Prologue
The End
Leon Castro was pretty much your average joe. White guy, 5’11, brown eyes, dirty blond hair, and weighing in at around 160lbs. He was a guy with dreams of making it big someday in the future but having no real plan as to how he was going to achieve it. But Leon did have one thing going for him. He’d found a niche on the internet making videos that had gotten him quite a big following in the past year or so. Enough so that he could use the ad revenue to continue making those videos and not have to work another job to keep his tiny little apartment in Norfolk Virginia. The content of his videos was quite easily summed up in just a few words… Theoretical Monster Biology.
Leon had always been into gaming, anime, and fantasy in general. But he had always also been very keen on physics and biology and pretty much how the natural world worked. And for some reason, one day out of the blue he’d decided to figure out how the biological makeup of one of his favorite monsters in fantasy would actually work. A Dragon. The problem had seemed easy enough. But what he soon discovered just with the dragon example was that they could never fly based on their physical structure. But he didn’t give up on imagining and creating the internal biology of a traditional western dragon that would actually work. It honestly only took Leon about a month to come up with his first fully explained “Monster Biology for Dummies” video and post it in his free time. Looking back on that first video Leon felt a cringe deep inside his gut thinking about how he had presented it and the amateurish feel of the video. But it was what had gotten him started.
Now Leon had over a hundred videos out that detailed the possible realistic biology of every creature in the monster hunter franchise, quite a few Pokémon, Xenomorphs, and even a few creatures from popular anime. His latest one had been the biological makeup of an owl bear. And the thing that set his videos apart from others who had done the same thing in the past was that he actually studied deeply into how it would all work and created detailed models of everything from the nervous system and cardiovascular systems of the creatures in question, to the pressure that their joints could withstand and how the muscle tissue connected to the skeletal system. And even what the skin, scales, and everything else was made out of. His videos pretty much described and detailed the creatures as if they were living things already.
Leon had actually gone to several college courses regarding biology and was constantly studying online to be able to make his videos better and more and more accurate. But right now was not really the time for Leon to be thinking about his meager accomplishments in life. Right now, he was sitting in the parking lot of his apartment building on a lawn chair while the city around him was burning, looking up at the sky through the haze of smoke where he could barely see the moon which was doing its duty of defending earth from the great beyond admirably but in vain at the moment. Leon was watching the end of the world coming with a half empty bottle of rye whisky in his hand while breathing in the scents of a city on fire.
What Leon could see in the sky was a giant dark orb beyond the moon. The orb was an object that had been discovered three months ago. It was roughly the size of earth. And composed of some kind of very dark, light absorbent, material which had kept it hidden from the occupants of earth until it was spotted in June of 2022. And by then it was far to late. The orb had been named The End. Because it truly was the end. You see, normal celestial objects which are zipping around out there are generally traveling at around 17 to 30 thousand miles per hour. The End was moving at a speed of nearly 75 thousand miles per second. Almost half the speed of light. And it was about to collide with Earth’s moon and keep right on going straight through the earth itself in about an hour. There was no time to save the world, there was no time to save even a select few humans by moving them off world. As that would simply have meant a longer slower death at the hands of the vacuum of space eventually.
No, this was The End. Not just of humanity. But of all life on Earth and as far as anyone knows, life in the solar system. This was it. And Leon was drunk as a skunk while watching the last spectacle he would ever be able to see. He took a deep pull of the already half empty bottle as he watched The End approaching.
* * *
Unknown to Leon, and in fact the majority of the world, there was a small group of individuals currently working at a frantic pace. Their location, a deep underground bunker under the famed Area 51. The bunker was absolutely massive and had been a location where the greatest minds of humanity, up until recently had been probing the deepest secrets of the universe. Now they were hastening to put the finishing touches on their current and final project. And what they were working on was considered the last possible solution to at least saving a tiny percentage of humanity. Within the hustle and bustle of men and women carrying boxes and moving crates one could easily see what this project was. Although they’d have no idea what it was they were looking at.
A large cuboid object that looked like it was made of metal, some 200 meters on its every face sat within an even larger ring of metal. The cuboid had a massive door into which crates, and crates of things were being loaded. The Cube, as it was aptly named was being loaded with samples of nearly every kind of domesticated crop and even preserved eggs and semen samples of every creature that the us government had been able to get their hands on. On board the Cube were facilities for cloning, among other things, for when it arrived at its destination. Its destination? Mars. The means of transport? The entirely untested and completely brand-new Einstein-Rosen bridge generator. The ring that surrounded The Cube was that device.
