The name of that being was "Ort."
He—or perhaps she—had no physical body. To call Ort a lifeform would be inaccurate, yet even describing Ort as a consciousness was insufficient. Ort was far too divine, far too knowledgeable, understanding everything.
To Ort, time and space were meaningless. Every possibility dwelled within that consciousness. To Ort, everything was reality, and every time, space, and dimension was genuine.
Ort had only one purpose: to offer guidance to the gods and to observe the protagonists of a certain story.
Ort understood what lay ahead, where the future would branch from the present, and what had occurred in the past. Taking all of this into consideration, Ort would advise them.
Ort was known as "The Prophet of the Gods."
The place where Ort existed was a world filled with something resembling droplets of vapor scattered throughout an endless darkness, like countless particles of mist suspended in a black void.
Outer space is composed of four dimensions: the three dimensions of space and the dimension of time. At present, the observable universe extends for approximately 13.5 billion light-years, an incomprehensible vastness. Within it exist galaxies containing hundreds of billions of planets, clusters of galaxies, superclusters formed from those clusters, and Great Walls woven together like a cosmic web. Between them stretches the dark emptiness known as void regions. The universe itself resembles a structure of bubbles made from galaxies.
But there is not only one universe.
The universe born from the Big Bang expanded into infinite other universes at the same moment. Like cells dividing, they continue multiplying even now.
Within those infinite universes exist realities unlike the one humanity knows. There are universes where antimatter remained after matter-antimatter annihilation, universes where neither matter nor antimatter survived, and universes utterly incomprehensible to human understanding. The number of such universes defies imagination.
There are universes outside universes.
Yet there are other kinds of worlds as well. There are universes identical in every way except for a single choice made one second later, leading to an entirely different future. These are Parallel Worlds.
Infinite parallel universes exist, containing every conceivable possibility.
Outside every universe lie infinite other universes. Beside them exist infinite parallel universes.
But there is no end.
Outside those infinite universes are yet more infinite universes. They gather together to form larger cosmic structures. Beyond those are infinitely many more of the same kind, constructing even greater universes. Beyond those are still more, continuing endlessly.
Thus exists an infinite state of universes stretching forever without end.
The Multiverse.
An eternal condition in which infinite universes continue multiplying endlessly.
The Multiverse refers to a multidimensional cosmos containing countless universes.
In other words, reality has no boundary. It is merely a continuous expanse of ever-larger cosmic structures. Only the gods, the enemies of the gods, and Ort know this truth.
This Multiverse extends into an eternity where infinity is raised to infinity, and that infinity is raised again to infinite infinities without end.
Containing all of this is the Omniverse.
The Omniverse is not merely the existing dimensions of time and space. It encompasses every possibility, every creation, every construct, every story ever conceived. It treats all of them as universes and contains them within itself.
Within the world where Ort resided, there were tiny shining droplets suspended in the dark mist.
Each individual droplet was an Omniverse.
Within a single droplet existed all possibilities, all infinities raised to infinite powers beyond comprehension.
Those droplets themselves repeated infinite multiplication endlessly, and then repeated infinite multiplication again, existing in numbers without end.
And what lay beyond the black space that contained them all?
There is no need to explain it.
The answer is obvious.
It continues forever, expanding so endlessly that discussing it is meaningless.
Ort perceived all of it.
Ort observed every possibility, everything that would happen, and everything that had happened.
As Ort watched the gods—the protagonists of the eternal story—an idea emerged.
The current gods were merely the final gods in an endless flow of eternity.
Before them, there had been others.
Predecessors.
Beings whose stories had never been told.
Ort decided to preserve the records of those forgotten predecessors.
In an instant, Ort found the recorders who would document them.
The chroniclers of the eternal tale.
And thus, Ort began a new story.
[The Story of the Predecessors] End