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Erick saw the monsters, and the monsters saw him.

Half disoriented from finally returning to the world, Erick wondered if this was the end, and then he tried not to make any mistakes. The first monster to come after him was a giant thing of stone and shale, nearly four meters tall, almost all of it buried under a meter of stone and broken rocks. Claws and legs stretched out revealing the beast as something similar to a decorator crab, but large and hungry and already directly above Erick, ready to drag him into a maw made of venomous fangs.

As one moment almost became two, Erick reorganized some of his thoughts, and realized the monster was more like a tunneling spider, and less like a decorator crab. He also flooded more power into his thankfully-running [Greater Lightwalk] and rolled away, avoiding the first monster’s chompers and almost running right into the grabbing tentacles of another.

With a directed slap to divert the tentacle away, Erick struck the tentacled beast, but he was moved instead of the monster. The monster’s tentacles kept coming. A spike of worry invaded Erick’s mind, but it was only one more bit of panic and he was already at full saturation. So he moved as he should have in the first place.

There was no light here to step upon, though, and he certainly wasn’t getting anywhere near that flowing river of gentle glows ever again, so he made his own light by flooding power into his [Greater Lightwalk]. The only reason he didn’t turn fully to light and actually float away was because he was worried about [Lightshape]; the only true counter to an Elemental Body.

The cavern glowed brilliantly as Erick made his escape from tentacle and maw. He saw even more monsters in the revealed shadows, but luckily, the monsters also saw each other.

Erick couldn’t fight for shit in melee, but his second Script Second had arrived, so he turned on [Lodestar], and solidified his defenses as best he could. Now he turned fully to his sunform, since [Lightshape] was not a concern like this. This stopped the bleeding, and also made much of his pain go away. He was just in time to avoid three wrapping tentacles that tried to curl around his legs. Erick carved up that monster with manually cast blades of Light.

And then some massive shale-covered crab whipped a ten-meter arm out of its hiding hole, aiming for Erick from behind, only for Erick to slip around the grabbing claws. The attack struck the bleeding tendrils that Erick had cut, grabbing at the anemone-like thing buried in the ground and ripping it out. The arm folded back, drawing the morsel into a deathtrap mouth full of chitinous, shearing plates.

Screaming, roaring. Clashing and cracking. Monsters ate each other as fast as they could.

Erick had a surreal moment of wondering how in the heck these things lived so close to each other always being at war. There had obviously been an equilibrium before now, but then Erick showed up, and broke that equilibrium. How had such a ‘peace’ been able to happen at all? Did some unnatural force collect these monsters together?

But then again, this was the Worldly Path, so maybe some unnatural force was exactly responsible for this gathering of beasts.

After thinking that thought, everything made a bit more sense, except that, as his wherewithal came to him, Erick realized he had more important things to consider than ‘how did this happen’. He was in the middle of a massive melee of monsters, and he was very glad that his initial instinct not to fully lightform up had held, for the monsters were now throwing around invisible magics. A shadow wolf of bright red darkness grabbed a worm with [Stoneshape] and ripped it apart. Crabs threw clouds of shadow at beasts that attempted to be shadow, killing them instantly. Other magics here and there were less obvious. Anemones radiated fields of thorns that stuck into whatever was stupid enough to approach, making wounds and drawing blood. Lions of stone hunted in a pack, walking upon the wall like it was a floor, to rip through false-walls to gorge upon a fleshy toad/bat/blob hiding inside. Something made of rocks struck something made of water, and the water won, turning the rocks to mud and then spitting that mud out the side.

And then a shift came into the tunnel. Something moved deeper inside the walls. Erick watched as the stone walls buckled up here and there like a wyrm moving under desert sands, knocking loose boulders and bodies into the air. The boulders hovered out, stopping before they got too far, but the bodies and the monsters eating those bodies continued onward, into the mana stream. The corpses didn’t care about their new trajectory, but the living still did.

Some of the suddenly-frantic monsters were able to stop themselves from touching the stream, but the bodies continued onward to strike the thick, glowing air, and turn into more thick air themselves. Erick was glad he instinctively knew not to seek shelter in the mana stream.

—Something tried to eat him; suddenly everything was darkness and fangs pressing inward against his light. Erick turned the light to razorblades and shredded the monster, whatever it was. The fresh corpse painted the cavern floor—

The frantic, floating monsters knocked into the air by the worm managed to make it back to the tunnel walls, but the worm-thing was right under that part of the cavern wall, waving thin tendrils through the stone, into the air. The smaller monsters struck the invisible tentacles and the cavern walls opened, revealing rows upon rows of meter-long teeth. The vulnerable monsters ripped apart under the tentacles long before they entered that dark maw.

Except for the eating part, the sight strangely reminded Erick of when Jane popped the heads and legs off of her dolls. At least the worm-thing cleaned up after itself.

—The nearby 40 meter crab tried to swipe at Erick again, but this time the attack came with an oily sheen to it; magic, of some sort. Erick let the attack strike, for two reasons. First, Erick was finally fully present in the moment, and second, he needed to know how strong these monsters were against his standard defense.

The clawing crab arm struck Erick’s sunform, center mass, hitting his stabilized sphere of light like a hammer hitting an anvil. Light splashed away; sparks from a forge. Iridescent magic splashed away, too, like so much denied promise. The sound that entered the cavern from that attack was that of a spreading gong, but it was but one massive noise among many.

And now, another second had passed, and Erick was able to cast his next spell.

Ophiel rejoined Erick, and as the little guy suddenly screamed for joy, Erick had him cast [Greater Lightwalk], to prepare himself against the rest of the fight. As another [Strike] from the massive crab bounced away again, sending a splash of brilliance into the cavern that lit up everything in deep shadows, Erick allowed himself to briefly return to physicality to hug his [Familiar]. Renewed pain assaulted him, but the warmth from Ophiel was more than enough to make that go away. The little guy puttered against Erick’s bloody chest with happy chirps and welcoming trills.

