Chapter 396: The Pillar of Home

’Pain is nothing, I cannot die here... I cannot die! I cannot die!!!’

This thought continued ringing inside my head as I forced my mind and soul to learn about space faster than I had learned about magic in my entire life, and every point of it was paid for with a piece of my body, as nearly half my body no longer had any skin.

Not that I was complaining, as every brush with death here was filling me with instinctive knowledge of space that I had to transform into understanding or I would die, and I could not die here.

It had been a long time since I feared death, but now that fear had returned. Sure, I did not really fear the act of dying, just how I died. There was too much for me to do, and I didn’t want to be torn away from those I love when I knew that I was the only one who could save them.

The first breakthrough I had was the realization that the pillars came in clusters of hundreds, and the clusters had a rhythm to them, and once I understood there was a rhythm, I stopped trying to fight the pull and started trying to read it.

I could see the patterns of space, and was now aware that the pulling force came from the places where several of them ran close together, and it was strongest in the gaps between, as though the tearing was worse where two wounds nearly touched.

So the safe route was not away from the pillars. It was along them. Close enough to scrape, far enough not to be pulled into the seam itself.

The truth was that I worked it out because I was hit, like a lot, and lost a lot of flesh, not because I was clever.

∞

My new sense was the only thing keeping me alive, and it was not easy to weave between the jaws of death, and I would have to thank the nature of the Moon Fox that enabled me to have a great sense of balance even as I used the elementary control of space to push myself through the pillars.

When I used my Space Resonance, space thickened around me, the way water thickens when you slap it, and I could push off that thickness. Not much, enough to move a body length, to turn my shoulder out of the way of something that would have taken the shoulder, or just cleanly place me in between two pillars while I lost the skin all along my back.

By all the light in heaven, how could I even remain alive if not for me being an Adamantium Titan?

Every time I used it, I lost a little more of myself, since the pillars were now so close together. If I had been any larger than an ant against them, I would not have survived at all."

Suppressing any hint of fear inside my heart, I chased everything away and focused on survival.

A pillar came up under me, and I turned, and it took the outside of my right thigh, and my leg did not bleed. That is the thing about these injuries I am getting from space: as normal wounds bleed, but these do not, there was simply less of my leg than there had been, and the edge of what remained was smooth and grey, as though it had never intended to continue.

Adamantium Titan: 133 → 135 (Sovereign)

My body fought it. By the Heavens, my body fought it. It rebuilt the leg from the inside, slowly, and I could feel my marrow pushing new flesh into an absence and the absence arguing about whether flesh was allowed there at all.

Space Resonance: 48 → 51 (Acolyte)

Somehow, I thought even the act of healing these wounds was furthering my understanding of space.

I fought to survive for twelve days.

Observation: 118 → 119 (Arcanist)

Concentration: 110 → 119 (Arcanist)

Anima Sensitivity: 112 → 119 (Arcanist)

Marksman: 89 → 95 (Adept → Arcanist) — Uncommon → Rare

∞

Maybe it was the time that I spent in the darkness that gave me the focus to survive, or how my body was evolving as I fought to live, but there was a stretch in those twelve days where I stopped being a person.

I did not know how long it lasted; what I remember was patterns. Turn, scrape, lose something, rebuild, turn again. Somewhere in it my right ear went, and my hearing came back wrong for a while, in a way where the sound of my own screaming arrived before I opened my mouth, and I made a note of that in my head because I was still, apparently, taking notes.

Meditation: 96 → 99 (Arcanist)

Space Resonance: 51 → 55 (Acolyte)

Adamantium Titan: 135 → 139 (Sovereign)

Somewhere in it I lost the four fingers of my remaining hand and got them back and lost two of them again.

Somewhere in it I understood that I was not going to die of this, and that this was worse news than dying, even though I did not want to die... but the pain was making me wish I could die, while I fought not to give in.

My body was keeping up. Just. If it kept keeping up, then this would go on, and I had no reason to think it would ever stop, because I had found no boundary to this place in six months when there was nothing but me and darkness, and I don’t know if this would be any different... was I going to suffer like this forever?

I thought about the loop again; I was fearing that I may reach my limit in the future and chose to give up.

If I died here, would it take me back? The Soul Flayer had suggested the mechanics of the loop were larger than the Sovereign of the Stars understood, and I had never been able to test it, and this was a magnificently poor place to find out. But there is a difference between dying and being unmade, and everything in here was unmaking. I did not think a thing that erased a volume of space would leave a soul behind for anyone to send back.

I cannot die, not here, and I decided to stamp that into the core of my soul. That decision did not help me in any practical way whatsoever. It just made me stop screaming, which was something... at least.

∞

I fought for another two days before I figured out that the pillars were not identical. I mean, I knew they might lead to different places, but there was a destination that no longer screamed at my soul, while others seemed closer... as my new instincts told me I might be able to cross without tearing all I was to pieces.

I was getting ready to make that decision to choose any pillar and escape from this place when I passed a pillar, and my soul shook. I did not doubt this instinct, and I threw out my senses, caught the space around my body, and swung myself around. I lost most of my left forearm doing it, and I did not care at all.

It was above me, or below me; directions were meaningless in this place; all I knew was that it was the one pillar among probably millions where I thought my soul perceived the feeling of home.