While praying that no death asteroids desired to knock on his door to visit him, it was now the 13th day since the Ether Law awakened and a new era started.

There was no official name for it but ‘Ether Era’ or ‘Dimensions Era’ were no-brain and uninspired names for the majority of the people on the board who wanted to officially name the new era.

Maybe you thought that an argument involving hundreds of people was chaotic? But what about when hundreds of trillions of people were involved and everyone wanted to say his own opinion?

Fortunately communicating using the board bypassed the language barrier.

The wiki confirmed that this type of communication was called “intent communication”, it was something done automatically on the board by translating your thoughts with the Ether Law’s help, but it’ll in the future become possible to communicate even in the real world using intent.

Intent expressed what one wanted to say with no ambiguity possible, it was proven by some genius who made stringent tests, and some of those tests were truly hilarious.

The most famous one was the “scamming test”, literally translating to “Do you want to buy my fake spaceship for three times the price of one? it’s a one-time offer!”

Intent meant that no lies were possible, you couldn’t make what you knew was a lie into something real in your mind.

So recently more than ever before, the same hilarious situation happened to lots of braggarts, with forum titles ending up being “Oh my god I just didn’t find a resource worth 10 000 EP!”

As the geniuses did their tests, observers like Rune just laughed.

You couldn’t lie to yourself was the premise of this new form of communication, and even now, its rules were still being explored, pity the unfortunate ones who had to learn by making a mistake and being hit by reality the next moment.

‘Oh!’ After dozens of minutes of searching with his perception sphere, Rune observed a peculiar asteroid through his perception sphere, emitting what was called in the board “ether light”.

It was a peculiar aura that, if you were giving attention to your perception sphere, you would immediately see, and that was the sign that the thing was an ether resource.

A perception sphere didn’t allow you to see colors, everything was dull with it, appropriate for the Void dimension, wasn’t it?

The only source of light, or what could be equal to one, was this ether light, shining with a weak pure white light while floating in the emptiness of the Void.

Seeing it for the first time made Rune feel a little strange, it wasn’t a regular light, and he wasn’t in a regular dark, everything was new to him and everyone else.

Less than 4 minutes later, the time it took to move the 100 meters needed to reach where his sphere detected the resource, he grabbed an asteroid that looked the same as every other floating rock in the Void dimension.

Once again following the predecessors' advice, he stopped everything he was doing and concentrated on assimilating what this rock represented as an ether resource.

‘I can feel something… A flow? Yeah, it’s a flow of something, is that ether?’ Having cut all his senses, even his perception sphere, there was only him and what was being assimilated into him, a flow of ether, a flow of ether points.

The Void dimension was birthed at the same time as their universe, except that from the start the ether density was millions of times that of the universe at his birth due to different circumstances.

Their Universe dimension got the matter, and the Void dimension got what little ether remained from the creation of their own defective law, giving it a massive amount of time to replicate itself and increase in density.

Billions of years later, the result was the formation of ether in the form of solid crystals in the Void, the condensed form of volatile ether that would one day appear in the universe dimension in many billions of years naturally.

A few minutes later, Rune deployed his sphere again and re-accelerated to his maximum speed. After absorbing what was important in the asteroid he just let it go and departed again to continue his resource gathering activity.

‘Let’s see how many EP it was worth, the gathering log should have appeared after absorbing my first piece, yup, here it is.’

Dimensions

Information Board

Ether Wiki

Event

Avatar

Gathering Log

Opening this latest addition, Gathering Log, he saw the asteroid he just absorbed.

Absorbed ‘Rich asteroid’, gained 65 EP

‘My first harvest, a good start, just a little below the average gain of 70 EP per ether resource told on the board.’

Not much needed to be said to describe the satisfaction of earning what he worked and planned for more than a week.

‘My 100 perception stat is a banger-stat, I think I should write down my yield and compare it on a forum, like-minded people that did like me should have done the same already or they’ll soon start to do the same.’

Opening his notes, he added a time log to what he wrote, he just had to wish for it and a time appeared next to his notes.

It was inevitable for like-minded people to appear, he just didn’t find them yet, he couldn’t be the only one to take notes on his gathering speed and yield right?

Rune thought about it and realized that he himself was going to continue taking notes for multiple days before sharing them on a public forum, it could in part explain why he only found some results after searching for this particular subject.

In the end, the actual situation for every traveler of the Void was the same, aVoiding dangerous ground because they caused random damage if they encountered one.

Not approaching the gravity source as they killed you once you got too near.

Gathering resources and knowledge, for the serious ones who wanted to be a step ahead of others like Rune, wanted to be.

The size of the Void dimension was equal in size to the universe itself from the wiki, meaning ridiculously huge, trillions of trillions of trillions of light-years would only be a fraction of its radius.