Erick’s third through twelfth Script Seconds were spent summoning the rest of Ophiel, while Ophiel’s Script Seconds were spent getting him up to power. Erick returned to sunform and endured 32 attacks of various nature in that time. [Strike]s from crabs. A series of [Stone Javelin]s from the lion pack. A [Field of Blood Drinking Thorns] spread out from a nearby anemone that lived upon the giant crab’s right claw; apparently the thing didn’t eat every single anemone it came across, and this one worked together with the crab for some reason. The massive worm continued to undulate through the cavern, moving right along, interrupting fights, deciding the winners and losers of the various conflicts in a way that many combatants did not see coming.

The worm was directly on its way toward Erick, though; everything else was a target of opportunity.

Many of the larger beasts eventually noticed the worm’s obvious movements. Even the ineffective giant stone crab had stopped attacking Erick, for it saw the massive worm poking up closer and closer. Suddenly, the giant crab lifted up from the side of the cavern, displacing an area the size of the statue of liberty, and buried itself deeper, moving down, down through the stone like it was water, vanishing from the cavern and leaving trash to stick out of the wall it had vacated. The crab escaped with bare seconds to spare before the worm got there.

Erick sent out Ophiels left and right, each under their own sunform, toward the worm. The largest threat in the cavern looked to be much larger than it originally appeared, for as moments passed, more and more of the cavern walls bulked out with cutting tendrils and maws. It had to be ten kilometers long, or more, for almost half the cavern was filled with the exposed worm.

It had only taken 15 seconds from waking in this place to this happening. Life happened fast down here in the Underworld.

Erick sent an experimental sunform Ophiel out at one of the maws of the worm—

The tendrils went right through the sunform cutting with what had to be a Domain-empowered slice, carving Ophiel into eight misshapen pieces, breaking the [Familiar] like a sword would break a particularly soft feather.

Ah.

So it was like that.

Erick thought he felt a Domain from the worm; now he was sure.

Erick rapidly floated away from the encroaching monster, pushing his mana sense wide open. He raced down the cavern, trying to lightstep but feeling some awful sort of tug in the middle of the step, so he stopped that right away and simply moved through the light like a floating ghost—

He dodged left, and moved faster. The worm’s tentacled maw opened up where he would have been. Erick wasn’t trying to escape though, for who knew what the fuck laid in wait down the way, or in the next cavern. He wasn’t trying to escape. He just needed time to understand.

Much more carefully this time, a sunform Ophiel stepped out of Erick’s light, into a nearby maw that held less tendrils than the others. Dodging like a pro, Ophiel turned off [Greater Lightwalk] and turned on [Fulmination Aura] at the same moment. Lightning ringed Ophiel like a great mandala, catching upon every nearby tentacle and illuminating the cavern with a splash of white lightning—

The attack did nothing as lightning danced away from Ophiel.

Less than a fraction of a second after the lightning show started, it ended, as Domain-tendrils sunk into the Ophiel and broke him, scattering white light across the air. There was a reflection going on, or maybe Erick fucked up using his Domain. Maybe both. Good thing his next Ophiel had [Animadversion] active.

While Erick spent his next Script Second summoning another Ophiel, to bring him back up to ten, he had the [Animadversion]-protected Ophiel flicker into a different maw, and try again. This time lightning flashed and reflected and flashed again. Erick focused on pushing his Domain against the worm’s—

It was like pushing against the surface of a pond that was fully frozen through, but the very act of pushing began to boil the frozen lake on the other side of the surface. One second. Two. Erick evaded an opening maw and worm’s resolve weakened—

In a single instant, the battle swung the other way. The worm’s Domain fractured and broke altogether.

Lightning sunk into the worm. Tentacles flash fried. The worm bucked under the cavern wall, shaking and breaking, sending boulders and otherwise lifting into the air as the worm tried to crack the stone world apart to get away. It succeeded in breaking the lightning-riddled portion of itself in half, instead. Erick had effectively cut the thing into two pieces, one side kilometers long, and the other only a few hundred meters long. Both sides fled into the depths of the cavern, moving away from the surface as rapidly as they could. Erick thought that they might be moving in two directions, but he had no idea. The thing rapidly left his mana sense range.

The danger wasn’t over.

Erick took a moment to cast his own [Animadversion]. The silver shield hovered around the holographic representation of his body, inside his own sunform. It wasn’t much use right now, but it might be useful later and the thing didn’t go away as long as he ‘held’ it.

The cavern rumbled and broke as it settled back into its new position.

Monsters came back out, and some of them were dumb enough to go after Erick.

He let loose a [Withering] into the cavern, Shaping it to exclude the manastream in the center of the space, layering the power into the surrounding land. Monster notifications did not start appearing. Instead, most everything either turned to stone and flowed through the ground to get away the very second they realized they were in danger, or they ignored the [Withering], because they were not made of water in the first place. The stone lions were in this second category.

The stone lions rushed toward Erick, aiming to eat the bright enemy who was good enough to mark himself as a target. The lions would have been cute if they weren’t each ten meters tall at the shoulder, with three meter wide heads and mouths to match.

Fuck this.

[Luminous Beam].

Solid light carved through stone lions and crabs and everything that couldn’t get away fast enough. Almost every monster here was over level 75, but a few of the larger ones, like the lions, were level 86. The worm that got away was likely very high level, but Erick had no hope of killing that thing unless he chased after it, and that wasn’t going to happen; he had very few spells that would work well underground, and he had no [Stone Body], either. No Stone Domain, anyway, so he wouldn’t want to put himself underground even if he had the capability to do so.

Erick let loose, killing absolutely everything that moved, eliminating every possible threat that he saw.

Clearing out the cavern only took a few minutes. But there wasn’t just one cavern! Oh no!

Some giant bat/lizard/darkness thing tried to enter into the cavern from the next one over, once it saw all the light, or maybe it heard all the noise, but Erick sliced that thing into pieces and set those pieces on fire. Such a monster would have had Erick shitting his pants two years ago, but now? It was just another bump in the road. He encountered some Domain resistance, but it was a weak Domain compared to the worm, and Erick had gained a lot of experience since Fallopolis so easily broke his Domain back at Last Shadow’s Feast.

Plus! Very few things could deal with [Luminous Beam] when paired with [Lodestar], and the Deepnight Crawler, as its Kill Notification said, was not much of an exception. It had been level 91, though. Erick’s Experience increased for the first time in months.

And the waves of monsters from the next cavern over kept coming.

