I started with the mountains.

My material aura expanded as it drank in the matter around, reducing it, pouring XP into my progression, which I further used to enhance my reduction capability, which caused me to expand faster, and so on.

I stood in a widening crater as the mountain around melted away into this swirling white mist. Soon my aura consumed the estate and the cabin, including everything in it. Every discrete object that came into contact was flash-reduced automatically, and I watched my mana bar fluctuate. Every time seed stored in the basement dripped into my aura, the data filed away in the air around me.

That's what all of this was. This reduction. My aura was essentially the data of everything that I had reduced. Yes, I could see it now. To recycle was to recreate from this data, the particular organization of atoms that made a thing, an identity, a point in time of an object's state.

Every time seed I had obtained should've contained entire world's of data, but they were hyper-compressed. There was no need to dive into that data just yet.

I checked my notification stream. Recipes were dropping in at alarming rates. Just a river of new things dumping into me.

Fascinating but useless to watch.

In time, my aura had become thick enough to see from afar. Like an expanding swirling white sphere--a nuke in slow motion--as I encroached down the mountain slopes and shredded through the grass and dipped into the sand of the desert.

I could watch it from afar, or rather, I could sense it. I could sense the edges of my aura, and while I floated patiently in the epicenter of the storm of me, crossed-legged like a monk, eyes closed like a grand wizard channeling a spell, I watched my progress blossom out across the land.

Soon I made it to the city. The people came out to bear witness, pointing at it, shouting in despair, running fruitlessly back into the shelter.

There were 431 people in there. And now they were data.

I made it to the ocean. The water hissed and churned against my expanding shell as I reduced my way into the sea.

Soon, I reached the other side.

I expanded from the size of a mountain, to a city, to a country. And within moments, I was the continent. The ocean. The hemisphere. And soon--

+5.972 × 10^24 kg Matter

+29.86 × 10^24 XP

Level up!

You are now level 100.

I had consumed the planet.

I floated there in space, protected by my planet-sized material aura, and at this point, I was a little tired, so I made myself a snack and a drink and took a nap (I was still human, after all), and when I woke up--groggy with messy hair and tired eyes--I started again.

There was more to the universe than just the Earth.

Since I was no longer expanding my aura, I couldn't outright reach anything on my own. In essence, I was stuck. Bottlenecked by time and space.

But that was okay. I had a solution.

I simply did what Laya had done, and I reached into the abyss of data around, and I picked out a random person, and inside that person, their memories, and a lifetime lived on that dying planet flooded past me--a playful childhood, a hopeful youth, a tragedy, a jaded adulthood--and I picked a person from their earliest memory--their parent. With parallel data from other people within the same timeframe, I could build a replica of this parent from scratch. I could recycle someone with nothing but the collective memories of everyone they've ever known.

And by creating them, I could create them in a state of time. Filled with even their own memories. Memories that I dug into and continued the cycle. I recreated the history of this planet, generation by generation, until I reached the point of time when mages were still alive.

And I picked one out from the bunch--a porter. Just a simple guy who could create portals. And I duplicated his data and spawned him right beside me.

He looked around in shock and horror and confusion--from his point of view, he had just been transported to space in the middle of a conversation--and he saw my open palm pointed at him.

And I reduced him, put him right back into my aura as data, and in turn, I gained his skills and power, and his ability to skip through spacetime using portals.

Using this, I hopped over to the moon, and I ate it.

Then the other planets. One by one.

And finally, the sun. This was tough, but with a few more magic skills I had "borrowed" from other mages, I made it work.

With that, the solar system was now apart of me, my aura now a swirling white and red mass, essentially a star of my own, with me at its core. I was far, far from done.

I continued on, eating neighboring stars, nearby solar systems. I soon became large enough to consume the entire galaxy--including the black hole at its core. The explosion was stellar, and all that matter that had compressed into it blossomed my aura out spectacularly in size.

I then began to eat other galaxies, growing larger, clusters, growing faster, superclusters, protocluster, quasar groups. I didn't even know what the shit was called; I had to look it up in someone else's memory to find out.

And within some stretch of time, so much sooner than I had expected--

+10^53 kg Matter

Silence. Absence. The void.

I was done.

There was nothing left to recycle anymore. There was only the abyss of the void, the infinite nothing, and me, who held all of the data of the universe.

The extent of my aura reached impossibly far--essentially the width of the universe--but there was no longer a need to be so big. So I compressed it. More. Harder. Tighter. And the aural field rushed inward at me to compact tightly, tighter than tight could be, and with enough mana and power to force it in, I did it.

The aura was now but a thin line across my body. A singularity of existence, as dense as the point of everything before the big bang.

But now was not that time.

Instead, I opened a gate to the next universe.

And I ate it.

And then the next.

And I ate it.

And I continued on throughout the multiverse for an indescribable amount of time until I was eventually done. Surprisingly, only a few hundred in total.

And that was that. The multiverse was collectively in the process of heat death, some slower and some faster, and they were, for lack of a better term, at the end of their cycles.

Now there was nothing left. The gates couldn't work anymore. There was no longer even any "space" to put a universe beside this one. Everything just sort of collapsed into the void. Into nothing.

We didn't need all that extra shit anyway. Not where we were going.

I recreated the time seeds, and one-by-one, I decompressed them and drank in the data. Even countless more save-states of universes and worlds and moments. Memories upon memories. An endless ocean of data.

And when I was done, I had all the knowledge of everything. The past, the present, and whatever future I decided to create. All of it. Forever.

There was only one more thing not within my control, and it existed here, in the void.

So I willed myself there.

And I found her again.

