Chương 492: Chapter 493: The Universal Tree

The vanishing stars and sun in the night sky filled me with a profound feeling of wrongness. The sun, especially, grew dimmer and dimmer. Even the faint strands of light that sometimes peeked through the clouds and snow started to vanish. I shivered as the world grew colder. I watched the sky in dawning horror. Where once, a giant glowing orb of heat and gas had existed, now there was only endless darkness.

Instead of the glowing points of light in the sky that I was used to, strange lights and colors started to appear. They didn't come from any source at all - it was like I was seeing some kind of twisted, eldritch lattice of lights, colors, darkness, and sounds as it wove itself into being in every single surface of reality around us. I had absolutely no idea what was going on anymore, but I was certain of one thing. The laws of physics were breaking down.

Then, I felt the cold, dark feeling of being plunged into water, and I felt as if something was ripping away at me. My memories, my essence, my very being - whatever was touching me wanted to suck out everything that I was and devour it. It wasn't a feeling I was unfamiliar with. I had felt it many times before, in fact - though never quite as vividly as this moment. It was the feeling of the ocean of souls, brushing up against me.

For the first time, I realized that the black 'ocean' of souls I had seen every time we died was far more bizarre than I had ever given it credit for. The water from the ocean of souls wasn't physical - it was somehow passing right through my body, as well as the bodies of every other person sitting on top of our village-bearing beast. It was as if the water was an illusion, but I could still distinctly feel wetness clinging to every surface of my body - even my organs and my stomach.

It was one of the most profoundly uncomfortable things I had felt in the last century. On instinct, I opened the Market's description for the world that we were located within, to see if it could give me any clues about what was happening. What I saw only confused me more. Analyzing this world… Analysis complete! Essences Present in this dimension: All four essences present. Special notes: Dimension Integrated by the Universal Tree. Free passage to and from the main trunk is available!

Estimated tier: 20 (according to the Market's standardized power evaluation scale) Special Notes: The Market is in a state of @*#($&#@*($& with the Universal Tree's 40912nd branch, and has @*#($&@#($*&@ technology. Please keep this in mind, since @*#$(&# @#($#@ @(! @#(*! @&#. The Universal Tree is also the civilization with the strongest known monsters and individuals in the multiverse. You appear to be a young transmigrator. There are likely many powerhouses in the Universal Tree that can permanently kill you, regardless of how many lives you have left! Proceed with caution! The Market's analysis of the universal tree was less than helpful. However, the Market message did confirm something - we were no longer present in our original dimension. I wasn't imagining things. We were probably in the middle of the ocean of souls right now - and we were either integrating into the universal tree, or we were about to be. Worse, there was nothing I could do about it, and the Market's System could only give me useless information about our new world. I suspected that the boxes in my System messages were supposed to contain information about whether the Market was at war with the Universal Tree branch that we were about to touch, or whether we were trading with them, or whether we had some other kind of relationship with them. However, the only information the System actually gave me was gibberish - likely because the Market was annihilated, and thus any databases this message was supposed to reference were now rubble. At the end of the day, it also didn't matter much. It definitely looked like some branch of the Universal Tree was behind the destruction of the Market - and that was not good news. If a faction was strong enough to destroy the Market, I seriously doubted that they were a weak faction in the Universal Tree. That meant they probably had influence over a good number of other factions on the Universal Tree. If the enemy realized we were from the Market, they were likely to be very hostile. Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences. I also did not like the System notification we got about the possibility of being permanently killed here. I probably could have guessed that fact just from learning that we were about to enter a Tier 20 dimension, but knowing that the Universal Tree had some of the strongest monsters and people in the multiverse - and that they could permanently kill us - was terrifying. If the enemy noticed us, we might not get that chance to fight for more lives. Some demigod with a few hundred grades in every stat might vaporize us and permanently annihilate our souls in a nanosecond if we were caught. <How the heck did the universal Tree drag us out of our original dimension? > asked Sallia. I caught several notes of raw terror in her mental voice. <They literally dragged us out of the dimensional cluster we were part of! > Before I could say anything, I felt the ground lurch. For a moment, I felt like the laws of physics were warping. Whatever my body was made of, however the pieces of my body and organs worked together to keep me alive, it was not the way physics worked in the ocean of souls. It felt like my intestines were trying to crawl through my stomach. I gasped in pain, as my [Vitality] from the local System and my [Fortitude] from the Market fought to keep my body from imploding, as my intestines did things they were not supposed to do. Then, the eldritch lattice of colors, lights, and shapes in our surroundings started to still. I saw the giant crack in the sky start to expand rapidly, until it was bigger than the world itself. Bigger than the sun. Bigger than the Market. Bigger than everything in this entire dimension. Everything in the sky became a lattice of tree roots. The tree roots grew larger, and larger, and larger, until our perspective shifted as the entire continent was wrenched into place like a gear being nestled into place in a much larger machine. The feeling of the ocean of souls surrounding us disappeared. Light and color started to make sense again. My intestines stopped trying to crawl up through my stomach, and I got the feeling that my body was no longer fighting the laws of physics just to exist. Not because the laws of reality were compatible with my biology - but because somehow, the completely and utterly different laws of physics this dimension and my body were built off of just… coexisted. Even though it made zero sense, completely and utterly incompatible versions of reality were just forced to interact with each other, no matter how much that was impossible. I looked up at the sky, and I realized that the old snowstorms that had once dominated the horizon had disappeared. The stars and the sun were still gone, never to return. Now, it appeared as if we had somehow entered outer space - or at least something that appeared like it. In almost every direction, there was nothing but an endless, pitch black void. Far in the distance, I could see endless currents of black water, speckled with the dim light of souls - the ocean of souls was literally visible from inside of a dimension, without any kind of special sight at all. I had never seen that before. Of course, while endless darkness and the ocean of souls was visible in most directions, there was one even more dominant feature that was impossible to miss. The Universal Tree itself. The giant tree root that had expanded until it was infinitely large was now deeply anchored into the ground. The dimensional rift was gone, though. In its place, I could see a massive pillar of wood that rose into the sky. It was so massive in comparison to the rest of the landscape that it was practically infinite. The tree root gently glowed, illuminating this vast, dark space. Most confusingly of all, however, I could see dozens of other dimensions attached to the tree root as well. They were attached to the tree like apples hanging off of a branch on an apple tree - dozens of different dimensions were all connected to the massive tree root in every direction. This continued as far as I could see, right up until the trunk of the universal tree, which looked like a giant pillar of trillions of dimensions fused together into some kind of chaotic, unimaginable mass of physics, essences, magic, and complete and utter chaos. Things moved in the trunk - things beyond my understanding. They were beyond concepts. Beyond mana. Beyond even the nature of the eldritch, which I had just begun to grasp the faintest hint of. They were so distant that I could barely see the largest ones - but the largest ones were big enough to put even galaxies to shame. They shambled and moved and twisted and writhed with terrifying, unnatural grace as they shimmied up and down the trunk of the universal tree. Further up the universal tree's trunks, I could see branches that spread out into the distance like a distant, starry canopy. I couldn't see them, but I suspected that they held dimensions of their own - probably billions of them. I wondered if the universal tree could really be traversed just by walking along this massive pillar of wood, essence, and mana. If someone had enough time, and the willpower to keep walking for however many thousands or millions of years it would take, could they just… walk from one dimension to another? A few moments later, my sense of wonder faded, and I felt icy tendrils of terror worm down my spine. We were no longer attached to our previous dimensional cluster. We were now fully integrated into the universal tree.