Chapter 395: Falling Through Space

The orb loomed before me, a dozen feet across, bulging from the ground like a tumor of black stone. It was joined to the floor by a neck of itself about the width of a staff, almost as if it was a gigantic drop of water that was falling upwards.

The thought made me cock my head to the side. Holding the stance as best I could, I lifted myself a few inches off the floor and began to rotate, slowly, keeping the orb in my sight.

In three seconds I had turned over, my head pointed at the floor and my legs at the dark above it. From here the orb resembled a drop of water about to fall back into the ocean. ’Yes,’ I muttered. ’This is how it is supposed to be.’

At that instant the space rumbled, and the world around me began to transform. The darkness suddenly took shape around me, and I thought I saw vast crystalline pillars rise and connect to spaces that I could not even properly define, before gravity snatched me into the air.

Before now, I saw the darkness above as, well... up, but when I changed my perspective, this space seemed to have changed alongside it, and I was dragged down into the air.

I panicked and looked up towards the ground as I was falling up, and for some reason, the darkness chose to reveal itself to me at this point. I froze when my perspective spread out, and I could see the ground stretching away for thousands of miles.

However, now the ground was bubbling as if it was an ocean of darkness, and not the unbreakable black stone, and as my perspective continued to expand, the bubbling sea below me suddenly took the shape of a palm with six fingers.

I ignored the fact that I was falling into the air and furiously blinked, but yes, this was a palm, and from my estimation of its size, it could cover half of my entire world.

"Fwosshh... whoosh..."

A wave of darkness washed over me, and a great pulling force threw me left, then right, up and down. When the wave passed I was still falling, with no idea whether I was going up or down, and the six-fingered hand was gone.

What had changed for me was that the darkness no longer hid my sight, and I could see far, and what I saw left me stunned.

The vast pillars I had glimpsed were now solidified in my sight, and I saw them clearly now: massive, translucent structures that stretched from the darkness above to the darkness below, and to directions that did not make sense in my head, and what drew my attention despite was that their surfaces were covered in the same grey runes I had seen on the door of the chamber.

I fell past one of the pillars, and a familiar sensation swept past my soul, reminding me of the moment I had crossed into this space from the Caelith, as part of my senses was dragged into the pillars and I saw... I did not know what I saw; it appeared to be a jungle, but the leaves were eyes.

A scream burst out of me and I tore my perception back. In the instant I had touched it with my mind, my eyes had begun to bleed, and my soul felt worn thin.

And what scared me was that it was not as if these pillars were inherently dangerous; I think it was more about the distances that they connected together that made them dangerous.

I had stepped across a tiny seam from one Caelith to another, but I feared that wherever these pillars led to, they were much farther than I could mentally conceptualize, and crossing such distances would tear me apart in a way that I was not sure that even the loop would be able to bring back.

These pillars were doorways or better yet seams in space, like the edges of edges of something that had been torn and was trying to heal, and the force that was pulling me was coming from them, and as I fell, the number of pillars increased, from a few hundred to thousands, and they kept increasing in number, all of them a reflection of unknown spaces.

I tried to stop myself from being pulled by this unknown force. I called on my lightning, on my domain, on every scrap of power I had, and I felt them answer, but the force was stronger. I felt like a fly caught inside a tornado, and all my magic and power was simply me buzzing my tiny wings.

As the pillars increased, it was inevitable that one of them would touch me, and even though I tried to maneuver my body to the best of my ability and keep my perception firmly locked inside my body, it was not enough.

The pillar rushed past me, and I felt its surface scrape against my skin, and the feeling was... wrong, and where it touched me, my flesh began to unravel, as if I was made from wet clay, and had just been let out in the rain.

I don’t know how to describe this pain, and I could only scream, but my cry was swallowed by the darkness.

Space Resonance: 18 → 29 → 31 (Initiate → Acolyte) Epic → Legendary

The notification flickered across my vision, and I clung to it like a lifeline. My Space Resonance was growing, and it seemed to be the only thing I could count on in this place to help me survive.

Reaching Acolyte level in Space Resonance, I seemed to have gained a brand new sense of space, and as if I had a new limb, I slowly reached out with it, and I felt space congeal around my falling body, and while it could not stop the force that was pulling me down, I was able to gain a bit of control over my direction.

And this was the only reason I survived the next few seconds as hundreds of pillars rushed past me, and my Adamantium Flesh struggled to bring me back in one shape. There was something about the injuries that I had suffered that made healing incredibly hard, but my body was grinding through this problem; I only needed to survive long enough to give it the chance.

Adamantium Titan: 130 → 133 (Sovereign)

However, as I fell, the pillars were clustering closer together, and even without touching any of them, the force they were exerting on me grew ridiculous, and I did not have any defense against it, I could only scream as I felt my body begin to come apart.

I felt a tearing sensation, and my left hand simply disappeared, and something was broken in me as that happened, almost as if my body knew, with the instinct from the Law of Flesh that this wound was an absence that would take a long time to heal as it was the erasure of a volume of space, and my arm had been occupying that volume.

The pain was immense, but it was also distant. My body was doing its best to survive, and I was doing my best to learn.

Space Resonance: 31 → 35 → 48 (Acolyte)