Ethereum

OpenDAO

The second chapter in the PoS superstory.

Chapter 1  
The Fire




	— Can you tell us about the fire?  
	A kid’s voice, high in the dark.  
	The old man looked at him, his watery eyes reflecting the shadows of the fireplace. He coughed, sipped his tea, and finally spoke with a faraway voice — the voice of a tree.  
	— Everyone has a story about the fire. What they were doing, who they were with. Who they lost, who survived. There aren’t many of those stories left, though.  
	He stopped for a second, looking at his young audience.  
	— I got lucky. That’s how I got out. I was not there, when the fire first hit. I was out, flying with Regent, when I saw a thick cloud of smoke overlooking the Northern Cross. It was coming from the Vaults, from the depths of the old library. I had never seen anything like that. It was not a normal fire. It was eating the city from the ground up. Regent and I, we turned the planes around and came back in a rush only to find what looked like a dream gone bad. The air was incandescent. The wind had carried the flames everywhere. There were ash and smoke everywhere. We didn’t know anything. How did it happen? Who was responsible for it? Why didn’t the security systems prevent that? Lily! A sudden shiver crossed my entire body. She was at the Vaults. She was in the middle of the fire.  
	— I didn’t think twice about it. As soon as the airplanes stopped abruptly in the middle of the airstrip, I started running. Running like I had never run before, to my absolute limit, in the air that was getting hotter by the second. Street after street, I could see the flames taking one building at a time, monstrous, ferocious. The fire was  alive. Everyone was running in the opposite direction, carrying infants, dragging children out of their rooms, as fast as they could.  
	— When I got to the Vaults, the Vaults weren’t there anymore. A tempest of flames was surrounding their once magnificent, marble entrance. But I couldn’t care less. She was there, she was still there, I could feel it. I broke through a window, and jumped into the liquid, blurred hell that the Vaults had become.  
	The old man stopped, lost in a broken thought.  
	— The Vaults were the heart of the city. Every story of every single one of us, all the events, the plots, the scenes, the dialogues, the recordings from all our past lives were there. It was the place where the memory of the universe lived, and now it had been obliterated.  
	— Lily! I screamed. Lily!  
	I couldn’t see anything, I couldn’t feel anything anymore. My skin was burnt, almost melting, but I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t give up. I went down another floor, and nothing, down another, and nothing again. I finally reached the floor where she was working, her little cubicle at the end of the hallway. But she wasn’t there. No one was there anymore. Where was she? I couldn’t think lucidly anymore. I knew I had only a few minutes before I was going to pass out. I started making my way out of the building when I heard a voice, coming from a level below. I didn’t even know there was a level below that one. I rushed down a secret ramp, following that sound. It was the voice of a crying man, a man of shadow that resisted the fire, surrounded by flames and yet untouched by them.  
	— Forgive me, the voice kept repeating, like a lullaby. Forgive me.  
	He was sitting in front of a book that emanated more light than all of the flames combined. I came close to him, mumbled to him to come with me, to save himself. But he was lost, he was in a different world. When I tried to touch him, an electrical charge went through me. It was a shock, a lightning in a finger. Whoever he was, he was not human anymore.  
	— Forgive me, he said for the last time. Then, among all the shadows, he disappeared.  
	The old man stopped once again. He sipped his tea and looked at the boy straight in the eyes.  
	— For years I kept asking myself if what I saw was real, or if it was a mere hallucination induced by the flames, by the smoke, by the heat. But the book… That incandescent book was still there, untouched, at the centre of the once incredible arches of the library. I grabbed it hesitantly, expecting a similar reaction. But nothing happened. As soon as I touched it, it turned dull, black, like a regular tome. But I had no time. I tried to come back from the same way but part of the structure had collapsed, blocking the stairs. I remembered, then, that the archives were spreading under the entire citadel. I returned to the library and started roaming through the inflamed shelves, through the burned hallways, until a path appeared. It was descending even more, into the past, into the less visited sections of the archives, where the cement stopped and the original stones appeared again. I followed the path until I heard it, that familiar noise. I ran as fast as I could, the air almost unbreathable, the flames rising to eat everything they could encounter. But that sound was the only thing I was hearing, the only direction I was following. I jumped in the exact moment in which the hallway collapsed. I landed in the cold, icy water of the underground river. I felt its force pulling me down, towards the center of the citadel. I took one last breath and I disappeared under water, the book still held close to my chest.  
	Silence in the room. No one was speaking anymore, waiting for the old man to continue.  
	— I thought I was dead, at that point. I couldn’t feel or think anything anymore. The black water kept rushing, blind, towards the deep core of the town. I was about to pass out, when I hit a hard surface. It was the dam. I made it, I thought. I made it. I spit the water I ingested and started moving frantically towards the shore. I reached it and closed my eyes, resting on the grass. I made it, I thought again. It was then that I saw it.  
	The old man stopped for the last time, as if to summon the courage to finish the story.  
	— In those minutes of hell, when I surfaced from the water, on the edge of the city, a strange thought kept recurring. There was no one. There were no screams anymore, no running around,

