Damon's Ascension-Chapter 144: The Chaos Realm

The Chaos Realm.

It was the strange space that was adjacent to our universe, previously undiscovered in the grand void until our nascent universe expanded enough that its borders touched the edges of this new realm.

Our universe had never expected something like this, and this early discovery shattered the typical timeline of growth for our universe.

In human years, one could say our universe was around 3 years old, an infant by such standards. This was why the Universe Will was so underdeveloped and limited, even having to ask the sentient beings within its ’body’ to go and farm on its behalf. fгeewebnovёl.com

A mature Universe Will did not need such politeness to make the subordinate species within its boundaries obey.

A universe wasn’t even supposed to develop its own will by this age. However, our universe had no choice, because it needed to organize efforts to explore this new adjacent realm that had suddenly appeared.

The Chaos Realm.

It was not like a typical universe. Its rules were orderly, not at all chaotic, and seemingly drafted by a higher will that was not only conscious but extremely experienced.

It was only called ’chaos’ because of the energy type it possessed, not because of its nature.

The Chaos Realm, as far as sentient minds have experienced it and understood it, was a vast and expansive world that was split into Sectors. Each Sector was akin to a state within a country, a flat expanse of land - or sea, and even sometimes sky or void - that was removed from other Sectors in terms of laws.

Each Sector had its own rules, its own laws, its own time flow, and its own danger rating, as well as its lucrativity. Sectors varied, and the IUAS had discovered around 400 sectors so far, but the higher the number did not mean the deeper it was, just the order in which it was found.

Sectors were graded based on difficulty versus lucrativity. The basic difficulty scaling was done with the average explorers in mind, as Ability Users were rare in most species, and the majority of Chaos Realm spelunkers were Explorers.

Within each Sector were various ’areas’. Sectors were large and expansive, requiring spacecraft like the Normandy to traverse because walking from the edge of even the smallest sector to the other end could take an entire lifetime.

However, areas were different. You could think of areas as Essence instances or dungeons in RPG games. They were one of the mini-worlds within a sector that shared its overt rules but also had some unique rules that forced the Explorers that entered them to complete or achieve something within them based on the rules of that area.

Let us take the now-named ’Armageddon’ area in Sector 33, the one Damon first heard about and was later revealed to be a copy of Ragnarok from Norse Mythology.

Entering within, one must obey the rules of the area, in which the Unions Battlecorps revealed that anyone who entered would be reverted to a common Asgardian citizen and must escape Asgard during the chaos.

You didn’t need to fight Thor, Loki, Odin, Jörmungandr, or the other Gods, just escape the aftereffects of their blows. And yet the Union Battlecorps, which features the top explorers in the universe over level 80, were almost completely routed.

It was so bad that Kissuo Vritu and the IUAS banned all those below level 150 and had at least a C-rank Ability.

But why do this?

Well, we will have to talk about the clash of laws between our universe and the Chaos Realm.

Both were separate realms with their own inner mechanics and workings, and due to the ’connection’ between the two, some laws of each could carry over to the other.

This allowed the Essence system to work. By raising one’s stats and acquiring ordained skills from the Universe Will, they could take them into the Chaos Realm and enhance their chances of survival within various areas.

However, this had many limitations. Firstly, in Sectors farther from the Universe Will’s ’connection point’, the power of stats and skills became weaker, especially for skills. Secondly, some areas have rules that either suppress or remove stats and skills outright, leaving you as a mere mortal to resolve the task within.

And in talking about this, we have to talk about awakened abilities. As Damon had already shared with his group, awakened abilities came from the soul and were activated by injecting Chaos Essence, which was from the Chaos Realm.

This meant that no matter the Sector or Area, your ability would always function at 100% power.

So now, you understand all the hype about abilities.

For example, the same Armageddon before, which forces you to become a normal Asgardian, means that your stats and skills will be limited to the role you have. Asgardians were slightly stronger than average humans, but a skill like Damon’s Empty Soul Palm wouldn’t be usable because it was not something an Asgardian would have.

However, Probability Manipulation, Avatar, and Devour would work at their full power. If Damon at level 30 entered that realm with a level 100 explorer with a lot of awesome stats and skills, Damon almost had a guaranteed chance to exit, while the explorer’s life and death were up to a mixture of his wits and luck.

This was not even taking into account mining.

Don’t forget, the Chaos Realm was not like essence realms, which had a results screen that granted rewards. Your entire purpose of entering the area was to find deposits of Chaos Essence and quickly mine them while being mindful of the rules of the area and trying to avoid dying.

So your job was not just to survive, but to make your own profit. As Felicia had shared on the BBC, one could also snatch items from Chaos Realm Sectors or areas depending on their own ability. For example, snatching Thor’s Hammer in Earth’s essence instance and coming out with it will grant you the item.

Doing so in Armageddon would also yield the same outcome, if you could survive the theft. The difference between an Essence R item and a Chaos Realm item was the same as skills and abilities, in that things brought from our universe, no matter how powerful, may be disabled or weakened, but things from the Chaos Realm did not suffer such limitations.

Sounds harsh, but what did you expect? We were the ones intruding upon the realm to harvest its essence in the first place, we should be lucky that the items brought over from our place even worked there.

Now onto the matter of the Primordial Lake.

As the Universe expands, it goes in all directions, so if you were to imagine it in a 2D manner like a map, then it’s expanding to north, south, east, and west. Assuming that the Chaos Realm was located to the east, as the universe expands eastward, it ’connects’ more with the Chaos Realm.

So much so that entire sectors have been covered by the new territory of our universe, causing the rules and laws of these areas to be mixed. They have their own natural Chaos Realm rules and also our universe rules.

You can picture it like a Venn diagram with two connecting circles, and the connected part as the sectors which contain both our universe and the Chaos Realm.

These connected areas are called ’Safe Zones’. They are places that have been either around for years—the universe handled them long ago—or recently—the universe just expanded to cover them in full a while back—where even Explorers can move about with relative ease.

Due to the strong influence of our universe, these safe zones, even if they have areas or entire sectors with rules that suppress stats or skills, this suppression would be greatly weakened.

Since they are closer to the connecting point between the Universe and the Chaos Realm, bases have even been established in each of these sectors that allow for rest, recuperation, and restocking, hence the overall term ’safe zone’.

Even the areas within the safe zones have detailed guides on how to enter, often used for newbie training when a species finishes their 20-year grace period and sends its top members to explore for the first time, allowing them to get used to the flow and rules of the Chaos Realm.

Currently, there were 15 Sectors that were covered by the universe, marked as green safe zones.

The sector where the Primordial Lake was located was at the edge of the 5th Sector, away from the 13th Safe Zone.

So from Safe Zone 13, one had to cross 4 sectors and nearly 99% of the 5th to reach the Primordial Lake and make it back in one piece for their journey to be successful.

Luckily for them, the Primordial Lake wasn’t deep in the Chaos Realm. From Sector 13, going in the direction of the Primordial Lake, were Sector 45, Sector 53, Sector 32, and Sector 54.

The Lake was located in Sector 69.

As these sectors were numbered, they had been somewhat explored, so there was a basic roadmap for the vanguard team to cross, and they had some basic guides to learn from up until the area where the team who discovered the lake itself died.

That area where the lake was would be the only mystery and was where the real danger was at.