Chapter 417 - 416 - The First Crossing

In the depths of the Blue Dragon Mountain Range, on the final floor of an S-Rank Labyrinth, two people suddenly appeared atop a teleportation circle.

Aisha and Rygar looked at each other.

The place around them was vast, silent, and far removed from anything else.

Aisha looked around and spoke.

"I think we exaggerated by choosing a place this isolated."

Rygar looked away and laughed.

"I thought you would like being alone with me for a while."

Aisha slapped his arm. Rygar smiled, and the two began the final preparations with a slightly lighter mood.

That labyrinth had been completely cleared, modified, and adapted for their use. Unfortunate were the monsters that had lived there before, when the First and Second World Powers suddenly invaded their home and claimed it as their own.

But there was no better alternative.

The reason for choosing that place was both the concealment provided by such an inhospitable and isolated region and a technical necessity.

The final portal required a mana core that was resistant, durable, and capable of withstanding an absurd amount of magical pressure. And there was nothing better for that than the core of a labyrinth.

The World-Shift Tool was on the final floor of that labyrinth.

Its core served as the main source of a battery, and the portal had been built around it. Of course, it still needed to be supplied with a considerable amount of mana. For that, they used both their own mana and mana crystals taken from monsters.

While they finished the preparations, Rygar internally reviewed his objectives.

The target of this first journey was none other than the Beast World.

Historically, it had been the first world destroyed by the First Dragon God. Precisely because of that, it was the best place to test whether even a world destroyed so long ago could still somehow be saved.

Over the last three years, with the best researchers gathered together, the focus had not only been travel between worlds. In truth, that had been a significantly smaller part of the time spent. The main direction of the research was a much more fundamental question.

What was necessary for a world to continue existing?

They had obtained excellent results. And that was precisely why they were going to another world.

To test their hypotheses.

Even so, Rygar could not help feeling a certain melancholy when thinking about his alternate future.

Oldgar.

In the current reality, the research had flowed much more smoothly, but that had not happened by chance. It was the result of a combination of events.

The experiments and conclusions that Oldgar and everyone in that reality had taken nearly a hundred years to obtain had already been with them from the beginning. That had become the foundation of the current research.

After delving even deeper into the records of the Ancient Dragon Race, Rygar became even more certain that, for some reason, Oldgar had not had access to that information.

Perhaps because he had been fighting, or because he had not had a proper method to store it. Or simply because the situation of his reality had been far more desperate from the start.

But Rygar was certain.

Oldgar had not had the same pieces.

And, finally, they had both four of the five Sacred Artifacts necessary to reach the Void World and the False Divine Core produced by the Dragon God’s Hole Labyrinth.

Both had an intrinsic relationship with gods and, above all, with the reason worlds needed a God to exist.

Those were only the tools and research materials available to them.

Rygar had not even considered the enormous advantages brought by the butterfly effect. Verdia had obtained the Spiritual Eye and summoned space spirits.

Star Rise Academy gathered all kinds of geniuses from across the world. Nanahoshi Shizuka had voluntarily joined the research team, already experienced in that field from the beginning.

Each of those factors, alone, would already be an enormous advantage for someone like Aisha.

All of them together made the failed research of Oldgar’s entire lifetime succeed in around three years.

That was why Rygar felt melancholy.

Oldgar, the Aisha of that time, the Rufus of that time... none of them had access to any of this. They explored a completely new field from the beginning, while also advancing in other equally absurd areas, such as Rejuvenation Magic, Celestial Concealment, and the Sköllvindr Armor itself.

Their path had been marked by incredible discoveries and extremely difficult battles.

Rygar, relying on the achievements of that reality, had overcome part of those difficulties and even gained greatly from them.

Little by little, the melancholy gave way to gratitude.

He knew, from the accounts in the Future Guide, how many difficulties they would have faced if Aurora had not gone back in time. And although he did not know how that story had ended, he hoped Oldgar had succeeded in his reality.

And even if he had not...

Rygar would make certain to succeed this time.

Nothing else stood in his way to Hitogami.

The reset of Orsted’s Loop was still many years ahead. Hitogami’s main apostles were dead. In the end, Hitogami’s haste in trying to eliminate Rygar because of his descendants had only accelerated his own death even further.

Finally, Aisha and Rygar left everything in place.

There were several barriers protecting the improvised laboratory at the bottom of the labyrinth. Some served for concealment and containment. Others were simple layers of security in case something went wrong.

