The Boundless Expanse(An Epic System Apocalypse LitRPG)

Sam teleported away from the Inferno Gauntlet, but instead of the System depositing him back on Earth, he found himself hovering in a boundless expanse of nothingness. The only variation in that nothingness was a tree the size of a universe, made from radiant power. Beneath it, a shadowy reflection extended downwards, completely homogenous in comparison to the multihued tree that it copied. A System message appeared in front of Sam.
For reaching the 100th floor of the Tower, you have been rewarded with a Transcendent Dao Insight!

As Sam stared, he felt information started to trickle into his mind, filtered through his Dao Heritage to make sense of it all. As soon as that happened, Sam realized what he was seeing. The tree was made up of all of the Daos that had ever existed, save two, that of the shadow reflection, and the nothingness all around it. Twelve massive boughs extended out from the trunk, each representing one of the elements and sharing their colors. Each element mirrored its opposite on the other side of the tree, with Order and Chaos taking the top spot, rising vertically from the top of the trunk. Each of those boughs split off into many branches, representing smaller concepts that were still important on a cosmic scale. Concepts like Gravity, Entropy and Space. Each of those split further into their components. Sam recognized a few of the tiny branches near the edges of the tree, as they were Daos he had once possessed. The Motes of the Arbiter and of Anger. The Fragment of Righteous Anger. His Dao Seeds.

In comparison, the shadow tree represented a single, unified concept. It was the antithesis to creation, a bottomless Void that sought annihilation at all costs. Then, surrounding it all, was something far stranger, and far more terrifying. It was Nothingness.

True, absolute nonexistence. Sam couldn't even understand what he was looking at. It had no color, but neither was it the absence of color. It existed in the form of emptiness, defined more by the things that it was not than the things that it was.

Sam felt names coming to his mind, drifting from the corners of his Dao Heritage. The tree, its shadowy counterpart, and the emptiness around it represented Creation, Destruction and Nothing. Those were gross simplifications, though, and Sam found the real names, held out to him by his Dao Heritage. They were the Supreme Daos of Zenith, Nadir, and Nil. One step beneath the Dao of Existence itself. Their scale went beyond the limits of Sam's mind to understand. He knew that all he was seeing was a pale reflection of the arch-concepts of the Boundless Expanse, like a solar eclipse viewed on a piece of paper. Had he seen them in their full glory, he would be more than blinded, though. He would be dead, without even a soul to continue to the afterlife.

Connections began to form within him, tracing out a template that extended into infinity. His path became a little clearer, and for the first time, Sam truly understood what it meant to be the Dao Incarnation of Existence.

Somewhere in the Solar System

Lao, Eduardo, Talnor and Jeffrey stood on the bridge of the flagship of the nascent Terran Starfleet. Over the last week, Thomas Aquinas, the faction's resident inventor, had finished his preliminary designs for spacecraft. They were modeled after the vehicles brought by Talnor's faction, but to a far larger scale. The flagship, Terra's Will, was named after Sam's hammer, and its design was certainly close to that ideal. It was blocky and heavily armored, with twin fusion cannons affixed to both sides. Each was about as powerful as a Mid E Ranker's final skill, but they could only be used a few times before needing to be recharged. For most encounters, the ship was covered in pulse cannons and railguns, able to hold their own against a low E Ranker.

Terra's Will flew in the midst of a small fleet of other starships, surrounding the mile long vessel. The fleet was between Jupiter and Saturn, approaching the location of the Worldmaw. It loomed ahead, its titanic mouth wide open as it crept inexorably towards Earth.

Within the bowels of Terra's Will was the faction's secret weapon. For the last two weeks, every one of the faction's members had donated mana to fuel a bomb the likes of which Earth had never seen before. It contained the destructive capability of ten thousand hydrogen bombs, and could have turned an entire country into a crater. The only problem was that using it was a risky proposition. Just its detonation alone was enough to take out anything within a few thousand miles, including its wielders. It was a weapon that could only be used on something like the Worldmaw. Just keeping it stable required the power of multiple Dao Seeds, hence the presence of so many faction elites.

"How much closer?" Lao asked, peering at the Worldmaw. "I can see it turning towards us."

Jeffrey narrowed his eyes. "For optimal targeting, about another million miles. I can do it before then, but my abilities won't be as effective."

"So... another hour?" Talnor asked.

The ships of the Terran Fleet were incredibly fast by Earth's standards, blending technology and the Dao to form vessels capable of immense speed. Most of the ships were even faster than that, but they had to wait for Terra's Will, which had a maximum speed of about a million miles per hour.

"About that," Jeffrey said absently, using his fingers to measure the sector of the sky that the Worldmaw took up. "Sizes are incredibly deceiving with that thing. It's the size of a planet, but it's moving about as fast as we are."

"What is it even using to propel itself?" Lao wondered. "Most likely the Dao, but I do not feel anything from it..."

Jeffrey turned. "Again, it's the size thing. The strength of that monster is mostly dependent on its size. As a D Ranker, it's on the weaker end. Its Dao is probably limited to the area around its core. Any propulsion mechanisms would be impossible to sense from this distance."

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

"Captains?" a female voice came over the intercom. "We might have a problem."

"What is it?" Jeffrey asked, though he was already turning towards the window. Outside, thousands of monsters drifted through space, miniature versions of the Worldmaw. Each was about the size of a house. Though they were far, far slower than the ships, given that they were only E Rank monsters, they still posed a threat. There were so many that they blanketed space in front of the fleet. E Rank flesh would pose as much a threat as crashing into a diamond floating in space, given that most of the vessels were not exactly the most durable of constructs.

Eduardo leaned towards the control panel, and pressed a button. The intercom came on with a crackling noise. "Rax? We have a job for you."