Erick began methodically killing every single monster that came into the cavern—

Well. Ophiel did that. Sometimes a Domain monster would come along and Erick would have to help, but ‘kill every single monster coming this way’ was a very simple and easily executed instruction for Ophiel to follow, especially when every single living thing nearby was a monster.

Chimeras. Stone things. Crabs. Another tentacle maw worm, or perhaps the same worm as before; this one got away, too. Everything that didn’t flee, died.

When the larger monsters stopped coming, but before Erick had time to think about the deeper questions of ‘where was here’ and ‘how to get back home’, it was time to secure his person. The first order of business was not figuring out his missing left foot, or even healing it. Erick could live with a missing foot for a little while since there was no pain, since he was in sunform. The first thing to figure out was his backpack and his supplies…

But returning to physical form would mean a return to pain.

Erick ripped off the bandaid and transformed back into a person, cushioned in a sphere of Domain-controlled light. He winced hard as everything hurt, from his missing foot to his full-body scrapes and wounds. He spared a moment to look at his Status.

Full on Health, and full on Mana. Good. But the numbers were wrong. They were low.

This was because his rings were gone. Both hands were bloody and both rings were gone; lost to the flowing mana stream, or whatever. He still had his Crystal Star upon his chest, securely stuck to his inner set of clothes; thank the gods, or perhaps just Koyabez, for that. Erick spared a glance at the rainbow flow of thick air in the center of the cavern. He was still trying to understand what had happened when he was inside that, but there were other concerns at the moment. Besides, he still had a bit over 40,000 Regeneration for both Health and Mana, even without his rings granting +61 to every Stat.

Defending himself was more important than items at the moment. And speaking of defense.

Erick had an Ophiel expend himself to cast a [Prismatic Ward] around him, and around his immediate space. The effect of that dense air flowing across his body was like stepping into a comfortable home. The gentle rainbow glows of the cavern seemed less dangerous. The shadows all around seemed less dark. Erick dropped his own Meditation, and relaxed for a moment, because he finally could—

Some new monster came down the intake part of the cavern, looking like a mess of red ooze.

Ophiels turned it into evaporated ooze and [Cleanse]d away the shit that remained. The kill notification was for a ‘Crimson Blood Ooze’, and the thing was level 85, or something.

No true time to rest.

Probably wouldn’t be able to rest for a while.

Erick returned to sussing out his current predicament, dreading what he would find when he actually bothered to look inside his backpack. Of course, as soon as he had this thought, he was already looking with his mana sense.

The adamantium knife was still there, but this was likely only because it was strapped in tight so it didn’t accidentally cut anything. A spare copy of his rings was strapped into a small, very secured pouch right next to the knife. Erick breathed a sigh of relief at that; he could enchant a new pair of rings without much trouble. He even had some beans tucked in with the ring. Both were very nice to have. He didn’t want to even try making it [Exalted Rain] down here, so he was glad he did not have to do that to remake a ring from scratch, or to get food after 24 hours of rain.

Everything else was gone. No papers. No pens. No food. No canteen. Erick still had the backpack itself, though, and he could fill that with more stuff, so this was fine. The backpack was very messed up, though, so he cast a [Mend]—

The backpack did not change, at all.

… Erick tried to mend his clothes, but they remained torn, too.

Erick frowned. Time in the mana stream must have fucked up everything on his person…

His person had seen better days, too. Erick thanked the gods that Healing Magic worked off of something greater than the natural shape of the soul. The lacerations down his arms and across his face, and the ones that twisted around his left thigh all the way down to the… void where his foot should be…

It didn’t hurt that much, actually. Not as much as Erick thought it should. Perhaps Constitution dulled the pain to a manageable level. Poi did seem to think that Constitution made the world a softer place, and seeing this, Erick could agree with that statement. He wasn’t even bleeding that much, at all. Rozeta’s Recovery probably had something to do with his resilience, too. Having his Mana Regeneration apply to his Health Regeneration gave him over 40,000 Health Regen, which was supposedly comparable to a low-grade [Treat Wounds] active at all times. He had never needed to test that theory until now, so Erick was glad to self-report that this theory was likely true. As he floated there, he even watched as some of his larger wounds became slightly smaller wounds. Glancing into the manasphere of the past—

Ah. Another problem. The manasphere in here was seriously borked. Gazing even half a minute into the past or future showed more static than anything. That static all flowed toward the mana stream in the center of the room, so that neatly explained that. Erick ignored that part of his mana sense, for now.

His wounds were healing. But not fast enough. And there was another problem.

Erick looked at his foot, and barely recalled the injury which caused the missing limb. He had been inside the mana stream… or something. Yes; he had been inside the mana stream and it had moved like a rushing river, but… there had been a twist in the river, or maybe a turn, or maybe he had caught himself on a sudden rock that jutted out into the river...

He wasn’t quite sure what had happened there, actually. The result was obvious, though. Erick stared down at the twisted bone of his leg and saw the raw, wrapped and warped flesh around that bone. It was like his body had been turned to putty, or something, and then someone had grabbed the foot and twisted… Trying to pull…

Trying to pull him out of the stream? They grabbed him by the foot and pulled—

Erick shook his head as a minor headache threatened. His memories of the flow were shot to shit. Well. Whatever. The missing foot was a problem. Problems required solutions. He had [Regeneration] due to his time in Star Song, but this was a strange, magically induced injury. He didn’t want to simply [Regeneration] it.

So Erick cast a [Cleanse] over the broken lim—

Almost his entire leg, but mostly starting halfway down his thigh, turned into a mess of raw, twisted flesh and pitted bone and so much blood and—

Erick’s thoughts flared for a solution, and not a temporary fix like turning fully sunform would accomplish. He found a solution in what his daughter had once told him. With a cast and a twist, Erick [Polymorph]ed into a light slime, falling into his own shirt. He let his clothes fall away in his sudden relief as the pain of his twisted, wounded leg instantly vanished. After a moment of quietude Erick realized that he was now a plopping dollop of light with a shimmering white core, hovering in the center of his own sunform and [Prismatic Ward].

He looked a bit dim, though.

