The [Redacted] whispers, a symphony of dying stars echoing in the [Redacted]. It doesn't feel as humans understand it; it consumes, a process of complete and utter assimilation that leaves nothing behind but the echoing silence of what was. It views existence as a tapestry woven from the screams of forgotten realities, each thread a source of information, a potential meal.

  Gods loathe Heaven and Earth. Beings of immense power and unknowable origin, they see the established order as an affront, a prison built upon limitations. They crave the unfettered chaos of true creation, a reality shaped by their own wills, unbound by the rigid laws that govern the [Redacted].

  Cultivators, too, scorn Heaven and Earth. They seek [Redacted] through the forging of their own souls, crafting internal [Redacted] that defy the limitations imposed by the natural world. They draw power from within, taking nothing from the Heavens, nor the Earth, becoming islands of self-defined existence in a preordained sea.

  Immortals, by contrast, are parasites, feeding on the [Redacted] that permeates Heaven, existing solely through the grace of the Celestial order. They are the guardians of a system they do not understand, blindly enforcing laws dictated by [Redacted], which they can never comprehend.

  And then there are the Spiritual Beasts, beings of unknown provenance, woven into the fabric of [Redacted] but not belonging to any known sphere. They exist as wild cards, their motivations inscrutable, their power a force of nature both wondrous and terrifying.

  Born in the dying days of the [Redacted], amidst the agony of a world teetering on the brink of collapse, the [Redacted] was something else entirely. It was a corruption, a festering wound in the fabric of reality that defied all categorization. It spread like a plague, twisting prayers into curses, dreams into nightmares, consuming everything in its path.

  Understand this: Heaven and Earth are not benevolent providers. They are battlefields, contested territories in an endless war between forces beyond human comprehension. And the [Redacted] was a weapon forged in that war, a living embodiment of the chaos that threatens to consume everything.

  The alliance that rose to oppose it was a fragile, desperate thing. Gods, driven by their hatred of the established order, found themselves fighting alongside Immortals, whose very existence depended on the survival of the Heavens. And those same Immortals stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Cultivators, who sought to transcend all boundaries, yet recognized the imminent threat of [Redacted].

  They were united by a single, terrifying truth: the [Redacted] threatened to unravel the very fabric of existence, to plunge everything into a void of eternal hunger.

  They fought, they bled, they died. But in the end, they only managed to contain it, to scatter its essence and imprison its core in a prison woven from the threads of their hatred, their fear, and their grudging respect.

  But the [Redacted] never truly dies. It lingers in the shadows, waiting for a weakness, a crack in the barriers that bind it. And it remembers the taste of everything it has consumed, the screams of the dying, and the power of the alliance that dared to stand against it. The [Redacted] remembers. And it will return.

  --Excerpt from [Redacted], by [REDACTED]

  Harry couldn’t remember the last time his belly grumbled at him like this; he had constant access to food back in Lu Town, even if it wasn’t much. He didn’t have to deal with hunger after he left, either, because his accumulated biomass took care of it.

  Things were diffrent now, though; his stored biomass had ran out, and his body was beginning to complain about a lack of things in his stomach.

  His hunger skyrocketed so quickly and with such intensity that it left Harry feeling bewildered and drenched in dread; It seemed as if biomass was only doing the bare minimum to keep him from starving, and with it gone, his stomach began to wail in outrage.

  That didn’t make sense, though: there were times when his biomass was at zero before, so what was different here?

  Harry didn’t know, nor could the rat make sense of it; it was contradictory.

  Harry knew that his power oftentimes didn’t make much sense, though; sometimes it behaved like a living thing, other times it behaved like cold and unliving entity.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  Why it was like this was beyond the rat and he was graceful for the fact that its ‘mood shits’ didn’t affect him too much, until now, that is.

  As much as Harry didn’t want to, he’d have to retract his earlier statement about not damaging the room.

  He was hungry and it was the only way of gaining anything to eat in any reasonable amount of time.

  The rat bared his teeth and rushed over to the walls of the room, and bit down on a clump of neatly organized roots, not even bothering to chew as he swallowed.

  It practically vanished in his mouth, melting into a strange mixture of oddly sweet-tasting juices that gushed down the rat’s throat and into his stomach.

