"You’re trying to organize the information."
Voralith’s voice was soft, almost patient. "I understand that."
Scáthach took a deep breath.
The absolute light of that place no longer seed as aggressive as before. Or perhaps it was just her mind adjusting to the impossible. She ran a hand through her own red hair, still finding the weight of that humanoid body too light.
"It’s a lot." She finally admitted. "I just... died."
Voralith observed her silently for a few seconds.
Then, with a simple gesture, the golden interface disappeared completely. The surrounding space softened. The crushing pressure that had previously seed constant reduced to sothing bearable—still vast, still incomprehensible, but no longer oppressive.
The throne behind Voralith changed shape, becoming less grandiose, less imperial. Still impossible, but less... distant.
"You’ll get used to it." She said.
And, for the first ti, it didn’t sound like an entity above all else.
It just sounded... ancient.
...
Ti didn’t flow there as it did in the living worlds.
There was no sun to rise or set.
There were no shadows to lengthen.
But sothing changed.
The two remained in that space for an indefinite period—perhaps hours, perhaps days, perhaps sothing between thoughts.
The initial tension slowly dissolved.
Scáthach discovered that, when Voralith wasn’t analyzing universes or summoning spirit kings with shouts, she... spoke.
And listened.
At first, they were technical questions.
About the world Scáthach ca from.
About wars.
About draconic lineages.
About the physical sensation of death.
Then, the questions beca less structured.
More curious.
More... personal.
Scáthach ended up sitting down—not because she needed to, but because the space had ford sothing resembling a bench beneath her. The black dress spread around her like a tranquil shadow.
"My world was simple," she said at one point. "Brutal. But simple."
Voralith lay on her side on the reconfigured throne, resting her head on her hand.
"Constant wars?" she asked.
"Yes."
"Ambition?"
"Always."
"Pride?"
Scáthach gave a small smile.
"We are dragons."
Voralith nodded slightly.
This seed universal.
There was a comfortable silence.
Then Scáthach spoke again.
"I had a son."
Her golden eyes turned to her with imdiate attention.
"I know," Voralith replied, but this ti there was no ntal intrusion. It was just a mory of what she had already seen. Scáthach looked at her own hands.
"I died in a bed."
The sentence sounded strange in that place where entities destroyed entire sectors.
"Not in battle. Not fighting. Not defending territory." She let out a small, humorless laugh. "After years... since I gave birth."
Voralith didn’t interrupt.
"It was a rare disease." Scáthach continued. "It started small. I ignored it. I always ignored weaknesses."
She closed her eyes for a mont.
"I thought I would have more ti."
The light around her seed to soften.
"I wanted to have enjoyed it more." Her voice lost its firmness for a mont. "Teach more. Stay longer."
Silence.
Not heavy.
Not overwhelming.
Just present.
Voralith shifted slightly.
"I never had children." She said naturally.
Scáthach opened her eyes and stared at her.
"Never wanted to?"
Voralith thought for a few seconds—sothing rare.
"It wasn’t a priority." She replied. "My master had many won."
The na wasn’t spoken, but the echo of Azi Dahaka always seed present when she ntioned "master."
"He valued bloodlines. Power. Continuity." She made a slight gesture with her hand. "I valued evolution."
Scáthach tilted her head.
"You weren’t interested?"
Voralith gave a half-smile.
"Relationships require emotional investnt." Her golden eyes glead slightly. "I always preferred to invest in becoming stronger."
Scáthach let out a small laugh.
It was unexpected.
And sincere.
"You’re strange."
"I know."
There was a pause.
"But..." Voralith added, this ti more slowly, "I understand how you feel."
Scáthach looked up.
"You understand?"
"Losing sothing before exploring its full potential," Voralith replied. "That’s universal."
For a mont, there was no Empress.
No Prisoner.
Only two ancient beings speaking about what remained unfinished.
"He’s alive," Voralith said then, casually, but with surgical precision. "Your son."
Scáthach’s heart reacted imdiately.
"I know."
"He’s growing fast."
"I know."
"And he carries sothing that can break structures."
Scáthach held her golden gaze.
"I know."
A small smile appeared on Voralith’s lips.
"So you don’t completely regret it."
Scáthach thought.
She thought of the illness.
