When Elara finished speaking, Warren's expression shifted.
The casual confidence he'd walked in with was gone with the rising tension. He understood one thing very clearly, Elara Everhart wasn't the kind of person to panic or make dramatic declarations without reason, If someone of her level, someone one step away from being a Star God, said the Endless Abyss had a fatal flaw, then it wasn't a guess, it wasn't something she would say on a whim.
But Warren still couldn't figure out why, while the abyss was obviously bizzare, he struggled to classify it as dangerous.
He needed a real explanation, and almost like she'd read his mind, Elara exhaled and turned toward him.
"The Endless Abyss can run," she said calmly. "That's not the issue."
"What matters is how it runs. Its dimensional stability… is dropping."
Warren blinked. "Dropping?"
It took him a second to register what she meant. Then his brows furrowed.
"But isn't that expected in a low-latitude world? We've seen dimensional decline in plenty of self-sustaining syste..."
"Not like this," Elara cut in, voice sharp. "In this case, the decline is uncontrollable."
"I ran multiple simulations, Warren. Every model of the Endless Abyss eventually collapsed. Some imploded due to planes being too small. Others collapsed under their own mass. Some just… twisted out of structure."
She paused.
"Each version of the world followed the same pattern. Descent. Collapse. Death."
Warren frowned. "But… none of that's happened in the actual simulation."
"Exactly," she said. "Which is what bothers me the most."
He took a deep breath, trying to make sense of it.
"Isn't that a good sign? That the real thing hasn't broken down?"
Elara looked at him with eyes like stars and voids.
"No. That's the problem."
"In my projections, nothing about the Endless Abyss is consistent. Even concepts like logic and confirmation become unstable in that environment, it becomes impossible to verify anything because even mathematics itself begins to break down."
She sighed again.
"This world doesn't obey the laws of creation. Even now, I can't predict where it's going."
Warren was quiet for a long moment.
"So what you're saying… is that you're not actually sure."
"I'm not," Elara admitted. "I can't be."
"This Cillian… he's created something I didn't think was possible. A real, living low-latitude world. But it refuses to follow any predictable path. It feels like even the rules of failure don't apply."
"Should we warn him?" Warren asked quietly.
Elara's eyes closed.
"No."
" We just… observe, let's not interfere, at least not yet."
"Cold as it sounds, his failure may teach us more than a dozen other projects ever could."
She opened her eyes again. Her voice was calm, but cold.
"In every world, the weak become stepping stones for the strong. Grim as it may be."
Warren nodded slowly. "Understood."
But inside, he felt hollow, no one at Grimstone valued the success of their students more than he did. And Cillian wasn't just a genius, he was visionary.
And yet, according to the greatest mind at the university…He'd built a masterpiece that might collapse under its own brilliance.
Warren turned to leave. But as he reached the door, he remembered something.
He turned back.
"One last thing," he said. "Just now, you were saying we had to stop the expansion of the Endless Abyss, now you want me to observe ."
"What made you change your mind?"
Elara smiled faintly.
"That was my mis-judgment then, when I first ran the numbers. Some of the patterns disturbed me. I overreacted."
"And now?"
"Now I believe we don't need to stop it at all."
"Because I doubt it'll last long enough to matter."
Her smile didn't reach her eyes.
"If that world is destined to die… it'll do so on its own."
And with that, she closed her eyes, and the stars and black holes behind her lids shimmered.
"Failure?"
At the bottom of the Endless Abyss, Cillian sat in silence.
Then a smirk touched his lips.
"Impossible."
Across the twisting, corrupt planes of his world, countless larvae writhed and fought in the muck and poison. Some hunted others were hunted. But they were all changing.
And one of them, the twisted, malformed thing, was special.
Cillian's focus narrowed.
He watched as the larva consumed, evolved, split, then consumed again. It grew. Changed and transformed.
"I don't know how long it will take," he whispered. "But eventually…"
He stood, shadows gathering around him.
"They will give birth to what I desire most."
His eyes burned.
"The first devil."
"The original devil."
And as the larva finished its grotesque transformation, Cillian smiled wider.
