Chapter 394: A New Face

I did not lower my arm for a while, because I was too busy grinning at nothing like a lunatic.

It was not just the fact that two of my resonances had just crossed into the Arcanist Tier, giving me one Sovereign Tier Resonance, which was my Lightning Resonance, and three Arcanist Tier Resonances, which were Force, Darkness, and Earth Resonance.

It was that, my crazy conjectures, and the sheer stubbornness in my heart that kept me in a single position while surrounded by nothing but darkness that had paid off.

Maybe I should have been more scared that I was surrounded by eternal darkness, but my body was its own light source, so it was not as if I was buried inside darkness entirely, and it may have appeared like I was standing still when I was actually reaching out into the darkness for five months.

Anyways, I was now sure about one property of this place, and that is that the darkness and the earth are one mystery wearing two faces. Ridiculous concept, but the truth was staring me in the face.

I slowly lowered my hand and sent my senses washing through my body, and as I expected, there had been no physical strain on my body; in fact, pushing two Resonances into the Arcanist Tier had filled my body with new strength. There should be no way a single body was supposed to be gathering all this power, but I was doing it while on the search for knowledge.

Shaking my head away from these distracting thoughts and choosing to focus on what matters, I glanced at the ground beside me and saw that my journal had thinned away to nothing.

Only one page remained, and it was already at the edge of dissipation. I had poured a lot of power into the creation of this journal, but five months was enough for the darkness in this place to claw out nearly every shred of Anima inside the journal.

I sighed as I gestured towards the last page, touching the remnants of the lightning essence and Anima that filled it before pouring power into it, and in a second, another flawless journal landed on my palm, and it still contained all the writings I had made inside it.

I wanted to create something permanent with magic that would outlast me, and it was not as if I did not know a way to almost do that... Inscriptions. Seed, or Arnold as Sovereign Halloway had called him, had been able to carve out a layer of sanctuary in the eye of the storm using Inscriptions.

Inscriptions were extremely Anima efficient, and even minor Inscriptions could last decades while feeding on the ambient essence around them; I highly suspected that the Inscriptions written by a Sovereign would last for many millennia.

If I wanted to create a journal that would last far more than me, then I needed Inscriptions to do that; however, I still wanted to try if I could create something more permanent without resorting to Inscriptions.

It was a pleasant challenge to be sure, and I doubted that I would be able to create a permanent journal that would remain after I passed without using Inscriptions.

I glanced at the ground and cocked my head to the side... the earth and the stone of the Caelith held this strange property of permanence. One of my future goals was to learn this magic and maybe apply it to my flesh, but what if my journal also had this property?

This thought remained in my mind for a while, and I knew that it would not leave me.

∞

By my count, I had been here a little over six months, which left me about three before the Jade Oracle’s hold ends and the Pale Matron tears her way out and this space becomes unstable enough to leave.

Since this loop began, this was the longest time I had spent being alive, and that time was being spent in darkness. I don’t regret this moment spent in this solitude, since I could feel something inside me that I could not name, nor could I shape... but it was there, and the more time I spent in this darkness, searching for a way to understand where I was or how to leave, that unknown feeling was becoming brighter.

At this time I wondered about the first mage that ever walked this world, and I thought, how could they have seen magic or manipulated it for the first time?

Could they be like me, and find themself in a world where they did not understand anything, and they must not have given up, or the magus civilization would not be what it was today.

I was in the same situation; I knew nothing, and my magic was practically useless here. What did it matter that I could fly many times faster than the speed of sound when this space was infinite?

In three months, I would be gone from here, but the chance to understand the unknown... I think I truly needed this.

∞

I took the stance again. Feet spread as though the floor might roll, right hand at my side, left hand up with the palm open, and I settled outward into the nothing rather than down into the stone.

The darkness came to me in the space of one breath, and what was weird was that it felt as if I was touching the earth, but this was obviously darkness.

That alone was worth the five months, as I now had the capability of near-instantaneous connection with the earth and this darkness. It was almost as though this knowledge had been standing at the door waiting for me to learn the knock... but you know, I had to really be looking for it, even if I did not know what any of it meant.

I began to deliberate on what I was touching. Stone had weight and could be moved in patterns that could be understood, but darkness had no weight, and even though I could touch it, there was nothing for me to grab, and for one moment I thought that I had driven myself to a dead end.

It took a while for me to grasp the concept that I was touching darkness, but I could not control it the way that I did with stone. It was there; I just had to trust my instinct that I was moving it.

I drew in a deep breath, and I called for the dark, attempting to do something simple, like create a small orb of darkness, and a loud rumble nearly pulled away my concentration as a dozen feet in front of me, the ground bulged and took the shape of an orb that was ten times bigger than me.

My mouth opened in shock as my status screen vibrated, and a rush of power filled my body.

Earth Resonance: 90 → 95 (Arcanist) — Epic

Darkness Resonance: 92 → 93 (Arcanist) — Epic

Space Resonance: 17 → 18 (Initiate) — Epic

I stared at the three notifications in shock. I thought I was trying to understand the unique connection of darkness and earth in this place, but I had somehow stumbled on a new connection with space?