Novel Full Chapter 818: Rings of Travel and Storage
Chapter 818: Rings of Travel and Storage
I stood in the center of the Tech Hub. The orb pulsed behind me—that mysterious, color-cycling sphere with its persistent golden heartbeat. ARIA’s confusion still echoed through our link, but she’d accepted my silence.
For now.
A hush had fallen over the room, the kind that comes before lightning decides whether to strike or just threaten.
I took a breath. And with a sigh that carried the weight of everything I’d become, I closed my eyes. Spread my arms wide. Like a superhero accepting his destiny. Like a supervillain welcoming his throne.
Like something in between—something new, something that didn’t fit into the neat categories humans had invented for power.
The pose felt ridiculous. I knew that. Some part of me—the part that was still old Peter Carter, still the bullied kid who used to flinch when Jack Morrison walked past—wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it.
Standing in a ghost mansion, arms spread like Christ on the cross, about to summon rewards from a system that had turned my life into a fever dream. But another part of me—the part that had grown teeth, grown power, grown into something that made gods nervous—knew this was exactly right.
This was my character moment. Every power fantasy I’d ever had while lying in my shitty bed in our shitty apartment, dreaming of being more while the world treated me like less—this was all of them coming true at once.
Every comic book pose.
Every anime transformation sequence. Every video game cutscene where the protagonist ascends to their final form.
I was living it. Me. Peter fucking Carter.
The charity case. The doormat. The nobody. Now standing like a god demanding tribute. The irony wasn’t lost on me. I embraced it anyway.
The breath I took was deep. Theatrical. The exhale came sharp—dramatic and alive in the stillness, cutting through the ambient hum of impossible technology like a blade through silk.
And I intoned:
"System... My Super Mystery Box."
"Master—" ARIA’s voice came urgent, alarmed. "Energy readings are spiking. The room is—I’m detecting fluctuations beyond anything I can measure. The scales aren’t built for this. The numbers don’t make sense. Master, what’s happen—"
She went silent. Not cut off. Not interrupted. Overwhelmed. For the first time since I’d created her, ARIA had encountered something that exceeded her processing capacity.
Something that made even a near-ASI go quiet with awe. A machine intelligence, vast enough to simulate entire civilizations in microseconds, reduced to stunned silence.
That alone should have told me how far beyond ordinary this had gone.
[DING!]
The notification didn’t just echo in my mind. The room responded. The walls pulsed—those organic-technological lines flaring brighter, cycling through colors like the orb behind me had infected them with its prismatic rhythm.
The floor vibrated beneath my feet, a deep bass hum that I felt in my bones more than heard with my ears.
The air itself thickened, charged with energy that made the fine hairs on my arms stand at attention. The temperature fluctuated—hot, then cold, then something that wasn’t either, something that felt like standing at the edge of a thunderstorm and a furnace simultaneously. And there was a smell.
Ozone. Sharp and electric.
But underneath it, something else—something ancient, something that smelled like dust in temples that hadn’t been opened in millennia, like the air in tombs where pharaohs slept, like power that had been waiting so long it had developed its own scent.
The scent of epochs turning over in their sleep and deciding, today, they would wake.
Madison gasped, stepping closer to me instinctively. Soo-Jin’s hand twitched toward her weapon before she caught herself. This wasn’t just a system notification. This was a moment. The kind civilizations remember in scripture.
The kind that gets carved into stone so future generations can argue whether it really happened or was just the best story they ever told themselves.
[Super Mystery Box received...]
[Manifesting...]
Reality rippled. In the air before me—exactly at eye level, exactly at arm’s reach—space began to fold. Colors bled together. Light bent around a point that shouldn’t exist, creating a visual distortion that hurt to look at directly.
A sound emerged from the distortion. Not loud, but present—impossible to ignore.
It was like a hum.
Like a heartbeat.
Like whispers in languages that had never been spoken by human tongues, layered over each other until they became music, became prayer, became something that vibrated at the frequency of creation itself.
The universe clearing its throat before it spoke your name.
And then it appeared. The box. It materialized from nothing—or from everything, from the fabric of reality itself condensing into form. Deep blue, almost black, pulsing with an inner light that seemed to breathe.
