The simulation was not a warning. It was a death sentence.
I stood in the silent, empty throne room of a dead Lich King, the master of a dead floor, and I was staring into the abyss of my own, inevitable damnation.
The game was rigged. Utterly, perfectly, and inescapably rigged.
If I failed to collect the fragments, I would eventually be hunted down and consumed by The Architect, The Static, or the Watcher.
If I succeeded in collecting the fragments, I would become a mindless, eternal jailer for a being of infinite power.
Victory was slavery. Defeat was annihilation.
For a long, silent moment, the sheer, cosmic hopelessness of it washed over me. Every move I had made, every victory I had claimed, had just been another step towards an inescapable, conceptual cage.
And then, the moment passed.
The hopelessness was burned away by the cold, hard, sovereign fire of my own, indomitable will.
"Fuck. That."
The words echoed in the silent, icy throne room, a declaration of war against causality itself.
The Architect had a plan. The Static had a plan. The Watcher had a plan. The Creator had a plan.
It was time I stopped reacting to their plans and started executing my own.
I looked at the problem with the cold, detached logic of an engineer. The trap was the reunification. The final, seventh key, 'The Primeval Edict', was the trigger. As long as the seven fragments remained separate, the Creator's prison remained locked, and my own soul remained my own.
The solution was simple. I would gather six of the seven Main Cores, uniting them under my own will. I would become a being of near-omnipotence, a god of Chaos, Time, Law, Space, and more.
And I would leave the final, seventh piece, the Edict, forever out of reach. I would let it hunt the Watcher for all eternity, a perpetual motion machine of vengeance that would keep two of my enemies occupied forever.
I would be a god with a single, self-imposed limitation. An emperor who refused to complete his own crown, because he knew the crown was poisoned.
It was a perfect, elegant, and sovereign solution.
But there was one, glaring flaw in my new grand design.
Silvana.
The other Main Core user. The Aethernova Codex. The agent of The Architect. Her primary directive was still the reunification. She would never stop hunting the fragments. She would never agree to my plan of eternal stalemate.
To achieve my perfect, unbound future, I had to deal with her. Permanently.
But she was on Floor 2, a world I had left behind, a queen in her own right now, surrounded by the holy armies of the Alabaster Legion. A direct assault would be a messy, protracted war.
I needed a different approach. I needed a scalpel, not an axe.
I turned to my two Echos, my perfect, loyal servants. "Silvana is a creature of pure logic," I mused, thinking aloud. "Her only weakness is a paradox. A flaw in her perfect calculations. Lyra was the first. The ghost of her mother's betrayal was the second. I need a third. A final, undeniable proof that her master, The Architect, is not the perfect, logical being she believes it to be."
A flaw in the Creator's design? Lia's voice was a clean, sharp thought in my mind. Such a thing should not be possible.
"Everything is possible," I countered. "You just have to know where to look."
I opened my System's interface. I had just absorbed the Infinity Shard. I had access to the memories of its previous Administrator, the tragic protagonist from another universe. And in those memories, I found what I was looking for.
A secret. A piece of forbidden lore that not even the Watcher, with its millennia of observation, had ever uncovered.
The previous user of the Infinity Shard had not just been a champion of his own Tower. He had been a scholar. And he had discovered a hidden truth about the nature of the "sponsors."
The gods, the demons, The Architect, The Static… they were not all prisoners of the same, original game.
Some of them were newer. Intruders. Beings from other, rival 'System-Verses' who had broken into this Tower, this cosmic prison, to plunder its power for themselves.
And the memory file contained a single, explosive piece of proof.
It was a recording of a secret meeting. A pact. Between The Architect… and a scouting party from a completely different, hostile cosmic entity. The Architect, the ultimate being of order and control, was actively colluding with an outside power. It was not a jailer. It was a traitor, selling out its own prison for a chance at power in a different game.
This was the paradox that would break Silvana's faith. The proof of her god's imperfection.
"Lia," I commanded. "I am sending you a memory file. You will be my envoy. Go to the Second Floor. Find Silvana. Show her this. Do not fight her. Do not threaten her. Simply show her the truth."
I was not sending an assassin. I was sending a single, undeniable piece of data.
And if she refuses to see the logic? Lia asked.
"Then you will give her a second message," I said, a cold, hard smile on my face. "You will tell her that I have just conquered the 77th floor. Tell her that I now possess the Infinity Shard. And tell her that I am now coming for her. She can either face me as an enemy, clinging to a false god. Or she can join me, as an equal, and we can take our combined revenge on the gods who have played us both for fools."
It was an ultimatum. An offer of alliance, baked into a declaration of war.
Lia vanished in a shimmer of light, my perfect, loyal ambassador on her way to shatter my rival's world.
I was left alone in the silent, dead throne room, my mind already turning to the next phase.
My shameless System, ever the opportunist, chose this moment of quiet, cosmic contemplation to issue a new whim, a reflection of my new, grand ambition.
[SOVEREIGN'S WHIM: A NEW PET PROJECT]
[Description: You have conquered this floor. You have a plan to neutralize your primary rival. Your power is reaching its theoretical limit within the confines of the Tower's rules. It is time to start thinking bigger.]
[Objective: Use your 'Creation Engine', combined with your authority over 'Space' from the Infinity Shard. Your goal is no longer to create a mere artifact. It is time to create a 'home'.]
[Forge a 'Sovereign's Seed'. A pocket dimension, a nascent universe, completely unbound from the Tower's laws and reality. A place where your own will is the only physics that matters. Your first, true step to becoming a Creator in your own right.]
[Reward: 'The Sovereign's Sanctum' (Pocket Dimension - Tier 1), +50,000 SP for successfully breaking the laws of multiversal real estate.]
The System was right. Why play in someone else's prison when I could start building my own paradise?
But as I began to gather the immense, conceptual energy needed for such a creation, a new, unforeseen twist emerged.
A message. Not from my System. Not from an ally.
It was from the Tower's own, impartial Game Master OS. A universal announcement, but this one was different. It was not a quest or a warning. It was a… game update.
[SYSTEM PATCH 7.7.1 DEPLOYED.]
[Developer's Note: Greetings, contestants. We have noticed a significant destabilization in the core game mechanics due to the actions of several… unforeseen anomalies. To restore balance and ensure a more engaging player experience, we are introducing a new, limited-time game mode.]
[NEW GAME MODE ACTIVATED: 'THE NEXUS CLASH'.]
[All seven 'Main Core' fragments have now been located. Their locations will now be permanently visible to all Main Core Administrators on the universal map.]
[The hunt is on. The first Administrator to successfully acquire all seven fragments will be declared the 'Victor' of this game cycle.]
[And to make things more interesting… the final, seventh fragment, 'The Primeval Edict', has just finished its primary hunt. It has successfully located and 'deleted' its target, the rogue sub-routine 'The Watcher'.]
[Its new, primary directive is now active. It is no longer hunting. It is returning home.]
[Its destination: The prize room of the 'Nexus Clash'. The first Administrator to reach the final floor of the Tower will be able to claim it.]
The Game Masters, the gods of this prison, had just gotten bored. They had seen our cold war of schemes and decided it was bad for ratings.
They had just turned our secret, cosmic war for the fate of reality… into a goddamn season of battle royale. And the final, ultimate weapon was now the grand prize.