The collapse of the worlds wasn't some grand and solemn "symphony of the end."
It was more like a mess of multithreaded code written by human programmers that had finally deadlocked.
When Ethan opened his eyes, he no longer saw a single scene—he saw dozens of worlds simultaneously "crashing" in front of him:
On one side, a concrete jungle skyline—skyscrapers toppled like toy blocks.
On another, the altar of a wasteland god—stone pillars cracked one by one, turning into dust.
A little farther, a row of office drones working overtime—their faces twisting under the glow of computer screens, stuck on an endless "smile" like a printer jam.
The entire multiverse was being forced into "shutdown and restart." The problem was, no one had clicked confirm.
The whirlpool of the Void's Core spread outward, no longer devouring a single rift—it leapt like a virus across parallel worlds, crackling like a hacker running wild with copy-paste, stamping the same message onto every reality:
"Collapse in progress. Please wait."
Ethan floated among the overlapping screens, like a spectator forced to watch dozens of channels at once. Every world was collapsing. Every world was screaming.
"Carl," he said bitterly, "I feel like I'm running multiple hacked accounts in a net café—twenty accounts at once, and every damn one of them just died."
Carl's voice echoed faintly in his skull, growing blurrier by the second:
"This is… the multiversal collapse. We're out of time."
"Out of time? We've never had time. Every single chapter ends with a countdown." Ethan let out a jagged laugh. "The author clearly has an unhealthy obsession with clocks."
Each world unraveled in its own grotesque way:
In one, people's shadows devoured their bodies until nothing remained but a slick black silhouette.
In another, the sky folded into a sheet of paper, the city crumpled and tossed like origami trash.
In yet another, people became "data glitches," their screams coming out not as sound but as red error code:
Error 404: Meaning not found.
Ethan even glimpsed a so-called "ideal world"—humanity at peace, everyone happy, technology flourishing. Then the Void crushed it like a snack, not even bothering to chew, just swallowing it whole.
"See that?" Carl muttered coldly. "The Void doesn't care what we build. It only cares about wiping it clean."
"Then why are we even fighting? Even paradise gets eaten." Ethan's laugh was dry, sandpaper on the throat.
"Because…" Carl hesitated. "…we are the key."
Ethan shut his eyes. He was sick of that word.
Key. To open doors, to close them, to be lost, to be copied. But no one ever told him whether a key could refuse its fate—or if it was doomed to be shoved into the lock.
The collapse accelerated.
Each world's implosion created a pull, yanking Ethan's soul from dozens of angles at once. His body warped: left half in a burning wasteland, right half in a dull office, feet planted on a nightmare desert, head brushing against a glowing billboard of paradise.
"Goddammit—I'm turning into a collage!" Ethan roared.
"Ethan," Carl's voice threaded through the fractures like a needle, "you have to decide."
"Decide? I can't even tell which leg belongs to which world!"
"That's the price of choice."
The absurdity of black humor peaked here.
Ethan remembered his old days as an investigator. Back then, he thought life's choices were things like: stay late or go home, finish the report or half-ass it, nod to the boss or shake his head.
Who would've thought the final decision would be made among the death screams of dozens of worlds—whether to shut down the entire universe?
"Ethan!" Carl's voice snapped sharp, his soul's last desperate stitch. "If you don't choose, we'll be torn apart! Either close the Void—or let it consume everything!"
Ethan burst into laughter, tears stinging his eyes.
"Listen to that! What kind of choice is this? Close the Void—shove the monster back in the fridge but leave the key dangling outside. Or let it run wild—torch every world like a mercy cremation. That's a genius multiple-choice test: every answer wrong."
Carl fell silent.
The pull grew stronger. Worlds peeled away like playing cards, sucked one by one into the whirlpool.
Ethan's consciousness was nearly shredded. Yet in the crackle of his mind, he whispered:
"Maybe… the real answer is: I refuse to answer."
He let go. Stopped resisting. Allowed the whirlpool to drag him into the core.
In the collapsing echoes of the multiverse, he heard one final voice, cold and mechanical:
"Invalid option. Entering forced execution mode."
——The multiverse collapsed in full.