The surface was simultaneously smooth and textured, covered in patterns that shifted when I tried to focus on them—technological circuitry one moment, arcane symbols the next. It floated. Rotating slowly.
Fantasy and technology merged into something that belonged to neither world and both. The glow emanating from its edges was soft but intense, casting shadows that moved independently of the light source, creating patterns on the walls that looked almost like writing in languages that had never been spoken.
Tech lines traced across its surface—cyan and gold, pulsing in rhythms that matched my heartbeat. But beneath them, deeper, older, I could see other patterns. Runes. Glyphs.
Things that predated circuits by millennia but somehow coexisted with them perfectly. The whisper-hum intensified. The box was singing. Singing to me. Welcoming me. Preparing to offer tribute to its new master.
"Beautiful," Madison breathed. She wasn’t wrong.
The box hung there for a long moment—presenting itself, demanding appreciation, making sure we understood the significance of what was about to be revealed. A pause pregnant with the weight of worlds.
Then it opened. Light erupted.
Blinding. Absolute. The kind of radiance that didn’t just illuminate—it consumed. I threw my arm up instinctively, shielding my eyes, and heard Madison and Soo-Jin do the same. The glow was warm. Golden. It washed over us like liquid sunrise poured from the heart of a newborn star that had chosen, for once, to be merciful rather than merciless.
I couldn’t see inside the box. The light was too intense, too complete.
Whatever treasures waited within remained veiled behind that incandescent curtain, as though the universe itself had drawn a breath and held it, refusing to exhale until the moment was worthy.
But then— Something emerged.
Two objects, rising from the molten heart of the brilliance like sacred offerings ascending from the anvil of creation itself. They drifted toward me, trailing motes of golden fire that flared and faded into nothingness before they could kiss the floor—embers of divinity too pure to linger in mortal air.
Rings.
Two of them.
Black as the midnight between dying stars. Black as the abyss that had once devoured my enemies whole and left no echo. Black as the void that birthed oblivion and then forgot its own name.
They settled into my palm—one, then the other—and the overwhelming radiance began, slowly, reverently, to recede.
[First Gift: Ring of Travel and Storage
Description:1. When Master wears the first ring, the other is placed upon his most capable companion (Note: Not his woman). The companion can appear before the Master upon summoning, regardless of distance. No barrier—physical, magical, or technological—can prevent this summoning.]
[2. Master and companion can store any object within these rings. Storage space is INFINITE. No limit to size, weight, or quantity. Time does not pass for stored objects.]
I stared at the rings cradled in my hand.
They were heavier than they appeared. Not in crude matter, but in presence. They carried the gravity of eons, the solemn weight of oaths sworn when the first gods still walked naked among the cooling slag of creation.
They bore the heft of covenants forged before light learned to separate itself from darkness.
Because that was precisely what they were. Not mere trinkets. Not clever artifacts of artifice. Covenants.
The bands themselves were austere yet impossibly intricate: a deep, light-devouring obsidian—if obsidian could be said to dream—polished to a mirror that swallowed reflection rather than returned it.
And etched deep into their midnight surfaces, filled with molten gold that pulsed with its own inner dawn...
Runes.
My mind—now a living archive swollen with the system’s forbidden libraries—recognized them instantly. Not merely Old Norse. Far older. A primordial script that had been whispered by entities older than stars, when the cosmos was still soft clay in the hands of beings who had not yet invented names for themselves.
These rings were not technology masquerading as wonder. They were magic. True magic. The kind that did not bow to equations or silicon. The kind that remembered when the world was sung into being rather than hammered.
I lifted the first ring. Held it to the light that still lingered in the air like dying embers. Gazed into the golden runes that seemed to breathe beneath the black.
And slowly—almost prayerfully—I slid it onto my finger.
The instant the band kissed my skin, the runes awoke.
Golden fire erupted from every carved sigil, blazing with such fierce purity that mortal eyes should have been scorched to ash. The light traced impossible geometries through the air—binding spirals, ancient lattices, the very architecture of vows spoken before language was born.