A single wisp lit up the dark and musty halls of the laboratory. Gray was the first to leave the protective chamber of their elevator where a single lightbulb hung from above. Boris followed close behind, crouching down low, as if he were ducking beneath the invisible feelers of a monster that lay hiding in the darkness.

It felt like the entire laboratory was alive, and knowing that basic firearms were plain unusable because of some God’s decree made it only worse — as if the laboratory was eternally cursed.

He should’ve taken that as a sign that this place was not to be trampled upon. He was stepping into the domain of someone who would become a God through the most maniacal of ways.

“Where are we?”

“In the deepest shell of the underground laboratory, the server room,” Gray answered.

“You know this place!?”

“I’ve only stepped in here once, and from my experience, there’s one thing you should learn — that in this world, silence is worth its weight in gold.”

Boris fell silent. The two stood still.

They heard a wet footstep.

He wanted to run away and into the elevator. If the elevator didn’t work, he’d go out of his way to crawl up the shaft like a rat. If guards caught him and summarily executed him for treason against the Empire, that death in the gallows would be better than whatever awaited them in the lab.

Just what did await them?

Boris knew a touch of magic, but only a smidge — enough to do the absolute basics. He went ahead and summoned a wisp, sent it down the maze-like halls of what looked like computer terminals, and watched as its light grew smaller and smaller. He had to squint to keep an eye on that glowing wisp, only to find it gone after a blink.

It was dumbfounding. He felt like an idiot for ever entering the lab, even more for trespassing past the Imperial soldiers. He felt the most stupid when his mind fell on Isabelle, who got out of ‘exploration duty’, despite being the one who roped him into this mess in the first place.

Let’s be heroes, just this once, she said. It’ll be proof that he was hero material, she implied. It was all unsubtle and obvious manipulation on her end, to get him to go on a mission she wasn’t willing to take part in.

Risking his neck for some random kid — he found it was the stupidest thing he could’ve ever chosen to do.

The second stupidest thing a person could do was walk forwards into the maze of terminals. That man was Gray who, sword in hand, marched on forwards.

“There is nothing to fear,” Gray said. “I, as a man, have the duty of cleansing this evil place.”

He took slow strides, with Boris following behind. Boris swallowed his fears and came along, carrying his sword with both hands and pressing his back against Gray’s with the belief that Gray would lead him down the right path.

Gray was fearless. His sword was infused with fire, glowing a gentle orange through the catacombs. Every step of the way, he could hear the wet footsteps of creatures lurking in the shadows.

Strangely enough, those creatures didn’t attack. Boris caught a glimpse of one just simply… sitting atop one of the towering terminals, watching from above with deep, emerald green eyes that lit up with the flaming sword.

They were nearly silent. They were stalking monsters, lurking in the night, always one step behind. It was as if they were waiting for either one of the two to slip up.

“There is nothing to fear,” Gray repeated. “These monsters… are not the creatures you are thinking of.”

Boris refused to speak under these stalked circumstances. Gray was understanding enough to continue the one sided conversation.

“I don’t know what went through his mind when making them, but these creatures are the result of his experimentations. It’s not their fault that they were born this way, or that they look the way they do, or that their intellect has been… neutered.”

“N - Neutered?”

“Their brains don’t develop normally, leaving them stunted. It was a result of the shoddy testing and rushed development. If he had spent a bit more time and had some more patience, maybe they’d properly develop past infancy. Unfortunately, because they’re trapped in these rejected bodies, they’ve been locked in this labyrinth to be forgotten for eternity.”

Boris had no words. Just what the Hell did all that mean? He wanted to ask more, but seeing the green eyes peer out from the darkness made him fall silent. Surrounding them were not monsters, but victims made by a monster — victims that would never, ever develop the brain capacity to realize what sort of messed up creatures they were.

It was like staring into the eyes of a comatose patient. They were human, sure, but in every sense of the word they were like corpses.

Gray marched through the mess of a server room, but to Boris’ confusion, he went out of his way to make a straightforward path by pushing the wheeled terminals and servers around. It was like he was untangling the maze, making a path towards the door on the other end of the room.

Boris saw small, pale hands reach for the door, grasping for the handle but being unable to open it. Those arms extended from the darkness, slipping away into hiding when he approached them.

