SSS Ranked Reincarnation: Dark Dragon Legacy

The plane they stood on had no name that mattered anymore.

It floated somewhere above the world, above the rifts, above the chaos that was currently tearing through the sky below them, and from up here the scale of what was happening was visible in a way that made it worse rather than better.

Ophelia stood at the edge of it and looked down.

The being that had come through the rift was still moving, its four arms shifting, its wings casting shadow over everything beneath them, and the wave of purple energy it had released on landing was still rolling outward from the impact point in every direction, flattening whatever it found.

"That is an awakened abyss monster," she said.

Order stood beside her. He was looking at the same thing she was looking at, his expression carrying the particular quality it always carried now, calm without weight behind it, present without being fully there.

"A being capable of destroying an entire world if left without intervention," he said.

She folded her arms.

"Can I go and help?"

"No."

She looked at him.

He did not look back, his eyes still on the being below.

"Then how do I get Silva here?" she asked. "Because that is what this needs. That is what ends this."

Order was quiet for a moment.

"The distance between where you stand and where Silva currently is would take even you a significant amount of time to cross," he said. "Time that the world below does not have. By the time you reached him and returned, there would be nothing left to return to."

She rolled her eyes.

She caught herself doing it and did not stop.

"Is there there was a way?," she said.

"The rifts," he replied.

She looked at him properly this time, waiting for the part that made that make sense.

"The same rifts that have been tearing the world apart."

"Yes."

She exhaled slowly through her nose.

"Explain it," she said.

He turned away from the view below and looked at her with those eyes that had been emptied of most of what made a god a god when he had placed his power on the throne.

"When I first studied the rifts closely," he said, "I observed that time behaves differently inside them. It does not flow the way it flows out here. It slows, or it pauses, depending on where within the rift one is. This means that the travel time between entering a rift at one point and exiting at another point is significantly compressed." He paused. "Multiple rifts connect to the abyss simultaneously. Passing through the abyss itself creates the possibility of exiting through a different rift entirely, at a different location, if one knows precisely where the target rift will open."

Ophelia said nothing and let him continue.

"I developed the means to do this some time ago," he said. "I did not implement it. The risks were significant. Passing through the abyss exposes the mind to what I call abyss madness, a contamination that comes from direct contact with that space. I tested it using beings under my guidance. They came out changed. Broken in ways that could not be repaired."

She was watching him with the particular expression of someone who was accommodating this conversation because the alternative was worse and not because she had any patience left for it.

"Then why are you telling me this," she said, "if it does not work?"

"Because there is a way to make it work," he said. "Divine energy. If the mind is wrapped in it before entry and the body travels inside a vessel coated in the same, the abyss cannot make contact. The contamination has nothing to reach." He looked at her. "For ordinary beings, the vessel must be constructed and coated externally. For someone like you, the technique is different. You channel the divine energy yourself, wrap it around your mind completely, hold it there through the transit, and the abyss cannot touch you."

"And the anchor points," she said. "How does one move from one location to another rather than simply moving through and coming out somewhere random?"

"Nodes," he said. "If nodes can be established, they function as coordinates. You move through the abyss from entry node to exit node and emerge in the general location of wherever the exit node is placed." He turned and looked at her directly. "You need a way to split open a rift at will. To create the entry point on your own terms."

She looked at him and waited.

He reached into the space beside him and produced something.

It was a cube. Small enough to hold in one hand, its surface divided into precise segmentations arranged in a pattern that was not decorative but functional, each division placed exactly where it was for a reason. At the top of it was a single crystal, dark and waiting.

"I have been working on this," Order said, "since I separated myself from the throne."

He held it out to her.

She did not take it immediately.

"You built this while the universe was falling apart," she said.

"I built this because the Universe was falling apart," he replied.

She took the cube from his hand and turned it over, reading the surface of it, the segmentations, the crystal at the top.

"How does it work," she said.

"You communicate the location you want to reach to the device completely," he said. "Every detail you have of it. You hold that in your mind with full clarity and press the crystal. It will create a temporary rift at your position and a corresponding exit point at the location you have specified." He paused. "You then enter the rift, maintain the divine energy around your mind throughout the transit, and you emerge on the other side."

She looked at the cube.

Then she looked at him.

"Where is Silva?" she asked. "Last confirmed location."

Order looked out over the world below them.

"Last I knew of," he said, "he was at—"

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