Maybe everything that was outside our universe has already been gobbled up. Ours could be a 14 billion year old black hole, inside a many-trillion year old universe... the outside universe may be so old that it is undergoing heat death, and can no longer offer ordinary states of matter for our own -- maybe only bose-einstein condensates or some kind of super-cold nebula of planke-scale particles...

... that empty space is growing everywhere would suggest that the event horizon exists everywhere in our space and the new Dark Energy is infused without inducing noticable curvature. This might suggest something about the behaviour of gravity inside a black hole, or about such super-cold states of matter.

... one still wonders where it all came from... but perhaps black holes offer a cyclical restoration process, like a larvae growing and finally consuming or shedding its exoskeleton.