From here, certain realms were close by, including the Cosmic Forest. But that was always close by. The problem was the specific part of the Cosmic Forest was much further off.

  If I were in the Hells, for example, I would see the Woods of Hell. And if I were in the Heavens, I would see the groves of Holy Druids. But the Hills of Life, the specific part of the Cosmic Forest I was headed to, was still a good way off, assuming I didn’t travel through the celestial realms.

  “Maybe if I head to the Halls of Life and then through the…”

  My mind raced. There were an infinite amount of realms, along with an infinite amount of paths. I was calculating danger and death and many other possibilities.

  There were celestial sects who specialized in this stuff. The Star Seeker, the Pathmen, many groups made fortunes just navigating the void for people. There were paths for God-Kings, because even they had to worry about celestial realms, paths for ninth ranks, even paths for fresh immortals.

  Realms could be turned into ships. There were universes that changed their nature and were pushed through the void with the qi, traveling through the emptiness. The most well known was the Lying Realm of Plane, it was said to be what Plane wanted it to be.

  The point is that there was a lot of methods to navigate the multiverse. Some were simple, some were complicated and it all depended on your needs and abilities.

  If you were a God-Imperium, you could slide through the void easily. But if you were someone like me, that was where your problems started.

  Aside from God-Imperiums, I was also trying to avoid anything beyond my current rank. Fourteenth ranks and above were far beyond my abilities, and even beings at my own rank could become a threat.

  I wasn’t special. I was at the thirteenth rank, but there were many others at that level. I wasn’t the strongest or most powerful at this rank. Hell, I’ve heard of kids only a thousand years old reaching this rank.

  But the chances of a fight among beings at our level were relatively low. We were established in a way. Immortal. Any being willing to fight someone of a similar rank would be risking death, and that wasn’t common at our level.

  But I still planned for that too. I was ready for a fight. It almost felt like I was expecting it.

  You took my words to heart, the Tome noted.

  “Yes,” I replied.

  It knew me. It knew my thoughts, what I had thought, what I would think, and what I would do.

  So even my thoughts were up to its desires.

  “If you know everything, why do your followers search other realms for knowledge and trade for it?” I asked.

  I do not know everything. Things of other God-Imperiums are limited from me, and I have adversaries.

  “Yog-Sothoth,” I muttered.

  Yes. Knowledge is the domain of many beings. Even you are unpredictable. You have been touched by Wukong and that blinds me in ways. My peers are ever present and that limits my actions.

  They were an annoying bunch.

  “Why does Yog-Sothoth hate you anyway? Do your domains overlap so much that it wants to eat you?”

  No. It is a thing of knowledge and consumption. It seeks to be all and to do that it must know all. I would be a resource, a pool for it to draw from and understand.

  “Strange thing for an eldritch chaos god.”

  Chaos is not empty. It has definition, more than anything of order could contain in some ways. It is information-dense and meaningless. Meaning is pattern and truth. It is language, words that form ideas. Chaos is empty bleatings and noises of nothingness, defined only by its existence. It can mimic order, it can have patterns but it isn’t meant to do so. The noises might make words and say sentences, but there is no intention behind them, no knowledge. That is Yog-Sothoth, it contains all but contains none as well. It is greed and consumption, an amalgamation of all things, those with sense and without.

  I said nothing to that.

  Yog-Sothoth was a known enemy of the Eternal Tome. Probably the biggest one. It was a God-Imperium eldritch beast, one of the first to have ever been made. It was the enemy of the Keepers, and part of the reason the First Keepers had hidden Eden away from everyone.

  I looked towards its realm. It stayed near the Chaos Realms, a place empty and mostly realmless. Realms needed order to survive. They were a collection of rules and laws capable of holding lesser existences, bubbles of order in the vast chaos of existence.

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  It is hideous, the Tome commented.

  I kept moving.

  Realms passed me by the thousands and each step changed the realms in the distance. What was close to one realm would be further away from another.

  To get to the Hells from Olympus for example would be a great distance to travel, but from Olympus to Hades was nothing, and then from Hades to the Hells was only a few steps away. Hades floated on the Sea of Death as all death domains did, but you could travel from them and into other realms. The Sea of Death and the Cosmic Forest were strange in that matter. They were realms with no true boundaries, everywhere yet nowhere at once, concepts that could be found almost everywhere.

  The Hills of Life were located near the celestial realm of Aftol, a realm ruled by a God-Imperium of the same name. She was a plant who manifested in various forms. She was said to be one of the first fruits of Tree, a sister of Yggdrasil.

  But that wasn’t important, at least not to my needs. The important part was that she was a free realm. Anyone could walk through her domain and anyone could do as they pleased within it. The only thing she didn’t allow was the death of her own kind.

  I wasn’t journaling so close of course. Her realm shined close in the distance, but I had enough sense to avoid her lands. If for no other reason then her species.

  Plants weren’t sentient, and that was by choice. They were growth, the fundamental nature of life. They differed from each other, but it all led back to growth. Even as a God-Imperium, sentience was a secondary trait. To them, souls were more of a tool than an identity.

  Growth was all that mattered.

  They were strange and terrifying in some ways.

  I looked towards the Cosmic Forest and walked towards it. The void dissipated, the nothingness left and suddenly, I was in a forest.

  The Cosmic Forest, The Sea of Death, The Hive Lands, and a few other realms existed like this.

  They were everywhere, due to the nature of these realms. Death could be found in both the Heavens and the Hells, and the same could be said for forests. They were concepts that permeated all realities so thoroughly that they were not limited to one spot within the void.

  Wherever you were, the forest was always there.

  I walked within it.

  Trees surrounded me, though not trees of mere wood and leaf but trees that housed realms by the thousands. Yggdrasil’s children, holders of life and bearers of worlds spread out around me and into infinity. There were other things of course.

  Divine Beasts in the distance, wolf packs howling into the greater void, it was a forest in every sense.

  But I should be safe here, quickly I walked towards the hills in the distance.

  They weren’t hills of course. They were mounds of qi, earth that could withstand the blows of a God-King. And there were many of them, so many, an endless amount it seemed.

  Yet I could see beyond them and into the valley that hid behind.

  It strained me to see it all. My mind hurt beneath the brunt of the information I consumed but I looked at it anyway. I needed to know if there were any threats, any hidden beasts. My sense could only spread so far but I needed to make sure there was nothing there.

  I was like a mortal squinting off into the distance to see if there were any threats in the distance.

  The Hills of Life were fairly safe if you stayed near the edges, but deeper there were said to be God-King-ranked beasts in their depths.

  I sighed.

  The Cosmic Forest, like the Sea of Death, didn’t have a skin. It didn’t have an edge to it. It was a realm without borders, and concepts that were associated with it found themselves within it. The Hills of Life, for example, were right underneath Aftol, but from here you could also see Aftol’s roots digging into their earth. They connected with her domain and parts of them were within it, but they were also a part of the forest.

  But I would be safe if I stayed away from the roots. And besides, the thing I was looking for shouldn’t be too hidden anyway.

  Then I saw the lady and the dragon running at me.

  will be getting four chapters new this weekend. It is currently about 30 chapters ahead.

  The next chapter will be on Monday OR Tuesday for Royal Road.