Chapter 137: The World-Cube

Inside the cabin, the air finally became breathable again and the heat stopped torturing her, because the children of Nymeria and Aria had built it specifically for Freya and woven countless spells into it to make it livable for her visits.

So, while the others made up their minds to leave their favorite sunbathing session and Thalassa managed to get them to come, Freya could quietly make use of this moment to do something she hadn’t done yet today, without wasting a second more than necessary.

"System, start the gacha."

[ Initiating Gacha! ]

The usual wheel began to spin and the quantimanas gathered around her, but Freya wasn’t expecting much as she watched it turn. After all, she had already piled up countless knick-knacks, whether in the museum, in the storage chambers or among the dungeon treasures left for the mimics, and anything that wasn’t even worth putting away ended up stacked in a corner of the sixth floor she called her personal scrapyard.

So when the wheel stopped on three letters, it took her a second to understand what she was looking at.

SSS.

She blinked once, then twice, and the moment her brain finally took in those three letters, avarice swept over her all at once. A burning, delicious warmth spread through her chest and set her heart ablaze, her cheeks flushed, and her breathing grew short and ragged while her eyes stayed riveted to the motionless wheel.

She hadn’t pulled anything above rank A, from any gacha, since the Jackpot Machine she had summoned for Aldric’s sister, Amelia, and she had never pulled an SSS since Aria.

Her heart was pounding so hard she could hear it in her temples, and she had to rest a hand on the table to catch her breath.

Then the letters faded, and in their place, a perfect cube of absolute black dropped into her palm. It was cold, hard, strangely heavy, and no matter how she turned it over in her fingers, nothing at all happened.

[ Congratulations! You have summoned a World-Cube, Rank SSS. ]

A smile slowly spread across her lips, a delighted, greedy smile she didn’t even try to hold back as she brought the cube up to her face to admire it better.

"A World-Cube, huh?"

And at her words, the cube glitched.

Its edges began to tremble, then tiny black cubes broke away from it one by one, floating in the air around her hand and slowly spinning in orbit, before reassembling and splitting apart again, while the central cube seemed to fold in on itself without ever shrinking.

Then, all at once, her vision changed.

The cabin was gone, and the table, the chairs and the terrace with it, and Freya now stood in the middle of a space that was entirely white and empty, with no ground, no sky and no horizon, a white that stretched endlessly in every direction.

Soon, something took shape in the middle of that endless white, something else, white as well, a glow, but ringed with a thin film of black that set it apart from the rest. It was unsettling to look at, almost like the birth of a world, except that this world was made of white on white, and it nearly stung her eyes.

Yet Freya didn’t dare close them, because the avarice devouring her was far too strong, that hunger to know, to understand, to learn what this rank-SSS thing unfolding before her eyes truly was.

A thing that belonged to her.

The glow moved around her, drifting formlessly through the air, hesitant, groping, as if it knew nothing and understood nothing, and beneath the avarice Freya felt a shiver run through her, because she realized that at this very moment, the thing was studying her.

Then, all of a sudden, the thing took shape.

It was Freya’s shape. A perfect reflection, the same height, with the same silhouette and the same posture, except that it was entirely white and empty of everything that made a person human, without features, without color and without clothes.

Freya’s mouth opened on its own.

"Hello."

"...Hello."

The thing in front of her repeated the word without moving an inch, and anyone might have thought it was simply answering out of politeness, but Freya understood at once that this wasn’t the case, because this thing didn’t know what it was saying, didn’t even know what a word was, and understood absolutely nothing.

The entity in front of her was empty.

And as if to confirm it, her gaze slid down despite herself to its fingers, which were empty as well, without a single ring, far from any greed.

Freya stayed like that for a long moment, stunned, slowly grasping what stood before her: an entity beyond comprehension, on the same level as Aria, but an empty entity, one she could shape however she wished, until she had made it into the most fearsome weapon that had ever existed.

She gradually came back to her senses while her heart was still pounding wildly, and the thing in front of her had begun to repeat, in a perfectly neutral voice:

"Ba-dum. Ba-dum. Ba-duuum."