“If I were you, I’d forget everything you saw here,” Gray said. “It’s better for you and your sanity to discard these memories. They’re not worth keeping.”

Boris peered into the darkness. Those green eyes peered back.

“I feel bad for these creatures, being locked up in here for Goddess knows how long.”

“The best thing you can do is allow them to fade into irrelevance. They have no place in the world. To help them is to bring them to a world they don’t belong in.”

Gray didn’t look back. He marched on forwards and into the next room.

Aria found herself pushed further and further into the laboratory. With every room they passed through, a heavy, reinforced door locked behind them. It was like being led into another prison cell, one after another. A strange, metallic smell filled the laboratory where the samples became progressively more unsettling.

They slowly grew larger, taking up bigger tanks and growing into their more mature forms akin to the creatures at the bottom of the sea. They were still controlled through mana input, but peering into the glass, she worried that they’d eventually break out with raw strength.

That’s when she made her way into the prison section, where cells were built into the wall. The previous parts of the lab were sleek and polished, but this part was rough — as if it had been carved out hastily. The cells were identical to the ones on the battleship, decked out with anti magic seals, anti alchemy charms and tough steel bars.

Cinni brushed past the cells, ran her hand against the bar and finally unlatched the lock.

“Normally I’d lock you inside for future use, but I’ve prepared things beforehand this time,” Cinni said, and she shut the door, moving forward and through the rows of cells. Before them was a doorway that led to the final destination.

“Careful,” Cinni warned. “From this point on, you will witness a world shattering truth — truth that will separate you from every single other living being in this wretched world.” and Cinni leaned in, peering into Aria’s eyes to ask, “Are you willing to give up your humanity to learn the truth?”

“Do I have a choice? What if I say no?”

“Then I’ll blindfold you and bring you in,” Cinni answered. “After all, you are my test subject.”

“Then in that case, I have no choice but to accept this ‘truth’.”

Cinni smiled, then unlocked the door which strangely had only a simple lock keeping it shut. Stepping in, Aria saw it.

Sitting in the center of a room filled to the brim with protective seals and charms, on a table, sat a blank slate made of stone. From a distance, it’d look like a normal slate, but upon closer look, Aria felt something off.

The slate. It was otherworldly.

Everything in this world was made up of mana. The slate, however…

She shut her eyes, hovered her hand over the stone slate, and felt nothing. There wasn’t an ounce of mana inside of it.

“Tell me,” Cinni asked. “Don’t you think it’s a bit strange that we live to… level up? Don’t you think it’s odd we can see bars and stats? Isn’t it weird that we collect EXP to become stronger? That’s completely unnatural, don’t you think?”

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“What are you saying?”

“What does EXP mean? You’d think it's an abbreviation of experience points, but you couldn’t be further from the truth. EXP is a mistranslation. The true translation would be E x P. Otherwise known as ‘Existence’ and ‘Projection Percentage’. When you’re born, you are given a determined existence number. Existence is the total experience points you have and the projection percentage is a multiplicative value unique to all beings. Your E times P determines your level.”

“Are you telling me EXP is a lie?”

“Not a lie, but an obscuration of the truth.”

Cinni raised a hand, revealing a potion she had kept on herself. It was a bottled fire spell, and without an ounce of hesitation, she took it and shattered it next to the slate.

The fire spell escaped out the glass, spilling out onto the slate. Fire spells had an effect on the moisture of textures like stone, causing them to break and shatter, but when the flames dissipated, Aria noticed something strange.

The slate was untouched.

“What is this thing?” Aria asked, and Cinni answered with a shrug.

“As far as I know, it’s an object not of this world. You may not have noticed, but some of the glass shards of the bottle are gone.”

Aria took a closer look, and to her shock, she was right. Some of the shards had just… disappeared.

“You know what happened, don’t you?” Aria asked “Where did they go?”

“They didn’t go anywhere, for they never existed in the first place.”

“Excuse me? You retroactively ‘erased’ them?’

“I did no such thing,” Cinni answered. “The shards that touched the slate never existed. They never existed in the first place.”

“But —”

Cinni stopped her. She leaned in, very close, enough to see the pores on her face. Her voice came out in whispers, as if she didn’t want the slate to hear her.