The device was ready.

Before them, an arch of gray metal glowed with magic circles and runes finely carved both inside and outside.

Aisha positioned herself before the arch and pronounced the activation incantation.

"Kreuzung."

That meant crossing, in the Ancient Dragon Language.

A blue light appeared at the center of the arch and began growing rapidly.

The moments of failed tests had long since passed. The current device had already been proven successful within every possible limit before the real crossing. Even so, seeing it function was extremely impressive.

The False Divine Core in the Sköllvindr Armor, which covered Rygar almost completely except for his head, began to glow as it resonated with the portal.

When the mystical blue light finally reached the entire arch, a sudden shock rang through the hall. The unstable surface at the center of the portal trembled for an instant and then calmed, like a lake after the last ripple disappears.

An apparently liquid, blue, translucent film formed before them.

Rygar held Aisha’s hand.

Both of them activated Magical Isolation simultaneously.

A faint barrier appeared around the two. It was almost transparent, but clearly visible, like glass.

As it formed, the Barrier absorbed the characteristics of the surrounding environment: the atmosphere, the oxygen, the gravity, the mana. Every basic condition of existence was assimilated by the barrier enveloping the two.

In this world, that barrier was redundant, basically useless. It merely copied exactly what already existed around them.

But on the other side, it would be the only thing separating their bodies from a dead world.

Once the barrier had fully formed, neither of them hesitated or looked back. At the same time, they crossed the last steps and passed through the portal.

When the Six-Faced World was conceived, it was incomplete and imperfect.

The God of Creation was already old. To complete his project, he joined the six imperfect worlds he had created into one, forming a system similar to a die, each world occupying one of the faces, and, at the center, the Void.

Each world was conceptually connected to a God.

Six divine beings, born directly from the God of Creation, were created to administer their respective worlds.

Those Gods lived in a relationship of life and death with their faces. As long as the world was well, they would be well. If they suffered, their worlds would suffer as well.

So what would happen to a world with the death of a God?

If someone had followed the story up to that point, they would reach the obvious conclusion.

The world would die as well.

The question that intrigued Rygar and Aisha was what a dead world should look like. It was dead, but its corpse was still there.

The destroyed and uninhabitable carcass remained in its place, because no force could move it.

Rygar and Aisha finally obtained the answer when they crossed into the Beast World.

Around them, there were few colors, mainly black, gray, and white.

Debris spread in every direction, and in the sky, if that could still be called a sky, enormous pieces of land floated. Some were large enough to look like entire islands torn from the ground.

They remained suspended and still, neither falling nor rising.

Time and space were an unknown in that place. There was a horizon, but it did not seem to convey real depth.

Certain ruins seemed close and distant at the same time, while some rock formations repeated at angles, as if the world had been folded.

Giant trees rose in several points of that landscape, twisted and completely dried out.

Their trunks seemed petrified in a state before decomposition, without turning to dust or rotting. They remained there because the very laws that would make deterioration happen no longer worked.

The sky looked cracked into mirrors in many places, and fragments of light reflected in those cracks.

That was a world frozen in a cadaverous and deformed state.

Just as Aisha and Rygar’s research had indicated, the Beast World was no longer capable of producing anything.

A dead body does not circulate blood, and a dead world also ceases to fulfill its basic function.

It did not sustain cycles, did not transform matter, did not allow birth, growth, or natural death.

Everything was trapped in infertility.

If this had once been the Beast World, vibrant and full of vitality, now it looked like a world of death.

The two appeared through the portal atop an enormous piece of floating rock, suspended in the middle of nowhere because of one of the many errors produced by the surrounding space.

Thanks to Magical Isolation, the barrier around them blocked that distorted reality and preserved within itself the conditions of the Human World.

That made it possible for them to observe and analyze the conditions of that world safely.

For a few seconds, neither of them spoke.

Then Aisha seemed irritated.

Rygar looked at her and laughed.

"Looks like I won. Time here is achronic, not static."

Aisha snorted.

"It was pure luck. You yourself said you thought of that because you read it in a comic."

Rygar ignored the accusation and spoke with a triumphant air:

"A victory is a victory."

Aisha narrowed her eyes, but did not argue further. Rygar turned his gaze back to the dead world before them.

"Now it’s time to work."

With time in that place being nonsensical, they needed to be especially careful. If something went wrong, hundreds of years could pass in that world while mere seconds passed in the Human World.

----

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