My Ultimate Sign-in System Made Me Invincible

Chapter 735: Planting The Seed Gear

Liam stared at the massive entropy law gears, turning over in his mind how he was going to insert the seed gear between them.

But the longer he studied the gap, the clearer it became that it would prove impossible. The seed gear was vastly, almost laughably smaller than the galaxy-wide entropy law gears grinding all around him.

If he tried to slot it in between them the way a machinist would fit a cog into a machine, it would not turn a single one of them. It would simply be caught between two colossal teeth and shattered in an instant, ground to nothing before it ever had the chance to do anything at all.

He turned the problem over, and the only viable path came back to the same conclusion he had reached when he first conceived the plan. The seed gear could not be a peer in the grid. It was too small to drive anything.

But it did not need to drive anything. It only needed to touch. The way forward was to attach it directly to one of the failing entropy law gears and let it resonate with that gear, coaxing the giant into its own flawless rhythm, and from there let the correction cascade outward, gear to gear, across the whole failing wall. One perfect note, sounded against a broken instrument, retuning it string by string.

While he was still weighing exactly how to do it, a familiar voice slid into his mind — deep, ancient, and carrying a weight that no human throat could ever have produced.

"Strange human. Can you hear me?"

Liam knew the owner of that voice the instant it spoke, and it most certainly did not belong to a human. He wanted to answer, but he held himself still, refusing to let his focus fracture.

He had spent an unknowable stretch of time, mentally jumping through the universe, then forging the seed gear to absolute perfection, and he feared that if he let his concentration slip even for a moment, some part of the delicate construct might unravel and force him to begin the whole grueling process again.

So he said nothing, and waited.

The next moment, he felt something begin to materialize beside his mental avatar, which still floated over the endless field of entropy law gears with the seed gear held carefully in its hand.

At first it was only a shape. Then it grew — and it kept growing, swelling larger and larger with every passing instant, until it dwarfed his avatar so completely that he might as well have been an ant standing in the shadow of a mountain.

The whole process took less than a second, but in that second the thing beside him went from nothing to a presence so vast it strained even the boundaries of his own mind to hold.

And when it finished, Liam saw it clearly, and he smiled.

It was the young Voidling he had met months ago.

The massive space whale floated beside him, serene and impossibly huge, its body nearly half the size of one of the universal law gears, making Liam to realize yet another reason why they can’t go into a solar system.

And this was only a youngling. Liam couldn’t help but wonder, with a faint chill, how staggeringly vast the adults of the race must be, if a child of their kind was already this size.

’It’s grown, too,’ he thought, studying the creature. ’Enormously at that, since the last time I saw it.’

Even in his own mental world, where scale was a thing he could usually bend to his will, he found he could not quite fix the true dimensions of the Voidling.

It kept slipping past his estimation, too large to frame, too immense to reduce to a number. It simply was, the way a mountain or an ocean simply is, indifferent to being measured.

"What are you doing?" the Voidling asked. Its gaze rested on his mental avatar for a moment before drifting down to the vast, slow-grinding field of entropy law gears spread out beneath them.

"I came up with a temporary solution to stop the heat death from spreading," Liam replied.

"I see." The ancient voice held a note of genuine curiosity. "And how do you intend to do that? I can sense that you have grown incredibly strong since we last met. But you have not grown strong enough to directly affect universal laws — not at this scale. No being your age could."

"I’m not trying to," Liam said. "My solution is simpler than that."

And he explained it. He walked the creature through the whole of it — from the seed gear forged on the Law of Universal Consonance, formatted with every thermodynamic protocol he had decoded from the master gears; the resonance built into its structure so that, once attached to a failing gear, it would drag that gear into its own corrected rhythm; and the cascade that would follow, one retuned gear passing the correct pattern to the next, and the next, spreading the healing across the entire wall without him ever having to forge a second gear by hand.

He was, in truth, glad the creature had come. Of everything in existence, a Voidling was perhaps the single best consultant he could have asked for. He wanted it to look at the seed gear, to check his work with eyes far older than his own, to tell him whether the construct truly held no hidden flaw and whether the solution itself was sound.

Because for all that this was only a youngling, it was still a creature billions of years old — and its race was, in the most literal sense, the administrative caste of the universe, the living mechanism by which excess entropy was consumed and balance maintained. If anyone alive could find the crack in his plan, it was this.

When he finished, the Voidling was silent for a few long seconds. Then, at last, it spoke.

"It is a good idea," it said. "And it will work." A pause, and something softer entered the ancient voice. "Perhaps, at long last, the elders of my race will finally be able to rest. However briefly."

Liam nodded slowly, and he understood. He remembered, during their long passage together through the Infinite Dimension, the creature telling him how its parents had died in the multiversal war. The Void Beasts had been straining against the collapse for longer than his species had existed, and they were exhausted in a way he could scarcely imagine.

He knew what it was to be alone and he would not insult the creature by claiming he understood the full weight of what it carried. But he understood enough.

"I don’t know exactly how long it will take the seed gear to reset each galaxy to a harmonic state," he admitted. "But it shouldn’t take too long."

"From what I can see," the Voidling said, "the seed gear will work almost instantly. In your planet’s time scale — a few months."

’A few months is instantly?’ Liam didn’t even have it in him to laugh, because he understood the truth beneath the words.

A being’s sense of time stretched and thinned the longer it lived, and for a race that’s effectively eternal, a few months, even a few years, would indeed pass in what amounted to the blink of an eye.

"A few months for a single galaxy-wide law gear would be perfect," he said, doing the arithmetic aloud. "Within a few years, as long as the other galaxies — the ones whose entropy gears make up the wall holding the heat death back — don’t collapse before the cascade reaches them, the universe would be safe from the heat death for a long, long time."

"I will speak to the Voids stationed around those galaxies and tell them what is happening," the Voidling said. "We will pool our strength and make certain the wall holds until your gear reaches it. You do not have to carry that part alone. So — where do you intend to plant the seed gear?"

"That, I haven’t decided yet," Liam said. "I can’t put it between these massive gears. They’ll crush it the moment I try."

"Then place it on one of them," the Voidling said simply. "From what you have explained to me, it will work perfectly well that way. It does not need to sit among them as an equal. It only needs to touch."

Liam considered the words for a moment, and then he realized the creature was entirely right, and that the answer had been sitting in his own hand the whole time.

The seed gear would behave like the opposite pole of a magnet the instant it came near a law gear. He could feel it even now: the small construct was vibrating faintly against his mental grip, trembling, straining toward the great gears around it, as though every one of them was quietly trying to pull it in.

That pull was not his imagination and it was not random. It was the harmonic nature of the seed gear itself.

Liam smiled and turned toward the one of the entropy law gear at the very edge of the wall, the one facing directly into the raging front of the heat death, the first line against the dark. He brought the seed gear close to it.

And the seed gear flew from his hand and attached itself to the entropy law gear.