ID: Video essay, slideshow, faceless speaker.

Greetings~ I am finally beginning to create some written and audio entries pertaining to my stay in Sooted Star. From worldly phenomena to personal things, I hope that someone will find these essays and writings useful.

Today’s entry is about one of the most fascinating aspects of the Sooted Star Network: its portals leading to different universes, or “dimensions of reality.” It has baffled scientists and really just about anyone living here for millennia. Though people have speculated and theorized endlessly about the logic of this place, no one has come to any final answer (as it is with many things, I guess).

Firstly, some ground terminology:

As most people here know from a young age, the “Sooted Star Network,” also known as the SSN, is a network consisting of a realm that exists between five planets, each in its own universe. In the main realm, there are many islands scattered in the Grassy Sea Plains. There are also about 258 known portals in the realm, including ones that form a “portal bubble” that encapsulates the realm. If we don’t include the portals on the bubble, there are 23 major portals and 30 to 35 minor ones. The major and minor portals we can travel through each lead to one of the five planets. Meanwhile, the portals that make up the bubble also lead to various zones on each of the planets, but due to the shifting nature of these portals, no one except the most experienced portal navigator scientists is allowed to enter them. (Fun fact: some of these bubble portals can lead you to another part of the bubble).

“The Realm,” also known as the “Sooted Star Realm” or the SSR consists of two major islands, Rokon and Risenen, as well as a bunch of smaller islands. Because Rokon and Risenen are essentially pinnacles of vast territories covering the entire SSN, they own a fairly even split of portals, some of which lead more to some planets than others.

The reason why the five planets are mentioned as being within different “dimensions of reality” is because scientists have come to believe that each of them is in its own separate universe. It has been a consensus to this day that the planets have no access to each other through regular space travel and that the SSR is the only way they have access to each other.

Philosopher and scientist, Cruyien, proclaimed long ago that “there are many different dimensions of reality—some with physical access to each other, and some that a person can only reach with the imagination.”

At first, many people brushed off this idea. It was basically like the parallel universe idea but with different wording. However, scientists tried thousands of times with hundreds of methods to see if any of the planets attached to Sooted Star were in the same dimension. They failed every time.

Because of this, people began to take Cruyien’s ideas more seriously. Until it could be proved otherwise, maybe there really are universes out there that couldn’t be accessed except in rare exceptions involving portals, such as in the case of the SSN.

I find it comforting in a way to know that maybe there are universes out there that we could only ever imagine, which we could actually access if we found a way to make such portals. Maybe all the fictional worlds that we believe we “make up” could actually exist—which, not to mention, could imagine our universe in return—could be traveled to with the portals. But now I’m going off on a tangent…

To this day, scientists are trying to figure out the truth. Maybe one day everything will be disproved, but for now, it is what it is.

As for the Sooted Star Realm itself, which has a bubble of portals surrounding it, there is a mystery as to what lies beyond the bubble. The bubble only covers an expanse of the grassy plains, so the SSR isn’t actually a full planet. In fact, the SSR is only 478.8 kilometers (297.5 miles) from one side to the other. Scientists guess that the SSR may have been a full planet that became mostly uninhabitable somehow, (though it wasn’t the destruction of our solar system since we can clearly see our own star and sun patterns and whatnot). Unfortunately, no one knows what the current planet looks like beyond the bubble. No one has been able to go out into space because it prevents us from going into the SSR’s own solar system. We can only speculate by watching our own part of space turn up above us. The hope for us is that someday a break will occur between the portals on the bubble that allows us outside.

Why the portals appeared in the SSN is also still a question for the most part. However, scientists have theorized that after the planet’s destruction, space-time bent and fractured (to put it very simply), thus causing the portals to appear.

Of course, it’s quite strange that the portals inside the bubble are so different from the portals on the edges of the bubble itself, let alone the fact that the portals lead to places creating an optimal environment for life to inhabit it. It just makes it all seem, on an intuitive level, like the Sooted Star Network was created intentionally, like some higher species of space creature had created it to fit their needs or something. No one has yet found any evidence of this, which is why I and a friend have made it our dream and mission to find out someday… But I digress.

Lastly, why do the portals lead to the planets they do? One can only speculate. One of the most common speculations so far is that the dimensions are “in sync” somehow. Some think it is purely coincidence. Of course, people also like thinking it was intentional. But not knowing isn’t very satisfying, is it? I get that. So In a way, I try to take comfort lavishing in the mystery. We spend all our lives in mysteries we don’t even know to question in the first place, after all, so might as well enjoy the ride.

I would love to talk more about the different types of portals, where they lead, and how they work, as well as why the SSR is able to function as a planet despite being surrounded by a bubble of portals, but I’ll have to save that for another day.

– Zeijien out.