The instant Xavier returned through the hole in reality back to his version of the seven-hundred-and-fiftieth floor, he was seized by several System notifications—kill notifications for all the S Grade True Dragons he’d personally had a hand in damaging, and a notification telling him he’d finally cleared the wave that had comprised every one of the Champions who’d chosen to fight for the Empire of Servitude’s armada.
The armada which, of course, had been utterly destroyed.
Dealing with the Void Being alongside nineteen-hundred-and-ninety-nine other versions of him had been incredibly easy. The poor thing had been attracted by the myriad holes in reality, then the moment it had seen how many Xaviers were there, it had tried to flee.
It hadn’t gotten far.
The many versions of him didn’t want to linger in the void for too long, worried they might attract more Void Beings. As powerful as they were, the void held powers that dwarfed their own. And the longer they stayed, the more likely they were to get swarmed.
It wasn’t only Void Beings they had to worry about either. There were Wanderers out there, and other Interdimensional Beings.
The Interdimensional Dragon itself lurked somewhere out there, in the depths of the void.
But there had been a few things they’d needed to do while they were there. The explosion from the destruction of the Empire of Servitude’s armada had to be neutralised, else the entire planet—hell, the entire Galadsean solar system—would be lost.
Together, they were able to come up with a plan that sorted out the mess, siphoning the energy through a portal strong enough to take it, pushing the energy outward into the deep dark of space where it wouldn’t do a single being harm. They’d done this for all two thousand different versions of the seven-hundred-and-fiftieth floor.
That wasn’t the only thing they had to sort out, either. There was the problem of the hidden core. The Xaviers hadn’t wanted a single one of the S Grade True Dragons to remain alive. The smarter play might have been to examine that hidden core while one of the dragons still lived, but despite all the crazy risks they were used to taking, this wasn’t one they were willing to make.
The S Grade True Dragon’s body hadn’t been completely destroyed, however. In fact, none of their bodies had, and the Xaviers had access to a fount of knowledge through their mental constructs. With the psychic link connecting them all, they could combine their concentration and focus in a way that Xavier had never realised was possible. He was used to splitting his mind into many, many parts. He was even used to putting a slice of his consciousness into each of the drones he had summoned and looking at something from many different perspectives.
But this was different. He didn’t need to split his mind to observe from two thousand different perspectives, and instead of being split, everything was amplified.
They pulled in several different S Grade True Dragon corpses, experimenting on each of them. With two-thousand corpses, they had a lot of room for error. Some of the corpses were dissected, their energy channels tracked physically. Others were examined by the combined power of all of their Immortal Soul lenses working in unison. Though the S Grade True Dragon was dead, and the energy inside its cores was effectively dissipating into the aether, the energy hadn’t completely disappeared, and its cores were still very much intact.
Those cores, when reached through dissection, were completely destroyed whenever they were touched. Without energy cycling through them, or a consciousness to control them, the cores had become incredibly fragile. The energy inside them was so faint it was hard to examine them through the use of an Immortal Soul lens alone.
And none of the cores that they had found or could feel through the Immortal Soul lens were out of the ordinary. Every single one of those cores was a normal Denizen core, not the hidden core they’d felt the S Grade True Dragon use.
They dissected over two hundred of the dragons before they were finally able to remove the cores safely, but they still didn’t have any luck locating that hidden core. It could be that the hidden core had been destroyed when the S Grade True Dragon had been killed, but Xavier didn’t think so. None of the Xaviers did.
They continued their search.
Days turned to weeks, turned to months. Then years passed with them all hovering inside the void together. Though they did not wish to linger inside the void with the risk of Void Beings coming being so high, this wasn’t a search they were simply going to abandon—not unless they had to.
The Xaviers began searching through the S Grade True Dragon in another way. The concept of the core being hidden led them down the path of wondering if the core wasn’t necessarily a core at all. What if it was more like a pocket space? What if whatever energy the dragon had been pulling from actually came from another plane or “phase” of reality?
The Xaviers had, after all, recently come to the discovery that there were far more planes of reality than they’d realised. Even Roln, the “all-knowing” dead Wanderer hadn’t known about the plane of reality where that Astral Soul resided.
They still didn’t know much of anything about that plane.
More Void Beings came while they remained in the void. Void Beings that were easily destroyed. All of the Void Beings that made their way to the two thousand holes in reality were strong. They would have to be strong to disregard the time dilation fields. But none of them were strong enough to disregard their combined strength.
Thus, the search for the hidden core continued with the occasional minor interruption.
Over the time they spent in the void, their psychic link only grew in strength, their combined thoughts becoming a mind of its own. Xavier wouldn’t have gone so far as to call it a hive mind, as a hive mind supposed there was either one ruler of the hive, or that the individual members of the hive couldn’t work individually if they so wished—and neither of those things were the case.
