Chapter 70: Infinite [Series Finale]
On the last Sunday of the year, Jake went home for dinner.
He was forty-five. His mother was eighty-three. The kitchen was the same. The smell was the same. The doenjang-jjigae was, impossibly, even better than it had been forty years ago, as if the recipe had been improving through some form of culinary evolution that defied explanation.
He brought Pi. And Sol, who closed the cafe early. And Lyra, who had returned from her latest expedition with gifts from a dimension where the sunset lasted three hours. And Vex, who had come back from her exploration with a new form of energy that made her glow in colors that didn’t exist.
And Epoch, and Gerald, and the Remnant, and even Kael—who had traveled from the Shattered Corridor, where his garden now covered a hundred acres of healed dimensional wreckage.
Jake’s mother’s apartment was not large enough for all of them. It didn’t matter. They sat on the floor, on the counters, on cushions dragged from every room. Pi took up most of the hallway. Gerald brought his own chair (conceptually). The Remnant hovered near the ceiling, its surface alive with the stories of every dimension its friends had visited.
“I don’t have enough bowls,” Jake’s mother said, looking at the crowd that had filled her apartment with beings from across the multiverse.
“We’ll share,” Jake said.
“Sharing is fine. But someone needs to tell the glowing one to stop absorbing my kitchen lights.”
“Sorry,” Vex said, dimming.
They ate. They talked. They told stories that spanned dimensions and years and the impossible distance between who they’d been and who they’d become. Jake’s mother listened to all of it with the unflappable calm of a woman who had long since accepted that her son’s life was strange and her role was to feed everyone involved.
After dinner, after the dishes (which Jake did, because some battles he had won), after the stories and the laughter and the moment when Kael’s tomato gift made everyone cry, Jake stood on his mother’s balcony and looked at Seoul.
The city glittered. Above it, invisible to everyone but him, the dimensional fabric shimmered with Null’s presence—steady, gentle, infinite. A message appeared in the stars:
Good dinner?
“The best.”
Save me a bowl.
“Always.”
He stood on the balcony of the apartment where he’d grown up, in the city where the System had changed everything, under a sky held together by his best friend, surrounded by beings from across the multiverse who had come for dinner because he’d asked them to.
Infinite mana hummed in his veins. Infinite love filled the apartment behind him. And the infinite, messy, beautiful, impossible universe stretched out in every direction, full of stories and connections and the endless, ongoing miracle of things that chose to matter to each other.
His mother appeared on the balcony. She handed him a cup of tea.
“Drink this. You’re cold.”
“I have infinite mana. I can’t get cold.”
“Drink it anyway.”
He drank it. It was warm. It tasted like home.
And Jake—Professor Jake, the infinite one, savior of reality, terrible rice chef, beloved teacher, devoted son, friend of voids and architects and mathematical entities and everyone in between—smiled at his mother and said the only words that mattered:
“Same time next week?”
“Same time every week.”
Always.
On the walk home, Jake’s phone rang. Director Kwon from the Rift Recovery Bureau.
“Jake. The Gwangju exclusion zone. The mana residue we’ve been monitoring for three years—it’s not dissipating. It’s crystallizing.”
“Crystallizing into what?”
“We don’t know. But the locals are reporting plants growing in the dead zone. Plants that shouldn’t exist. And animals that haven’t been seen in Korea for centuries.”
Jake stopped walking. The evening air was cool on his face. Somewhere behind him, his mother’s kitchen light was still on.
The apocalypse was over. But the world it left behind was still changing. And change, Jake had learned, didn’t care whether you were ready for it.
“I’ll be there tomorrow,” he said.