For the first time in a long time, Observer N°29Y6F9NZ0 was shocked.
His role as an observer meant that he would oversee a denizen's complete transition inside their instanced rooms, appearing when they do and leaving at the same time. He had been doing this for so long that this nanosecond of true universe time had elapsed into longer than he could easily remember, but never had he encountered such a situation. After all, dying while inside the staging room is literally impossible, as the system would heal them up in no time.
Even if someone entered an integration portal hours after being declared medically deceased, the system would fix them up instantly and return them to peak condition. That is how powerful the system is, and such blatant demonstrations of godlike power are simply a gift, not even requiring any sacrifice on the system's part at all. There have even been accounts of pre-system deities whose entire existences conflicted with the system's mana framework and required an entire restructuring, yet even then the system barely noticed as it deconstructed and rebuilt an entire godlike being, keeping it alive and safe during the entire process, even when that being tried to fight back and unleashed a devastating amount of power within the integration instance.
All that to say that an unassuming human mortal could never outperform the system's protocols and inflict such damage. Which is when the observer's senses were assaulted with the irregular time-space distortions permeating this instance, all stemming from some enormous black fracture within the dimensional walls of the temporally suspended room.
Despite being the mind fragment of a pinnacle being, even the observer was forced to reach into that deep pool of shared knowledge all its mind fragments shared to identify what was happening here. It took a while, but that was happening outside of space-time, so the information appeared instantly from his perspective.
According to the shared memories, this was a void incursion. An extremely rare event where a disturbance in the realm beyond space erupts and causes a disruption field powerful enough to even interfere with the system's barriers. Such an event is often thought to be the birth of a new realm within the void, but its effects are always shielded by the system from the greater multiverse.
Unfortunately, since these integration rooms are temporary instances that exist outside of time, they have little protection against such rare disruption events from the void.
Still, it's an extremely rare event even for pinnacle beings like the mind fragment of the observer, and it's entirely impossible to predict due to the inherent effects of the void. You might think that the system would do something to better protect the integration rooms from this sort of thing, but it's such an unlikely event that it would be a total waste. After all, these instances are already in suspended time, so no threat would be able to reach them before the pocket realm is dematerialized, nor would any of even the strongest beings alive be able to penetrate the most basic of the system's default barriers in the first place.
The only reason the void incursion was able to affect this place at all was due to the reality-warping nature of its existence. It's the natural counter to a being of laws and structure like the system, and the disruption field was only able to enter because of its hyper-targeted nature. Think of the instance rooms as being on a huge spectrum with each new room in minutely alternate frequencies from each other. This void incursion was so condensed that it didn't even raise any alerts from the neighboring instances, yet this instance was fully affected, the very dimensional walls cracking and leaking void stuff into the instance.
It's this same void stuff that had warped and eroded the space-time of this place, moving time forward when it should have been frozen and crushing the denizen without the system realizing what was happening. After all, the void incursion would appear as nothing more than a tiny pinprick on its radar, an almost unnoticeable blind spot which it flagged as unusual, yet didn't comprehend the gravity of.
Yet now that the observer had arrived to investigate, it found that this instance was lost, and the void stuff was deconstructing the system's framework. It was time to cut their losses and abandon this instance to the void.
Looking at what remained of the denizen, the observer noted that most of its crumpled body had been turned to mush, not through compression but due to the genetic material being dissolved by the void's influence. Soon, the entirety of its being would be unbound from any structure and transformed into nothing but chaos energy to feed the endless void. The observer had found two other instances deep in its communal history when similar incidents had occurred long ago, and each one caused the complete loss of the target denizen.
Yet right before he abandoned this instance and reported his findings to the system, a strange feeling gnawed at him, telling him to stay, to look closer. As an observer, he had always been interested in discovering new things, which is why he enjoyed overseeing the integration of new and interesting beings, but this felt different, as if something deeper was urging him. Not thinking about it too deeply, he took another glance at the liquified denizen, his other senses flaring as he looked deeper than what any mortal would be able to see and found something curious.
Despite the void-stuff dissolving the very atoms that make up its body, the denizen's soul was continuously receiving energy from the system. This was unusual as the void was obscuring the system's sight, hence why he was here, but it appeared as though the denizen was undergoing class selection when this happened, and so a direct link between the system and the denizen's soul was opened. And through this link, a veritable torrent of energy was being administered to maintain the denizen's soul as it was being actively eroded by the void.
It seemed that despite not realizing the denizen's body was being destroyed due to the void's obfuscation, the system was aware the human's soul was perishing and working to fix it; it simply wasn't aware of the cause of said erosion.
This by itself wasn't that surprising; it was the fact that the soul itself wasn't perishing that truly surprised the observer. Since the system wasn't able to identify the issue, it had begun pumping more and more energy into the soul as that seemed to make it more stable, but what it couldn't see was that that energy was in an active war with the void energy, on one side attempting to force structure and stability while the other unraveled it. All this power would normally have vaporized the weak and feeble mortal soul of the human, yet it appears to have harnessed this battle of energies and was wielding them against each other, weaving them together with outstanding precision, sacrificing a large portion of itself to this internal struggle to protect itself as a whole.
The observer didn't even know this was possible; the other denizens involved with void incursions had their souls eroded into chaos energy along with their bodies. Something like this was utterly unprecedented. Then again, so was the idea of a void incursion hitting at the precise time and location as an integration instance being created.