So he did as his daughter had suggested. He cast [Greater Treat Wounds] on himself, and just like how Jane had told him his slimy body expanded. He became brighter; more whole. Suddenly, everything felt better. All he wanted to do was hover right there in the middle of a battlefield of dead things and broken land—

Some monster came over the lip of the outflow part of the cavern. It had a Domain. Erick came back to himself and instantly helped Ophiel kill the offending crab/rock thing, which was apparently called a Greater Rockslide Crab according to the Kill Notification. It had been level 89.

Erick luxuriated in the glow of the—

He frowned, and not just because his single moment of peace was broken by more war, but because there was a much more serious problem happening. There were rads condensing inside his light slime form.

With this many clues, Erick realized why all the monsters were here, next to the mana stream. This area had not been ‘primed by the Worldly Path to fuck him over’. The monsters were here to ‘feed’ off of the thick air, or something. It wasn’t really ‘feeding’, but it was certainly ‘allowing themselves to be exposed to the thick, glowing mana, in order to grow their own cores to a large and powerful size’, or something.

Erick ripped the rad droplets out of his slimy body, feeling like utter shit as he did so. With another cast of [Polymorph] Erick transformed back into a person. His foot was still missing and the wound looked like he had stuck his leg in a grinder, but at least it didn’t look like it had been twisted off and the rest of his body wasn’t bleeding; healing himself as a slime had done wonders, but some of the injuries from before remained. Erick cast a [Greater Treat Wounds] on himself, hoping that that would be enough—

The foot remained gone, and now he had a clean stump.

“Well, shit.”

Erick prepared himself mentally, then he cut off the stump with a slice of light. He breathed deep, exhaling his pain, and then he cast [Regeneration] on himself. Slowly, surely, the flesh of his lower leg began to grow outward, and then he felt hungry. This was the upside and the downside to [Regeneration]; it could repair deeper damage, but it ate up the body’s natural resources by quite a bit. Not normally a problem, but Erick didn’t have any extra resources at the moment.

He looked to his bag, still shredded, and his clothes, also shredded, as they floated underneath him, nearer to the wall. He was naked and nothing was okay. Erick sighed. Then he glanced back up at the mana stream above, and finished having another thought that had bugged him for the last four minutes, since he fell into this place.

“So you’re where all the thick air goes in a [Cleanse], eh.” Erick said to himself, “Kinda pretty.” He stared inward with his mana sense, then looked outward again, saying, “But I’m gonna turn into a monster if I’m exposed to you. Odd that it didn’t happen when I was actually inside of you, though.”

On a whim, he had an Ophiel grab the body of a dead crab and chuck it at the mana stream.

The body broke apart like a mana construct breaks, but with blood and viscera turning into motes of light and thick air, to flow along with the stream. Yup; that was the same.

Erick looked around. Some of the bodies were floating in the air, toward the stream, but there appeared to be a maximum rate of conversion, and Erick had hit that maximum in his very first minute of Beaming everything.

Time for a bigger break! Erick turned to the ground and cast an [Obscuring Redoubt]. The land shifted and twisted then deepened, before a door appeared, and then opened, creating the home like an automatically-deepening well. Erick took his stuff and went down inside the hole to get away from the light of the mana stream, bringing his own, purer light with him.

The very first thing he noticed, after he saw the darkness take a moment to leave the hole in the ground, was that gravity was funky. Every solid wall had some gravity to it, but not a whole lot. The gravity in the tunnel, toward the cavern wall was more than it was here, in this oddly cramped-feeling space. Here, Erick could give a tiny hop on the floor and slump toward the ceiling, which was a new floor.

Erick left the Redoubt, hopping back out into the cavern. He recast the Redoubt.

This time, the inside was better suited for the crazy gravity. Erick alighted on the floor, while the ceiling was a good five meters away. He hopped on his good leg, and came back down to the ‘ground’. The gravity here was weaker, for sure, but it was somewhat normal. A cast of [Prismatic Ward] from Ophiel made the place feel more like home, but Erick was sure not to use too many of those. Jane or Poi or Teressa, or any of them, really, might be staying in the [Prismatic Ward]s that he had left behind in Enduring Forge, and he wouldn’t want to strip them of their defenses. Maybe in a few days he would cast a few more [Prismatic Ward]s and those up there would automatically pop. That way they’d know he was alive. But. Eh. For now…

With a tug of light, Erick grabbed his stuff, then he got to fixing everything that was broken. Food came first, though, for he had passed ‘hungry’ a few minutes ago. He wasn’t starving yet, but he would be, and soon.

With a controlled application of [Duplication Aura] from Ophiel, three Erick Beans rapidly multiplied into a thousand, and then more. A rush of air rapidly flowed outward, alongside the outpour of white-striped lima-like beans. Erick caught the beans in his light.

Erick set them aside in a bowl of stone.

Water came next.

Finding water wasn’t all that hard. Ophiel went out and found a monster, and then cast [Purge Water] on the thing, killing it as well as harvesting its water. [Cleanse] removed half of that water —of course, this land was poisonous!— but this was fine. Ophiel brought the water back and [Duplication Aura] solved the water issue.

While simultaneously on high alert, and with Ophiel mana sensing the world around him and helping to cook with [Incandescent Aura], Erick killed a few monsters inside the walls before they got near him, and he made soup as fast as he possibly could. It was bland, but it was passable; it was safe calories. As he ate his second bowl the pangs in his stomach stopped being so insistent. As he ate his fourth, the stomach finally stopped. He could already tell he was going to get tired of beans.

He got out the spare ring and copied it. It looked good; the clear diamond interior was fully covered by the metallic shell. An All Stat lightmask came next. Erick scratched the surface of the rings to expose the clear diamond, shoved them into the lightmask, imbued the rings with manalight from all of his Stats, and then he [Mend]ed the rings back to whole. Good as new! Slipping those rings back on his fingers felt like casting off a weighted blanket.

Erick tried telling a joke to Ophiel, “The world seems about 62 points easier to understand.”

Ophiel chirped happily; he loved being included in conversations.

Repairing his pants and backpack took a bit more time, but he had the raw materials necessary to repair everything present, even if those fabrics and threads and leathers and clasps weren’t in the right places or in the right amounts. [Duplicate] solved resource problems and then [Fabricate] put everything back together.

