2038 Project.
The second-ever Zone that Leonel had entered, and the first one he had entered with Aina by his side, was one he slotted away in his mind as the "Joan" Zone. This was a Zone he was transported back in time for and one that had been very close to becoming a Unique Zone due to outside interference, but in the end, whatever had been about to trigger this change stopped and didn't follow through.
In that Zone, Leonel met a Bishop, and he learned about a man that both said Bishop, Joan, and her adopted brothers called God. This God was able to gift them a great deal of power, power they could never imagine… These powers were things that Leonel immediately recognized to be Ability Indexes.
This so-called God was able to copy the Ability Indexes of others, distill them into Force Arts, and then pass them down via a tattooing and branding method that allowed these Ability Indexes to become a permanent part of themselves. Of course, Leonel had also noticed that these Force Arts also carried a monitoring aspect to them as well.
Back then, Leonel had had no choice but to allow one to be branded onto him due to the circumstances, but it was also something that he had long since gotten rid of. Not long after that, Leonel exited the Zone and was caught up in a whole host of trouble before he ended up on the side of the Slayer Legion and entered the Camelot Zone alongside many others, even including some of the Adurna family.
In that Zone, every one of the Adurna family had died with the exception of Little Nana, whom Leonel had saved. But it was also as a result of those who had targeted the Adurna family in the first place that things had gotten out of hand. Although Leonel recalled that Zone to be a Mythological Zone, the reality was that it had long since become a Unique Zone.
Within the Camelot Zone, Leonel had entered Merlin's Trial, and even up until right this very moment, he still had the reward for that trial in his mind. Although he hadn't used it in a long while, when he meditated upon the Natural Force Art, he was able to call down Auspicious Air, entering a deeper state of focus and benefiting from twice the benefits with just half the effort.
Then there was Monkey. Monkey was one of the Savants that had been in the same group with Candle, Vice, and most importantly, Lionel, the prisoner who had believed himself to be Leonel. Monkey was a Savant with the ability to double things. It was a simple ability that was extraordinarily overpowered. In an instant, he could exponentially increase the numbers of himself and his strength. The only reason Leonel had been able to defeat him was that he was na?ve and not used to his power yet, and as a result easily hurt himself using his ability.
Back then, despite defeating him, Leonel had still failed to kill Monkey and had no choice but to store him within a snow globe where his regeneration abilities were stalled. However, years ago, when Leonel decided that he wanted to give Monkey a chance to live a normal life just like Candle and Vice had, and he summoned him out, Monkey spontaneously died.
Leonel was absolutely enraged when this suddenly happened because he felt that he had been plotted and schemed against. There was no reason for Monkey, who had such powerful abilities, to suddenly die in such a fashion if there was no foul play involved. However, there hadn't been anything that he could do aside from using the Silver Tablet to transfer what was once Monkey's ability to the Tentacle Womb.
Since then, he hadn't found any clues or potential answers to the shocking question of back then.
Then there was Orinik's transplanted organ. It was only a vague line, but it was eerily familiar to Leonel, familiar enough that he was quite baffled by it all. This sort of power-gifting ability was something that he had only seen casually done once before, and he hadn't heard a word about this "God" at all afterward.
What was shocking about this was that during the Merlin Trials, Leonel had met the people of The Bishop. One of their people, Aliard, had questioned him about why he wasn't following the way of The Bishop if he was branded.
But the issue with this was that it was a Mythological Zone, it wasn't like the Joan Zone where one could just go back in time and place people in wait for an event that connected the past and present, it didn't make any sense.
Camelot wasn't a real place, so how could you send people into it… But if Camelot wasn't a real place, then how could Leonel have entered it, then? How could Mordred and King Arthur come out with their people and become citizens of Earth without issue? What was the difference between those two events and someone infiltrating?
What was he missing here, exactly?
That was when it all came crashing down, a single kernel of information, a single pointed memory, a single remembrance that hit him like a falling tsunami.
The Cataclysm Zone. Leonel had only spent a handful of months in the Cataclysm Zone, not long at all. He had only spent a fraction of a fraction of a second returning to the Human Domain after he found a method of connecting back. And yet, that fraction of a fraction of a second resulted in the loss of over two decades to him, a truly devastating loss to most.
He hadn't thought much about it back then. After all, Zones always had different time dilation situations, and this was also the first time that anyone had ever escaped from a Zone that had been closed off to begin with, it made sense for there to be certain distortions in time. But…
Zones didn't work that way. If anything, less time should have passed, not more, it didn't make any sense.
When Leonel entered the Joan Zone, months had passed within, but only days passed on the outside. When he entered the Merlin Zone, it was the same. The only Zone where this wasn't the case was with the Valiant Heart Zone, but even then, the time was one to one.
The idea of a Zone having time that passed slower than that of the outside world didn't exist; it was even safe to say that it was entirely unheard of.
Leonel knew this, but he didn't have an explanation for it. He could only ignore it because he didn't like thinking about things that he didn't have a reasonable chance of coming to a conclusion on. Since he didn't have enough of an explanation, it was all useless.
But then these bits and pieces all began to slide into place, slowly connecting with one another.
The Three Finger Cult. Of their three founders, only one had died. They should have been established countless generations ago, and yet two of them still lived and breathed, one of them even still in the process of targeting the people of the Human Domain and maybe even the entire Dimensional Verse. Wouldn't it make more sense for these people to be alive if for every second they experienced, decades passed here?
The Tribulation. How could there be more than one Spear Domain? Whether it was his own understanding, or even the records of the Void Palace, there had only ever been one. If there was more than one Spear Domain ring, there should have been more than one Bow Domain Ring as well, so why did the Spirituals have to steal it from the Constellation Bow Alliance? The Spirituals weren't a warring race to begin with, or else they would have likely already conquered the whole of the Dimensional Verse, it felt odd that they would take such a stand for something that wasn't even unique.
The Valiant Heart Zone. How had Leonel found that ring so coincidentally? And how had a ring that had been in the hands of such an insignificant figure led to a treasure like the Silver Tablet, a treasure even capable of resurrecting the dead and treating the lives of real people as though they could be bargained for and bought?
God. Leonel knew so much about Force Crafting now, he had already touched upon the Life Grade, he had already entered a state where although he had yet to climb it, he could see where the Peak of Force Crafting lay. And yet, even until this moment, even though he had personally seen the methods of Crafting, he still couldn't even begin to understand how he would turn an Ability Index into a Force Art. Such methods were so far beyond himself that he couldn't even fathom them, and yet he already felt like he was approaching the limits of the universe. So how could such a person even exist?
A person who could gift an Ability Index with a tattoo, who could change one's constitution with an organ transplant, who could resurrect the dead with a wave of the hand and even breathe life into fictional characters… Just what level would such a person be at?
This God… Maybe even these Gods…? Where were they? Why was it that there were so many religions in the Dimensional Verse, Religions he thought had stemmed from experts who had followed the God Path, and yet he hadn't seen or heard of even a single one of them despite having already rubbed shoulders with the Ancestors that stood at the pinnacle of it all?
There was only one thought that gripped Leonel's heart and refused to let go.
There was an old riddle of Ancient Earth that he had heard of before that left him chuckling.
If technology reached a point where one could perfectly simulate an infinite number of Earth's, would there be a reason to not do it?
Even further than that, what if the fate of your world depended on one of these simulations bearing fruit?
The Cataclysm Zone wasn't a Zone at all. This was the Zone. The Dimensional Verse Leonel had known his whole life was no different from the pages of the fairytale that the legend of King Arthur had been written down upon.
The Dream Project.
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