Dungeon at the End of the Universe

When I woke up, I was once more inside that strange mind space. A System notification was waiting for me.

Level-Up initiated.

You have [5] charges.

The same familiar interface appeared in front of me, but this I ignored it. Instead, I spoke directly to the System.

System, store my charges for the next Level-Up.

For a brief moment, silent reigned. Then, a bit slower than usual, as if the System wasn’t supposed to have such free access to this space, the message appeared.

Storing charges.
Cost: [1] charge
Confirm?

Yes.

And that was that. Easy. Again, I felt the drowsiness and soon after I blacked out again.

As I woke back up in my own Dungeon, I remembered what happened as I was falling unconscious. Faellen had something to tell me. Something that made it quite panicked.

Which is, what, the second time this has happened? Third? I don’t know, but I don’t want it to become a habit. I can’t afford to fall unconscious every time something important is happening. At least this time it hopefully shouldn’t have been too long since I passed out.

But let’s check on everything. Starting with Faellen.

“So, I seem to remember you wanting to tell me something,” I send over our Bond.

For a little while there’s no response. I’m almost about to start searching for it. But a response nonetheless reaches my mind.

“Finally done Levellig-Up? I hope it was worth it, because we have a lot to catch up on.”

“Oh come on, it couldn’t have been too long,” seriously, why does the fault always land on me.

“Yeah, it wasn’t. But we’ve both forgotten something.” What did we forget? And why does it matter right now? I can’t think of anything, so I just stay silent. “We forgot the reason why we didn’t have to wait billions of years for this Universe to cool down and become habitable. Your stupid UNIQUE Aspect combination.”

Oh. Oh no. That really is bad news.

“How fast are we going through time?” I ask, “Surely it must be millions of years per day? But no, that wouldn’t make sense. I can feel my Dungeon Seed on Lapis just fine and not too much has changed there.”

“Yes, we seem to have gotten lucky and it’s not a constant acceleration. For now we’ve slowed down, but since we’ve arrived here more than a year has still passed on the outside.

And before you ask, the reason your mini-Dungeon still feels the same is because it hasn’t had the chance to develop a will of its own yet. It’ll be a while before it’s actively expanding on its own.”

I contemplated for a moment, “Okay, understood. What does that actually mean for us? We don’t necessarily have to speed anything up. Really, this just means there’ll be less waiting around for us as the ‘apocalypse’ progresses.”

Faellen winces at this, “That’s… technically true. But it also means that the three Sipalians we kidnapped have been gone for much longer than they thought. It’s not good to be known as people who mess with time. Trust me, I should know, I’m fae.”

That’s… also true. There’ll probably be horror stories soon enough about young people being kidnapped by ‘the Light’ only to turn up decades later barely aged. And then their imagination is going to invent the opposite, where someone disappears only to appear the next day as wrinkled and old.

Which will then lead to anyone else we select for adventurer training to be much more scared that this first batch.

And also to people trying to find protections against the beams of light. Which, now that magic is being slowly introduced to them, could actually work to prevent us from doing out thing.

Not a great start to out plans. Then again, it’s not as if we could’ve prevented this.

…

Could we?

“Hey, Faellen?” I ask out of nowhere, breaking out silence. “This may be a stupid idea, but… what if we killed ourselves?”

“What?!?!?”

“Sorry, sorry. Wrong phrasing. What I meant is, what if we activate my time loop Ability? I’m not sure when exactly it’ll take us, but now that I have some control over my Essence maybe I can control it somewhat. And since I now have my Dungeon Seed Ability, we could redo everything without taking anyone onto my Dungeon.”

But Faellen once more proves to be much more rational than me, “And risk having to wait all those years again until we stumble upon Lapis or some other planet? Or what if it sends us all the way back to before the End? Thanks to you we can survive it easily now, yes, but there’s no guarantee we’ll enter the Ferras again.

No, it’s much too risky. But a good fallback option regardless. If someone from Lapis somehow manages to gain enough power to take revenge against, it’ll be what we have to do. But until then it’s much too risky.”

I can’t say I agreed with everything it said, but I understood. Besides, it would be good to see what will go wrong so that we can fix it next time over.

With that decided, we prepared for the next stage of the apocalypse.

It was time to train another group of adventurers, introduce more Dungeons and mana to Lapis, while monitoring the overall situation. And if anything went wrong, out first graduates were only a quest away.