Chapter 390: The Big Guns

That is a stupid thing to write down in my journal, and it frightened me more than anything else since I came to this place. My body has not needed food or water since I became an Arcanist, and even before then I was sure I could last for months without eating as an Adept when the extreme nature of my physique was placed into the equation.

After a minute, my thirst slowly vanished as my body readjusted, but I could not say I enjoyed the experience of feeling as if I had just eaten a whole jar of salt.

I checked myself properly, which I had not done since I arrived. My Anima was fine. Full, in fact, and refilling at a rapid pace, and this space did not seem to affect this side of my ability. My Marrow was also full, since I was not spending it by expanding my size.

There was nothing wrong with my body, but there was something about this space that drank the moisture in my body when I elementalised my body into lightning.

Lightning Resonance: 125 →126 (Sovereign) Legendary

Space Resonance: 15 → 16 (Initiate) — Epic

Now, this was interesting... I could understand the reason for my Lightning Resonance growing, despite any growth in the Sovereign Tier was supposed to be a slow process, but what made my Space Resonance grow as well?

Was it the nature of this place and its broken geometry that made no sense that was boosting my Space Resonance?

The rules of space here should have been suspended or altered or simply absent. And my soul, in its constant, stubborn refusal to accept the world as it was given, was learning to adapt.

Perhaps I may be able to escape from this darkness earlier than expected, if my Space Resonance kept growing in this manner.

I spent the rest of the day trying to understand the subtle pressure of the space around me, but I failed to detect anything. Ah, it has only been five days; what more was I expecting?

∞

On the sixth day, I decided that it was time for me to bring out the big guns, and I had been saving it for last to avoid a situation where I could make mistakes due to my lack of experience.

I did not have teachers who could conveniently tell me every answer I needed at the snap of their fingers, and so in order not to draw any wrong conclusions, taking care of the basics was paramount.

So I saved the best for last after using all the spells that I believed could affect this space. I still had two other spells and other Celestial skills that I had not touched yet, but I would be using them in another round of experiments if what I was about to do next was a failure... this would give me another way to compare and contrast certain aspects of this space.

What I needed to use next was one of the greatest tools of an Arcanist, the domain. At this tier of power, we began to touch the mysteries of space, and our domain was the eye we use in peering into this mystical power.

To understand my domain, I comprehended a Lightning Law, thereby enhancing my understanding of this ability.

My domain, the Stillness of the Storm holds space by pressure. It is the only tool I own that acts on space itself rather than on things inside it, and if this dark behaves strangely, then pressing on it should tell me exactly how.

A deep pressure exploded from the center of my chest, and my domain expanded, and I smiled when I discovered that it was no longer a hundred and seventy-five meters, but had doubled in radius, reaching three hundred and fifty-five meters, and this should be the result of fully comprehending one of the nine lightning laws I have.

The most powerful Arcanist I had met had a domain extending for about seventy meters, of course I knew I had not met other so-called Proto Sovereigns, but I did not think a domain of my size was normal.

I was distracted by the size of my domain for only a moment before I focused on the readings it was showing me, although I was a little bit surprised how smoothly I could deploy my domain inside this place when I was expecting some kind of resistance.

However, after hours of careful investigation, I had to accept the rather absurd result that my domain was presenting to me, which was that this place was... normal.

There was apparently no difference between the space here and what was outside, and even when I performed the same experiments that I used to understand my first law, every metric came out the same, which meant the space in here is ordinary space, but that was nonsense, seeing how my Space Resonance was growing, which was suggesting to me that even in the midst of this normality, I was in a storm. I sat inside the silence of my domain and thought about how strange that was.

Pushing these thoughts aside, I rose an inch into the air with my domain around me and began to use it as a measuring stick, and I flew end to end across my box, over and over, and confirmed that this mysterious floor was perfectly flat, and there was not one millimeter of rise or dip.

Nothing natural was that flat. Nothing built was that flat either, at least not by hands.

I sat with that disquieting thought for the rest of the day, before I fell into meditation.

∞

My first big gun was a failure, and I only had one more, and that was from the abilities that came from the Law that I had comprehended. Path Perception from my law showed me every route my lightning could take, which was a sort of future vision, and I used this to see if there was any flicker, but I came back with nothing.

This was already the seventh day in this place as far as I could tell, I had just spent a week learning almost nothing of this place, but I did not feel much despair, because this lack of meaning was one of the greatest clues that I had discovered.

I spent the entirety of the seventh day thinking about all I had, and the conclusion only pointed to one constant... the floor.

In this maddening place, the ground under my feet could be the key to this darkness, and it was in my meditation that a memory flashed into my mind, and that was the weird posture that the Hollow Avatar had made in that basin hundreds of loops ago when it took my body.

Cor Telluris evolved into Stone Origin Shell, and this gave me a Celestial Status, Archangel, I did not know what this status meant, but it helped me become a Warden, and with this shell, I could draw power from the earth and perhaps it had other uses.

Smack!

I slapped my forehead in exasperation, could it be possible that the reason I was able to manipulate the Caelith came from my shell?