Loopshard

Nova was on his twenty-third loop, and his approach to ‘ruling’ his universe with the Self-devouring Eye was similar to Emelia’s, except less naïve and more selective. He selected people he knew made it far and gave them the information he thought they might need to grow just that extra bit stronger to make it even further.

He was like a gardener who oversaw his crops and let them grow without his interference for a bit, and then the ones that flourished were given fertiliser to grow even stronger, while the rest would be left to wither as a matter of course.

It was brutally efficient, but it made a lot of sense.

Emelia had tried something similar, but she’d been giving out information in a much broader way, trying to spread it to as many people as possible.

Both had reasons they could work, and it seemed mostly that the time-loopers behind these philosophies shaped them according to their morals. Nova didn’t seem like a bad guy, but he didn’t care about those who wouldn’t reach Stage Ten, and that alone basically excluded 99.9% of all Players.

The problem with humans is that we’re really bad at conceptualising big numbers. It’s really easy to write off 400+ million people because it’s too big of a number to imagine.

And if Emelia was right, and only three to five thousand make it to Stage Ten, then those people represent 0.001% of all Players. And Nova is selecting from the ones who survive, which probably means even less than that.

Putting it into perspective like that is actually insane.

I’m still struggling to understand how hundreds of millions can be reduced by that much.