Chapter 381: The Truth About The Weird Dungeon

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"...What?!" Desire exclaimed, unable to believe Nihil had dismissed her so easily. She glared at him for a moment, then looked back at Riven as if trying to understand what made Crow and Riven so important.

Hearing Desire’s annoyance, Nihil decided to move on from the conversation before she could continue arguing. "But that is beside the point..." he said with a sigh. Desire folded her arms and looked away, clearly dissatisfied, but she did not challenge him again.

"That Dungeon... Just what was it?! How did you turn a Dream into a Dungeon?!" Riven demanded, using the question to buy himself more time. He needed them focused on explaining their plans instead of searching through his thoughts. "That thing was a monster! A Memetic Beast from the Noosphere...! Did you make it?!"

"Oh yes, huhuhuh...!" Chatterer laughed, raising his hands with pride. "It was my own design! Beautiful, aren’t they? They disguise themselves as ordinary Gates, but they slowly eat away at the thoughts and minds of everyone who enters! The victims rarely notice until the Dream has already trapped them." His fingers twitched with excitement as he continued. "The System registers them as yet another Gate, another Dungeon, but they are Tears of Conceptual Mass that I shaped with my power! Ahh, I am known as the Nightmare Architect for a good reason, after all! Huhuhuhu!" He chuckled while rubbing his hands together.

"We have decided to plant hundreds of these ’fake Dungeons’ across the globe to accelerate the expansion of the Noosphere into the Material Plane," Desire explained. Her anger disappeared as she imagined the result, and a delighted smile returned to her face. "Thought, desire, lust...! Love! Imagine it! Every person’s love would become a tangible thing! Nobody would be lonely, and nobody would be forced to lust endlessly without satisfaction. Their desires, from the smallest and most innocent to the wildest and kinkiest, would all be fulfilled!"

"But the world would stop being what it is!" Riven argued. "Without rules or the laws of physics, it would become something incomprehensible. People wouldn’t be able to survive in a place where every passing thought could suddenly become real. They would lose their bodies, their minds, everything they are! Everyone would die before they could ever experience the paradise you’re promising!"

"Hohohoh..." Slob laughed, tilting his head as if Riven’s concern made no sense to him. "Huh? What’s the problem? Let them die, then. How is that a bad thing? Life and death would stop existing anyway..." He licked his wounded tongue, smiling despite the blood. "Even if you died, you would become something new. Is that so hard to understand? You’re such a strange one, ohoho... and so tasty-looking." Riven recoiled in disgust the more this thing continued trying to get closer to him, only to stumble into the invisible wall made of Void conjured by Nihil.

"The more our Dungeons are explored and their resources exploited, the farther the Noosphere’s reach spreads into the Material Plane," Nihil explained. "Every person who enters them unknowingly helps weaken the boundary between both worlds. Our ultimate plan is not only her complete resurrection, but the total annihilation of all life within reality. Once the Noosphere becomes one with the Material Plane, life as you know it will cease to exist."

"Because the Noosphere... has no concept of life. No concept of time... No concept of anything..." Riven muttered, his remaining eye gleaming with realization. In such a place, death itself would lose its meaning, but so would everything that allowed a person to exist as an individual.

"Indeed! In that world, the only things that matter are thought and desire," Desire replied with a laugh. She spread her arms as if welcoming the future they intended to create. "And we, her shadows, are the greatest embodiments of such power! Hahahahaha!"

While they spoke, Riven looked past them toward the distant tower he had noticed before. Countless smaller, demon-like beings swarmed across its surface, carrying pieces of conceptual matter and adding them to the impossible structure. It stretched across billions of kilometers, rising so far into the Noosphere that he could not see where it ended.

"That tower..." he muttered, swallowing hard as a terrible possibility entered his mind. He had seen that shape before, although it had looked different then. "You’re...! What are you doing with it?"

"Oh? The Babylon Tower is still under construction, but it will become our ultimate magnum opus, a bridge between the Conceptual and the Material," Nihil said. "Several Authorities have already agreed to cooperate in its creation and consolidation. Once it is completed, the separation between both planes will no longer protect your world."

Riven could not believe it. The Tower of Babylon he had climbed during his second life had actually been created by them. The battles, the floors, and everything he had endured inside it returned to his mind at once. Then that meant... Was his second life, his reincarnation, connected to this same world? Had he unknowingly crossed the bridge these entities were still constructing?

Riven studied them while he felt something reaching him from outside. A faint whisper entered the depths of his consciousness, careful enough that the five entities did not seem to notice it. He forced himself not to react.

Using his other brains, he generated layer after layer of random thoughts and formed a barrier around the message, hiding it beneath meaningless memories, numbers, and disconnected images. Whatever was calling to him, it might be his only chance to escape he desperately needed right now.

"Riven! It’s me! What’s going on?! Who are you speaking to?! What...! What are these immensely powerful presences filled with such malice?!"

Riven could not answer Ignias without alerting the five entities, but the light within his soul flickered in response. She immediately understood what he was trying to tell her. He was preparing to fight back, and he needed her ready to move the moment an opening appeared.

The members of the Hand of Inevitability slowly began approaching him from every direction. They surrounded the bubble; their eyes fixed on Riven as if they were deciding which part of him to claim first.

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