So including the size of an avatar's perception sphere and their momentum speed, without forgetting the fact that the original position where your avatar spawned was random, ignoring even the sector limit imposed by the Ether Law for the Information Board…

Then the result was that all avatars were alone, some tried to use the dangerous grounds as landmarks but only those with enough cohesion, health, health regeneration, and luck could approach those without dying immediately and carefully analyze them.

Therefore, everyone on the board pretty much scrapped every idea to create a map or find each other in the short term, it was too soon for this to happen.

…

The history of the Intergalactic Society, the IGS, could be started as much as six hundred thousand years ago, when the Azorans, the founder and the first to reach out to everyone else, took their first step in the discovery of their own galaxy.

Disinterested in power since its foundation, the nascent IGS, back then simply referred to as Azoran’s Federation, was mainly operated as a charity for every intelligent species discovered by chance by the Azorans.

And from all those they helped in their native galaxy, only 2 civilizations elevated themselves to become true contributors and pillars still defining the IGS at the time when the Ether Law pieced itself together and ushered a new era.

One was the Human Civilization, which used culture and entertainment to attain a position of power and marked the IGS forever.

The feat they achieved was to integrate by sheer soft power all types of isolated species and all sorts of very different civilizations into becoming true members of the IGS.

This soft power, a culture where life could never be disrespected, while freedom of choice was put on a pedestal, later became the only way the IGS used to integrate other civilizations into the fold.

Who would have thought that culture could be so powerful when support was given to it.

The second was the Pachin’s Civilization, their story is a lot more tragic.

Before being unearthed by the Azorans, they were on their last breath after failing to escape their solar system and succumbing to their own planet's dying breath as its magnetic field gave away as their star entered the advanced fusion stage.

The situation reversed after they were given the technology to explore the galaxy as their whole civilization attained unity in adversity and became, thousands of years later, with hard work and difficult research, the leading contributor not only to exploration technologies but also in the domain of professional exploration education.

Even the Azorans, with their research culture that made them become the founder of the IGS itself, couldn’t keep up with them.

The Pachins became the pathfinders of the IGS, birthing a tradition of pushing the limit of physics, ultimately leading to the birth of viable intergalactic traveling technology, the greatest turning point in the IGS history.

The IGS developed with no obstacles in its path from its earliest records to even now in the current age, with 5 leading species after hundreds of thousands of years.

The Azorans, the Humans, the Pachins, the Kajos, and the Rululus were called the 5 leading species.

All were humanoid with one head, one torso, two arms, and two legs, different inside make-up but overall similar lifestyle and condition of comfort.

Some very unique species also came to become part of the high sphere of the administration of the IGS, of course, some, in IGS terms, meant hundreds of unique half-amphibian sapient species and hundreds of others with scales or wings.

The Kajos elevated themselves from late-comers from another galaxy to their current position by controlling investment funds equaling at least 5% of the IGS total economy.

And with the IGS representing 12 major galaxies currently, it meant they owned at least half a galaxy, not counting the dwarf and minor galaxies.

The Rululus were a miracle of life, they were discovered relatively recently, within the last ten thousand years, but they were pushed to the forefront of the scene by the then 4 leading species due to their innate gift.

A natural eidetic memory.

Elevated from the tribal age to the intergalactic age in but tens of years, they were showered with advanced education programs tailored for them with being to have them assume a greater role.

And the more they learned, the more their unique way of talking, arguments, and living was loved by the majority of the IGS. Who would say that they were more qualified as a leader than beings who did better than AI cores when in their specialized domain?

Exactly.

This led, from the moment of their ascension to them becoming in control of the political and administrative side of the whole IGS in a record time, with every leader apart from unique cases all being Rululus from that time on.

The only way to be more charismatic than a Rululu was to not argue with them. That was reality then, and it still was the reality now.

The progress of biotechnology never achieved the necessary level to freely modify DNA apart from targeted medical uses and genetic therapies with some 90% probability of it working, it was how hard it really was.

So, only Rululus rightly deserved the name “Wonder Of The Universe”.

…

In the major government bodies, a meeting was nearly over.

At this meeting, everyone was present, not only the current elected leader of the IGS, but present were also all the ministers from all the major departments of the IGS, culture, research, economy, administration, defense, education, and dozens of others, not one was absent.

“Everyone agrees to the release of the currently held experiment data and gathered knowledge? If you have any objection, say it now,” the one who spoke was the IGS leader, a Rululu in his prime.

Rululus were similar in size to the Kajos, meaning a little shorter on average than the other 3 leading species, their defining trait was the general blue theme of their eyes, skin, and hair.

Genetically, all rululus were blue humanoid with only slight blue variants that existed after ten thousand years of evolution from their tribal equivalent.

A silence lasting 5 seconds took place before the IGS leader spoke again, “In this case, the data will be released tomorrow, in an announcement held on the government channel and in a newly created forum in the Information Board, the meeting concluded, thank you for your attention.”

Without any signs of being relieved from the last 2 weeks of urgency, the IGS leader knew that the situation would only continue to change in the near future.

And nobody could do anything to stop it.