Epilogue

  247,056 years. That’s how long it’s been since I first achieved emerald rank. It has been a truly wonderful story, but now it is coming to an end. Below me, I watched as the strongest beings in this universe tried to fight the coming doom.

  I gave them a chance to escape with me long ago, but they chose to struggle to the very end, and I respect that. Their stories will come to an end like mine, but like for them, this wasn’t true—this was just the end of our beginning, because what’s to follow would be us joining other people’s stories.

  Now I looked upwards. Over half of me was outside this universe. I have been like this for about 20,000 years, testing if I could survive the void. I could. I was strong enough for it, but it had been a long journey to get here, and it felt kinda lonely, as no one else had made it even close to the power I had.

  Currently, I was 1000 floors deep, and on every floor there were dungeon rooms for adventurers, but the last 250 floors were empty of adventurers because no one could beat the last Onyx-ranked floors boss.

  In fact, no one in this universe besides me had ever reached the rank beyond Onyx, or as the majority in this universe calls it, the Black Realm. Oh, there were so many individuals in the Onyx rank, but taking a step above that was something only a few could do.

  I myself only managed because I was able to truly brute force it. It happened during the last millenniums of the Celestial Government, when I finally broke through almost 140,000 years ago. 100,000 years before that, when I broke into Onyx rank, the Celestial Government started its golden age.

  It was then when I learned, as I reconnected with my dungeon gateways and re-established connection with my home world, that they had made a deal to keep their freedom in exchange for the knowledge of how they were able to upgrade their world’s Celestial Core.

  They even gave dungeon seeds to them, giving the Celestial Government a way to not only upgrade worlds, but to have access to endlessly renewable resources—and, of course, the skill system that we dungeons mimic after our own physiology.

  Before that, barely anyone colonized planets that were underneath a certain rank. After that, the great age of colonization began, because with just a few dungeon seeds you could take a world that could support life but was just beginning its ascension through the ranks and speed things up tremendously, not to speak of the benefit of the wish every time you triggered the making.

  While it was the start of the golden age for the Celestial Government, they barely hung on in the early days of the age of colonization. At first, they were a bit too overbearing, but even to this day it still surprises me they actually decided to give up some control to stay in power. It was truly a wise decision, but in the end, no one saw the doom coming. We dungeons were actually the ones that pushed the doom back even if it was just a little bit.

  The Doom was an apt name for the death of a universe, because that was what was happening. Apparently, when I was born, the universe was basically at its end.

  It surprised me deeply when I learned that at the beginning of this universe, there were most likely billions upon billions of galaxies, instead of the over 300 when I first started to learn about the stars. Now there was only one galaxy left, and already its edges were being consumed by the void.

  The void broke down anything it came into contact with, but if you were strong enough, you could resist it. The funny thing was that the void surrounding me and this universe right now wasn’t even that strong.

  I have had plenty of time to observe what was outside this universe, and I guess I should call this outside the cosmos, because our universe wasn’t the only one. When you look below our universe—way, way down—you could witness the birth of universes, and it was as terrifying as it was beautiful.

  So much fighting was going on in my universe. While most tried to find the solution to the doom, others who were at the end of Onyx rank were trying to take a step above that.

  If your soul was strong enough, it did not disperse inside the universe; instead, it rose upwards. So right now, there were millions upon millions of souls rising out of this universe, past me, and moving ever upwards.

  As soon as they reached the void, the void tried to break down that soul. While souls who had reached Onyx rank seemed to survive longer, it wasn’t a guarantee that you could survive the void. I saw many souls broken down, and the very energy that was left when the void finished its job started falling downwards.

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  It was the cycle of life. The void broke down anything that wasn’t void or pure energy. That energy fell downwards until it reached the white void—the very furnace of life itself. From it, new universes were born that started to rise upwards, and the further they rose, the thicker the void got.

  If the universe was too weak, it would be broken down quite quickly. But when I looked upwards, there were many universes seemingly surviving without any problem. Way above my current position. I wonder what life looked like inside them.

  There were edges to this cosmos. The closer you got to the edge where reality stopped existing, the stronger the void got. If I were to get too close to that edge, I honestly don’t believe I could survive that strong of a void. And then, if you look upwards going along the edge, then you could see the truly scary void. Even looking at that was scary.

  It comforted me to look inside at my dungeon. There were so many adventurers—basically every floor had up until Onyx rank. 100,000 copies of them. And the Onyx rank itself had 25,000 copies. There was only one version of what came after Onyx, and that was just another way of understanding how hard it was to reach the rank I currently was.

  “I do not think I can hold on much longer, my son.”

  I heard my mother—the very will of the universe—say. She was the reason why I hadn’t left, and why I was witnessing the death of this universe. When I reached the rank above Onyx, the wider cosmos, as my mother told me, called the demigod realm or rank or whatever, I could finally hear her words.

