The Multidimensional Transcendent Gallery

People say a piece of writing can be loud.

The extreme end of that synesthetic illusion—hearing with the eyes—was something I was experiencing live, in real time.

The Multidimensional Transcendent Gallery. A community whose name I had never once heard, much less laid eyes on. And apparently, I was quite the illustrious figure there.

"......"

Naturally, infamy counted as a subset of fame.

For a good while I stood soul-stunned by that riot of posts, until at last I gathered myself. Then I began reading through the community's threads slowly and thoroughly.

LurkMoar3!

The expression originally stood for shut your mouth and lurk for three years, but since the whole culture felt rather familiar to me, I was able to slash that timeline down to a fraction.

And so, roughly thirty minutes later—

"......Is this for real."

The suspicion I'd dismissed as absurd turned out to be the plain truth. In other words: if everything in here wasn't just a stampede of people committed to their bits, then this place really was the 'Multidimensional Transcendent Gallery.' And one of its members had kidnapped me into it. As for why—I'd found that answer a long time ago.

"......They saw every last bit of it."

Apparently the tier lists, ranking charts, and hypothetical-battle analysis posts I'd slapped up in every spare moment for three years had caused an absolutely enormous stir in this place.

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At first, it seemed to have been pure chance. By the common sense I knew, transcendents of that caliber had no reason to bother snooping around a community of mortals. But apparently one useless bastard among them had been idly browsing the lower realm's mortal community, and the place had scratched an itch just right.

Here was the problem: everything I wrote consisted of things lower-realm mortals could not possibly know. And since every scrap of supporting evidence was dead-on accurate, they had apparently written it off as the playful whim of some transcendent. But the posts kept piling up and up, until one day the total was simply too much to wave away.

Before anyone noticed, the entire hype machine of the Transcendent Gallery had swung around to me. Honestly, since three years is close to an instant for beings like them, there was nothing strange about them chewing on the same bait for that long a stretch. At the same time, countless transcendents spent those years hunting for me—and in the end, one of them actually found me.

So why had it taken so long to track down a nobody like me? Because not one of them had considered, even for a heartbeat, that I might be in the lower realm. And even if they had, pinning me down wouldn't have been easy. That was thanks to the so-called Law of Causality: simply put, transcendents above a certain threshold cannot heavily interfere with the lower realms. Which meant finding the username 'Oz' down there was a needle-in-a-haystack affair—like hunting for one specific Mr. Kim somewhere in Seoul. And then along came a bastard who managed something harder still.

Gallery username: Wandering Merchant. A figure famous enough even within the original novel that the username alone gave away their true identity. And of all the beings in existence, I had let this one step on my tail.

The one mercy was that they had failed to expose my identity. In other words, no transcendent seething over their own tier or strength ranking would be climbing down here to split my skull open... or rather, to carve the planet I currently live on in half.

"......So this was the kind of place it was."

As the whole picture assembled itself, that was the first thought to surface. The Multidimensional Transcendent Gallery was a setting I knew nothing about. Being the 'Monster of 42 Rereads' had never meant I actually knew everything. Portions never depicted in the real novel only revealed their true shape after I transmigrated into this world. This gallery was one of those things. The trouble was that its scale was absurd even by those standards—though even that, I could somewhat understand. Fewer than two hundred chapters passed after the protagonist became a transcendent; there had been no room in the story for anything about some gallery.

"Well, damn. Incredible."

In three years of living in this world, it had never once occurred to me that I might come face to face with characters from the novel. For one thing, the world's original protagonist hadn't even been born yet—and for another, my life was even more destitute than that protagonist's, whose hardships the story had painted as considerable. I would simply live like this, and when my time came, keel over. My circumstances were bad enough that the outlook didn't even qualify as pessimism. Of course, getting invited to this gallery changed nothing about my position. But the chance to talk directly with living, breathing characters from the novel was making my inner otaku stir a little. I couldn't help but feel a little delighted.

Trading banter with beings whose usernames alone identified them instantly—as though they were just ordinary people on my level—was, quite simply, fun. Because I knew exactly what positions those beings occupied. And with comments and attention raining down on my very first post, for a little while, my fucked-up reality slipped my mind. Yeah. This was enough. As if stirring up a bit of power-scaling drama on some forum would ever land me a fate-changing fortuitous encounter. I was snickering as I typed out my replies when—

"......Hm?"

Notifications popped up one after another, jingling all the way. Only then did the profile entry in the upper-left corner catch my eye.

"What the—."

My post's upvotes had blown past one thousand, and roughly ninety thousand points had accrued to my name. The problem was, I had no idea what these 'points' actually were. In all my combing of the gallery's free board, I had never once seen the word.

"......So that's why I never saw it."

Either way, if I ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠wanted to find out what the points were, I would have to step into one of the newly unlocked boards. The first board to unlock had been the Archive. I tapped the entry. And then—

"What is this."

What unfolded before my eyes went beyond anything I had imagined.