Still, it was a strange state of being. Though while it was strange, Xavier couldn’t say that it was bad. Actually, he found it incredibly uplifting. There was something amazing about being able to think as one with so many different beings—so many different hims.
It made him wonder just what they all might be capable of, and what they might be capable of if there were even more of them.
What about ten thousand Xaviers? A hundred thousand? Or a million?
Hell, what about trillions?
That number was hard to fathom even with their combined strength of thought.
When they had exhausted all of their known ways to examine the S Grade True Dragon’s corpse, they started pulling memories from its brain. This was something that was very difficult to do from a corpse. Extracting memories from something living? That was easy enough, assuming you could overpower the being’s mind. But when their mind was dead, inert, and their brain severely damaged from the attack that killed it?
Well, then things became rather difficult.
But that didn’t mean it didn’t work.
Good thing Arrack’s memory mages didn’t know how to extract memories from my corpse, else I wouldn’t have survived his capture…
Contemplating his escape from the A Grade Arrack was a big part of the reason he’d decided he needed to kill every single one of the S Grade True Dragons in the first place. As confident as he was, he didn’t want to fall into the same trap Arrack had—sparing an enemy because he thought there was no way that enemy would be able to turn around and defeat him.
The memories were incredibly disjointed, but they were there. With their powerful combined mind, the Xaviers were able to piece the memories together. They spent a long time recreating those memories and examining the S Grade True Dragon’s thought patterns—patterns that didn’t appear to be cohesive at all. It was as though there had been five distinct minds within that one brain, though four of those minds were significantly weaker than the last.
He supposed that must have been the remnants of the individual dragonkins who’d transformed into the True Dragon.
As they examined the dragon’s mind, they couldn’t stop a traitorous part of their own conjoined mind from wondering how powerful they might be if they made the transformation themselves. A thought that had already occurred to Xavier when he’d first realised what the True Dragon was. Their minds would work in concert far better than the four dragonkins had. But those thoughts were quickly dashed when they examined the mind that won out. The True Dragon was simply too primal in a way that was overbearing. It slaved the others minds to its will, slowly eating them away until they would be no more, and that final mind looked nothing like what it had come from.
Besides, versions of Xavier had already made the mistake of going through this transformation in the past—that was where the Interdimensional Dragon had come from in the first place. They had clearly not survived the transformation intact.
So the Xaviers each vowed that this was a path none of them would ever pursue.
In studying the dead beast’s memories—harvested from hundreds of different corpses to strengthen the data they put together—they were able to piece together a rudimentary understanding of what the hidden core actually was.
When they had, it became clear that it wasn’t something they would be able to assemble while inside the void.
And so, each of the Xaviers had returned to their versions of the seven-hundred-and-fiftieth floor. Xavier flew down to the planet Galadsea. A planet that was now safe from the Empire of Servitude and the Champions that had chosen to fight for it.
The floor wasn’t finished yet. Though Xavier had killed every Denizen in every wave that was yet to come, those waves hadn’t been initiated by the System. Xavier wasn’t yet sure what that meant. Perhaps the System would adjust and have the floor finish early. Perhaps the floor would run until the very last wave would have come down to the planet. If it was the latter, he wouldn’t stick around long enough to find out.
But unless the System was about to pull him out of this floor and place him back in the Staging Room of the Tower of Champions, there were things here he still wished to do.
Xavier went in search of Queen Aecia. Before he’d returned from the void, he’d cancelled out the incredibly powerful time dilation field that he’d had active. There was a part of him that wanted to hold onto that field, but he also wanted to be in sync with the time dilation field that the other Xaviers possessed when they returned to their seven-hundred-and-fiftieth floors.
They all still remained in contact through the Communication Stone channels, though thus far none of them had said anything.
When Xavier found Queen Aecia, he enveloped the woman into his time dilation field, knowing that an identical scene would be playing out in the other nineteen-hundred-and-ninety-nine versions of this floor.
Usually, when Xavier finished a floor of the Tower of Champions, he knew for a fact that he would never see the people of that floor ever again. But things had changed when he’d gained the ability to portal to different universes. Now, he could travel back to the exact universe he’d experienced that floor in again if he wished. Though even with that power, it wasn’t something he’d ever bothered to do.
That would soon change, because he very much intended to return to this universe again.
Xavier had spent a great deal of time on this floor, more time than he’d ever spent on any floor—even if that time had been inside time dilation fields, it had still been real. He’d gifted the people of this world incredible powers that they wouldn’t otherwise have if not for him, powers that no one in their universe would possess. And he’d gotten to know them.
He wasn’t about to abandon them.
In fact, he had plans for them. This world, and the other nineteen-hundred-and-ninety-nine ones just like it, were going to be a part of an experiment.
Xavier was going to teach Queen Aecia how to hop from one universe to another.
The two-thousand versions of this world were about to become interconnected in a way that Xavier hoped would ensure they were protected from any new threat that came their way.
He was very interested to see what kind of society this interconnectedness built.