Lewis was confused about what was happening as he got back up, the white space around him gradually filling with black cracks as the world itself seemed to be breaking apart. Lewis thought he might be hallucinating or that this was some sort of optical illusion, as his brain struggled to comprehend a crack in reality itself.
Yet the moment those dark cracks widened enough, a sense of danger spiked within Lewis and a coldness overcame him, as if he was standing out in the open in the middle of winter, his body instinctively shying away from those cracks, yet they surrounded him utterly, he couldn't even tell how far away from him they were as the very concept of space and distance seemed to have become broken in here.
He tried moving away from the closest dark fracture, but inside this white space, it was hard to tell if he was moving at all, as there was nothing to measure distance, yet he seemed to be sliding closer and closer to the dark fracture in space despite running as fast as he could away from it. It almost felt like he was on a slow-moving treadmill that would hand him over to that chilling darkness no matter how hard he tried to get away.
But the closer he got, the more the darkness began affecting him. It was nothing more than an urge to run and a bone-deep cold at first, but soon a physical pressure began latching onto him, like he was being sucked into the slowly growing darkness. And throughout it all, a system message was silently waiting for his attention.
Realizing that all his efforts were being wasted trying to escape this space-breaking fracture, he turned his attention back to the system in hopes that it would get him out of here.
Please select your starting class from the list of curated options.
- Warrior (heavy, medium, light)
- Rogue
- Mage
- Archer
- Healer
While running at full speed, but still being sucked towards the fracture, Lewis hurriedly selected the mage class without much thought. He had never been much of a muscle freak nor a fighting maniac, so warrior was out. He didn't see the point in rogue since he had bad experiences with being forced to sneak around, and he had no experience with a bow, nor did he want to rely on the protection of others and inevitably be taken advantage of, so he refused to even consider the healer class.
That left mage as the logical decision, plus he had always dreamed of using magic, and flinging spells at his enemies sounded a lot safer than facing them head-on. Especially if creatures were going to become larger, like the rats and the crow he saw.
Mentally selecting the option, he felt the pressure on his body increase drastically as it went from pulling him backward to actively crushing him.
Pain flared all over his body as the pressure increased, blood vessels popping and skin tearing as the black fracture tightened its hold over him. A scream escaped his lips as he tried to fight back, but his legs buckled beneath him, and he crumbled to the ground. It was only then that he noticed he wasn't being dragged backward; instead, it was space itself that seemed to be getting deformed, his body tearing and snapping as it was being warped and mutilated, as if the world was a sheet of paper being crunched up into a ball, distorting the picture that is Lewis within it.
He tried to focus on the system message with his tear-filled eyes, the pressure on his body having gone from zero to a hundred in a single second, but instead of a way to escape this death trap he had walked into, the message simply displayed a single screen.
Assigning Mage class in progress...
Please stand by, this procedure may cause varying degrees of pain, but the host's health and safety are guaranteed.
That message seemed like a slap in the face, considering his current situation, his body being actively torn apart as his vision darkened and he heard the loud sound of a bone snapping, his arm having twisted the wrong way.
Yet despite the exponentially increasing pressure, Lewis wasn't being pulled into the fracture in space; the cracks simply seemed to expand endlessly without appearing to get closer or farther away, something that appeared utterly reality-bending, but so was the fact that Lewis was being ripped to pieces by an invisible force simply for being close to something that seemed to be able to freely break the most basic laws of reality.
But Lewis didn't even have time to curse himself for walking through that damned portal before his skull imploded and he knew no more.
***
Observer N°29Y6F9NZ0 was working tirelessly from one staging room to the next, observing the new species introduced by this latest integration and ensuring their smooth transition to the system.
As only a single copy of a split consciousness spanning multiple trillion versions, he had access to all the cumulative knowledge of his other split minds. He was able to find plenty of information not only on the new species he was overseeing but also on the new worlds being integrated. This was often needed for creatures that had been born outside of the system but still had access to mana, meaning they often formed their own evolutionary paths that weren't supported by the system, meaning standard integration would just kill them, requiring them to pass through a transitional process where innate magical properties are restructured and returned as racial skills that would support their future growth instead of having them handicapped at their current grade.
This integration had brought several known races, including some common ones like vampires and elves, races that can occur on nearly any mana-rich world, while others weren't so common, like a flesh tree that assimilated corpses into itself. That one was definitely an interesting species, for sure, but the observer was more interested in what one of its research minds had found out.
It turns out one of the many grade 0 resource worlds--planets with low potential and mana density-- is actually a planet called Terra, locally known as Earth, and despite its low mana density, it's actually one of the most resilient planets in this sector of the new universe. The fact that it wasn't that big or birthed any truly meaningful beings was actually a plus in this case, as the world had survived several mass extinction events and still somehow clung to life.
