Chapter 964: Sightseeing Across Continents [Friday the 13th!]
The Original Earth.
It was one of the most notable planets in the Cosmos, and for a variety of reasons.
It was an Apex World, the smallest known Apex World, with a surface area of only around 500 million square kilometres and a diameter of roughly 12,000km.
Myths claimed the humans of this planet could achieve interstellar travel and reach different parts of the Cosmos without using any magic.
To them, magic, comprehensible universal laws, and similar phenomena existed only in their stories and fiction.
According to the accounts, they exchanged their advanced technological inventions for the magic and mystical arts used by the rest of the Cosmos, and through this exchange, they integrated magic into their technology, allowing their development to advance in leaps and bounds.
It was from this combination of science and magic that many of the widely used magi-technological devices, such as Arthur’s phone, which he could charge with his magical power, were created.
The location of Planet Earth, however, remained a secret to everyone except the people from the planet itself, and such individuals were rare on the cosmic stage.
Wars had been fought over knowledge of the planet’s location and humans from it, even if the information ultimately proved false.
Recognising this, the people of the Original Earth did something to mislead those seeking them.
They located planets of similar size in other universes and terraformed them, turning these worlds into ’Replica’ Earths.
They had manipulated these planets behind the scenes for centuries, guiding their histories in similar ways before leaving them to develop independently.
It took some time before people noticed this trick, but by then, their tracks had been completely erased.
To prevent anyone from searching the same location again, whenever an ’Earth’ is discovered and confirmed as a ’Replica’, it is assigned a number, serving as a warning to everyone else in that universe: ’Don’t Touch This Planet.’
But now, Arthur found himself on the surface of the Original Earth, and as he looked around, he couldn’t help but feel...
"Normal?"
Indeed, Arthur felt normal.
The world around him appeared normal, with people moving about their daily lives as they would on any ordinary planet.
"Of course, the planet is normal. What were you expecting?" Quinn asked, chuckling lightly as she blended into the crowd walking down the street.
Arthur followed her, shrugging slightly as he said, "I don’t know what I was expecting, to be honest."
After hearing so many different stories about the planet, his expectations had scattered so much that he couldn’t make sense of them.
"Well, you can put expectations aside and focus on the reality," Quinn said, turning to him before adding, "I’d step out for a bit to head to where Adam is so he doesn’t come here and give Luka a reason to appear."
With those words, she disappeared from his sight, the people around them continuing to move without noticing.
Left behind, Arthur paused for a moment to look around, then muttered, "For starters, I suppose I should find out where the hell I am."
He summoned his phone from his subspace, and after swiping across the screen for a bit, he reacted with faint surprise.
"Oh wow, my phone connects to the network here. I guess that’s to be expected since the planet still operates under the same universal laws..."
Arthur trailed off and raised his gaze, scanning the surroundings once more.
’On the contrary, the universal laws here seem...stronger?’
[That’s to be expected, Master,] Celestia said. [This is the Origin Multiverse, the place where the Chaotic Concepts exert the strongest influence.]
’Strongest influence?’
[Yes. Harmonia didn’t have anything like the Numbered Multiverses of this Era, so there was no difference, but when the Eternals of this Era created the Numbered Multiverses using the cosmic power extracted from the Force of Chaos, they expanded the range of influence of the Chaotic Concepts, which originally governed only the Origin Multiverse.]
When Celestia reminded Arthur of this, he immediately understood her point.
’I see. It makes sense that the laws derived from the Concepts would be stronger here than they are in the Numbered Multiverses, which are extensions, so to speak.’
Arthur slipped his phone into his pocket and walked down the street under the late-afternoon sun, using his Authority over the law of Languages to comprehend the writing on newspapers and billboards, and the speech of the thousands of people moving through the city around him.
Gradually, the previously unintelligible words became readable, and after checking the addresses of several shops, he noticed a single word repeated that he believed was the name of the city or town he was currently in.
