Chapter 468: Expanding The Pocket

Truthfully, I was shocked that what I did even worked. It almost seemed too far-fetched, and even the System had looked at what I had done and called it an anomaly, with no applicable entry to file my abilities under.

Did this mean that what I had just done was unique?

You know, the System almost felt omniscient and omnipotent, and it had no issue giving Titles to me, and deciphering even the most elusive of my abilities. I have been a Bearer, a Warden, a Godslayer. This was the first time I had ever made something it could not define... I don’t know everything I was feeling right then, but one thing I did know was that I kind of liked it... very much.

Now, time to test if this pocket of mine worked.

∞

I was immediately tempted to push the crystal or the compass into the space, but I held back, looked around, and picked up a stone.

Hmm, how do I do this? I thought I should manifest the pen first, but there seemed to be no reason for it. I could feel the space inside my soul, and I held up the stone, and with the space firmly in my mind, I just thought about putting it down, and the stone vanished.

My eyes widened, as I could feel the stone sitting in the pocket, waiting and unchanged.

A part of me had feared that the stone would be shredded to dust the moment it crossed into that space, but that did not happen.

I grinned, and I reached through the space in my mind and pictured picking up the stone, and it appeared in my palm.

[Space Resonance: 59 → 61 (Acolyte → Adept)] — Epic → Legendary

I froze. For a while now, I had not been able to receive any notifications for the growth of my skills, but what I had just done had gone through the crack in the seal, and that must have been the reason I was able to observe my Space Resonance growing, and see how far it had climbed while the seal kept it hidden from me.

While I had focused on Inscription, I had disregarded that it was perhaps my attunement with Space that made all of this possible. I had no spells or skills for Space, and had gained this Resonance by the crazy places I had carried myself into.

While the other Resonances I had would have been graded at Epic Tier at the Adept level, Space was Legendary. And I think it deserved it.

I repeated the same gesture with the stone over and over again, trying to understand the dimensions of the space inside me. Finally I held my hand over the ground, and the sand and stones in front of me began to vanish.

This went on for several seconds until I had a pit over twelve feet deep and four feet wide in front of me, before I began to feel a sense of fullness inside the pocket, and a mild feeling that I was carrying something a bit heavy inside my chest.

For a moment I was tempted to keep shoving more dirt into my soul to see what would happen if I went beyond my limits, but I held back. This was not the time for those sorts of experiments.

I began releasing all the dirt I had inside my soul, filling the hole back in, but then I sensed something in it that was different. For a moment I did not understand what, and then I realised that the dirt that emerged from my soul was dead.

Every worm and every tiny organism living inside it had failed to survive the transition. Hmm, so that meant that for now I would not be able to put any living thing inside my space, or perhaps it depended on the level of life. I imagined that what would kill a worm would have a harder time killing an Adept, but those would be experiments to run later.

Now that I was done with the mundane, it was time for the supernatural. I did not create an Anomaly that the System could not recognise just to use it to ferry dirt.

First I took out the compass. This was the one tool most important to me, at least until I was able to understand every single inch of this world.

Holding the compass, I let it fall into the space, and for a moment there was almost a stutter, and the compass seemed to fuzz in the air as if it were not real, just a reflection in still water that had been disturbed, and then it vanished, and I fell to my knees and groaned in pain.

The amount of dirt I had just shoved into this space was about ten tons before I felt a sense of fullness, and the weight was almost negligible. However, the moment I placed the compass, which should barely weigh one pound, into my soul, it was almost as if I had swallowed a mountain.

I was bent over on the ground shivering, and I felt Ruggah begin to move towards me, and I held up my hand to signify that I was all right. I remained in that position for almost an hour before a new notification came from the System.

[Space Resonance: 61 → 64 (Adept)]

The load lightened a bit and I was able to breathe more freely, and it amazed me that my Space Resonance could grow in this manner. I looked into the pocket and it had grown bigger.

The compass was sitting in the centre of that space, radiating so much power that it was stretching the walls of it inside me. I stared at the power coming off the compass, and I began to slowly understand that while I carried this compass with me, the world itself had been bearing its weight.

I do not know how Dorrik had created it, but he had fused the weight of mountains into this compass. I mean, the compass had to be metaphysically heavy if it was going to lead me to places of old power in this world.

Well, I had just unknowingly gained a way to grow my Space Resonance, so I was not even thinking about bringing the compass out until I could carry it without feeling as if my soul was about to be torn in two.

I glanced at the crystal, and I knew instinctively that if I tried to place it inside my soul, I would be torn to pieces. The crystal was filled with the lifeforce of millions, and I was sure they were not harvested from people who peacefully went to their graves. Every scrap of lifeforce in it had been torn from the screaming souls of the dying.

If I could feel a pressure from the crystal with my bare hand, then placing it into my soul would be like trying to swallow an entire ocean of lava.

∞

I remained in that position all night long, and when the warband gathered in the morning, I told them to leave without me, and that I would catch up.

I had done this several times, so they did not see anything wrong with it. Even Ruggah thought it was all part of the weird experiments I had been doing. Only Ogg looked at me strangely, and he nodded at me before he left.

I watched them vanish into the distance and I sighed. I wanted to continue this journey with them, but my time was running out.

In the distance, the crows numbered in the thousands, and more were coming.

[Space Resonance: 64 → 69 (Adept)]