Awakening a 10,000x Skill Proficiency Multiplier in the Apocalypse

He wasn’t just falling down a deep hole; he was plummeting through the literal foundational layers of the multiverse’s programming.

The darkness was so absolute it felt like it was actively pressing against his eyeballs. He couldn’t see his own hands.

”System,” Sebastian commanded, engaging his green Administrator UI. ”Activate [True Sight]. Give me some headlights.”

BZZZT.

His silver-tinged void eyes flared beneath his cracked porcelain mask, piercing the gloom with a sharp, high-resolution beam of digital light.

The darkness pulled back, revealing the walls of the chasm passing by in a terrifying blur.

Sebastian’s breath hitched in his throat.

The walls weren’t made of rock, or bedrock, or even the smooth, glowing hard-light of the Core OS. They were a horrifying, colossal collage of sheer, unadulterated failure.

”What the fuck is this place?” Sebastian whispered, his eyes widening in morbid fascination.

The walls were embedded with the ancient, discarded drafts of the multiverse. This was the trash bin where the original Architects threw away the concepts, the monsters, and the physics engines that they deemed ’imperfect’ before launching the Ethereal Plane.

As he plummeted, a colossal, half-finished biomechanical monster zoomed past him on the right. It was a beast the size of a mountain, possessing the head of a dragon and the lower body of a mechanical spider, but it had too many arms. Hundreds of massive, jagged limbs sprouted randomly from its torso, clipping awkwardly through its own chest cavity in a permanent, frozen glitch of bad rendering.

”Someone definitely failed their 3D modeling class,” Sebastian quipped, watching the monstrosity fade upward into the dark.

A few seconds later, he fell past a massive, floating chunk of terrain that made absolutely no sense. It was a dense, lush forest, but the trees were growing upside down, and the rivers of blue mana flowed in erratic, geometric zig-zags that defied all logic. The physics engine in that localized pocket had been coded in reverse—gravity violently repelled matter instead of attracting it. It was a chaotic, unusable mess of bad math.

But the most terrifying sights were the gods.

Embedded deep within the walls of the chasm were colossal, humanoid corpses. They were massive, featureless figures that looked like rough, unpolished sketches of the Grand Archons. They lacked the blinding, sterile white light of the finished product. They were just heavy, gray, dormant blocks of code that had been abandoned because they couldn’t process the sheer processing power required to run the game.

They were the alpha-test deities. Failed prototypes left to rot in the dark.

”It really looks like my old sketchbook from middle school,” Sebastian chuckled dryly, trying to use relatable banter to push back the heavy, crushing isolation of the descent. ”Just pages and pages of bad ideas that never saw the light of day. Good to know even the creators of the universe need a rough draft.”

He continued to fall. Twenty minutes passed. Then thirty.

The sheer verticality of the chasm was staggering. Sebastian had to continuously pulse his [Concept of Mass] to ensure he didn’t reach a terminal velocity that would instantly liquefy his avatar upon impact. He calculated his speed, managing his descent with the cold, precise calculus of a man who refused to become a smudge on the floor.

Finally, after what felt like an eternity in the void, the absolute darkness below him began to shift.

A faint, sickly, pulsing red glow emanated from the deep depths, casting long, eerie, bloody shadows against the walls of discarded code. The smell of raw, unadulterated ozone and burning iron wafted up to meet him.

”Approaching ground floor,” Sebastian noted, adjusting his posture in mid-air.

He engaged his [Reality Rendering], forcefully dialing his physical weight down to near-zero just a few hundred feet above the bottom. His terrifying, hypersonic descent slowed instantly, his black leather coat whipping around his legs as the localized physics engine violently corrected his momentum.

He drifted the last fifty feet like a falling leaf.

THUD.

Sebastian’s heavy combat boots hit solid ground. The sound echoed with a deep, heavy resonance in the cavernous expanse. He instantly spiked his mass back up to a solid two tons, anchoring himself firmly to the floor.

He slowly stood up straight, rolling his shoulders and taking in his surroundings.

He had reached the absolute bottom of the Ethereal Plane.

He was standing on a sprawling, perfectly smooth platform of polished black obsidian. The platform was utterly barren, lacking any of the messy, chaotic debris of the Juncture above. It was a sterile, highly secure antechamber.

And looming directly in front of him was the reason this place was so heavily guarded.

The Tartarus Gate.

It wasn’t a standard door. It was a structure the size of a literal continent, stretching infinitely upward into the dark and stretching endlessly to his left and right. It was forged from a dark, encrypted titanium that seemed to actively absorb the faint, red ambient light.

But the metal wasn’t smooth.

Wrapped tightly around the colossal structure were thick, glowing chains made of pure, corrupted code. And bound beneath those chains, fused directly into the metal of the gate itself, were the faces of millions of deleted entities. They were the rogue NPCs, the corrupted players, and the failed code-smiths that the Architects had deemed too dangerous to simply recycle.

Their faces stretched and contorted in permanent, silent agony. Their mouths were wide open in endless screams, their digital eyes weeping rivers of thick, gray static down the face of the door.

It was the ultimate, horrific warning sign.

”Well, this is welcoming,” Sebastian deadpanned, walking slowly across the obsidian platform toward the massive, screaming barrier.

He didn’t feel a drop of fear. The Sovereign of Laws simply cracked his knuckles, staring up at the incinerator of the gods. He had a backdoor to hack, and he was completely out of patience.

”Let’s see who’s home,” Sebastian whispered.

The absolute bottom of the Ethereal Plane was not a place meant for the living, the dead, or anything in between. It was a place meant for things that the universe simply wanted to forget.