Chapter 2503: The Emperor of Earth

"What’s wrong?"

Nathan followed Alex’s gaze toward the Demons marching into the Gate. However, he couldn’t see anything that would explain why his friend had suddenly gone so serious.

"I’m not sure yet."

Alex frowned, his attention still on the figures moving through the crimson passage. He had run into plenty of Demons during the Summoning, and if he was being honest, a lot of them hadn’t seemed all that different from ordinary animals. Hobgoblins, undead, devils... he had seen all sorts, and most of them had no interest in anything beyond fighting and killing.

But, Alex had also met Demons who were far more intelligent than that. His conversations with Xarvenya had only driven home that the Demon World had civilizations every bit as complicated as the ones in the Real World.

If that was the case, had he been looking at this the wrong way from the very beginning?

Alex had always assumed the weaker Demons were just stupid, that their lack of intelligence came naturally with their Race or how they had evolved. What if that wasn’t true? What if the System had been suppressing their intelligence all along, just to make them easier to control during its challenges?

He didn’t like where that thought went.

Alex had already known the System could restrict what Demons did. Seeing just how completely it could control them was another matter. These creatures weren’t just following orders, their Wills were practically gone, leaving behind bodies that carried out their tasks without the slightest sign of a thought of their own.

And if the System could do that to them, what was stopping it from doing the same to him?

Alex’s expression darkened for a moment, then he shook his head. It wasn’t as though he knew much about his Demonic heritage to begin with.

He had lived practically his whole life as a human. He had started uncovering some of the secrets of his Bloodline, but there was still an enormous gap between what he knew and what he only suspected. Getting worked up over a few mindless Demons wasn’t going to close that gap.

"Are you alright?"

"I’m good."

Nathan studied him for another moment before turning to the projections around them. Whatever he’d seen on Alex’s face, he apparently decided to let it go.

"What now?"

Alex grinned. "What? Were you expecting me to say I didn’t think that far?"

Nathan gave him a deadpan stare, and Alex burst out laughing.

"Look at you, pissing your pants already. Relax, would you? The Demon World is collapsing, which means its laws are a lot easier to manage than those of the Real World. Getting to the God Plane here should be pretty straightforward. We can practically fly right to it, and once we’re there, all we need to do is find another Summoned World with an active Demon Gate."

He waved a hand at the instruments around them.

"The only thing we need is a little time for the equipment to adjust to the physical laws of this place. After that, getting where we need to go shouldn’t be much of a problem."

Nathan frowned. "If the Demon World is so unstable, what exactly are you adjusting to?"

"Bah, details, details."

Nathan’s lip twitched. Alex had already turned back to his console, looking a lot more pleased with himself than anyone in their situation had any right to be.

"You really don’t trust me?"

"Would you trust you?"

Alex’s grin widened. "People forget because Sylas is always around, but if that monster didn’t exist, the emperor of Earth would be me."

Before Nathan could answer, Alex slapped his palm against the central console. A powerful surge of Will spread out from his body, and the change was immediate.

Thousands of circuits lit up across the command deck. Their electrical currents fluctuated as the software running them began to go through an enormous transformation.

Normally, changing the operating principles of a machine this complicated would have taken countless individual adjustments. Alex would have had to rewrite the software, account for the differences in the environment, and then change the physical circuitry anywhere the old components couldn’t support the new instructions.

However, the Omnimous had taught him something far more better.

At its most basic level, software wasn’t all that different from the laws that governed the universe. Ordinary computers used arrangements of positive and negative signals to pass along instructions. The Omnimous approached the same problem through particles and their spins.

By manipulating those relationships, it was possible to change the instructions running a machine without going through the usual process of rewriting them. And it could be said that Alex had gotten quite good at doing exactly that.

His Will spread through the circuitry, altering how the particles interacted while rebuilding the electrical pathways that carried information at the same time. The physical circuits changed right along with the software underneath them, letting him rebuild the entire operating framework in one coordinated process.

This time, though, he wasn’t tuning the equipment to the laws of the Real World. He was tuning it to Demonic Will.

That was a big difference, especially with how unstable the space around them was. The Demon World’s laws were weaker than the Real World’s, and on top of that, many of their relationships had started coming apart. That meant the equipment couldn’t rely on one fixed set of measurements for very long.

This was why Alex had gone with an adaptive system in the first place.

Instead of forcing the instruments to run on a single understanding of the laws around them, he let the circuits keep adjusting their relationships based on whatever changes they picked up. Every fluctuation became one more piece of information, and the faster the environment changed, the more often the system corrected itself.

Alex pulled his hand back as the last of the circuitry stabilized, a satisfied smile on his face.

"Let’s go."

The Hollow Ship sped up, leaving the area around the Demon Gate behind as it began climbing through the layers of the Demon World. It didn’t take long for Nathan to understand what Alex had meant when he said reaching the God Plane would be easy.

In the Real World, the divisions between Planes were reinforced by incredibly complicated laws. Crossing them took either enough strength to overcome those restrictions, or access to passages that already existed.

The Demon World was different. As the Hollow Ship climbed, the space around it grew more and more unstable, and the barriers between one Plane and the next showed up as enormous regions of warped Aether, nothing like the nearly impenetrable walls Nathan had been expecting.

Alex steered the vessel toward one of those regions, adjusting its course as the instruments measured the changes happening in the Mesh. However, weaker barriers also meant less predictable ones.

More than once, the Hollow Ship had to change direction when a passage that had looked stable moments earlier started collapsing. Alex didn’t seem particularly worried.

The instruments answered to his Will. Whenever the laws around them shifted beyond what their current setup could handle, he changed the circuitry again, letting the vessel slip through openings that would have been impossible to use without his preparations.

Before long, they had passed through the Demi-God Plane and into the regions belonging to the God Plane. Alex looked at the projection, where countless fluctuations had started appearing across the space around them.

"Now we just need to find a Gate that’s already opening toward a Summoned World in the Real World. The System is handling so many of these challenges that there should be plenty of opportunities, especially if we search from somewhere with access to the higher-level spatial currents."

Compared to locating a hidden Summoned World, finding an active Gate was much easier. Every time the System connected the two universes, it had to briefly form a relationship between their otherwise incompatible laws, and those relationships caused disturbances that Alex’s instruments could pick up.

It was technically even easier to find a Summoned World here than it was in the Real World because the gates weren’t hidden like Summoned Worlds were.

After several minutes of searching, a cluster of crimson signals appeared across the projection. Alex looked them over and picked one, his fingers moving across the console as the Hollow Ship changed course.

But, the longer he looked at it, the more serious his expression became.

Getting into the Demon World had been one thing. They had come in from the Real World, and the System’s attention had mostly been focused on registering an invasion that wasn’t supposed to exist.

Leaving through a Demon Gate would be far more dangerous. This time, they would be coming from the exact side the System expected invaders to come from, and Alex had already seen what happened to Demons who fell completely under its control.

He had no intention of becoming one of those mindless puppets.

Alex took a deep breath as the Hollow Ship drew closer to the first of the crimson disturbances, his eyes settling on the enormous passage starting to form in the distance.

"Here comes the hard part."