Universe's End

Two years, seven months, eight days, six hours, and fifty-two minutes.

That was how long it took until it was finished, as Rory and the rest of the artisans stood back.

“I think that’s it,” Rory said, before a laugh escaped. “I think we did it. Void Gate, complete.”

It was an utter marvel of magical engineering, and one that Rory hadn’t even been the main brain behind. Oh sure, he’d cleaned things up, but the general idea had been born from those he’d brought with.

They were inside a large room, a perfect sphere with thirty-two pylons jutting out of the circular walls at equidistant, save for the far ‘wall’ where a circular ‘portal’ that looked as if it had come straight out of Stargate was installed into the wall, several feet deep of tunnel. The walls were made of a grey, nearly black, glass-like stone, not all that different from obsidian in appearance. Alchemically transmuted stone, isolated to contain only concepts of integrity and durability that had been melted down alongside a large amount of monster cores, with the final addition of a large helping of liquid pneuma. While it sounded relatively simple in practice to make, the interplay of the materials when they were introduced released a byproduct, a ‘wave’ of invisible energy, only visually detectable by the refractive effect it had on light.

Said energy was also enough to instantly vaporize lower tiers, something Rory had realized when a gust of it had hit him, a tier eight, and he’d instantly had a layer of flesh removed from his face.

Throughout the walls were grooves or ‘veins’ that had been carefully planned and detailed, made to geometrically balance out the influence of the energy required to operate the gate in the first place.

Then there were the pylons, functionally the ‘heart’ of the entire system. Each pylon was stacked with not one, not two, but ten pearlescent cores, as well as a heavily modified pneuma crusher system. That was one of Rory’s iterations, born from his own thoughts on how exactly one could create a system that would automatically condense pneuma into higher states without wasting the ‘gains’ from refining the pneuma in the first place.

Each core was essentially a bound space within, or rather, the pearlescent cores could house bound spaces with very careful modifications, something only Rory could handle. If he were being absolutely accurate, they weren’t truly bound spaces, more like 99% bound spaces, as he still couldn’t figure out a way to open and close a bound space without requiring rebuilding it from scratch each time. The pearlescent cores had a very similar degree of isolation, and while the tiny bit remaining was also technically the most important, the benefit of a pearlescent core made from a monster core was that its natural ability to refine and store pneuma made up for what was lost in that final percent.

While there were more details regarding the entire system, they ultimately boiled down to ‘lots of inscriptions, alchemical transmutation, and material science that had required a full team effort over the last few years.

But what mattered was that it was done.

Or, theoretically speaking. They hadn’t tested it out yet, after all.

With the final pylon carefully inserted, they would have time to test it out, careful boot-ups that would-