Chapter 387: Lost In Darkness (Bonus PS)

As the door slowly opened, I saw that the strange rune had vanished, and I paused; I wanted to study that rune, but I could always return, and I needed to know what was inside this place.

The door took two whole seconds to open, while I gathered golden lightning around my fingers; if there was anything that did not look friendly inside this place, I was blasting and asking questions later.

The door opened, and the lightning slowly dissipated from my fingers when I noticed that, like all the chambers in this place, it was empty. I had always wondered why this massive structure was so empty, but I guess maybe there was a time when it was filled up.

A frown touched my face when I noticed that I could not feel this room as I did with the others, and anytime I tried to touch the room, my perception just stretched outward.

I slowly perused the chamber with my sight; it was about forty metres or so, and... I nearly shivered, incredibly cold, and this was coming from me, a guy who has been to space.

It was empty of furniture, machinery, or anything that I thought should necessitate a rune like this appearing in the doorway of this chamber. Maybe this place contained something once, and now it was gone.

My eyes narrowed when I noticed the same grey runes that had been on the door now running across the floor of the chamber in rings, three of them, one inside another. I had not noticed them at first, since they did not reflect light, but rather seemed to be absorbing it, and I guessed that if I was an average Arcanist, then my eyesight would have failed even to see these runes.

I stayed at the edge of the chamber for a second more before I stepped into it, and except for the growing chill, I felt nothing at all, when I was half expecting to feel my body being ripped into ten different places.

Well, it may just happen anytime from now; my life was fun like that. After waiting another ten seconds with no apparent changes but feeling increasingly colder by the second, I placed one boot into the outer ring of the runes, and it was no longer my body that felt cold; my soul joined the party.

My perception, which had slowly stretched into the distance, now seemed to be strapped to a lightning bolt, and I had to make a visible effort not to let it escape my body.

After becoming used to this sensation, I took several steps forward and entered the second ring, and this feeling of being stretched grew, and I closed my eyes to properly experience this feeling, and it soon came to me with a great help from my Space Resonance, and oddly Death Resonance... these unknown runes were more like seams in space, similar to the same mechanisms used by the demons when they become free of this Caelith.

Tearing a single structure into ten pieces without any visual distortion around the structure obviously meant a deep manipulation of space, and these runes seemed to be the focus of this split.

Space Resonance: 10 → 12 (Initiate) — Epic

My change in the way I used my Status Screen made me smile because my integration of space deepened at the moment, and I no longer had to strain as hard to stand in this second ring.

With renewed confidence, I pushed for the third ring, and I gasped as the sensation that had sewn me to this Caelith went wide, and then it went thin, and suddenly I felt myself standing in ten other places at the same time.

I felt a faint sense of disorientation and struggled to process the feeling of standing in multiple exact places at the same time while being physically present in only one space.

Space Resonance: 12 → 15 (Initiate) — Epic

This place was stretching my spatial adaptability, giving me the capacity to think properly, and with this freedom, my first Lightning Law unexpectedly clicked into place, as I began to see the weird connection I had with this strange space.

I was in this Caelith, and yet, I was touching nine other Caeliths across vast distances, meaning that, in a manner, I was not traveling, because I had already arrived.

A chill crossed my neck. Why did it seem as if every step I took was almost predetermined? There was no reason my first law should fit so well with what split these Caeliths in pieces, and I wondered if there were such great coincidences.

I shook my head; there would be moments for thinking; this was not the moment. Holding this law firmly in my body and soul, I made the obvious choice and took a step.

And there was no sort of transit; I put my foot down, and it landed on a different floor... the moment I moved, I had already arrived.

∞

I arrived in total darkness and I collapsed to my knees as my senses slammed back into my body, and suddenly I felt so small.

Shivering from the cold, I stretched out my senses and felt... nothing. It was as if I had just transported myself into the void of space, and worse yet, I could no longer feel the Caelith, and I was left feeling... hollow.

Understanding dawned on me as I checked my status screen and found the section for Warden to be grayed out. I was no longer in Caelith Fragment (243^235), but in a different Caelith Fragment, and in this one, I did not have authority, meaning that for all intents and purposes, I had just sent myself into an area over which I had no control, which even the consciousness of the Caelith could not access.

I believed that if I had moved into any other areas of the Caelith, I would have been able to access the consciousness of the Celestial Prison, but in this place, that strange rune was most likely there on the door, and I no longer had any way to access it.

With a burst of will, I circulated my Anima in my channels and called for lightning. I was tired of this darkness, and when lightning came, I gasped in shock because the forty-meter chamber that I entered in the previous Caelith was gone, and as far as my light could reach, there was just darkness that extended forever.

I looked down at the floor, and I could not see any runes. Then I slowly took to the skies, and I shot up, hoping to find a ceiling, but I had traveled for ten minutes at full speed before I stopped and descended. When I reached the ground, I moved sideways, staying a foot above the ground.

An hour passed, and I was still moving; two hours, three, six, twelve... twenty-four hours, and I could not find any boundaries. I kept shaking my head, denying the thought that was creeping into my mind with every second I was spending in this place.

All of these hours of flying through absolute darkness, my lightning the only light in an endless void. I had stopped counting the miles somewhere around the twelfth hour, when the sheer scale of the emptiness had begun to press against my mind like a physical weight.

There was no ceiling, and no walls. There was just darkness, stretching in every direction, infinite and patient.

I had tried everything: Stormstep, Lightning Incarnate, even my new technique using the loom as a path laid out in front of me like a road. Nothing worked. The darkness absorbed my light, swallowed my threads, and gave nothing back.