She did not fully understand the metaphor, but just from the words, Vera felt it absolutely could not be dismantled, because who knew what would happen afterward. "You misunderstood. Think of it as the thigh I am clinging to is trying to heal the wound, but this emergency patch got stuck here, you get it?"
"If you do not remove it, it will actually hinder recovery, like leaving a bandage on too long." "...So whose thigh are you clinging to?"
Vera believed it, because deep down she seemed to agree with this explanation for reasons she could not explain. She had also seen many marked errors before, so if that was the case, it made some sense, but she still cautiously asked about that thigh Ham kept mentioning.
"Guess who wiped out Demonkind before, and why I dare tell you to safely develop their territory." "...Black Dragon?"
"Correct." That was convincing enough, because when Demonkind were wiped out, a massive Black Dragon head had descended from the sky and started slaughtering them, something too obvious to ignore.
It was extermination by pure force, not by curses or interference from Fate, and such direct displays of power were the most shocking, which Vera understood well. "Is your change also related to it?"
"You do not need to worry about that. I still have to keep living in the World, and if it is destroyed, I am done too, so why would I do something that harms others and myself?" "...Alright, I will try."
Vera took a deep breath and began to control it, this time without hesitation burning all her remaining research points and constantly analyzing to find the hidden secret. The light grew brighter as Ham watched from the side with a hint of regret, while Vera felt a headache as vast amounts of incomprehensible knowledge flooded in.
Gate, darkness, Abyss, Crown. Tear, Rend.
There also seemed to be vague whispers mixed in, and after all her points were burned away, the phenomenon stopped, and she roughly found a solution. This thing still could not be directly dismantled, or rather, from the design stage, it seemed absolutely forbidden to destroy.
But Vera found another method, or perhaps a small backup hidden within Celestial Forge, something the designer may have intended. "I still cannot destroy it, but I think I can adjust it to slightly contract and fold inward. Would that work?"
This was her compromise, because if folding it caused irreversible consequences, it could still be undone. "Oh yes, that is exactly what we need, that should be enough."
Ham's eyes lit up, and after estimating the range of the membrane built by Belial and the construction area of Bella's Nanometal, folding and shrinking this door would let it fit tightly against the wall of the World. That would work, and as for future issues with the door, they could be dealt with later, or given enough time, Belial could dismantle it slowly, they just did not have the time now.
Vera took a deep breath and clicked the folding function she had analyzed by burning massive points in Celestial Forge, then pressed her five fingers into the Void. At a higher level, countless interlocking pistons and levers, and gears rusted and filled with bloodstains, trembled slightly as the long-unclosed gate slowly contracted.
There was no earth-shaking reaction, because this was not an effect on the physical layer, but an intervention at another conceptual level within the Void. "Alright, that should do it. It is fine even if it was not dismantled."
Belial stood nearby holding a hammer for a long time, and seeing that the problem was finally mostly resolved, nodded in satisfaction.
As long as some space was cleared, it was fine. The outer Cosmic Membrane he built was placed even farther outside the World, and this Black Gate might have been sturdy by his old standards, but it likely would not survive the future impact of a Singularity Explosion. With that decided, he quickly grabbed a hammer and sealed this area, and Belial still remembered why he had split off such a Clone in the first place.
Back then, he had planned to carefully study this gate. He had already discovered this strange gate inside the World, and to deal with unresolved resentment and annoying neighbors, he deliberately left a Clone here to loiter and pass the time. In the end, he accidentally cleared everything too fast, leaving no sense of challenge at all.
"Cleared it with cheats without meaning to. No game experience at all. Sigh." Belial sighed as he spoke, while starting to calculate something else in his head. Since this gate could filter Dark Power and resentment, it meant there had to be someone skilled behind it, and then you know what came next.
It still came down to doing construction work. Right now there were not enough hands for that kind of work, so he started thinking that maybe he could pull that person out to help too, no, that was not quite right. Thinking more carefully, the original World had not even been fully explored before he rushed through the whole map, so there might be other talents suited for this kind of work.
"That said, it probably would not change anything important. If even the resentment problem cannot be solved, that is really hard to deal with." Mephist had noticed it too, whether it was old acquaintances or his current teammates, none of them had any good way to deal with resentment. He himself relied on the power of Diablo to ignore everything and just devour it.
Others could at best give him a little assistance. Belial thought for a while, set down the cement and bricks in his hands, and looked over at the Cosmic Membrane that was already close to half finished. In the middle layer between the World and the Cosmic Membrane, the basic rules of the universe had mostly returned, and with his deliberate adjustments, it already looked somewhat like a proper universe.
Even so, it was still not stable. Without him continuing to reinforce it and make constant adjustments, it could easily collapse on its own, and this construction work had grown more and more complex as his understanding of universal rules deepened. At the start, to train his abilities and most importantly to beat up The End, he had planned to build a solid foundation as a battlefield, such as compressing a supermassive black hole into a single piece.
Later, after repeatedly beating back Overlord Ridge that tried to crawl out, he realized the full scale of The End was far beyond imagination. A battlefield, no matter how large, could not contain it all, so he had to arrange an extra layer of protection for the World, which was the Cosmic Membrane. After that, he discovered that a simple Cosmic Membrane was still not enough, and only a complete set of universal principles could withstand the full impact of The End.
He had already realized that The End was itself part of universal law. If an uncertain big explosion was the beginning, then The End was the end, and this seemed to be the fundamental operating logic of this universe. Of course, Belial had an infinite perpetual engine of his own, so if he himself were a universe, his mass and energy would be infinite and his expansion endless, and there would be no such thing as The End at all.
That was why, after his evolution, he could pin down the Beast of the End and beat it relentlessly, because at their core, it was a clash between two completely different sets of universal principles. As someone who held a complete set of principles, he could ignore all mechanisms, since others at most grasped only one or two partial rules. There was no way they could contend with an entire framework.
Although he could endure it, the things that originally existed in this universe clearly could not. Anything that belonged to the original universe would inevitably be targeted by The End, because this was part of the fundamental logic, like how life inevitably faces death after birth. It was not some power beyond reason, but simply a basic cycle.
If something was to withstand the power of a complete The End that he truly wanted to fight, then the only equally matched defensive force would be the universal principles that symbolized completeness itself. The relationship between the two was like x and negative x. At that point, he tried to pick up the old Shard fragments, reorganize them, and personally forge a new one, eventually expanding it into the current act of reopening a universe, which was also something he would need after ascending in dimension and coming back to play.
He already had some ideas about singularities with infinitely reduced spatial scale and the requirement of dual infinities while beating down Overlord Ridge along the way, but he also noticed some small issues. "Let us assume that the original end of this universe was heat death. Whether the result was destruction or a restart, it should not logically give rise to something like Overlord Ridge, a kind of absolute finisher."
"Is that not strange? The finish line only needs to stand there and wait. There is no reason for it to run toward the contestants, the Lord." The more he researched, the more puzzled Belial became.