  She was so happy. Apparently, the universes that had reached this far up could communicate with each other, although it took a long while. Turns out that no one, not even she, ever expected to be able to produce someone who reached the demigod rank.

  "I am so proud of you, but it is the end for me. It is so wonderful to see that I’m not just the mother of a demigod, but that I am also the only one to have birthed a species of truly sentient dungeons. Never would I have imagined that me, a relatively average universe, could have ever achieved something so magnificent."

  Every time she spoke, the void was able to consume more and more of her. It took so much to communicate like this.

  "Mother, you will be remembered forever. I am just sad I could not help you."

  "Do not worry much. Everything that has a beginning has an end. But you—you must take care of yourself and not reach that end for a long, long while. Is that understood?"

  "Yes, Mother. I understand."

  "Good. And because of this, never take the step to go above demigod. You do remember that, right? Never try to achieve godhood."

  I was about to answer her, but the void started to consume her at a rapid pace.

  "Goodbye, my son."

  "Goodbye, Mother," I said, and could feel her happiness even in the last moments before the void consumed the last of her.

  Now, the last galaxy was fully exposed to the void, and it was horrific to watch—everything rapidly breaking apart, turning into pure energy. Some of the planetary shields that were built to protect against the void held out longer than others, but in only 14 days there was nothing left but void and souls that slowly started to rise, heading upwards—if they were strong enough to survive the void, at least for some time they might reach another universe.

  I announced the death of our universe to everyone living in my dungeon. The grief that followed was overwhelming. So many had left the universe, leaving behind people they cared about who didn’t want to join us in my dungeon.

  That being said, even my creatures were sad, even the ones who haven’t left my dungeon even once. It was understandable. Even if they didn’t truly know what was out there, it was still our universe—the one that birthed us all— our mother now gone forever.

  Don't worry, Mother. I will remember you for as long as I live, and it seems that your legacy of a dungeon species that can truly think will live on as well. Because now I notice billions upon billions of dungeon seeds also dispersing.

  Some of them seem to not be strong enough to survive the void, but some seem to be doing good enough. It was funny that the seeds didn’t exactly rise like the souls did—they moved the same way they always did, wherever those particular seeds decided to move towards.

  I did not know exactly what this meant for the other universes, because like with souls, whenever one reached a new universe, it would be taken in and that person would be reborn or reincarnated there. I’m guessing the seeds would do the same—birthing new dungeons.

  We are a special kind of dungeon because we are actually mana-positive. We are able to create energy like every other living being, but we are just way better at doing so.

  My inhabitants were wondering what we were going to be doing next. In the cosmos’ terms, I was still incredibly young, and most of the people who started their journey near my beginning were still with us.

  Their lives were a bit more tragic—for example, Ace and Carl had lost many of their children, not because of fighting, but because some just couldn’t rank up high enough to have the lifespan to be with us right now. It was a hard thing for a parent to watch as their child grew old while you were still young.

  Many have also died while trying to challenge the last floors boss of the onyx-ranked dungeon rooms. It didn’t take long after this floor was made for me to have to make a talisman that people could farm, that they could use to escape that boss fight.

  At least this way people could have a chance to try it out, because before this escape talisman, this boss had a 100% kill rate. The step to demigod was simply so great.

  The only reason why I have achieved this and been able to be just one step away from, if I understand correctly, a proper God, is because I was able to brute force it.

  My floors were now so big, but for a large majority of them, I decided not to go with making solar systems—there was simply too much empty space between planets. No, most of my floors were filled with flat worlds that were the size of entire solar systems.

  The amount of creatures even one of those floors had was so high that even the tiny bits of mana they gave me, compared to how much I needed to rank up, started to accumulate.

  It was the same way as, technically, if you were efficient enough with collecting mana, instead of killing a few hundred monsters the same rank as you, you could kill a couple of trillion rats two ranks below you.

  I had more life living in my dungeon than there was in the whole universe when I was born. My mana regeneration was at the level of a small universe while I was still just an individual. My core was the size of a small gas planet, and my core floor was truly huge, but this was needed so my core could fit. I wondered how much bigger I would get if I were to take the step into godhood.

  But I will heed my mother’s warning. Apparently, there were no gods in this cosmos. Long ago, billions of billions of years ago, there was a huge war between gods. The result of it: the death of all gods. But also, anyone who reached godhood nowadays seemed to die.

  So I looked upward, towards the very top. There was something huge there, something that stretched nearly to the edges of the cosmos. I believed if I was going to get answers—especially about why every God seemed to die—that was most likely the place where I was going to get answers.

  So, it was time to start slowly rising, alongside so many souls from my universe to see what else was out here.

  The End

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