You know the drill.

Eyes: opened.

Chest: Patt- huh?

Wait, hold on, there's actually something squishy there for once. I can actually see...gee, what is that? C cup? Isn't that above average?

"Hey, Trin, you know that stuff better than me, what size is-" I stop myself mid-sentence.

Trin isn't with me anymore, I stayed back there a little longer than expected. But I had to leave, I'm sure she'll be fine, she's a tough girl.

Anyway, C cup, that's...actually pushing against my shirt a little, and I don't have a bra. I use Material Solidification on parts of my shirt so it can properly contain my newly acquired feminine beauty.

What? It works, mostly. Listen, I had to use tape as a bra once and trust me, that's way worse. Anyway, let's actually look around and see where we ended up today!

We are...in a hotel hallway?

IN a hotel? That can't be right. I always spawn outside of buildings when possible, unless the entire universe is inside of something. Maybe it's a pocket dimension, that would make sense.

Ho, did you know there's a difference between universes and dimensions? Universes are massive souls, but dimensions are actually spaces separated from everything inside said universes - some inventories are pocket dimensions, for example- but I've never spawned inside a pocket dimension before, since I'm pretty sure my soul considers it "inside" too.

I'll be honest, I still don't know a lot about my soul's dimensional travel properties. I'm not the one who made it, and it's so deep inside my soul that examining it is near impossible without someone else doing it. Maybe that's a good thing, if I had access to the core of my soul I might make things worse just by experimenting. Some things are simply not meant to be touched.

Going back to the hotel hallway it's...a hallway, a narrow hallway with abstract paintings on the white walls, and between each painting there's a door going to what I assume is a room, there's a red carpet under me that covers the entire floor, and dim electric lights on the roof that illuminate all of it, repeat that for the entire hallway, a very long hallway actually that's...maybe normal for this universe?

Wait, no, I have to think a little harder about this. I spawned inside, which means EVERYTHING is inside, so if I get this right... ho no.

I knock on one of the doors, no response, I knock even harder, still nothing. No one is getting out of bed or telling me to stop, so I gently open the door.

There is another hallway behind the door, the same one.

I open another door, then another, then another, more of the exact same hallway, lights, carpets are behind, only the paintings seem to change ever so slightly.

We've got ourselves a rare spawn, everyone! A liminal space!

Right, so liminal space was a thing back on earth where it was a bunch of images of infinitely long hallways or something. And turns out there are universes like that! But they are extremely uncommon because they are kind of...antithetical to what universes are supposed to be.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

So, souls feed on emotions, memories and stories, the stronger they are, the more it feeds them. This isn't a metaphor by the way, it literally consumes them, the reason why people don't remember their past lives is because your soul used it as fuel, it doesn't care what those memories or emotions meant to you, only that it can eat it.

This is actually what experience is, it's what you literally experienced. When you kill a monster in a system, it rips off part of its memories and give it to you, this is why raising a monster farm will give less experience than wild monsters, because their life is less interesting when kept in captivity.

But what if you were to make a more...large scale farm? Say, an entire world worth of experience by creating your own little mortals to produce experience for you? That's what universes are, massive experience farms to keep the massive soul that is the universe self-sufficient.

Universes tend to form on accident more often than not, a soul somehow detaches itself from its original world, and then it's alone without a body in the void. A lot of things can happen at that point, they can end up "gravitating" towards another universe, or simply die out as they run out of experience to live on.

Or they make their own universe in a last act of desperation to survive, this requires the soul to have some degree of self awareness and memories that it can recreate in said universe, and as a reminder most souls will consume memories out of habit. A lot of things can go wrong when a universe is made, but once it starts being self-sufficient, it's pretty hard for it to starve again, it might die from other things though.

Which is why liminal spaces are a rare spawn, they don't make sense. Liminal spaces are what happens when a soul only had a very specific memory to build their universe upon. In that case, this universe only had a single memory of a hotel hallway, and it built an entire universe out of it because that's literally all it knew.

Now you might wonder, hey, how does a liminal space create experience if there's no one in it, and it's an endless expanse of the exact same thing?

That's the thing, it doesn't, it shouldn't anyway. It's a failed farm, universes like this should die out at top speed as they spend all their resources in the worst way imaginable. This leaves only two options for a place like that to exist, the first is that the soul was already massive and has energy to spare - unlikely, since massive souls tend to have multiple memories to build a universe upon. The second, and more likely option, is that the universe is newly born and is going to die soon as it hasn't yet run out of its very limited energy.

The thing that doesn't make sense is that I've always spawned in universes that had humans before in some shape or form, so it doesn't make sense for me to be here if that universe has nothing resembling a person, but my understanding of my own dimension hopping is very limited, so it's possible there's some other condition I'm unaware of.

But if this place is truly empty and it's going to die soon, there is actually something I'll be able to use it for.

Soul Bloat : DANGEROUS

Experience Level

ABOUT TO BURST

89%

Soul Vacuum BARELY CONTAINED

2079 s/ps

Memory Corruption

Above Average 16%

It's time to burn some experience.