’London, huh? All the addresses end with London.’
With that in mind, he stopped a passerby to ask if they knew of any bookstores or libraries nearby, and after receiving directions, he made his way to a store with a name that made him raise an eyebrow.
’Burns and Nobles? How is that the name of a bookstore?’
Shaking his head, he stepped inside and began looking around in silence.
[What are you looking for?]
’Something like an Atlas or a Geography book,’ Arthur replied, lifting his gaze to the overhead signs.
He eventually found the textbook aisle and picked out an atlas intended for high school students.
’If this city is really called London, then I should be able to find it on a map and know where on the planet I am.’
With those thoughts, Arthur flipped through the atlas until he found a world map, and after scanning the entire thing in seconds, he spotted a small dot near the top labelled ’London’.
"So we’re up north, huh? That explains the cold, I suppose."
Muttering to himself, he scanned the entire map, using his spatial Authority to record the longitudes and latitudes of every labelled city so he could teleport to them later.
After committing the world map to memory, he flipped through the rest of the atlas, reading at incredible speeds to learn as much about this planet as he could, before returning it to the shelf and checking other geography books.
After reviewing a few more, he left the bookstore and walked down the street, thinking about the monuments and notable locations he had seen in the books.
"Well, the past few years have been a headache in more ways than one. I guess I should let myself unwind a little."
He stretched his arms and then walked into an alley between buildings, summoning Celestia in her humanoid form.
[??]
Celestia was naturally taken aback by the sudden summons, and when she looked to Arthur for an explanation, he simply said.
"I want an exploration companion. Let’s go."
With those words, Arthur began his exploration of the famed ’Original’ Earth, dragging Celestia along from one place to another, doing everything from beating the shit out of someone trying to rob him with a knife and taking all their money, to heading to a casino and cheating by manipulating time to win more, before moving on to sightseeing across different countries on the planet.
He started by visiting the giant clock and old castles in the city Quinn had dropped him off in, then travelled to another continent to see a giant statue of a woman holding a torch.
Since giant statues were on the itinerary, he and Celestia crossed continents again to see another statue dedicated to a ’Redeemer’, then went to a continent shaped like a sideways gun to see the pyramids up north.
That continent had a vast desert spanning several countries, and its nighttime view was remarkably beautiful.
While there, he met a man from a country on another continent, and the language the man spoke sounded familiar to Arthur. He discovered the man’s home country and teleported there using the coordinates of its capital city that he had noted in the atlas earlier.
Upon arriving in a place called Berlin, he paused to listen to the words being spoken by people on the street without using the law of languages, and hearing them speak, his suspicions were confirmed.
"The language spoken by the people of this country is the same as the one Bewússtsein used," Arthur said.
Bewússtsein, the Incarnation of the now-destroyed Cruotis Prime in the Valmone universe, had spoken a language Arthur hadn’t understood during their fight back then, but he hadn’t paid it much attention beyond trying to translate it with the law of languages.
Now, hearing it spoken as the common tongue of this nation on the Original Earth, he couldn’t help but wonder if the people of the Original Earth had interacted with Cruotis Prime in the past.
While considering that, he walked past a phone store and saw an advertisement for an X26 Ultra phone, the release date listed under it using a calendar system different from the one he grew up with.
’They use the same names for months, but their years are called ’AD’, and this is ’AD’ 2026...’
Seeing it in passing, Arthur quickly set it aside and continued his exploration, heading toward the planet’s largest country, which stretched across two continents.
[So they have their capital in one continent and almost 70% of their territory in another?]
"Why don’t you put your capital in the part where you have more land?"
Arthur shook his head as he muttered to himself, closing the more detailed paper world map he’d bought after exchanging some of the money he’d gotten while in London.
"Not my planet, not my country, not my business."
He then travelled south across the continent to another one of the largest and most populated countries, nearly getting lost in a city called Chongqing that was somehow even more complex than Gindry’s Trap Labyrinth in the tower.