“The slate doesn’t care about petty things like time, continuity and all that. The slate takes whatever is thrown at it… and erases it, permanently. What it takes does not come back. It is an anomaly. It can be either the greatest weapon mankind has ever seen, or the catalyst for the end of the world as we know it.”

Cinni leaned in, her eyes a gentle bloodshot red.

“Go ahead,” she whispered. “Throw anything you want at it. Any spell, any weapon — anything you want. I guarantee the slate will erase all traces of it from existence.”

Aria stumbled back, bumping into the door which was locked behind her. The room was small — enough to suffocate anyone overwhelmed by the presence of that reality shattering slate.

Cinni simply stood, looking down on Aria. She still looked gentle and sweet, but like the slate itself, her outside presence was wiped away clean — leaving behind an unsettling, otherworldliness.

Cinni was not human. Even if she was made of flesh and bone, that didn’t change the fact that she wore the skin of a person.

“What are you going to do to me?” Aria asked, pressed up against the door. “What did you do to the other kids?”

“Other kids?”

“The other kids! The guards all talked about other kids being locked up in those cells, only to be dragged down here!” Aria cried, her calm demeanor shattering like the bottle, her eyes wide, her body filled to the brim with adrenaline and fear. “What did you do to them!? Where are they!?”

“They don’t exist.”

Cinni peered over to the slate, then back at Aria.

“Did the guards talk to you about any of the children who were kidnapped and kept in those cages? Could they… perhaps… give an eyewitness? Could they testify that there really were kids there? Has anyone actually seen a child being brought into this laboratory other than you?”

“They —”

“Even if they did see, that would have all been undone,” Cinni said, cutting her off mid sentence. “For you see, the slate erases. Permanently. Those children who were supposedly brought in here, after supposedly touching the slate, were definitely erased from existence, leaving not a smidge of their consequential actions behind. Every action they took in life was undone. Every box they opened now shut, the contents made unknown.”

Those erased by the slate had their actions… undone. Aria found only one example of a discrepancy against that theory of Cinni’s.

“The cage!” Aria cried. “There were dents and scorch marks on the inside of the cage you transported me in! If those kids were erased, then all their consequential actions would have been erased too, right!? If that’s the case, then why are those marks left behind!?”

“Those marks were the consequence of my actions,” Cinni answered, dismissively. “I had the SDS go and test the cage, to make sure it was functional for transporting potential children. Judging by the fact you hadn’t escaped, it seems like it worked like a charm.”

“Then don’t you have records!?” Aria asked. “Shouldn’t you have records of all the test subjects you used!?”

Cinni pulled out a notebook. Written in it were the names of seven people.

“Here's your proof. Their existences weren’t completely erased,” Aria said, but Cinni simply shook her head no.

“I’m afraid these are nothing but random scribbles,” she answered. “There’s no proof linking these seven names to children who were supposedly erased by the slate.”

“Then what’s going to happen to me!? Are you going to erase me too!?”

Cinni smiled gently, but behind it was malice combined with a terrifying curiosity, like a child picking apart a spider they caught, prying off its legs and splitting its abdomen from its body.

“My dear test subject, there’s nothing to fear. I’ve done several tests with the slate, and I’ve calculated the E and P values needed to be resistant to its effects. You, Aria, have the qualifications necessary. Your existence value is very low, while your projection percentage is wonderfully high — far higher than the average child. Children naturally have higher P values that gradually drop with age, which is why people commonly believe children level up faster than adults.”

“What are you going to do to me!?”

Cinni’s eyes turned cold. Her smile faded. “You talk too much.”

Aria could see it. Cinni’s eyes transformed. They weren’t ocular organs designed to take in the world, but terminals of a computer. Lines of text ran back and forth, moving through files upon files until it landed on an executable file. From there, it launched a malicious virus of a program — a hostile takeover.

“Aria, enough talk. Do as you were designed to.”

The file loaded, plunged into her brain and took over. Aria watched as her body moved without her permission. Her legs robotically shifted, bringing her closer to the all-erasing slate. Her left arm reached out. Her right one laid limp, unable to move.

