Vrusha and I were eventually led to a lounge of sorts where the mermaid Immortal, though I suppose by now I should stop calling her that… Laviesa, sat with us and continued her explanation on the void, while answering a few of my questions.

The first of which was, why did the shutters have to go down? How does that affect safety and traveling within the void?

Her answer was extremely simple.

"When you look at the void, it looks back."

There was no other explanation, no other theories or hypotheses put out for us to think about, just that line. When you look at the void, it looks back. I suppose that was all I needed to know, and I decided to take her word for it. Not that I had any plans to go staring into the void anytime soon.

Anyway…

"How long is it going to take for us to reach your empire?"

She thought for a moment before responding. "Well, that depends. We could reach there very, very quickly, perhaps in a matter of hours or days, or it could take a while, months to maybe even years. It all depends on the density of the folds we find."

Of course, I had no idea what she was talking about, but thankfully she foresaw that and continued her explanation. It was far more complicated and above my current understanding of how the world, or rather the universe, worked.

Essentially, there are multiple universes, and all of them exist within the void. Every single universe is different. There are universes out there that might have one singular galaxy with one singular planet, and there are universes that have the opposite, a whole bunch of galaxies each with countless planets. Long story short, they are all different.

But one fact between all these universes is that some are older than others. She did not know the exact age of all universes, but it was common knowledge, or at least common in higher circles, that universes have ages. There are older ones, but although these universes came before others, they do not appear next to each other in a linear way.

You do not ride a ship in a straight line and eventually reach the border of the next closest universe and then keep riding in a straight line until you reach the next one and so on. That is not how it works.

Essentially, and this is where it gets complicated, there are three things to pay attention to when it comes to traversing the void from universe to universe, laws and their density, and folds in the void. I suppose it is really two things since the latter two are related.

Each universe has its own set of laws. That is not to say that every universe has completely unique laws that will never be seen anywhere else, though that statement might still be true. But a lot of the same laws found on Earth could also be found in countless other universes. I will not try to name any of these laws right now, but they exist.

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The stronger and denser these laws are, the more likely that universe can resist the pressure placed upon it by the void. It all ties back to the void.

Through many eons and millennia, researchers have realized that the void exerts pressure on everything, including the universes that exist within it. The void is constantly squeezing and pushing against the boundaries of these universes, and how each universe resists this pressure, and essentially pushes back, is through the density of its laws.

Stronger universes, like the very first one for example, have the most dense laws, while newer ones, like the universe that Earth finds itself in, have weaker laws. She made it very clear, however, that weaker does not mean weak. There is no such thing as a weak law, only a difference in density compared to universes with older laws.

She did not explain what it means for a law to be dense, as I was apparently not ready to hear about that particular concept, but I accepted what I was told.

Now, folds come into the picture because universes that have weaker density in their laws will have the space around them quite literally fold under the pressure of the void. When she said "fold," I imagined clothes, but I do not think that is what she meant.

When she described the space and void around the periphery of those universes folding into themselves multiple times over, the words made sense, but I could not quite picture it.

How could the void and the space around a universe fold? First of all, I have no idea what a universe looks like, so it was kind of hard to imagine parts of it folding. But anyway, that is what happens.

It is these folds that we traverse to reach the next universe.

Where it gets tricky is that if the universes are not in a linear position in terms of their location, then how is it that we are able to travel between them? The fact remains that some universes are closer to others, and the answer lies in these folds.

The more folds a universe has, the weaker its resistance is not just to the void but also to the laws of other universes. They are able to flow into one another in a way.

This part of the conversation was where she did not have concrete answers herself, which meant I definitely would not know for sure what was happening. But what I could gather was that the more folds a universe has, the more exposed it is, and the freer its travel becomes to other universes with a similar number of folds.

So, if Universe A has ten folds, travel becomes possible to another universe with a similar amount of folds. But it becomes very difficult to travel to a universe that has only one fold. You would have to work your way down slowly, reaching a universe with two folds, and from there, a universe with one.

Yeah, none of that shit makes sense.

But that is essentially the explanation I was given, so that is the one I will ride with until I can get more concrete information.

And that about wrapped up the discussion on the void and universes. There was no use stressing myself out trying to wrap my mind around all these concepts. It was too far above my pay grade for now.

In the meantime, though, I decided it was time to ask about the nature of the favors I was about to repay for Laviesa.

"Your favors? Well, I can tell you that one of them will involve fighting. You see, while the empire as a whole stands together, there are constantly many moving pieces beneath it.

"People fighting and bickering for a little bit more power than they had over the last millennia, trying to claw their way to a peak they will never reach. But to avoid full scale wars within the borders of the empire, it was decreed that conflicts of a certain station will be handled by the youth, in this case, you."

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