As the only E Ranker in the faction currently present, Rax had a unique advantage when it came to space combat. He no longer needed to breathe.

With a plume of flame that jetted off a mile into space, Rax exploded out of the side of the ship. About the size of a minivan, he looked small compared to the Worldmaw spawn ahead. Despite this, he was far stronger than any of them.

With one flickering step, Rax pushed off space, his Dao lending him the strength to do so. He teleported, appearing in front of one of the tiny Worldmaws. A titanic mouth formed around his own, wrought from white hot flame. A single bite later, the monster before him was floating away in two chunks, both seared black from the heat.

As the fleet continued to hurtle through the darkness of space, Rax took care of the monsters in the way. Talnor ordered the fleet to slow, giving the monster time to deal with the obstacles. As an E Ranker with a teleport ability, Rax could keep up with the ships to some degree, but he couldn't move as quickly as their top speeds.

Eventually, all that was left of the baby Worldmaws were chunks of burnt flesh floating in the void.

By this point, the actual Worldmaw was in sight. The creature's mouth twisted into a continental grimace as it beheld them. Its eye flashed, and a beam of light the width of a country shot out, straight towards the fleet.

"Do it!" Jeffrey barked as he measured the beam's trajectory.

Eduardo slammed his fist into a large red button, and space lurched. The entire fleet blinked through space, and out of the range of the beam.

A few moments later, it struck one of Jupiter's moons, punching a hole straight through. Jeffrey breathed a sigh of relief. Had that beam hit the fleet, nothing would be left.

"I think it's time," he said a moment later, looking at the Worldmaw. "We're close enough."

"Very well," Lao said. "On three, gentlemen?"

To avoid blowback from firing the titanic bomb in the bowels of the ship, all four of the captains on deck had to press the fire button at once. It also helped to synchronize their Daos, ensuring that the bomb did not detonate before its time.

The entire ship shuddered as a hole opened up, revealing the pointed end of a titanic warhead. It glowed with ethereal light. A moment later it shot off into space, on a line with the Worldmaw's mouth.

Jeffrey grabbed a joystick on the console, and started to guide the missile, using his Dao to pinpoint the best place to send it. The Worldmaw likely hadn't noticed the weapon yet, given how small it was in comparison.

As the shackles imposed by the captains' Daos loosened, and the bomb entered detonation mode, it released a pulse of power into space. The Worldmaw finally noticed it.

Its mouth began to close with the finality of a coffin lid, teeth the size of mountains converging. Jeffrey pressed another button on the end of the joystick, and a bright portal opened up in front of the missile. It passed through, appearing millions of miles away in front of the Worldmaw.

With one final burst of energy, it accelerated through the teeth. All was still for about a minute. The captains wondered if the bomb had failed. Then, glowing cracks started to spread across the surface of the Worldmaw, and with a brilliant explosion of fire, it was torn apart. Earth was safe, at least for now.

All Across the Boundless Expanse

Fear spread amongst the elite of the Boundless Expanse, in response to one single, terrifying event. The System had vanished for the briefest of moments, less than a second in absolute time. However, that was completely unprecedented. In the entire history of Existence, the System had been inviolable and omnipresent across the universes that it ruled. There had never been a glitch like this.

Most cultivators hadn't even noticed the absence of the System, but to the true powers of the cultivating world, it was extremely hard to miss. Nobody knew why the System had vanished, only that there was a single place that it had remained. A tiny, insignificant layer of the Hells called the Inferno Gauntlet, affixed to the very edge of the afterlife, right where the realm of Death brushed against the realm of Life.

In the entirety of Sam's Multiverse, only one man knew what had happened. His name was Omnis, and he was a member of the Creator Kings. While technically an A Ranker, he had made a sacrifice long ago to tap into the shared knowledge of the cosmos in exchange for the majority of his power. Within his own Multiverse, Omnis knew all, and a good bit about the world beyond. He had been following the journey of Sam Atlas since the arrival of the System on his world, though he knew of the boy's life prior to that event as well.

His power had allowed him to pinpoint the location of the System, and why it had gone there. To no surprise of his, Sam Atlas had been there as well. He knew all about that man's destiny, of how far he could go if he truly tried.

"Interesting..." Omnis muttered, staring at a window in space hovering above his hand. Within it was a video of Sam, traveling between the universes back to his own.

"What is, my lord?" a hulking brute of a Teruvarian asked, shifting to look at Omnis. His name was Galagnar, one of the captains of the Genesis Knights, the private army of the Creator Kings. He had been assigned to Omnis on account of the Creator King's lack of personal power.

"Sam Atlas. He just met personally with the System."
Galagnar stared at Omnis impassively.

Omnis sighed. An unfortunate side effect of his bargain with the universe was that he was unable to discuss anything he learned as a direct result of using his abilities. Unless he discovered knowledge in a way that others could replicate, it was limited to him alone. Either those he told it to would think him a liar, or would simply ignore his words.

Closing the viewing screen with a snap of his fingers, Omnis turned, looking out the window of his house into space. He lived on a small asteroid, floating in the void around An'ari, the capital planet of the Multiverse. He was too weak to set foot on that planet, whose gravity would crush him in an instant. It was visible in the distance, taking up half of the sky. The twinkling lights of the cities that covered its surface looked like distant galaxies.

As he looked, Omnis caught a glimpse of his own reflection. He was the last member of a long extinct race of avian adjacent humanoids. His plumage was the color of the rainbow, feathers aligned in bands of iridescence. Around his neck was a thick ruff of softer feathers. His was an appearance unique in the Multiverse, one that would never exist again after his death.

The last time anyone had seen him, other than Galagnar and the other Creator Kings, was when he had met a semi-famous C-Rank warlord to trade away a universe. That warlord's name was Tantalos Veruvax.