Spending My Retirement In A Game

As the old man's feet touched the ground, Eisen quickly shrank down and looked around. He was surrounded by a cloud of dust that clearly came from the people currently fighting in front of him. Since he wasn't able to see through it normally, Eisen glanced at what was going on with his truth-seeing-eye.

But when he did, what the old man saw wasn't just Jyuuk and Brody swinging around their weapons and fists at the thing in front of them. And whatever it was, it was... wrong. It didn't belong into this world, like some disgusting splotch of rot that was thrown onto a page. It was disgusting just to look at this mass of black, sludge-like energy in the shape of a person.

At the edge of this area where they were fighting, or rather, where Jyuuk and Brody were tearing away at the thing, Xenia was standing and inspecting some kind of magic circle that was still leaking some of that same exact energy into the air. However, different to that thing, that energy wasn't contained in anything. It was like it was being diffused into the air.

Holding his hand in front of his mouth and nose, trying to stop himself from breathing it in as if on instinct, Eisen rushed over to where Xenia was standing.

"Oh! You came after all? Well, that's fine! You won't believe this," the high-elf exclaimed excitedly when Eisen approached, "Here, come take a look and-"

"What are you doing?! Put a barrier around this, just- just something to stop the energy from leaking more!" Eisen exclaimed, and Xenia looked at him confused.

"What do you mean? The ritual was interrupted, the connection has been cut..." she pointed out, looking at the ritual site with a frown. Xenia noticed that Eisen's eyes were glowing in that golden light, so she knew that he was seeing something that he couldn't, "You say that there's something 'leaking'? Can you describe it for me?"

"It's... Just I don't know, the same as whatever Jyuuk and Brody are fighting, as if that thing is made up of the same stuff as this," Eisen pointed out nervously, and Xenia's anxiety immediately grew.

"Oh gods..." Xenia muttered, "So... what if this works on a completely different system than what I know right now? It could create some kind of connection to another space, but-"

Xenia stopped when she saw Eisen's expression, as the old man held his hand to his forehead as if he was in pain, "Eisen! What's going on, are you okay?"

"I- Yeah, I-" he muttered, as he felt something weird encroaching on him. It was like a memory, or one of those 'flashbacks' that he got lost in sometimes, but this one seemed to have been locked away behind thick gates, as if these were memories Eisen wasn't allowed to even glance at. A self-imposed restriction, because he wasn't ready for this information yet.

But right now, that memory was forcing its way out. With large thuds, as the blood pumped through the veins in Eisen's head, and twinges of pain coursed through him, the memories forced their way out of the gate.

As the stared at the ritual's magic circle and that disgustingly wrong energy in front of him, Eisen felt a wave of annoyance.

"Another failure?" Eisen asked, placing his hand onto Xenia's shoulder. The elf nodded her head with a long, frustrated sigh.

"Just like every day. No matter what I do, it doesn't seem to work... I've been trying to figure this out for... what, three thousand years now? And every time it looks like I'm getting closer, I just hit another wall... How the hell did Samuel do it on Earth?" she groaned loudly, leaning backward into her seat.

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Coming in from another room, Jyuuk carried in some hot tea that he placed in front of his wife and Eisen, leaning in to Xenia for a quick kiss. As he pulled back again, he smiled lightly, "It could have been the cumulation of tens of generations. Or they had some kind of more natural access to these methods that we don't know about. You say that things work slightly differently in each world, right?" freewёbnoνel.com

"They work differently? How so?" Eisen asked as he placed the cup of tea against his lips, not sure if he was understanding right. Xenia thought about her answer for a few moments.

"Like... Okay, so. Generally, our worlds are very, very similar, right? For the most part, most building blocks of the world are identical, with the most prominent exception being the existence of mana. It interacts with the physical world in a unique way that we know isn't the case on earth. But while that's the most prominent difference, that's not all.

The rules of the universe are slightly... different. Since the last time you visited, I've been doing some experiments.

And you know, on Earth, while I went into an anthropological field later, but when I first started, I nearly got to the point where I got a bachelor's degree in physics, and with my abilities here, I remembere basically everything that I learned there perfectly, and can even comprehend it a bit better, and... well, let's just say..."

Xenia hesitated, as if she knew how insane what she was about to say sounded, "Gravity is different. Not by a lot, but it's tangibly stronger by a factor of around 0.003% relative to the mass of the object than it should be.

Magnetic forces are just so slightly skewed from what I know, and the speed of light, if I measured and calculated everything right, which let's be honest, we all know I did, is faster than on Earth. Or well... our home universe as a whole, obviously.

And these are just the things that I've been able to figure out on my own, and there's a lot of tests that I can't properly do because I can't cross-reference things on Earth, but there have to be far, far more things that are different that we just don't know about yet."

Eisen ran his fingers through his beard in thought, trying to understand the importance of that fact, "So... you think that it's possible that there's some factor that made it easier for Samuel, or his ancestors, to find the seed of another world, or universe, or whichever it is really, than it is for us."

Xenia immediately nodded her head, "Yes, exactly. And at the same time... there has to be some level of compatibility. Like, clearly, there's other worlds out there where... Light isn't even a thing that exists. It might be a world where matter isn't a thing, and they have something that we can't even comprehend.

It's possible that I did find some other worlds, but that the connection broke down because our worlds simply weren't compatible enough."

"In that case... once you do find it, there's a good shot that it will be our world? Earth?" Eisen asked, and Xenia didn't know how to answer that.

"Yes, but it could also be just... vaguely similar? I don't know. It's not like the whole 'parallel universe' thing where every possible variation of our world exists. Like a world where everything's the same but carrots are purple instead of orange. That's not how this works, so if we find a world that looks like ours, then it's probably the right one, but...

I don't know, it's more complicated than that. There should be a link between this world and earth that we can access already, but maybe Samuel did something that completely blocks any attempt in the first place," Xenia sighed in frustration, as Eisen placed his hand onto the elf's back.

"Don't worry. If anyone can figure this out, it's you," Eisen smiled, looking at Xenia's face which quickly turned into one of concern as Eisen was pulled back out from the memory he had just lived through. The knowledge was a bit hard to keep up with, but the old man did at least understand something important.

He understood the nature of what they were dealing with; the nature of what they had just accessed. Eisen didn't know how the Holy Empire got their hands on the methods of opening that 'passage', but that wasn't important right now.

"That..." the old man muttered, "It's from somewhere else... different to this one, or earth, it's something from a whole other world."