The bed.
The weakness.
She thought of the mont she closed her eyes believing it was all over.
And then she thought of the bond.
The connection.
That invisible line that crossed planes.
"No." She finally answered. "I just wanted to stay longer."
Voralith watched her for long seconds.
Then she looked away at the illuminated emptiness around her.
"Ti is an overrated resource." She murmured.
Scáthach tilted her head. "Says the entity trapped outside the flow."
Voralith slowly turned her face to her.
And, for the first ti since they t...
She laughed genuinely.
It wasn’t elegant.
It wasn’t controlled.
It was genuine.
"Maybe I really do need soone to talk to." She admitted.
"Maybe I really do need soone to talk to." She admitted.
And, after that, ti—if it could still be called that—began to take on a different texture in that isolated space.
Without sun, without moons, without natural cycles, the changes beca marked by more subtle transformations. The intensity of the light varied slightly as Voralith’s focus shifted. The conceptual ground beneath Scáthach’s feet beca more solid as she concentrated. The throne ceased to be a throne and beca a platform, then a table, then sothing resembling a study structure.
Voralith began to work.
At first, it was almost imperceptible.
Small golden panels appeared around her, floating like tallic sheets suspended in the air. Lines of conceptual code ran across their surfaces, reorganizing themselves, being erased, rewritten, combined into new structures.
Scáthach watched.
She didn’t understand everything.
But she was learning.
"Are you expanding that?" she asked at one point, as a new interface layer overlapped the previous one.
"Refining." Voralith corrected, without taking her eyes off what she was doing. Her fingers moved in the void as if pulling invisible threads. "The previous version was rudintary."
"It seed complex."
"Because you don’t know the original structure."
There was a pause.
More symbols appeared, now not only golden, but mixed with silver and black tones, as if different authorities were being forcibly superimposed.
Scáthach realized sothing important. Voralith wasn’t just copying.
She was rebuilding.
Sotis, the Empress would stand motionless for long periods, her golden eyes fixed on nothing. During these tis, the space around her trembled almost imperceptibly, as if distant connections were being pulled, probed, tested.
"Do you still have access to the royal system?" Scáthach asked once.
"Fragnts," Voralith replied. "And echoes."
"Isn’t that dangerous?"
A slight smile appeared on her pale lips.
"Everything is dangerous."
Ti passed.
They conversed between adjustnts.
Scáthach recounted more about ancient battles, about the sll of sulfur in the field after the fire, about the physical weight of carrying an entire territory on her shoulders. Voralith listened while, at the sa ti, rearranging layers of permissions, creating subnus, establishing internal hierarchies.
"Why are you organizing this as if it were going to be used?" Scáthach asked, watching a new tab appear with categories like Evolution, Transfer, Links.
"Because systems without order collapse," Voralith replied simply.
"But you’re trapped."
Her fingers paused for a second.
"I’m contained," she corrected. "Not rendered useless."
More ti passed.
Scáthach began to notice patterns.
Voralith tested hypotheses.
She created progression routes.
She simulated scenarios.
Sotis, a projection appeared in the air showing a hypothetical entity evolving under certain rules. At other tis, she erased everything with an irritated gesture, murmuring sothing about "limits imposed by this lower sector."
There was a mont when the surrounding light dimd slightly, not from a glitch, but from extre concentration. The interface expanded to occupy almost the entire visible horizon, layers upon layers of interconnected structures. Scáthach sensed the magnitude of it.
"Are you trying to replicate it completely?" she asked.
Voralith was silent for a few seconds.
"No," she finally replied. "I’m creating sothing adapted."
"For this universe?"
"For the variable."
Their eyes t.
Strax wasn’t ntioned.
But he was there.
He always was.
More indefinite cycles passed.
Scáthach noticed that Voralith was becoming less impatient. Less irritated. The boredom that had previously manifested in outbursts of authority against Kazess was now channeled into ticulous adjustnts.
The interface beca more stable.
More elegant.
nus organized by intention, not just by function. Interplanar links with specific filters. Internal limitations that prevented premature collapses.
Until, at a certain point, sothing changed.
Voralith stood in the center of space.
Around her, dozens of panels rotated slowly, all interconnected by almost invisible threads of light. Symbols ran through the connections like blood flowing through veins.