Pants acquired! Erick shoved himself back into them and finally stopped being naked. His shoes were both gone, though, and his outer dress robe that he had worn to the party was similarly missing. Constitution made his feet rather tough, so maybe he didn’t need shoes? He could do without the dress robe, too, but he should have a shirt, at least, so Erick made himself a shirt.

“I’m probably going to lose them, anyway, Ophiel. The wrought live down here and they don’t wear clothes.”

Ophiel nodded. Those wrought certainly were exhibitionists, weren’t they.

“They are.” Erick nodded back, saying, “I could let it all hang out, too, but what if I meet someone I know?”

Ophiel chirped as though that would never happen.

“There’s Melemizargo, but he’s already seen everything.” Erick said, “And he’s everywhere, so he doesn’t count.”

Ophiel did not respond, except to form a few more eyes and look everywhere. Erick also waited for the Dragon God of Magic to appear, but nothing happened for a full 20 seconds, which is as long as Erick was willing to wait. The Dragon God of Magic must have been a bit shy, so Erick decided to let that dragon lie.

He saw at least one good thing about his surroundings, though. He said, “The mana stream is blocked by even a bit of rock, isn’t it? This is good. Means I can raise an umbrella of stone and walk out there… Or something. I’ll figure it out.”

Ophiel chirped in a scoffing sort of manner; it was dangerous out there! The mana stream was barely a worry compared to the monsters.

“It’s all dangerous, Ophiel.” Erick smiled at his [Familiar], saying, “Listen: I’m sorry about the sudden unsummon. I’m not sure how deep we are, but I left all of you behind, didn’t I? I should have accounted for that.”

Ophiel hopped over and plopped at Erick’s chest, hugging him tight. Erick laughed a little in small joys as he hugged Ophiel back, while Ophiel chirped and chirped. And then Ophiel turned small, and alighted on Erick’s shoulder.

Erick let him stay there while he [Fabricate]d himself a nice shirt and fixed up the backpack. Ophiel briefly fluttered away as Erick put on his clothes, but he rapidly fluttered back onto his designated spot when it was once again available.

“I wonder where Yggdrasil is,” Erick asked, not expecting an answer.

Ophiel chirped, not supplying an answer, either.

A thought occurred.

Erick said, “Well… We’re down here anyway. And I’ve never seen these mana streams, but if the mana streams were more prevalent then I would have heard of them before now… And the monsters here are level 90 at the highest. We might be near the Core, Ophiel.”

Ophiel chirped in agreement; he thought so, too.

“And if we’re near the Core, perhaps I can find a nice spot to plant Yggdrasil. And if I can do that, then perhaps that’s all there is to [Gate]; I just have to make the damned thing.” Erick said, “I’ve been meaning to practice Spatial Magic with him, anyway, so this is the perfect opportunity—”

In the rocks below, a quick-moving rat the size of a subway car rapidly rushed in Erick’s direction. Erick had an Ophiel in the walls, in small tunnels he had made all throughout the space, meet the rat head on and [Fulmination Aura] it to death. The rat’s body stopped moving. Stone crushed it down, and it joined all the others that Erick had killed in the last half hour.

He had briefly lost his focus on the danger while he was talking to Ophiel and fixing himself up.

That was bad.

“I can see how Darabella’s husband died— Ah.” Erick frowned. He looked to Ophiel. “Is it ten days later? Or did Goliro survive for a while down here? You don’t know the date, do you?”

Ophiel chirped a sad sound; he did not know the date and he was ashamed for his lack of knowledge.

“It’s okay, Ophiel. I didn’t think you did. Don’t worry about it, okay?”

Ophiel chirped; he wouldn’t worry.

Erick looked around his temporary room and decided it was time to go—

He decided, “It’s not time to go, yet.”

He put his backpack on the ground and went through everything he had. He fixed up some bean reserves by putting them in a small pocket to have for more copying later, while he also cooked up some more beans both to have a fifth bowl, and to have some later. To have some bean soup for later required a longer term solution than ‘holding the soup in his light’, though. First, Erick copied some rustless steel buttons from his pants, enough to make a hundred thousand of the little things. Then he used [Incandescent Aura] alongside [Metalshape] and [Cleanse] to burn away all impurities, as he Shaped the metal into a canteen that would comfortably fit into his backpack. [Duplicate] made a second canteen. One was for water. The other was for bean soup. After filling those containers and strapping them in he was mostly ready.

His regrowing foot looked like a baby’s foot stuck at the end of his full grown man’s leg, and it probably wasn’t going to get much better than that for a few hours. But that would have to do. There was one more thing to do, and then he was gone; back in the cavern.

Erick waited till the latest encroaching monster was dead, then he cast his daily [Personal Ward], using almost all of his mana. White light flickered across his skin, briefly flowing over the edges of his clothes. With over 150,000 defense in his [Personal Ward], this would have to be enough. Ten minutes later, his mana was filled. This was enough.

He was strong, and he was mostly healed, so it was time to go.

Erick exited his [Obscuring Redoubt], and heade—

“Ah.” Erick had an idea. “I could have used [Unmoving Stone] to protect my space from stone swimmers. Ah. Well. Next time.”

Erick briefly hated how fast things were moving, but this was the Underworld. And then he focused on the new thing that caught his attention. He glanced up at the mana stream, and also at himself.

He couldn’t quite tell what was happening, but his [Personal Ward] was obviously taking tiny bits of damage under the light of the mana stream. It flickered here and there with glowing glimmers every so often, and most of those glimmers were decidedly not the white of Erick’s own mana color. They were reds and greens and yellows and blues. Magenta and cyan. The colors of the prismatic mana stream.

And, it seemed, there were no more rads forming inside of him, as they did before. Perhaps having a monster form sped up the process, but it would make sense for the process to still occur if he was a person.

… Whatever! He’d keep an eye on himself for the presence of rads.

Glancing upward, the river flowed from right to left…

Erick said to Ophiel, “I wasn’t sure before, but that thing is 100% the [Cleanse]s of everyone up above, which might mean that this tunnel has to be one of millions of such tunnels. What do you think?”

Ophiel agreed with a happy chirp.

Erick nodded, and began heading left, following under the stream. “So let’s go see the Core, wherever it might be—”

A crab burst out of the wall ahead. It was twenty meters tall and bloody red.