Normally, a world without significant enough mana density to infuse its inhabitants is doomed to fail, but this world, despite having no support, stubbornly clung to its nurtured life for billions of years. Even when it didn't have the mana density to ward off basic asteroids or regulate its climate, it managed to persist.
The fact that humans managed to evolve so fast when the universe had begun undergoing initial integration priming, to the point that they took over the entire planet in barely the blink of an eye, really shows the adaptability of that little blue planet.
Mana truly is the energy of life for worlds, and it says a lot that Earth immediately nurtured that species into existence the moment it received the echo of their blueprint from the building universal pathways. Of course, this is nothing conscious, more like a single-celled lifeform doing what it can to survive with no knowledge of its own existence, but the fact that it persisted and was so successful, even birthing a global sapient race that reached for the stars in under half a million years, was utterly astounding.
Yet its value wasn't in becoming a cradle for low-ranked monsters like other grade 0 planets; instead, it would become the perfect glue to merge multiple worlds together, the best conductor to rebalance the worlds that had been stuck in their ways for too long, their life and mana forced into a stable and unbreakable cycle. Without a glue-like Earth to tie them all together and enforce a new balance, the integration would only provide a minor improvement before they stalled out and began dying.
That was the other side of the integration that most overlooked. The system didn't mess around with worlds willy-nilly; it's always looking to optimize a planet by merging it with others that would synchronize and force its growth, allowing for its beasts and denizens to grow alongside it.
The observer moved on to the next creature in line for transitioning, finding a tall-looking creature with slender arms tipped with bladed claws and a bat's head. Since all these staging rooms are instanced creations formed uniquely for this specific task, they exist outside of the standard universe, and so time is suspended here, meaning the observer arrived at the exact moment the denizens did and worked alongside the system as a 'human' observer to ensure everything was going to plan.
Its second opinion was a necessary backup mechanism to double-check the system's work since this is the most volatile part of integration, and any deaths here would go against its laws. But that wasn't the part the observer found the most interesting; instead, it loved creatures that had developed outside of the structured framework of the system and integrated biomagical organs into their own bodies without any sort of fail-safes. It's the sort of thing that would rarely be seen outside of non-integrated worlds, as the system doesn't tend to like that sort of thing.
But another reason the observer's presence was necessary was to advise as to whether the newly integrated species was a monster or a denizen. Species like humans, elves, or even orcs exist all over the greater multiverse and are long established to be denizens, sapient beings that can choose a class and a path to power, whereas these more unique creatures like the nightmare bat person here have the possibility of being designated as monsters and granted the power to evolve their race and racial abilities, limiting their paths greatly but also making it easier for low intelligence beings to grow and thrive.
Not to mention it's always possible that they grow intelligent enough to be considered denizens in future evolutions, at which point they may be offered a class instead of an evolution or a combination of both. As for this bat person, the observer analyzed its thought patterns and found it was slightly below the minimum threshold to be considered a sapient denizen, but would likely be able to become one after a single evolution.
This labeling as an initial monster with potential to become a denizen of the greater multiverse is actually very common for a newly integrated world. It's actually the same for creatures like dragons, which are only considered denizens upon evolving from wyrms, and even then, only a select number of species.
But that doesn't mean that these creatures aren't intelligent. In fact, the bat person before him is perfectly able to speak and can even count and perform basic math, yet its potential for higher understanding is stunted, and it struggles with things like imagination and even the concept of lying.
No one truly knows what the system uses as a threshold to consider something a denizen or not, not even an observer of the entire process.
Watching the integration process from start to finish, it took a little under half an hour for the bat person to be processed and aligned with the system, turning its biological abilities into upgradable racial skills. When the bat person blipped out of existence, so did the staging room it was occupying, but the observer was already on to the next instance.
That bat person was the last of the flagged denizens it needed to overlook, so he was moved on to the next issue that the system had marked, this one in the lower-priority denizen category. This section of the integration is usually a lot smoother than the last, as most sapient denizens already exist out in the multiverse, so records of their possible paths for integration are all very well known and explored, not to mention they usually only get granted spells or skills, so the transition is a lot faster than unique monster species.
Yet as the split mind was brought to that flagged instance holding a denizen from that wonderful new world of Earth, he was instantly shocked to find the denizen already dead, crushed into a pulp. But this wasn't supposed to be possible. The observer had been going from instance to instance for an accumulated time of millions of years, yet not a moment had passed on the outside. So, how was this person dead?