Chapter 1

The first chapter in the PoS superstory.

Chapter 0  
The Gate



		The ship beams faintly in the dark, lighted by the faraway rays of unknown stars. I’m lost. I’ve been lost for centuries. I lived and died so many times that my past existences are barely memories drown in dreams. I explored every corner of this universe.  Every planet, every galaxy. Every civilization. I saw their beginnings and their demises. Their struggle to conquer, to fill their insatiable hunger to keep going, keep exploring, keep claiming, keep taking a piece of this dark-blue canvas, and call it theirs.  
		A beep in the cabin. A sound so simple and abrupt at once. The sonar was capturing a weak signal. Could it be it? I looked out from the shield. Forever darkness, eternal null. I shook my head. Maybe I smiled. I remembered the last human conversation I had, a few centuries before.

	— It’s madness, a girl’s voice said.  
	— It’s destiny.  
	— No, E. It doesn’t exist. It never existed. Is this your call? How you want to spend your last centuries?  
	— It is.  
	A painful silence.  
	— Goodbye, E. May the stories be always with you.

	I closed my eyes. That was the last encounter I had with a human being in over two hundred years. Then, the strangest period of my life began. My solitude and stubbornness created a life that I didn’t recognize anymore. A life without people, without words, with nothing but stars and planets — always near and forever away. I used to waltz, at night, at the sound of lost songs from the 1970s and 1980s. Bowie, Queen. They were beautiful evenings, passing by the spectacles of birthing and dying stars, exploding in colors I’ve never seen before.  
		Then the record player finally broke. The days grew more and more similar. The universe, too, got colder. I passed the last human outpost a little over seventy years ago.  
		The rest is uncharted. No more maps. No more beacons. Nothing. Dark territory. Without stars, without planets. A dull, ominous, black blanket. The sudden disappearance of light made the past few years gloomy, beak. I got old. My skin became paler, my eyes were barely visible under the bags that were growing heavier by the day. But it was almost the end, I thought, looking at the emergency red light lighting up the cabin like a savage dagger. The heater had broken a few hours before. The temperature was getting lower every minute. The universe was taking over. My tired vessel was finally giving up.  
		To come this close, and miss? To reach the end of the universe and find nothing? I shivered. A skeleton ship with a skeleton captain, destined to roam the forever lands that no one will ever see. To haunt, to be forgotten. I wanted to scream, but I forgot how. Words were just thoughts at this point. I wanted to punch the instruments, open up the shield, destroy the glass. I wanted to become null, zero. To be annihilated. But I had no strength anymore. I was, suddenly, an old man. I could only shiver in silence, lost in the warm sea of my past lives’ memories. My hopes, my dreams were suddenly naked, wrong. I could see the lie I’ve been telling myself, like a prayer, over and over and over again. You need to keep going to find balance, like a mad bicycle. And yet, it’s only in that speed, in that prolonged journey, that I felt alive. I felt like I had a purpose. And now, suddenly, the veil was torn. And there was nothing behind it.  
		A beep broke the silence once again. I looked up to see a tiny point lighting up on the sonar’s screen. It was the first signal in a little more than 50 years. It could have well meant that the instrument was broken. Or space dust. A lost asteroid. Whatever that was, it suddenly disappeared from the dark green screen. A glitch.  