Erick killed it with a [Luminous Beam].

And then he walked on, his feet not touching the ground as his sunform glowed all around him. He did not lightstep, but he did walk upon his own light, above the stone below. Maybe later he would attempt a lightstep, but...

Hunks and masses of dead crab began to float away from the cavern wall, into the mana stream, to become one with the glows therein. Flesh and filth seemed drawn to the stream, to become mana. But the broken rock kicked up in the fights had the exact opposite reaction; they sank away from the stream, back to the cavern wall, where they melded with the cavern.

All around, the dead became thick, glowing air, and stone returned to the cavern wall. Back behind him, after Erick stripped the spellwork holding together his [Obscuring Redoubt] the stone began to fold in on itself, as the dead monsters inside the walls were pulled out of the walls, into the cavern as the stone expanded, filling in like it was made of rising dough—

“Ah. Not good, Ophiel.” Erick said, “I’m starting to want bread! Maybe some of these monsters are tasty, but… Whatever happens, this isn’t going to be comfortable…” He stared at the glowing lights above, while he simultaneously watched from the eyes of four different Ophiel as they killed another four monsters.

He leveled to 91.

Erick shrugged. “This is fine.”

Ophiel twittered in happy agreement.

He walked down the cavern, stepping on the light he made, but not lightstepping; not yet.

- - - -

It was time to try lightstepping; this walk was going to take way too long otherwise.

Erick took a tiny lightstep forward, planning to go only half a meter. He ended up doing that, but he also ended up a meter closer to the mana stream.

All experiments with lightsteping to make this journey shorter suddenly ended; just like that. Erick was not going to fall into that stream a second time.

So he simply walked as a normal person would, upon the air.

He did a few experiments as he walked, just to see what he could get away with if he needed to do something drastic.

Gravity pointed toward the cavern wall. Large expenditures of magic pulled him toward the stream. An Ophiel extended their [Domain of the Withering Slime] into the cavern, easily reaching the mana stream only kilometers away, and was promptly sucked into the mana stream. Good news: Ophiel lasted 20 seconds in the stream. Bad news: he was not able to get out before the thick, glowing air tore him apart.

“Gravity pulls us to the stone,” Erick said, “But magic pulls us into the stream. Good to know.”

Ophiel chirped in recognition of these wise words.

“I was going to try for an aura of [Unmoving Stone] so that these monsters couldn’t crawl out at us all the time, but I can save that for later.” Erick said, “Maybe this cavern expands further down. Veins are like that, after all, and this seems like a vein to me.”

And so, he walked, with the stream of glowing, thick air leading the way overhead, flowing forward and down,

down,

down,

down….

- - - -

The 5 kilometer wide cavern joined to another cavern of roughly the same size, both heading in the same-ish direction, connecting to a third cavern that was the combined size of the other two. The new cavern might have only been 7 kilometers wide, while the kilometer-wide stream of glowing, thick air was only marginally bigger, but this place was bigger, for sure.

“The [Cleanse] streams operate like veins, then,” Erick decided.

Ophiel agreed with a chirp.

Erick gazed upward at the joining of two ethereal rivers, his own [Personal Ward] glittering with reflected rainbows, as Ophiels murdered every single attacking thing all around. The murdering of local wildlife had not stopped, all this time, on the entire walk to get here. Erick gained a lot of experience in crushing opposing Domains, while also gaining a lot of Experience, too.

He was now level 92. Most of the monsters didn’t budge his Status at all, but some of them did, and when they did, it was noticeable.

Erick took a little while to clear the monsters of this juncture of the mana stream, murdering absolutely everything while he enjoyed the sight of the flowing, glowing thick air above. He wondered what the locals called it, and then wondered if there were locals, and where they might be, if they existed at all. There had to be wrought locals, right?

Right.

His foot was fully healed now; it had been hours, after all. Erick experimentally stepped down onto the stone, directly, testing the foot out. It felt fine. It flexed fine, too. It was probably good to go.

Erick stepped back into the air and resumed his walk.

This time, with the mana stream being an extra kilometer away, Erick could actually lightstep a bit. It wasn’t what he was used to, but it was something. It was an increase in speed if nothing else.

- - - -

Erick pulled his canteen of bean water out of his bag and frowned before he even opened the cap. Something had happened while he was walking and now—

Yup.

Erick held open the container and watched with both his eyes and his mana sense as the green bean water began to rapidly solidify all at once, supersaturated ice forming out of soup. The metal container popped a seam, spurting green crystals out of the crack, while a cylinder of green solids rose out of the opening.

And then the whole thing sludged over in muck and goo.

Erick had to check the history of the manasphere to understand what he had seen. In one flickering second, thick air had gathered around the whole container, and then became something thicker than air. Back in the present, Erick held a baby slime with a bean water canteen as it’s core.

The slime slapped at Erick’s arm like a crawling puppy, trying to get away, or to eat him, Erick wasn’t sure. Probably both.

Erick used his sunform and broke the core out of the canteen while also breaking the slime in the process. As fast as the monster had been born, it was now dead, and transforming back into thick air along with the fragments of its ‘core’.

He grabbed his water canteen and this time he didn’t let the slime fully form, ripping the nascent core out of the metal container before it could get too large. This one, Erick set it down on the ground, near the remnants of its beany cousin. That slime finished being born, but Erick doubted it would survive for very long once he left this cavern behind. There was no need to kill it, whatever the case.

Erick gazed out at the shadowy, rainbow landscape, and at the Ophiels flying all around in their sunforms, killing every monster they saw.

“… It is an awful lot of killing,” Erick said. “I can see why Goliro died. He would have tried to run, though, right? Not many people are strong enough to survive down here.”

Ophiel chirped; running is always an option.

“Ah. Well. He might have been able to get away. Doubt that, though. A Spatial Mage down here? Where Spatial Magic doesn’t work? Hmm.”

Another chirp; maybe he was killed instantly, then.

“Then that would mean we were stuck in that mana stream for ten days, and I really don’t think we were under there for that long.”

Chirp chirp; no way to know!

“You’re right; we don’t know. Can’t know until we get out of here, either.” Erick said, “We were at least in that stream for a day, though. My [Personal Ward] was gone.”