The weakened soul was definitely taking damage, but had managed to infuse the system energy into itself to fix itself faster than it was being eroded. Suddenly, an absurd thought came to the observer.
'Could this mortal survive from having his soul exposed to the void?' The idea sounded utterly absurd; not even the gods of the multiverse can casually enter the void without consequences. The idea of a level 0 human surviving such an encounter was laughable. Yet with this accumulation of increasingly unlikely situations all combining together, perhaps it might just work.
Communicating its intentions to another of its split minds, this one functioning as a regulator, he made it so one of the trillions of instanced rooms wouldn't be dematerialized right away and targeted the human's soul, relocating it instantly inside a different staging room, leaving the void to claim the corrupted one.
Now paying extremely close attention to the human's soul, he expected to see it use the system energy to finally expel the void energy permeating it. Instead, however, it was shocked to find the now greatly empowered soul integrated the void energy into itself in a precise and delicate pattern. It reminded the observer of an intricately woven cloth, the strand of the mortals' souls perfectly balanced between the highly energy-rich system fed soul and the wild and unyielding void energy.
Somehow, despite not having any sort of conscious understanding of what was going on, the soul of the human was able to do what none had managed before, it stabilized the void energy inside of itself, locking it in place thanks to its energy-rich soul, the two energies evenly matched as they tried to affect each other but found themselves stuck, like two wild particles finally bonding and becoming a perfectly balance and calm atom.
Yet this wasn't even the most impressive thing; the human's soul had turned from a faint haze to a solid outline after all the energy it had absorbed to be able to stand on equal ground with the energy of the void. Such a powerful soul would make him equivalent to a high-level being even among mortals of the greater multiverse, his soul further enhanced by the dormant void energy it had woven into itself. Yet none of this would be apparent, as all that energy wasn't available to the denizen, instead being locked away to neutralize the void energy.
Seeing this, the observer felt a flutter of excitement in his chest. Through his actions, he had helped create something wholly unique within the greater multiverse and felt as though even as a pure soul, it would bring great changes to whichever spirit realm it floated off to.
After all, seeing as it had hardened itself to the extreme and literally harnessed the only energy capable of erasing every law reality can muster up, it would be nearly impossible to destroy this soul if it ever awakened, outside of a higher power getting involved, of course. Yet just because it now had the potential to become tough to kill doesn't mean it had retained its function.
Soul mutations are very well known to the observer; the practice of forcibly assimilating external elements or properties into one's soul to force a mutation in hopes of strengthening or improving its potency. It rarely goes well and often simply ends up corrupting the soul, turning them into horrific monsters.
After all, the soul is the most sacred part of any being, be it spirit, elemental, or flesh and blood; the soul is the shadow that is projected onto the universe, containing everything that makes them who they are, be it memories, DNA, and all the blueprints needed to rebuild a person from the ground up. It's actually for this reason that even the recently deceased can be returned to peak condition when entering an integration. To meddle with the soul is to corrupt the very foundation of a being, and doing such a thing is rarely ever beneficial.
Which is why this soul managing to instinctively bind itself with void energy is so unprecedented, not only for the feat itself, but for the shocking intrinsic survival instincts of the soul in question. To be able to persevere while your entire being is at threat is something that most beings cannot handle. The instinct of fight or flight is one that runs deeper than flesh and can be found in nearly all beings in existence.
For a soul to stand its ground and effectively weave the very energy of destruction around itself, sacrificing all its limbs in order to preserve its heart and mind, requires the sort of willpower not even gods possess, something deeper than mere stats and mana, a mindset that is so ingrained that it persists when everything else is ripped away.
The observer remained unseen as he saw the almost tangible soul of the denizen get rebuilt in real time, the blueprints of its body and mind having been protected and preserved so that it could survive the void incursion. Flesh and bones regrew in moments, skin and muscles appearing out of nowhere, even that brown leather jacket and kitchen knife reappeared in his hand, exactly the same as when he had appeared inside the instance.
Right as the human's brain was recreated, its neural pathways and memories were reinstalled, psionic energy reappearing as the mind was returned to its body, all three components were returned into sync, the final piece being the unusually high spirit being generated by the synergy of all the humans working parts, only now its was greatly boosted by the greatly enhanced soul despite the denizen not being able to tap into that well of power for a very long tim yet. Still, the spirit was the accumulated influence of all three factors, and so its tint shifted in the observer's eyes, taking on a cold purple hue as the void energy joined that synergy if only slightly.
When the denizen was returned to life, his eyes were dull and lifeless for a second before consciousness clicked back on.
Suddenly stumbling, Lewis found himself standing upright despite feeling that he was just on the ground. He felt completely fine and clear-headed, but was also somehow feeling confused and a little disoriented.
He looked around at the endless white room he had entered through from the magic portal and suddenly recalled where he was, at least, for the most part. He tried thinking back to what had just happened, but everything was a blur. One thing he could remember was that he had picked a mage class, but everything else was all hazy.
Thinking it was weird, but then again, so was his entire morning, he just assumed that it was a normal side effect of whatever this system had done to him. Instead of dwelling on his hazy memory of the last few seconds, he turned his attention to a blinking message demanding his attention.
Class selection interrupted, stand by...
Class grafting altered beyond acceptable parameters, calibrating...
Class, Mage has been assigned successfully!
Anomaly detected, changing tutorial group from standard to elite.
Prepare for tutorial commencement in
3...
2...
1...
Lewis barely had time to process what the messages were saying before he once again found the world shift around him and was standing in an entirely different place once more.