Marianna. She sat in the computer chair at the desk, knees brought close to her chest, her head buried in her arms in either torment or boredom. The body of the goddess laid there beside her, unmoving.

She looked up and noticed me, and her tired eyes widened with shock and... happiness. "Oh. Imsi. You're back."

"I am."

"Truth be told, it was getting a little lonely here."

"So it was."

She sighed. "I suppose you came back for the same reason I did." She looked back at the body of the goddess. "I had planned for this, you know. I hoped you would come back and make me gone. Forever this time. And then you could take my place as the king of nothing."

"I know," I said.

She huffed out a quiet laugh. "Very well. Let's get this over with." She stood with a groan and stretched her arms for a moment, and she drew the sword--the Sword of Gods' Twilight--and she tossed it at me.

I caught it, and I reduced it. It flashed away in my hands, leaving only a trace of dust.

Marianna looked hurt. "Why? Imsi, I need you to fucking kill me. That's the whole fucking point."

"Nah."

"What?"

"I mean, yeah, but..." I shrugged. "I'm not really doing this because I hate you." I aimed my open palm at her. "I'm doing this because... well, maybe I... Ugh. Maybe I forgive you a little."

Her eyes widened. Her head tilted slightly. "What?"

She flashed away into dust. Then the computer. Then the body of the goddess.

I dusted my hands off, looked around, and nodded at all the nothing there was.

Neat.

Now was the time to get to work. This place needed some sprucing up.

I spawned in an old friend and gave her a human body.

"Hello, Imsi."

"Hello, Cassandra."

She looked at herself, her genderless-yet-feminine body, and she looked at all the nothing, and then at me, the off-brand Marianna. "I am unable to analyze the situation."

"I plucked out the most recent living memory of you," I told her. "So you could join me."

She looked around again. "Very well. What will you have me do?"

"Keep me company."

She looked around, maybe trying to parse this as a computer would, but when she could find no good answer, she only looked up at me and smiled. "Okay."

And together, we went to work.

I created a palace here in the void. Lit by an artificial sun. Surrounded by grassy plains and endless blue skies that carried a breeze. It was a real fancy place that resembled classic architecture with rows of marble pillars and chiseled stone walkways. Grass in the yard, plants everywhere, airy windows, and several rooms to fill with stuff. I would leave it empty save for the basement. There, I recreated every time seed in my possession, and I filed them away neatly.

In the back, the Chronoflora garden. I set up the latticework while Cassandra created the soil. We made a little work shed and a big fucking tree for some shade. Laya had a cabin as her oasis in the dark. But now she'll have her own palace.

So I spawned her in.

She looked around, confused, then at me, at my smirking grin, and she sensed the essence of the void, and she began to laugh.

"Is it--is it done, Imsi?"

"It is," I said.

She chuckled. "I suppose we can just pick up where we left off, then."

"We have time," I said. "Literally all the time there ever is. Just in case you wanted to some tea and sandwiches or something."

She narrowed her eyes playfully at me. "Let me get settled, Imsi."

Cassandra and I followed her, and we watched her work.

She dug out a particular universe she had storage, a time seed, and she buried it there in the garden and watered it with her mana, and it began to sprout. The leaves poured out of the soil, stretched for the air and sun, and the roots spread, and the vines carried it up and over the latticework, and the flower--the universe--bloomed.

She waved her hand over the plant, and a perfect stillness washed over it.

"It's ready," she said. "Whenever you are."

"Good." I looked around at the palace estate and the fields and the tree, and I breathed the deep the peacefulness about it. This would be her waiting room, after all. The new Grand Magi. "Are you okay with that?" I asked. "We can split duties if you want."

Laya shook her head. "You needn't ask, Imsi. You knew the answer already. I was to become the custodian of the worlds."

Custodian. What a fitting term. Basically a glorified janitor. A trash cleaner. But so much terribly more than that. It was now the highest title in existence. The Custodian of the Recycled Worlds.

"I gave you everything you need," I told her. "Including someone to keep you company."

Cassandra looked at us both with wide eyes. She was enthralled in child-like wonder. "Of course, Imsi. But what about the other me in the other universe?"

Laya smiled at her. "You catch on quick, my new acolyte."

Cassandra blushed a bit.

Laya continued. "Once a version of you dies, it will return here to merge with your greater being--if you so wish--and thereby you would obtain all the memories it had made. So don't worry," Laya ruffled Cassandra's hair. "You won't miss out on anything." She looked back at me. "And are you sure? If there is anything you want to change--" she grinned a sly grin, "then let me know now. I can fix anything in that frozen universe now. I can make it so your adventure never happened. I can make it so you never became a paladin. Or that you never met Marianna, or--"

"No," I said. "I'm the sum of my experiences. My memories and my mistakes. I'm made from trash, and that's okay."

Cassandra burst into laughter. Laya grinned. Both knew better than to agree--that would be a bit rude--but nobody tried to deny it.

"Well, then, are you ready?" she asked.

"I am," I said. "I have just one more thing to do, and I can finally be done."

I walked over to the yard, and the girls followed me. I sat there on my knees, my eyes closed, waiting patiently as Laya aimed her open palm.

"Thank you, again, Imsi. Visit us sometime, and we'll treat you to a picnic."

I smiled. "Sure."

And in a flash, she reduced me to nothing—and as we planned—she inherited existence.

My senses vanished for a split second and rushed back.

Stale air hit me. The smell of sweat and gunsmoke and cyberleather armor. Thumping booms around, muffled explosions in the far distance, and a woman in the middle of a monologue.

I opened my eyes.

Marianna stood before the throne, the Sword of Gods' Twilight shining red in her hands, and beside her, Laya finishing a time spell.

This was the final battle, recycled.