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The crew was already on board and ready for transport. They had fifty-four minutes before the moon was going to be obliterated by The End and it would take approximately thirty minutes finish loading the crates of supplies and lock down The Cube. Then another twenty minutes to charge and set off the Einstein-Rosen bridge generator.
Doctor Seth Hissle Octavius sat at his control panel for the bridge generator his fingers working furiously at the keyboard. He knew that this wasn’t going to work. The whole plan was screwed. It had never even had a chance of succeeding. The reason being? They didn’t actually have a way to target where the bridge would go. Or even if the opening would be where they wanted it. They knew they could make what was commonly called a wormhole from smaller scale experiments. But it was always random where both sides emerged. Depending on the amount of energy used the openings could occur anywhere from a few feet away from where they wanted it, to up to a mile away on their small-scale tests. Just looking over the amount of power that they were attempting to put through this set-up and basic mental maths told Seth that the entrance could literally open anywhere within a 100,000-mile radius of this location which meant that it was just as likely to open in empty space as it was to open here and actually take the Cube where they wanted it.
Seths last minute adjustments to the code had ensured that the opening would at the very least be within Earth’s atmosphere… hopefully. But there was no way to know where. He kept working against the clock, trying to save at least a piece of humanity was all that mattered.
When Seth heard the charging sequences commence, he knew that he was out of time. He looked up at the massive ring around the massive Cube and prayed that at least one person would survive. As he watched the countdown timer Seth found himself praying to a god that he had never believed in before. He still didn’t believe but he prayed anyways.
Glancing from the timer for the generator to the timer for their demise Seth realized that they were three minutes behind schedule. They were about to press the button with only a few seconds to spare before the moon was obliterated by a planet moving at nearly 75,000 Miles per second meaning that it would only be about three seconds after that that Earth would be annihilated as well. Oddly, Seth found himself wishing he could go up top and watch the moon be destroyed. He’d only get a second or so’s glimpse of it before he too was destroyed, but it would still be something to see.
The last few seconds of the timer elapsed, and the facility buzzed as the generator suddenly preformed its task. The power went out across the entirety of the bunker. And Seth Immediately knew that they had failed. Humanity was lost.
* * *
Meanwhile Leon watched the moon as it exploded in the sky overhead. Closing his eyes as the world around him was engulfed in the brilliant light of The End.
* * *
The system functions in universe 03-255-2-L detected an anomaly on one of its thousands of seven layered Dyson spheres. The anomaly was a spatial tunnel of unknown origin. Which was alarming as the system had expanded to all known universes nearly 980 Era’s ago. [An Era being the systems measurement of how long it takes an L-Class universe to develop naturally to the point of total and complete heat death.] [L-Class universe being the designation for a universe that is capable of sustaining life at any point in its development.]
The systems functions determined that a biological lifeform was coming through the tunnel but that its material composition was composed of negatively charged electrons and protons. Which was the Anti of all matter at the arrival destination. Normally the system would allow this to play out naturally, as it was not supposed to interfere with the decisions made by lifeforms. But the fact that it was arriving on one of the seven layered Dyson spheres and the fact that it was over a LayLine made it so that there was a greater than 75% chance that the lifeforms arrival and subsequent antimatter reaction with the environment would cause a chain reaction that would destroy the entirety of the seven layered Dyson sphere. That would result in the total extinction of trillions upon trillions of different lifeforms including over a million different sapient species. And that loss of life would be unacceptable.
The system engaged its emergency integration protocols and isolated the creature in a containment field as it came through the wormhole. While at the same time reaching through The Nothing to find the origin point of the wormhole. What it found was shocking.
An entire L-Class Multiverse that did not possess even an iota of mana, and the remains of the lifeform it had in containment’s home world. It had identified the creature as a human variant which was not odd. Human variants were not especially rare. What was odd was the human’s soul. It had never seen a soul that developed in a universe completely devoid of mana. It was honestly the single most massive soul that it had ever seen. And it was layered in a strange way like it had been reused millions of times without ever suffering any form damage. A soul that had been free to grow without restraint for possibly millions or billions of years.
And the craziest thing was that this human was not an oddity here. Judging by the massive cloud of debris that was its home world, and the trillions of souls that were in the debris field that was the human’s former planet. Even the animals around the world had all possessed souls like his. These creatures would be able to possess thousands of skills and grow them to heights that matched and surpassed many of the gods in the systems different universes.
The system immediately began universal integration protocols spinning off functions to begin saving this new multiverse from heat death. Its attention turning to the one responsible for saving an entire L-Class Multiverse from eventual extinction. This human needed to be rewarded and at the same time integrated. Rewards had to be commensurate to the actions performed to receive them. And the system was not sure how to approach rewarding someone for saving an entire universe. Let alone an entire multiverse.