She made one last move.
A simple touch in the air.
Everything aligned.
The layers fit together.
The connections stabilized.
The surrounding light vibrated once—deep, silent—as if a colossal gear had finally found its perfect fit.
And then... it stopped.
The interface remained there.
Stable.
Complete.
Voralith lowered her hand.
Her golden eyes observed her own creation for long seconds.
"I’ve reached the limit." She declared.
Scáthach rose slowly.
"The limit?"
"Of what I can do from here." Voralith replied. There was no frustration in her voice. Only realization.
The structure before them was imnse, yet contained. A closed system, but functional. Adaptable, yet restricted to the authorities she still possessed.
"Is it... ready?" Scáthach asked.
Voralith tilted her head slightly.
"Yes."
The silence that followed was unlike any before.
It wasn’t contemplative.
It was conclusive.
Scáthach walked a few steps around the projection, observing the organized layers, the paths of progression, the elegant constraints that prevented abuse.
"Why did you create this?" she finally asked.
Voralith shrugged.
The gesture was simple.
Almost human.
"I was bored."
Scáthach blinked.
"You spent... how long doing this?"
"Ti isn’t relevant here."
"Even so."
Voralith looked at her own creation, the golden threads reflecting in her eyes.
"When you’re stuck outside the mainstream, you either go mad..." she paused briefly. "Or you build sothing."
Scáthach crossed her arms.
"And decided to build a system that can alter universal structures."
"Technically, it only optimizes what already exists." Voralith replied lightly.
"Of course."
A small smile appeared on the Empress’s lips.
"Furthermore..." she added, almost distractedly, "it’s interesting to observe how a variable reacts to well-defined limits."
Scáthach narrowed her eyes.
"Do you want to test this?"
Voralith looked at her smiling, "When the ti cos for to leave, I’ll send this to so universe sowhere."
Scathach nodded...
...
[2,423 years later...]
[Online Servers: The Soul Contract between Entity 666002777 and Entity 000000007 has been completed]
[Congratulations, Pri Sector Primordial Entity, Ten Celestial Winged Demon Dragon Empress, Voralith Antherio, Cultivator of the Supre Peak, you have completed the System’s final mission and are free to begin a new journey.]
[Do you wish to continue or restart the journey? If you choose to restart, you will return to being just a mortal.]
"Yes, restart. I am happy to return to the world of the living as Voralith. Leave this notification for the next being who compares to ," Voralith replied.
"I should have been reborn as a single woman, not with a partner, but millions of years have passed, damn it, how hard it is to be myself," she said, bringing her hands to her face.
’Send this to my friend’s boyfriend... he needs this,’ she thought.
[Confird. Sending system to Entity 900102304]
...
[...Two years ago...]
"Sothing’s wrong here... I feel it," he said, looking at the paths he had traveled; instinctively, he turned, feeling a strange noise coming from behind him.
A strange shadow appeared before Strax, causing him to instinctively recoil. A monstrous spider, with hairy legs and glowing eyes, advanced toward him, emitting a shrill and nacing noise.
"Damn it! What is that?!"
He recoiled even further and gripped the pickaxe tightly, terrified but prepared; the spider attacked with its venomous mandibles, ready to tear his flesh.
Strax dodged, in an act of pure luck, and instinctively counterattacked with the worn tip of the pickaxe, which struck the right side of the creature’s head, piercing it completely; however, it rose again.
"Damn it, are you kidding ?!" He yelled angrily and, gripping the pickaxe more firmly, attacked again.
Sweat dripped down his face as he continued to crush the spider’s head with the flat of the pickaxe, but it still moved.
He glimpsed a faint glint on its belly, like a jewel, and then decided to attack it repeatedly; finally, it stopped moving.
Panting, he observed the creature’s inert body on the cave floor.
"Phew... that was close. But I can’t stay here much longer. Who knows how many more of these things are lurking in the shadows."
[Ding!]
[Congratulations!] You received a gift from "Entity 000000007" of the Pri Sector!
[You obtained the Demonic Harem System of the Dragon God]
[Starting...]
Strax heard the sound... and panicked inwardly upon hearing the small bell and reading the notification in front of him...
"Damn it! I was right!"
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