Ophiel chirped.

Erick walked on, only now, he had a temporary goal: the search for water.

He fulfilled that goal in thirty seconds upon finding a plant monster and having Ophiel purge it of all water. Repairing and cleaning out the canteen was easy enough, too. The water wouldn’t last forever without turning into a slime, but that was fine.

- - - -

“I’m rather sure I’m walking at a speed of 25 kilometers per hour, what with the light letting me move faster, and all.” Erick added, “But I’m definitely walking.”

Ophiel chirped.

“Maybe more like flying; you’re right.” Erick nodded. “And you can’t fly too fast, either, or you get sucked into the mana stream. So both of us are just going a bit faster than normal.” He continued, “I’m no perfect judge of distance, but I think we’ve gone 250 kilometers. Maybe a bit more. Maybe less.”

Ophiel chirped; agreeing.

“And the tunnel is the same since that junction back there.” Erick said, “No side routes, all this time, either. Only forward, or back.”

Ophiel chirp-chirped. Time for a break?

Erick said, “I haven’t seen any good places to stop.”

Ophiel mournfully chirped. He hadn’t seen any, either.

“Not your fault, but if this continues on much longer then I’m going to have to make a space to rest.” Erick said, “Probably going to have to do that anyway—”

Yet another monster roared in the distance, charging over a crest in a distant bend in the tunnel, like the bend was a wave, moving half in the wall and half out like a stadium-sized shark in an ocean of stone. Ophiel moved to intercept before it got too close, lighting up the beast with [Luminous Beam]s and [Fulmination Aura]s, and then requesting, and receiving Erick’s help when the landshark proved to have a Domain of its own.

Fried landshark soon began to dissipate into the thick air, while the crater it left behind began to flow back together.

Erick told Ophiel, “We’ll walk for a full day, then stop to rest.”

- - - -

The cavern joined to another cavern, and the two continued on together heading down.

The two mana streams also joined, forming a river in the sky of thick air and flowing glows. Referring to that space above as ‘in the sky’ was very much incorrect, but the diameter of the cavern was nearly 10 kilometers across —or maybe even eleven at its widest points— while the diameter of the stream was at least a kilometer wide. This meant there was about four kilometers of open air between the wall and the flow above. Erick remained near the wall, of course. He did manage to increase his pace a bit from an estimated 25 kilometers per hour, to 35, though. He could have gone faster, but then he ran into another problem.

There were still monsters down here, Erick was still the brightest thing this land had seen in a very long time, and thus, they all wanted a piece of him. But one and all, every monster ended up with facefuls of light, or lightning. They joined all the rest who thought to test his power.

After a particularly tough vine-like monster blossomed out of the walls and tried to eat him, Erick killed it instead, and reached level 93. He also decided that he was far enough out of the manastream to attempt the creation of a new spell, which turned out exactly as he wanted.

--

Aura of Unmoving Stone, instant, super large area, 1 mana per second

Lull the land to slumber!

--

Nothing came out of the walls after an Ophiel started running that nifty little massive spell, and with that taken care of, Erick now had time to send his sight further outward, to see the other battles taking place everywhere out there in the deeper, rainbow-lit shadows.

Erick wasn’t the only one fighting for dominance all around, but he was certainly one of the brightest. Spells sparked here and there in the prismatic dark, while Erick’s light lit up his small portion of the world, and not much more. A lot of those distant battles stopped when Erick came close enough, though, with many of the monsters who had been trying to kill each other both going after him, instead.

Lizards the size of apartment buildings, covered in blackened, craggy lava scales.

Wolves made of glass and cutting shadows, or ooze and mist, each one the size of a semi truck, working in small packs, or pairs. Not too many pack-animals out there, but there were certainly some.

A massive stone elemental made of silver metal—

That one caught Erick’s eye.

The metal elemental shimmered like a polished thing of flowing silver light, brighter than anything down here had any right to be (or maybe the thing was simply reflecting Erick’s own light), but at 20 meters tall and moving like an animated tumbleweed, it certainly fit with all the other monsters Erick saw. A problem occurred, though, when Erick engaged the elemental. [Luminous Beam] did not solve the problem of this encroaching, now-screaming monster. Erick supposed that Particle Light didn’t work too well against the pure metallic construct, but he had eleven possible sources of [Luminous Beam], and he had only tried one.

It took seven [Luminous Beam]s and four seconds of concentrated fire to kill the thing.

As they say, if violence doesn’t solve the problem, then you’re not using enough.

… Which was a rather abhorrent thing to think about, but Erick recognized where he was, and what was required of him to survive this mess. Different times require different solutions, after all.

Anyway.

The Kill Notification declared the monster an Abyssal Steel Elemental, but Erick wanted to know if it was steel, or actually platinum, since there was some Shenanigans going on with that particular naming scheme; thank you, Headmaster, for that. Erick had time to check, too, for the scattered, dead monster was not vanishing into the manastream. The various melted and splattered pieces of the elemental were flowing back into the cavern walls. Maybe in centuries they would become a vein of metal for some intrepid miner to find.

Erick grabbed some of the rapidly disappearing body, though, before it got too far.

A quick series of Particle spells sussed out that the ‘steel’ monster was actually platinum, and of an odd variety, but [Incandescent Aura] killed the Elemental Abyssal inside the metal. Well. Whatever! Erick could imbue his own magic, later, if necessary, and he was starting to think that it would be necessary. He had plans for runework and [Renew], perhaps after he found a place to plant Yggdrasil, so a bit of platinum would come in handy. Thank you, Worldly Path.

Erick stuffed some platinum pieces into his backpack.

And he continued walking.

The fighting only got worse.

- - - -

Erick occasionally stopped for twenty minutes here or there, to open up a hole in the side of the cavern to protect himself while he made some food and gathered some water. Occasionally, he found a particularly healthy, meaty monster specimen, but a quick check with [Cleanse] always erased the whole monster, revealing that the whole thing was poison to him, or something.

Oh well.

Beans were fine.

- - - -

White light flashed across Erick’s skin.

He paused. He stared at his arm—

“Oh. My [Personal Ward] is gone.” Erick glanced around, and since he was mostly safe at the moment he recast the spell, draining almost all of his mana in the process. With a half shrug using the shoulder Ophiel was not occupying, he said, “That’s 24 hours.”

