Zoey asked.

“How am I supposed to know? Go smack it over the head or something.” Rory responded.

“I don’t have a body, dumbass.”

“Well, I’m sure you can figure it out.”

Without bodies, Rory instead was treated to the mental understanding that Zoey would have been flipping him the bird, to which Rory shot back a mental image of him sticking his tongue out at her.

Two Founders, the very peak of maturity.

Focusing on his task at hand, Rory began to take control of the magma world. Splitting his mental threads as far as they would go, he set each mind to a different task, some adjusting what gases were spewed, others gradually shifting the terrain to form favorable sites for life to form, others shifting the tectonics themselves. Hell, one thread even remained focused on snatching passing satellites from their orbits and sending them careening into the magma world.

Whatever Zoey was doing, it was working, as Rory progressed past the point at which the space dragon would hatch before.

Over time, life slowly emerged on the planet, following an evolutionary path similar to that of early Earth. First microbial life in the primordial seas, then itty-bitty multicellular life. It wasn’t long, at least from their time-accelerated point of view, until fish were swimming about.

Rory was feeling well and happy, until, without warning, the planet was torn apart by a hatching cosmic dragon.

With an incorporeal sigh, a moment later, Rory found himself back in reality, where Zoey was already frowning.

“What happened?” Rory asked.

“I ran out of juice,” Zoey said, throwing her hands up. “I latched onto it from an early point and forcibly suppressed it, but apparently we have a limit to whatever energy we get in there, because I sputtered out, and tadah, pissy little world dragon was born.”

“Oh,” Rory said, unsure what else there was to say.

“Brute force isn’t the answer,” Zoey said after a moment.

“Looks that way.”

“Question?” Zoey asked as she turned to face Rory directly.

“Yeah?”

“Is there anything special about the number eight?”

“Uhh, not really?” Rory said, before shrugging. “I mean, you could probably argue that eight correlates with the eight coordinates on a compass, and it’s a solid, divisible number, so that you could do a lot of conceptual heavy lifting with that alone. But the number eight itself? Not really, not that I know of.”

“So, eight total of these mountain chains, right?” Zoey suddenly asked. “The eight itself isn’t important other than what meanings you can attach to it.”

“Uh huh. What are you getting at?”

“It’s a cooperative challenge, remember? It’s not just you do your part, I do my part,” Zoey answered. “I can’t contain that thing on my own; I’ll run out of energy first. So, I need you to construct a prison.”

“Oh, that’s actually clever,” Rory said, surprised.

“Why do you sound so surprised?” Zoey asked, sounding offended.

“Well, a clever idea from you,” Rory answered as if it were obvious.

“Rude,” Zoey grumbled.

Rory’s mind briefly raced as he stitched together a ‘blueprint’ before he nodded.

“Yeah, I think it will work. You will have to suppress it directly for some time, but I’ll shape the planet to construct a ‘natural’ prison formation. With that, all you should have to do is inhabit it, and presto, job well done, and we all go home happy.”

“Then let's get to it,” Zoey said as the duo prepared to touch the gate once more.

Spoiler: A moment later, they were ejected with a frown.

“Now that’s just bullshit,” Zoey grumbled. “Why the fuck did those people think it was a good idea to blow up what was clearly some super ancient, totally mystical looking pylon surrounded by again, a super ancient and totally-not-something-normally-seen-in-nature array around it?”

“People are stupid,” Rory sighed. Their plan had been going off without a hitch until intelligent life evolved and formed societies. Of course, that was when some dumbass scientist reported strange energy fluctuations at thirty-two locations across the planet. Then, some world leader had the nifty idea to harness the sites for personal gain, and presto, world-devouring dragon hatched not long after.

“New, new plan,” Zoey said. “You understand golem-making.”

“You could say that,” Rory said, as the literal founder of the golem-making art.

“I need a golem army that I can mobilize to protect the sites.”

“So, build a prison that you can be the warden of, and also build a golem army so you can also be the guards.”

“Bingo!”

“Why not?”

Eighteen. It took eighteen attempts before the two finally succeeded in the gate challenge. First, it was just caging the damned dragon. Then it was stopping the intelligent life from destroying the cage, and then it was stopping the ‘intelligent life’ from waging war against the golem army. Then it was hiding the golem army, and then it was not hiding the golems because they became too much of an interest when they were so well hidden, and then…

Eighteen attempts, and by the end, when Rory and Zoey finally returned to the present and the gate turned incorporeal and allowed them to pass, the two took one step past before flopping on their asses.

“What the actual laundry-list-fuck.” Zoey groaned. “Were people always that stupid?”

“Yes,” Rory snorted. “Do you know how many times humanity almost wiped itself out?”

“Quite a few,” Zoey said. “My dad had me memorize quite a few.”

“That’s a little morbid,”

“He was weird.”

With that, the two went silent. They weren’t exhausted from a physical or even mental standpoint; they were just emotionally donewith dealing with a civilization that seemed hellbent on being the architects of their own demise.

It took nearly twelve hours before Zoey raised her hand.

“Alright, I think I’m good to go.”

Rory, meanwhile, fluttered his eyes open. Having dealt with an idiot civilization for so long, he’d decided that rather than spend energy working on ideas within his mental palace, he’d instead just take a regular old nap.

“Huh?” Rory yawned.

“Were you asleep?”

“Once a month,” Rory said, yawning once more.

“Damn it,” Zoey said with a sigh at the revelation.

“What?” Rory asked, confused.

“I could have saved my ‘good morning’ line for now.”