Chapter -20250401 (Gazed Into The Abyss)

  A rift in space tore open in the sky above a desert and deposited a woman unceremoniously onto the sand. The woman stood, grumbled loudly, and then brushed the sand from her pants.

  She looked up to the sky and shouted at nothing in particular, “Fucking sand again! How the fuck do I keep ending up in sand!”

  The woman attempted to open her [System Debug] menu, but nothing happened.

  “FUCK!” She yelled again, “Fucking rift!”

  She was very much not pleased. A few days previously, she’d had a void mage blow up in her face. Playing back that moment in her mind through the use of her perfect memory abilities allowed her to figure out what had been happening to void mages to cause spontaneous detonations.

  It wasn’t actually spontaneous at all.

  In actuality, every so often, void mages were creating miniscule amounts of antimatter when they tried to conjure up some void, which, as everyone might remember from Star Trek, completely annihilates itself on contact with normal matter, converting the entire mass of both into pure energy.

  It took her a couple days of playing that memory back in excruciating detail to work out a way to conjure the material using the wizardry language she had created for her own use, but she’d managed to do it. Of course, simply conjuring even a single atom of antimatter was dangerous without a proper containment vessel, which had been her first creation. Her second creation had been an array construct that could capture the energy released by that annihilation event and funnel that energy into a third construct, the rift engine.

  And so, with all of these pieces constructed and linked together just so, the woman had tested it. Conjuration through wizardry was terribly inefficient, but she had plenty of mana to spare. Her first test involved only one hundred grams of antimatter, which was more than enough to destroy the mountain she’d built her research lab inside if the containment failed, but the construct held perfectly. She then conjured one hundred grams of a complimentary type of matter and allowed the two to go through annihilation. The energy capture array also worked perfectly, flooding the rift creation array, which instantly punched a hole through reality.

  The woman was surprised, as she hadn’t intended on this part actually working so soon, but she quickly wrote up an additional array to wrap around the rift controls. If no one touched things within a few minutes, it would forcibly seal up the rift and stitch reality back together. This was an array she’d learned from Seira’s followers and had even used it when she’d joined them to hunt down people breaking the divine decrees, as she was now.

  She actually expected the pair to show up at any time now. The gods here tended to frown on people punching holes through the side of the reality they’d claimed, but honestly, they should have been more careful about letting people exploit functions in the [System]. Privilege escalation had been absurdly easy to work out, and there was even still a [Debug] menu built right in if you knew where to look. She didn’t know where to look, not at first, but finding them hadn’t been difficult. Yes, ok, another one of the gods had helped point her in the right direction, but that was all, honest.

  The woman could hear pounding at the barricaded door to her research lab. She’d been found, and unless she did something drastic, the two divine [Champions] and their minions would soon be upon her. Individually, neither of them were any match for her, but there was zero chance they’d come alone. The twins were hardly ever apart, and despite their appearance, they’d kept enough of their original biology intact to be a massive pain in the ass.

  The woman sighed, then walked over to the rift, and jumped through.

  Back in the present, she shook her head to clear the memories of the events that had brought her to this point. She’d just learned a couple useful pieces of information. First, she was now on some world called Pallimustus, whatever the hell that was, and secondly, there was a system.

  Actually three pieces of information -- this system also had administrator level access, and crucially, she didn’t have permission to use it.

  Considering this, she brought up her status with a thought.

  “Ah, hell. Everything’s gone.”

  She recalled a story she’d been told by a vampire which had sent her down the path of research that had led her to creating a rift in the first place. He’d told her about a fantastic journey that had taken him to multiple other worlds where some didn’t have system magic at all, and some had completely different systems that operated in a completely different way to the one on Pallos.

  Frowning, Ada looked over the racial abilities. The first three made sense, and seemed to be the same as some of the skills and abilities she’d had back on Pallos, but the last three were completely new. She concentrated on each one in turn.

  “Well, that all cleared up exactly nothing. The last one is also mildly concerning.”

  Satisfied that she wasn’t going to figure anything else out about the system by just standing around doing nothing, Ada looked around the landscape she now found herself within.

  Sand. There was sand everywhere. Dunes of sand in one direction, and dunes of sand in the other. The other two directions were likewise dunes of sand.

  She looked up. Two perfectly ordinary moons hung in the sky along with a perfectly ordinary sun. The two moons didn’t surprise Ada, as she’d just come from a world that likewise possessed two moons that even shared an orbit, one forever chasing the other across the sky. No, the only surprising part was that they were completely ordinary, both reminding Ada of the moon she remembered seeing on her birth planet so many centuries earlier. This was completely different from the moons from her previous world, where they both had the image of dragon eyes covering them. That had been a constant fixture in Ada’s life for well over a millennium now.

  “Huh, that’s different.”

  Shrugging, she looked down, and was pleased to see that she was still wearing the same pants, tunic, and sandals she’d put on that morning.

  “At least I’ve got pants this time.”

  The materials for the durability and self-repair enchantments had been expensive, and she was glad to have spent the arcs to get them. She’d lost her clothes to various things so many times when she first arrived on Pallos before she’d gotten her [Metal Manipulation] skill to a high enough level that she was able to weave supple clothing from iron threads, which she could then designate as a target for her armor skills.

  At any rate, that wasn’t the concern right now.

  Below her feet, she spotted something in the ground that wasn’t sand. She reached down and brushed the sand away from the object, only to find a small cube of what she would have sworn was iron, but completely free of any oxidation.

  “The fuck is this?”

  “Nah, fuck off.”

  Ada crushed the cube in one hand, rendering it into a fine powder, which she let fall to the ground.

  “System, execute privilege escalation.”

  “Yeah, that’s better.”

  Ada opened up her [Debug Menu] once again and started scrolling through all the options.

  “Transcendence, hmm? That sounds like the one I want.”

  She selected the menu option.

  Ada selected Great Astral Being. Immediately, her body started glowing with an inner light of silver, orange, and blue.

  “Fuck off with your list. I claim the domain of the endless wastes. It is mine. It has always been mine. In this universe and every other. ”

  “Fucking right it’s available.”

  The light pouring from Ada’s body intensified, reaching a level of brightness that would have seared the retinas of anyone watching. There was, of course, no one around to watch.

  This went on for a while until Ada’s body suddenly exploded and then evaporated.