“You know, I recognized you the moment you stepped inside,” Cinni said. “You were one of my old test subjects, the one that escaped. I thought you died out in the wilderness, all alone. When the SDS stationed outside of Gray’s dungeon reported that you were still alive, I was overjoyed.”

“A test subject?” Aria asked.

“Not just any test subject, but the most important one — a home grown homunculus, made with the DNA from the hair strand I stole off that Imperial bodyguard, the swordsman that rescued you. I suppose you could say he is your father, or biological clone — whichever you feel most comfortable with.”

It was the man from her memory. She knew he had some biological relation to her, but to hear that she was a homunculus created from a strand of his hair was something else entirely. The weight on her controlled body became unbearable. Her knees felt like they’d collapse in on themselves and burst into a cloud of pure mana.

“The swordsman? What happened to him? Is he still alive?”

“Wrath took care of him,” Cinni answered with a smirk.

Hearing that, it felt like the whole world had collapsed around her. Finally, she reached the truth on what happened to the swordsman, only to find that he received Wrath’s touch of death. If he was the one to rescue her the first time, there’d be no one left to save her now.

Her body moved on its own, and with her wrist let go, she felt herself growing closer to the slate.

Now, with defeat practically branded to her body, she let herself go, disappearing from her body to exist only in her mind. With it, she thought everything over.

She lived a life of isolation, never being raised by parents and never being taught how to quite be a human — fitting for a homunculus like her. She lived her whole life in an abandoned hut in the woods, reading the stories of villains and heroes, only to find herself attracted to the position of evil. After all, the villains were always more interesting than the heroes.

Then, she found herself magnetically pulled by the presence of Gray, a strange man who looked like he came out of a fairy tale, and found herself given the position of ‘Dungeon Keeper’. She wasn’t quite sure, but looking back, it was probably out of pity or out of Gray’s own sense of humor.

She found herself in the position of villainess, only to pity the few monsters she faced. First was Troy, a pity hire who became her stone wall. Then was Isabelle who would be the shield that would protect the dungeon from alchemy.

She had all the pieces together, only to be met by Wrath, the SDS and now dragged into Cinni’s dungeon.

Aria tried to shut her eyes, but when she placed her palm onto the slate, she felt nothing — causing her to open them in surprise.

The world around her turned to black and white. Cinni stood next to her, unmoving, as if she were frozen in time. Aria pulled away from the slate to reach out and touch her, and when she brushed a hand against the woman’s face, it phased through her. She found her feet weren’t touching the ground right, floating above the floor about half an inch.

Behind the door of the chamber stood Wrath who kept it shut, though that didn’t really help. Aria could simply phase through the door, through Wrath and through to the other side. She peeked back to find an odd scene.

She was still standing and touching the slate. Rather, a second version of herself was. It was like her soul and body were split apart. The slate itself, which was blank before, had changed. Etched into the stone tablet was a strange sight. Lines of text filled the slate, phasing off the screen of the tablet and rising up into the air as more and more text was written.

Every action that occurred in the world had been recorded through text, from the most mundane like ‘human990845 gained [E=12 x P=15] from killing slime_Weak with sword_Steel[pMultiplierValue=02]’ to the most intricate like ‘human040112 used alchemy_Formula[au1:22] and produced pure_Gold[weight=228_Grams].

The lines of text had paused when she touched the slate along with the rest of the world. It was as if she put a pause to this strange game calculated with numbers and commands and all that. It was jarring to see every action reduced to simple code, code no human should even begin to understand.

It was like seeing reality stripped bare, like seeing the wood of a bark-ripped tree, like the body of a hairless dog. It just wasn’t right. She appraised herself to find something strange.

Her stats were all rising. She could see her own E value rise and rise, as if the slate was pouring pure mana into her form. She watched as her level rose, rising up in quick succession to 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 50, 70, 99, 120, 150…

It was an exponential growth and she could feel it in her own body, how the mana flows through her veins, escaping out her fingertips as little glow flies.

Then, she hit the level cap of ???. Her HP, MP and all her stats reached ???.

Her fingertips turned pale, then began to disintegrate. It was as if her body, too infused with mana. She had reached a stack overflow. Having tapped into the ever generating source of mana that was the blank slate, her body, her form, the entire world around her was forced to do the one thing it could to prevent an overflow that could rip the entire system apart.

And that was to reset.