In the Endless Abyss, everything had a purpose, Even failure.
And in his ideal vision, the abyss wasn't some uniform pit of chaos, It was a nightmare ecosystem, layered, alive, and terrifying.
There were creatures with a hundred arms and the strength to rip mountains in half. Floating beholders that wielded raw magic like instinct. Fallen demigods. Dying native gods clinging to sanity before full corruption.
All of them had potential.
Some could singlehandedly conquer planes within the abyss, Others created bloodlines strong enough to dominate generations.
And then there were the outsiders.
Humans. Elves. Orcs. All trafficked in, enslaved, experimented on. Few lasted long. Fewer still adapted. But their blood added new chaos to the mix.
Still, for all the variety and for all the horror, one race stood above the rest.
Devils.
To the outside world, they were the face of the abyss.
Flame-spewing monsters, cloaked in poison and seduction. The nightmares of mythology. The ultimate predators. And in many ways, the only creatures truly of the abyss.
"Finally…"
Cillians voice broke the silence.
He stood still, eyes locked on a ripple in space deep within the endless abyss.It was here.
After eons of accelerated evolution, even with his will numbed by the crawl of time, something had finally taken form.
The larva had made it. It had changed.
Cillian vanished from the pit where he usually observed and reappeared beside the creature in an instant. He studied it in silence.
It was fresh, raw. Only just born from the abyss's gnashing womb. And it didn't look like the Devils of popular myth. No horns and no wings. Just a humanoid frame covered in black scales, eyes glowing red.
By abyss standards, it wasn't even that strong yet, barely above the mid-tier. But Cillian didn't care.
Because in its soul, something was different.
A two-way resonance.
This creature didn't just obey the abyss. It was integrally connected to it and feeding off it.
No other creature had ever done that.
Everything else Cillian had created, no matter how powerful, was ultimately just a pet. They followed his will and they answered when called. But they left no legacy, their victories and deaths did nothing to deepen the abyss itself.
But this Devil, this primitive, ugly newborn, was different.
It would never escape the abyss. Even if it traveled to other worlds. Even if it built empires or became a god itself.
Its soul would still be tied to Cillians will. To the core of the endless abyss. Even if its body was destroyed, its soul would return, bringing back coordinates, memories, and weaknesses of the world it had touched.
A demonic spy that would corrupt every world it went to, warp the rules of the region and infect their logic.
Even just one corrupted rule would be mirrored in the Endless Abyss, rewritten, and made usable here in its own grotesque way.
That was how the abyss would grow stronger, not only as a war machine, but by stealing the very laws of reality from other realms.
⸻
Suddenly, the primitive Devil trembled.
It had sensed him.
Even without words, even without seeing his face, it knew. Knew it was being watched by something far older, far closer to God than anything it could understand.
And it broke, the creature collapsed in fear, body shaking violently. Not out of pain, but out of awe.
It recognized its creator, Cillian smiled.
Good.
The devil vanished, reappearing near a nearby cave where another abyss creature lurked.
This one wasn't quite as evolved, it was a grotesque, eyeless beast with layered bone plating and snapping tendrils, not weak but not overly dangerous either.
Cillian said nothing, he removed the pressure of his gaze, and waited.
The Devil twitched once, then lifted its head. It sniffed once, and quickly located the other creature.
And then it charged, as evolved as it was at the end of the day it was still and would always be a creature of the abyss. The fight was violent and primitive, Bone and claw clashing, causing reverberations throughout the cave.
The fight lasted a full day, changing locations multiple times, but the Devil won, and when it did it, what was left was nothing short of meat paste, that didn't bother it in the slightest however, as it bent over and devoured everything.
And then it changed once more, with a scream of pain, its back split open. Two massive wings of flesh burst from the wound, twitching and curling like living armor.
It had absorbed the creature's best trait, and overwritten nothing else. Everything it had already gained remained.
Cillian exhaled, deeply satisfied.
It was working. The blueprint was real. The cycle was evolving exactly as planned.
"Perfect," he murmured. "The Devil form is now confirmed."
"And now…"
A flicker of flame lit behind his eyes.
"I can begin the third phase."