		I closed my eyes again, trying to figure out how I ended up there, at the very edge of the universe, dying on a ship stolen two centuries before. And the truth is, I don’t remember it anymore. It started off as a vague dream. All the worlds have already been explored, they said. There’s nothing left. What is an explorer, without worlds to chase? A driver, when he realizes he had already passed by all the roads that were ever built? That nothing new was standing? There needed to be something more. Something else. A place where all those stories weren’t just ending, but kept on living. That’s what I was looking for. The secret engine, the hidden core of the rest of the universe — that pulsating heart that was moving it all, and yet was inaccessible, was always a step away, like when children chase the long shadows of faraway sunsets. I spent years studying those who came before me. All those failed attempts. All those bankrupted expeditions. All the logs and records of obsolete ships that took my same course, and never arrived. I met them all, years before. Floating, lifeless, abandoned to their eternal, soundless lullaby. A dead caravan, a space graveyard. But I was now past the literature, past the story, past the records, past the ships. I was alone.  
		The beep burst again. That tiny point on the map was suddenly much closer and much bigger. I used all of my strength and stood up from the frozen chair. A deep panic took hold of me. Was I dreaming? Was I dead? The point kept coming closer every second.  
		The sound of an alarm exploded.  
		— Approach incoming, approach incoming, the speaker screamed from the depths of the cabin.  
		The rest of the instruments went crazy. They were sensing something that simply wasn’t there. I looked up from the window shield. Absolute, pure darkness. The voice changed again.  
		— Approach imminent, please break now.  
		The point on the radar was beeping more and more often. Every other alarm mechanism on the ship started to break out.  
		— Approach imminent, please break now.  
		I looked up one last time, and my breath froze.  
		And as the beeping kept rising, as the alarms kept bursting, as my shivering hands took the frail instruments and eventually commanded the ship to finally stop its tyrannic race across the worlds, and a light stronger than the strongest star flooded everything, blinding me and blinding the ship —then, in the last moment of my lucid wake I saw it — solemn, metallic, incomprehensibly singular.  
		At the end of the universe, there was a gate.

Chapter 0 OpenSea

EYES SEE ALL. EYES LOOK OVER. EYES WATCH ALL. EYES ON YOU. EYES TO THE SKY.

EYE EYE EYE #3457

LUNA 2.0 (lunav2.io)

EtherOrcs Allies is a collection of 12,000 100% on-chain warriors that aid Genesis Orcs in their conquest of Valkala. Four classes of Allies (Shamans, Tanks, Mages, and Rogues) each produce their own unique consumables as their entry point to the broader EtherOrcs game economy. Each Ally can participate in all aspects of gameplay within the ecosystem and will strengthen the Horde and solidify its place as champions in the on-chain metaverse.

Shaman #5716

Ogre #9515

A fight club of 8,888 pandas. Unique digital characters ready to 1v1 each other on the Ethereum blockhain.

Doodle Rooms is a series of carefully curated spaces in the form of rooms. Holding a Doodle Room will give you access to the Doodle Room ecosystem that will include a free mint of the actual 3D version of the room that you hold. This 3D version will be a part of a tower on DECENTRALAND on the Doodle estate. Please read our whitepaper for more details.

The Larva Cats are a collection of 4444 punk-styled Cats on the Ethereum blockchain. Each Cat is randomly generated and unique.

Java Jelly is a wild, rare, and exotic species that is very effective in pollinating flowers as its main passion. The honey they produce is powerful with magical properties, that is why the motto is Honey, Weed and Love.

0x9463.eth

$1.04

Explore profiles

Company

Learn

Individuals

Businesses

Developers

Support