Universe's End

Chapter 245: The Prologue that is actually an Epilogue Pt. 3

The young immortal looked between the two True Immortals, the pinnacles of existence. The Architect was smiling rather fondly and not at least a little smugly, while the Spear was rolling her eyes.

“You have thoughts and questions,” The Architect said after a moment.

The young immortal furrowed his brow. He did, but the act of even asking-

“Oh, would you stop messing with him?” The Spear sighed. “His brain is going to break.”

“Fine, fine,” The Architect sighed. “You’re wondering what the point of prompting conversation is when we already know what you’re going to say or ask?”

“Y-yes?”

“Because it’s rude not to,” The Spear again rolled her eyes. “Flexing our abilities to a tier fifteen would be like flexing that you can walk to a newborn child: pointless.”

“As for the second question that you were wondering: Is it mind-reading or fate-reading? No, that would be utterly overkill when you’re quite easy to read just from your minute reactions.”

“So, it has nothing to do with the Root?” The young immortal asked, mentioning something he’d heard only faint whispers or references to during his time learning about the oldest beings in existence and those of them who’d gone on to become True Immortals.

“See, that’s how you know we haven’t purposely been divining your fate or reading your mind, because I’ll admit I didn’t expect a mere tier fifteen to have even heard of the Root,” The Architect laughed. “But no, again the Root is something that even tier forties are barely scratching at. One needs to have transcended truth itself to grasp it. Which is one long way of saying that no, no Root manipulation here.”

“Your other questions?” The Spear gestured for the young immortal to continue, changing the subject.

“The Bird,” The young immortal said the name carefully, like an ancient trap one wasn’t sure how to deactivate. “It’s truly dead and gone?”

“For billions of years now, yes,” The Architect answered. “You seem surprised?”

“The idea of Founders just… dying seems impossible. I expected every Founder to have survived to this point and just changed what alias they went by or gone into some sort of self-imposed exile or otherwise.”

“Nope,” The Spear said. “We may have been the first, but that didn’t hand us any special protections outside of what we managed to make for ourselves, at least not outside what anyone could genuinely expect to have achieved.”

“The secret to reaching the peak,” The Architect suddenly fixed the young immortal with a gaze that could reduce universes to dust alone if he so wanted to. “Do you understand what it is?”

“Effort and ambition.”

“Close,” The Architect said. “It’s ten percent luck, ninety percent everything else, including effort and ambition. But in the end, it doesn’t matter your ambition or effort if you’re a tier thirty in a universe that a Tyrant Beast decides to gobble up for whatever reason, you’re just out of luck, is what you are.”

“Not that Tyrant Beasts are allowed to do that, part of the deal for infinite strength is they’re unable to impose themselves on existence unless others mess with them first. Plus, they aren’t protected by true immortality, and that would be a good recipe for a group of pissed-off True Immortals making it their personal crusade to kill them as long as it might take.”

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“Spoilers,” The Architect pointed at the Spear. “But you could replace a Tyrant Beast with an ordinary tier forty-nine monster, and her example would still hold. Which gets back to the point: No, just because we were Founders did not give us a secret shortcut to becoming True Immortals or somehow make us impossible to kill.”

The young immortal suddenly frowned at The Architect’s words.

“Oh, the classic paradox you just realized,” The Architect said with a laugh. “But go on, ask it.”

“True Immortals are immortals in every sense of the word,” The young immortal spoke slowly as if giving some deep consideration to his thoughts. “But there are also beings, such as other true immortals, who can manipulate fate, probability, and time itself. So, what prevents a true immortal from going back and killing a rival true immortal and preventing them from reaching the peak? With fate and temporal manipulation severing cause and effect, and probability itself only a minor inconvenience, it doesn’t explain why it hasn’t ever happened.”

“You are still a young immortal; to you, time is still mostly linear,” The Spear answered. “Are there jumps and skips and other oddities from time to time? Of course, but otherwise that is how you view existence. As The Architect answered earlier, we transcend truth. Say I went and messed with probability in the past, made it so during his fight with the Bird, it decided by its sixth Arcana to end the fight, at which point he wouldn’t have been able to hold it within a partial domain; he would have died.”

“Rude of you,” The Architect crossed his arms, putting on a show of looking hurt.

“What do you expect would happen? That after dying, would he cease to exist? Well, to answer for you, no. To explain further would be a matter of understanding the Root, so we will leave it at that upon turning my attention back to ‘the present’ rather than the Architect ceasing existence, he would still be there, looking overly smug.”

“Has… has this happened before?” The young immortal.

“Not much anymore,” The Architect snorted. “But you do occasionally get those who think they’ve discovered the secret to killing a true immortal, typically being some degree of messing with time, and then being shocked upon finding us entirely unaffected. Depending on the True Immortal in question, the fallout can vary from chastising to being voided from reality.”

“You have another question?” The Spear changed the subject once more; further conversation on the topic was almost entirely moot without being able to discuss the details of the Root.

“On the topic of True Immortals, what about you two?”

“What about us?” The Architect asked, prompting the young.

“Tier eight, and you two still hadn’t met?”

“Oh, that’s spoilers, but safe to say, soon,” The Architect answered.

“And what about…”

“Us getting together?” The Spear asked, snorting as she did. “Depends. ‘Together,’ when you reference billions of years, covers many different phases.”

“Wait… how exactly do you two consider yourselves?” The young immortal asked. Considering he’d never known they’d ever had a ‘thing’ much less had children, the young immortal was rather lost as to the true nature of their relationship.

“As the Architect here would say, spoilers.” As if thinking of something, The Spear raised her hand, and for a moment, it was as if the true immortal lost all sense, existing and not existing at the same time, like a character on a page who’d suddenly become aware they were but a character in a story. The moment passed, and yet for some reason the young immortal had an image burned into his mind. It wasn’t even a real ‘image’, more like the idea or concept of one, a ring, but a ring that seemed to make every other ring he’d ever seen feel like little more than incomprehensible squiggles on a page.

“Here you were saying I was going to break his brain, and you go and show off your ring to a mere tier fifteen,” The Architect snorted.

“What was that?” The young immortal asked.

“An Origin-grade item,” The Architect answered with a hearty sigh, looking off into the distance. “Dated, hated, married, divorced, sworn enemies, parents, pretty much every relationship under the sky we’ve been with one another at one point or another. It is to a wedding ring what a True Immortal is to a tier one.”

“Oh,” The young immortal said, swallowing once.

Did he understand that scope? Not at all, but there was a depth of meaning in even a single atom of that ring that was worth more than several universes combined.

“But anyway,” The Architect suddenly cheered up, drumming his fingers on his chair. “We’re getting far ahead of ourselves. You were curious about our first meeting. Well, in the grand scope of things, it wasn’t much after I’d slain the Bird. Now, picking up from where we left off…”