It took Freya a second to realize it was her own heartbeat the entity was imitating, and the discovery fascinated her as much as it convinced her of one thing: this being was certainly not going to explain what it was. If she wanted answers, she would have to look for them elsewhere, so she simply spoke the word that worked for every object and every person she had summoned so far.

"Status."

[ World-Cube — Status ]

[ Unique Skill: World Administrator Spirit ]

[ Skills: Infinite Dimension | Blood and Soul Link | Soul Transfer | Dimensional Storage | Dimensional Access | Dimensional Isolation | Temporal Regulation ]

[ Titles: — ]

Once she had read the status, she pulled her eyes from the window and turned them back to the being, which hadn’t moved and was now repeating the word on a loop.

"Status. Status. Status. Status."

"So you’re the World Administrator Spirit?"

The being naturally didn’t hesitate for a second to throw the sentence right back at her, again and again, like a slightly too noisy parrot, so Freya immediately turned back to the status.

The World-Cube had a lot of skills, and some were easy enough to understand from their names alone. Infinite Dimension simply meant an infinite dimension, Soul Transfer let her transfer her soul into it, Dimensional Storage allowed her to store objects from the "real world" and bring them in with her, and Dimensional Access let her enter it with her soul and leave again, which went hand in hand with Soul Transfer. As for Temporal Regulation, it was obviously for regulating time.

That left two, the ones Freya found the most mysterious.

[ Dimensional Isolation: Protects the dimension from external interference, preventing any unauthorized access and any outside force from affecting its interior. ]

Freya didn’t really understand what this external interference was, or these outside forces, but she gathered that it worked a bit like an antivirus, which would prevent any corruption or any intervention here other than her own.

Pleased with her comparison, she moved on to the last one, which seemed just as mysterious.

[ Blood and Soul Link: Establishes a link of blood and soul between the cube, World Administrator Spirit and its master. ]

"..."

Freya honestly wondered what the point of a description like that was if it didn’t even say what the skill was for. Fine, she’d understood she could create a link, thanks very much, but what that link actually did was precisely what she’d hoped to find out by opening the description.

So, just in case, she asked.

"System, tell me what this link is for."

[ The system cannot provide any description other than a skill’s original one. ]

"Mostly I get the feeling you’re making excuses because you don’t want to talk about it."

[ The system is an impartial being and... ]

"Yes, yes... tell that to someone else," she said, brushing the notification away with a wave. "You know you’ve got a bit of Thalassa in you?"

[ ... ]

With no answer forthcoming, she decided to think it through herself. It took a few minutes and, of course, she found nothing, but after rereading the description several times, something did eventually click in her brain.

"The World-Cube and the World Administrator Spirit aren’t bound together, right? One can exist without the other, for example?"

[ Yes. Think of it as a head housekeeper in a manor: one can exist without the other, but it will affect both. ]

Happy to learn a little more about what belonged to her and everything that came with it, Freya nodded.

"Mhmm... I see."

But why on earth did it come up with a comparison to a servant? Is it sulking over mine or something?

A small smile curved her lips, and a soft laugh slipped out of her as she remembered that her thoughts, too, could be heard by her system.

Well, it should be fine, after all. It’s just a system, right?

She laughed to herself a little more, and the being in front of her began to laugh too, with exactly the same laugh.

She was thrilled to have discovered her cherished new rank-SSS item and everything that came with it, but it was time to go, and before that, one last idea crossed her mind.

"System, when I leave, make time go by as fast as possible for him."

[ The flow of time within the dimension will be slowed tenfold upon your departure. ]

Freya turned her gaze back to the white being standing before her, motionless, in the middle of all that emptiness. It surely understood nothing of such things, not yet, but she was still glad to know it would have to wait ten times less, alone, in this all-white place.

"Well, I’ll be back soon, okay?"

She gave it a smile, a real one, and gently waved her hand.

"Bye!"

The spirit copied her, its hand raised.

"Bye!"

And so Freya came back to herself, in the cabin made to measure to keep her from dying because of Aten’s heart... and of course, Kaguya was there, trembling, in tears, holding her as tightly as she could.

Seeing that, Freya couldn’t help thinking that from now on, she really was going to have to take countermeasures before sending her soul anywhere else.