One Last System

Chapter 372 Universe's Test

I saw myriads of particles of light appear out of nowhere, leave their bright trail as they moved, and then disappear once their energy ran out. Then, black lighting would strike those trails, eradicating them from the world.

This process turned the black universe I was in into a festival of fireworks, brighter than the brightest day I had ever experienced. But as the flow of time continued to accelerate, all of the lights suddenly vanished.

Which could only mean one thing.

The process itself was happening so rapidly that no human eye could ever observe it!

'So why could I see it just a moment ago?' I asked myself when all the lights disappeared, and I dropped my attempts at applying the knowledge from earth to the world around me.

Now that I had taken a new approach to understanding my situation, the answer to my question turned out to be so damn obvious it was no wonder I didn't notice it before.

At this point, I could only guess it was human nature to ignore the things that appeared to be too obvious for comfort. And whatever the name of this mental fallacy, I just fell victim to it.

Because the answer was obvious. There were only two ways in which I could observe a dilatation of time in the way I did just a moment ago.

Either the time really has slowed down just for me, just to let me observe this event, or...

Or this entire thing was nothing more but a lesson left by someone with enough power to impose a rule where this kind of visual would appear before the eyes of anyone who reached a certain level!

'If I were me from the earth, I would likely believe in the first option,' I thought while gritting my mental teeth. 'But now I'm smarter,' I choose to believe.

To disturb the flow of time, one would have to mess with the very fabric of the space, as time was nothing more than another element of it. There were some theorems that a time used to be a dimension on its own, yet it ended up collapsing onto the three dimensions humans knew, creating the spacetime that people on earth believed to be the very fabric of the universe they knew.

But I wasn't a physicist to be able to verify those theorems. I didn't need to be a physics thought to understand something extremely simple.

Just like in the universe I was born with, one could manipulate the inner workings of the fundamental elements of the world only by either using an incomprehensible amount of energy or by approaching the very limits of the laws that kept the entire universe in check.

"But it would be stupid to believe that the same principle applies here," I muttered under my mental nose as I could only sit tight and wait for something to happen.

"It's obvious this isn't a real-world," I attempted to say out loud. "Even the strongest cultivator of this world isn't capable of seriously destroying the planet," I continued my speech even if there was no one there to hear me. "And the level of strength necessary to destroy a planet is only a fraction of energy one would need to use to actually influence the time itself!"

This line of logic was the reason behind my confidence that it was the other option that was in play here.

And soon enough, my beliefs proved to be true.

The black universe all around me remained calm for what could very well be several minutes, several hours, years, or maybe just a single instant. With no sensory experiences of any kind and stuck to the confines of my mind, I had no means of accurately tracking the time.

'And let's not forget that in this place, time might not play a significant role anymore,' I thought to myself, taking notice of the possibility.

And then, a massive ray of light suddenly appeared in the distance, cutting through the darkness of this place like some sort of massive, holy sword of a hero from the stories.

'What the hell is this?' I thought when the light surged ahead and passed me only to just... stop.

'No, that's not the right way to think,' I thought as I looked closer at the massive array of bright, whiteish light.

It wasn't a singular entity that crossed through the dark space. Instead, it was an active flow...

'Of what?' I asked myself as I glued my virtual eyes to the event. 'Pure energy? Photons? Or maybe mana?'

Arriving at the last possible option, I once again realized just how stupid I could be at times.

'What else could it be if not mana?' I thought before changing my approach to the topic.

The source of the light was way too distant for me to ever see anything about it. Yet, the place where the stream of whiteish mana ended was right by my side as if this very illusion was constructed all for the sake of showing me this particular element of what was going on.

And sure enough,  after I waited for yet another impossible-to-define amount of time, something changed.

As impossible as it appeared to be for me from a few seconds earlier, the ray of the mana suddenly brightened up. Even though I couldn't prove it, I could swear the mana in the flow suddenly sped up, increasing both in density, speed, and volume itself.

And then, right where the mana would disappear just a few inches away from my point of vision...

The sparks appeared.

The same sparks that I could see all over the place before. But this time, it wasn't the size of a single grain of sand. This time, the sparks covered nearly the entirety of the trail of the light, only to explode outwards, ripping the space itself apart!

"WHOA," I uttered a shocked sound when the darkness that surrounded me turned into nothing more than a pitiful shadow, a mere projection of the true darkness that appeared in the rift.

I couldn't see it. I couldn't feel it. But I could somehow tell how the space started to get all mangled up, tearing apart not due to the influence of an overbearing amount of mana but just as the aftereffect of an already existing fissure.

BOOM!

Even though there was no air in this place to transfer the sound, I could hear the noise when a thick bolt of extremely dark lighting appeared out of nowhere and struck the fissure down.

Then another one appeared. And another one.

Soon, the space around me turned into a hailstorm in which, instead of drops of water, lighting fell all over the place, desperately struggling to close the fissure.

Whenever lightning struck, the space around its destination would somehow reinvigorate, pushing against the fissure with renewed power. Yet, after watching the proceedings for just a few moments, I could already tell it wasn't enough.

In fact, it was far from enough!

Bit by bit, the fissure continued to grow in spite of all the lightning. And when it reached my point of vision...

Everything disappeared once again, leaving me in the familiar peacefulness of the darkness all around.

'What the hell was that?' I thought, stunned by the events, I had no other choice but to observe.

And then, barely a moment after the show, the bright sword of intense mana appeared again.

Everything happened exactly the same way in which it did before. The sword of light would cut through the space and established a flow of mana at a density I had never experienced before.

It was so damn powerful that some of the mana even started to leak out of its flow, seeping into the surrounding space.

But this time, no disaster followed. And no matter how long I waited, this extremely powerful flow of mana that dwarfed what I saw before continued to remain as stable as it was the moment it appeared.

'There has to be something to those images that I'm missing,' I thought as I once again directed all my attention to the one place that could hide the answers from me.

I looked into the details of the picture.

"It's not leaking," I muttered.

The mana that I formerly assumed was unable to stay within the flow was way too organized to be a byproduct of a powerful flow. It looked like a thousand small hands reaching out from the main flow and infusing the surrounding space with their power.

'Is that...' I thought, only to shake my virtual head. 'No, it couldn't be,' I quickly lectured myself. 'This would be too damn simple!'

For a moment, I attempted to protest the idea that appeared in my head. Yet, the more I tried to deny it, the more and more details I could see that did everything to make me believe in my own gut feeling.

"Does this flow actively tries to reinforce the space it's lodged into to prevent the fissures I saw before from appearing?" I formulated my thesis out loud, just out of curiosity about how it would sound.

And then, as if I passed some sort of test, the world around me collapsed and disappeared along with my consciousness.