Chapter 386: Expanding Connections

I was a bit annoyed that despite bonding with the Caelith, most of my access was still denied, and did they have to state those final words at the end there? Seemed a bit excessive if you ask me.

Provisional Wardens may observe. Provisional Wardens may not act.

Then what can I freaking do as a Provisional Warden, stare at the stone? After experiencing the rather uncomfortable sensation of having glowing celestial threads sewn to every part of my body, I had expected, I don’t know... more, not just been told I was allowed to look.

"You are joking," I said to the room, but I was realizing that if the Caelith could speak, it was not doing it. I was aware that there was a strange consciousness here, but it almost felt asleep.

I shook my head and got to my feet, and a wall four hundred meters above me and off to the north moved with me.

"What the..." I froze, and I slowly raised my hand, and behind me, the ground rose up a few hundred feet.

Wait a minute... I thought I could see but not touch?

∞

I stared at my status screen and I frowned as I thought about it for a moment, before I decided that whatever force was in the system and the Caelith that wrote the line about my access must be thinking about authority or command, like ordering the structure to do a thing, like I was a captain, but it would seem that whatever I was... I did not need to order, just move my shoulder.

The Caelith is my body now. That is not a metaphor I chose because it sounded good, it is the literal fact of every cell of me matched to a room of it, and nobody has to grant you permission to move your own arm.

Was this normal, I don’t know, and I was too fascinated to care if it was a good or bad thing.

So I tried something small and stupid. I put out my hand, palm up, and closed it, and nine hundred meters above me and half a kilometer east, in a gallery I have never walked and could see perfectly well anyway, a passage the width of a road closed like a fist, and I felt it in the meat of my palm.

I opened my hand, and the passage opened. I sucked in a deep breath, and half of the pyramid expanded an inch as if it was being inflated, and at this time I began to laugh, and the entirety of the structure echoed my voice.

This... this is madness.

∞

I began to play with it. Don’t judge me; it was a fascinating form of magic that I had not come across before, and I wanted to find the edges of what it could do; that has always been the best way to find the limits.

Small movements worked really well. Passages, walls, the angle of a gallery, the thickness of a floor. I closed a corridor a kilometer up and opened it again and closed it, and the cost was so slight I had to concentrate to notice it at all. There was an Anima cost after all, but it was not like spell casting, it was more of.. hmm, posture, yes, posture, just like the move that the Hollow Avatar thought me in the basin all that loops ago.

Large and exaggerated movements did not work. I tried to turn one of the great outer faces, the way you would turn your head, and nothing happened; there was no refusal, I was just unable to move it, and I detected that issue of command that I was able to skip being the reason why I could not just make this pyramid to become say a square, or maybe there was a deeper Celestial principle that I was not aware of.

So, in total, I had discovered that I could move the rooms, but I could not move the house. That is not the trade I would have chosen, and it is a great deal more than I had an hour ago. And there is a very obvious use for it that occurred to me immediately, since I knew that these stones were indestructible, and no matter how much damage they suffered, they would always return to the way they were.

∞

I still kept pushing, seeing how much I could go, and I was about satisfied with what I had and was about to check the Containment Status and the Seal Integrity that I could only read about to see the state of the prisoner, when I pushed into that strange room with the runes.

My mind-body connection touched that room, and I felt my bond stretch into the distance and I recoiled from that sensation and nearly collapsed on my back.

I shuddered, and reached for that room again, and I once again, my perception stretched past the pyramid to a cold and distant place, but I did not pull back, because it felt like it had exactly the same shape as the thing I was standing in.

It took a moment for me to piece it together, and when I did, I lost my breath. I actually lost it, because if what I was feeling was right, then it meant that I was feeling the other Caelith Mourne scattered across the world.

The Jade Oracle had told me that there were originally three Caeliths that had been shattered into thirty-one pieces, and she had not understood how it happened or why it happened, but I did I just did.

Whatever magic that allowed the Sovereign of the Stars bend the forces of chaos to serve his will must have been the one who had ensured that the Caeliths were shattered into pieces.

Those runes... what were they, and that unknown figure, that void that shattered the Caeliths, were they the one who left all of this behind, and the Sovereign of the Stars, found it?

I closed my eyes and thought about this process for a moment... and I knew the answers could not be found here, I must dig deeper, but it was satisfying to peel another layer of this mystery.

Shifting my mind away from this mystery, I peered deep into this strange connection, and I was able to track nine other Caelith Mourne, and two of them are on this continent, the other seven was spread far in the distance, beyond the sea.

Hmm, interesting... I looked at the Jade Oracle one more time, and turned around, and the ground began to move, carrying me towards the room with the rune by the door, maybe I would be able to find something interesting there.

Stones rippled open in front of me, and in less than a minute, I was in front of the room. I peered at it and stretched my hand towards the door, and it began to vibrate. There was a sort of barrier over this door that I could barely touch, and it was resisting my touch, but I just focused the weight of the entire Caelith on this door, and with a slow rumble, it shifted open.