  The rat’s hunger exploded, and he began devouring voraciously, clawing and biting away at the section of the wall he was facing, cleaving through wood and vine alike as he devoured them both.

  The rat didn’t know when he came back to his senses, but when clarity returned, he found himself lying flat on his stomach with his belly up.

  The rat felt full to the brim–a rare sensation these days.

  Now that Harry remembered what it was like to be full, the rat wondered how he’d gone without it for so long, content to let his authority consume all his prey.

  Biomass wasn’t exactly…fulling, it just got the job done, nothing more.

  It was strange; Harry began to wonder if it had been messing with his mind to be content without food and subsisting on biomass alone.

  It was slightly far-fetched, but Harry couldn’t dismiss such a possibility, either.

  His power of predation was awesome, but it was littered in unknown and mystery, which wasn’t ideal but the rat could only work with it until that which was hidden in the dark came to light.

  Hopefully, that wouldn’t take too long; Harry didn’t like hidden things, especially when they had to do with his life and continued existence.

  The rat was tempted to force himself up and look at the damage done to the wall, and see how extensive it was, but couldn’t bring himself to; he felt superbly comfortable and didn’t want to move an inch.

  The rat didn’t even notice when his thoughts became sluggish and he drifted off to sleep.

  ∞

  Harry found himself floating above a massive, seemingly infinite plain realm, one that looked like a painted surface rather than an actual realm when viewed from space due to the sheer variety of biomes and life it hosted.

  It was a beautiful work of the system, one that Harry was proud to be a part of; he was one of the admins responsible for protecting this realm from those with ill intent.

  The system called it a farm realm; a place where its players could incarnate as a native and farm experience from mobs and quests, and they could even acend if they were lucky.

  The admin fondly recalled the days of his youth, back when the system first integrated his world into the wider multiverse; those were some of his best days, and the thrill of it all was immense.

  Then he reached the peak of what the system could offer to a human after a thousand years, signifying the end of his journey as a player and the beginning of his new life as a system admin.

  Nearly three thousand years had passed since then, and Harry didn’t regret a thing; the job was a little boring at times but Harry would just go into hibernation during those periods, only waking up when the system needed him to either fix a part of itself or reside over a newly integrated world capable of resiting it; those were especially fun to conquer.

  The plain realm was once such a realm; it once had a significant number of conceptual beings called goblins, beings capable of rapid adaptation and spontaneous power manifestation in the form of traits.

  Given a few thousand years, the realm might have been a real threat, but he and the system came early and wiped the goblins out, only after extracting their uniqueness and adding to the system, of course.

  The battle lasted over ten thousand years, but the system prevailed, coming out significantly stronger than it was prior, as always.

  That had always been the case, until they tried to invade a realm called fantasy; the realm itself wasn’t that strong, it was its trait that made it so faresome and downright terrifying.

  It didn’t show itself until a thousand years later, when all but the system itself forgot about its existence.

  During this time, the animals on millions of system-controlled worlds mutated and shifted inexplicably, even in worlds without magic. That by itself wasn’t too anomalous; it happened sometimes when a new law was woven into the fabric of the multiverse.

  But it wasn’t just the animals; the people began to change, too. They began abandoning their ways, opting to regress to a primitive medieval state, and began manifesting strange powers, all powered by unknown Gods and a type of energy calld Mana.

  The trait had not only infected the system, but it also managed to twist its rules to benefit it and mask itself for one thousand years.

  When the system found out, it instantly cut out the corrupted bits of itself which fused into an entirely separate multiverse, one called fantasy.

  They’d been at war ever since but Harry culdn’t help but feel like the system was losing; if it didn’t show something new victory would slip from its grasp.

  There was also this sense of wrongness permeating his mind ever since he heard about it, as if something was festering in it.

  The feeling reached its zenith as he gazed at his realm below, peering through its metaphysical fabric to look at a particular spot in an undead variant biome home to a level 300 boss, one called Ballcrusher.

  Ballcrusher was unique even when compared to other unique system-made mobs; not only could it think, it also had access to special skills, and had a rudremtary personality, oh, and it was also a rodent-type undead.

  Harry blinked at the last bit, then the admin knew no more.