Chapter 2: The Collapse
A decade ago, few had taken them seriously.
The Ten Theorists—brilliant, eccentric, and mocked as delusional—claimed they could pierce the veil between realities. Their proposal was insane: link the same world across ten different universes.
Governments dismissed them. Academics sneered. Even the fringe forums of the net branded them frauds. But they found a way to keep their work alive: Bituber streaming.
People didn't believe their theories, but they loved watching their wild-eyed rants, their messy labs, and their reckless experiments. Millions tuned in daily, showering them with donations just to see how far the "mad scientists" would go.
That day, the lab was louder than usual. Cameras floated on drones, broadcasting every wire, every beaker, every humming coil of their latest design.
"We've done it this time," one of them grinned, sweat glistening on his brow. "The resonance equation—perfected!"
Another scientist raised his fist, eyes burning with hope. "Ten worlds, ten selves, one bridge! We'll prove them all wrong tonight!"
The chat flooded with laughing emotes and mocking comments. Yeah sure, buddy. Tell us when you blow up the planet.
And then—reality bent.
A flash of heat surged through the chamber. Alarms screamed. One scientist froze, staring at the core reactor. The metal casing glowed red, hairline fractures spreading like spiderwebs.
"No… no, no, no…" His voice cracked. "The alloy—it can't withstand the compression!"
The chat went wild. Scripted? CGI? Bro's sweating for real lmao.
Another scientist's face drained of color. His last words echoed across the world, caught forever on livestream:
"Shit. We messed up."
Then the signal cut.
---
The earth convulsed.
A tremor like none before tore across continents. Cities quaked, skyscrapers toppled, oceans rose in furious walls of water. Volcanoes that had slept for millennia bled fire into the skies.
Yet it was wrong. These weren't natural disasters.
The tectonic plates themselves tore apart—not colliding, but splitting away. Africa, Antarctica, Eurasia, Australia, the Americas, the Pacific—each sheared off and drifted at impossible speed. But instead of annihilation, gaps between them filled with new land.
Not barren land. Built land.
Colossal castles rose where deserts had been. Towering space stations hovered above newborn islands. Gothic fortresses pierced storm clouds. Futuristic monuments glowed with alien light.
And from these lands came them.
Wings blotted out the sun as dragons unfurled. Wyrms writhed through oceans. A phoenix streaked flames across the horizon. A tortoise larger than a mountain lumbered into existence, carrying cities on its shell.
The people screamed, prayed, cursed—yet the strangest change was not in the world, but in themselves.
---
"What the hell is happening to me?!" A scrawny boy, once the punching bag of his class, now held his bullies by the throat with impossible strength. His eyes burned with a confidence he'd never known.
"I… I remember… I was a knight," he whispered, voice trembling with awe. Then he laughed—deep, cruel laughter. "No… a king!"
Across the street, a kindly old neighbor dropped his cane. His back straightened, his voice thundered like royalty. "Kneel before me! This land is mine, and I will have my servants!"
All over the globe, people shifted. Some collapsed, clutching their heads as memories not their own flooded in—memories of lives as rulers, warriors, sorcerers, assassins. These were the Assimilated, souls fused with their counterparts from the other worlds.
Others changed more subtly. No memories, no past lives—only raw power, a spark of the supernatural. They were dubbed Awakeners—lesser compared to the Assimilated, yet still beyond human.
And then there were the rare few who lost themselves entirely. Their bodies became vessels for another existence. A child might rise as a merciless warlord. A stranger's face could replace a friend's. These were the Transmigrators.
The truth spread slowly, painfully, terrifyingly:
The worlds were colliding. The selves of other realities had come home.
And humanity would never be the same.
The chaos did not last long.
Those who had awakened—whether by inherited memories, strange powers, or complete transmigration—rose to seize the moment. Some hunted monsters with practiced precision, their new knowledge flowing through them like instinct. Others reveled in destruction, laying waste to cities simply because they could. Still more claimed the fresh lands as their dominion, erecting banners over alien castles and futuristic fortresses alike.
And then came the wonders.
Formulas scrawled from memory, equations once thought impossible, spells whispered from worlds where magic reigned—these breakthroughs transformed humanity overnight.
A cripple confined to a chair? Healing magic.
A family separated by oceans and shifting continents? Teleportation gates.
Unanswered questions about what had become of Earth itself? A moon-sized spacecraft appeared in orbit, scanning, stabilizing, explaining the impossible.
The truth was undeniable. Earth had expanded threefold in diameter and was still growing. New mountains tore through the clouds. Oceans surged into impossible depths. Four new moons joined the night sky, falling into harmonious orbits beside the original, as though they had always belonged there.
And humanity… adapted.
Drones captured images of figures soaring faster than the eye could track, some breaking the very speed of light. A man was filmed laughing madly as he wrestled a dragon the size of a mountain, his grin wide with exhilaration.
Yet not all arrivals were human. Entire kingdoms materialized—stone castles, medieval cities, even villagers who went about their daily lives as though nothing had changed. But these people were hollow in one sense: no counterparts, no alternates. Strangers called them NPCs, native inhabitants of the fused lands, living yet untouched by assimilation.
---
But the marvels came with terrors.
The collision had not been clean. Cracks tore open in the skies and seas, shimmering with unstable light—interdimensional portals to the collapsing remnants of the ten old worlds. From them poured monsters in endless waves, desperate to survive but merciless in their hunger. Wyverns tore through the skies. Behemoths trampled cities. Swarms of shadow-things darkened the sun.
And humanity's defenders rose.
The Assimilated, wielding power and identity of their other selves.
The Awakeners, blessed with raw supernatural sparks.
The Transmigrators, wearing entirely new faces and histories.
Together they battled the flood, carving safe zones from chaos. Engineers fused magic and machinery to build vast walled cities, sanctuaries where ordinary humans could breathe.
A decade passed.
The world stabilized—not perfectly, but enough to endure. Trade routes re-opened. Governments reformed. Armies and guilds of awakened patrolled the wilderness. The constant tide of monsters was no longer apocalypse but daily reality.
---
Among these havens was Veru.
A "small" city, some said. But "small" was a lie of perspective.
Its walls enclosed nearly twenty-five thousand square kilometers, a sprawl greater than many nations of the old world. Entire districts thrived within—markets, farms, academies, even forests preserved behind stone. Nearly eighty million souls lived in Veru, its streets alive with a blend of old Earth and alien architecture. Floating towers cast shadows over neon-lit alleys. Steam-powered carts rattled beside rune-bound lifts. Markets sold both microchips and dragon scales.
Yet compared to the continent-sized bastions other powers had raised, Veru truly was a speck. A dust mote clinging to the vastness of the remade Earth.
---
And in this dust mote of a city, a stir was rising.
For on this day, inside Greenwood Collegium's ancient courtyard, a young man named Noah Draven was walking toward the Awakening Crystal.
His moment had come.