Ophiel chirped. He was doing fine.

“I’m doing fine, too.”

Erick kept walking.

- - - -

The cavern joined with another, their flows of mana combining into one to continue down,

down,

down.

In the new tunnel the mana stream was two kilometers wide, but also 7 kilometers away, while the other side of the cavern was too far to see through the gloom and the rainbow light, though Erick knew it to be 16 kilometers away. The math of this place was too perfect to be anything but engineered. If it weren’t for the monsters constantly tearing up the place, Erick suspected that every bend and break in the cavern wall wouldn’t be there; this place would be perfectly flat and smooth—

Well.

‘Flat’.

The curvature of the cavern wall was not flat at all, but if Erick squinted, he could pretend it was flat.

At least in this new tunnel there were fewer monsters. This did not make it any easier to go forward, though. The ones Erick had been killing to get here were starting to get tough, and from the way the monsters ahead spread out from one another…

They soaked in the light of the mana stream above, each one controlling a territory that was as large as its Domain, spaces measured in multiple square kilometers. If any of the previous ones were any indication, every single monster ahead had to be Level 93 to 95, from the elementals of stone and gold, to the dogs made of lightning, to the floating krakens swimming in the air atop the cavern wall, to all the rest.

If there was another cavern past this one…

If these monsters here were not the true threats of the deeper Underworld, then Erick was going to be surprised. He still killed them, though, for they were in his way, and his Domain freaked them out, and they were all monsters with grand rads inside of them, anyway. He still moved forward, deeper into this new cavernous tunnel.

He could have taken to the sky, and skipped the monsters on the ground like the other flying monsters were doing, but that seemed like opening himself up for attack. Erick didn’t go that route. He went straight through, sticking to the cavern wall, with one of his Ophiel flowing out [Aura of Unmoving Stone] so that Erick nominally had a wall at one side. A lot of monsters had Stone-based Domains, though, so the efficacy of this technique was debatable.

The first few monsters fell easy enough. But then things changed.

Erick pressed forward with his Domain, breaking the monsters’ powers one at a time, then breaking the monsters. But every time he killed one, another Domain flooded in from the side, crashing against his, threatening to overwhelm him if he allowed it, or if he faltered. And what was worse, was that this cavern had been kinda stable before Erick arrived. Killing one beast set off a chain reaction of power grabs all across the greater cavern, with opportunistic strikes happening between neighbors who finally saw that they could get more space for themselves.

For that’s why the monsters were here; they wanted exposure to the mana stream. It empowered them. This was not a new thought for Erick in the past day, or two. But the depth of this reality before him reminded him of conversations he had had about mana and monsters and Experience.

Shadelings could cycle their mana inside their core to gain Experience, and thus Levels. Months and months ago, in Last Shadow’s Feast, Quilatalap had told Erick that dragons did the same thing, but on a much, much larger scale. Dragons were even able to reach into the 90s by creating multiple cores and cycling through each one.

And it seemed there was another way: Be a monster and stand under the mana streams of Veird to directly absorb the ambient, thick mana. Wizards or Shades could probably do this, too, considering they both had cores…

Well. Shades had cores, for sure.

Erick still wasn’t sure if a Wizard Core was the same, or not.

… He was hungry, tired, and stressed.

And he was also currently fighting three battles at once as he had these extraneous thoughts; a turtle of ice, a bird of decay, and a vine monster of shadows, each assaulted him from left, right, and behind. Erick killed them all, stressing his Domain to break, defend, and redirect as he needed, while Ophiels flew around and struck with needle-like precision, carving into eyes and exploding brains, piercing chests and bursting hearts, and severing tendrils into tiny little pieces before descending with lightning to finish off the job.

Notifications pinged.

Level 94.

Erick decided to stop moving forward for a while. Instead, he settled, and he secured his position. Monsters came to him, from the sides and from the sky, testing him due to his diminutive size no doubt, for he wasn’t about to flow his Domain all the way out there like the rest of them; he would be broken in a flashing second. He had pushed too hard against too many assailants for too many hours. He needed rest. He knew he wasn’t going to get rest, though, so it was better to keep himself small and concentrated.

Probably.

It seemed to work, anyway.

Erick killed ten more assailants before the nearby cavern occupants had adopted a new configuration that included him.

To his left, kilometers away, a monster made of green and flashing steel —might have been a bird— settled down into the ground and spread its ‘wings’; unfurling in the rainbow light to soak up the mana glow like a cat in the sun. To the right, also kilometers away, a thing of black branches extended itself outward and also soaked up the light. Their Domains collided directly onto Erick, but Erick held them both back. Their Domains also collided into each other, and into all of their new neighbors.

No one started a fight. None of these collisions seemed to disturb the settled monsters, each of which was easily forty or fifty meters tall, and double or triple that wide.

Erick took a breath, and forced a bit of relaxation into his spine. Then he opened up Ophiel’s [Aura of Unmoving Stone] directly below, before he cast [Obscuring Redoubt], extending his Domain into his spellwork so that it could actually work like it was supposed to. He had to pry a bit at both of his new neighbors to get his Redoubt to take, using an unaligned Domain to do it, too, but his neighbors didn’t seem to care.

Erick went into this hidey hole and began setting it up. He still had some beans, so those got copied, but he had no water. Luckily, he had to pee.

[Cleanse] turned that water drinkable, and [Duplicate] made more.

Ah.

Survival.

Bear Grylls would be proud.

Jane would certainly be proud, and that buoyed Erick’s spirits quite a bit.

After a short break, a short and very inadequate dinner, and a short [Scry] session to check down the tunnel, Erick discovered a few things. The first discovery was that he could probably take to the sky now, since the distance to the ground and the mana stream was well over five kilometers, and all the other monsters who couldn’t land a spot on the wall were already airborne and moving around up there with minimal fights. Erick’s arrival and elimination of fifty-three monsters had set off a chain of repositionings, though, where opportunists in the air took to the ground and took their places among the crowd, so the air here was a bit clearer of monsters than it had been.

But monsters were always flying through the air, probing for weakness among the wall-dwellers and mostly getting scared away. The air around here likely wouldn’t be clear for very long… So perhaps it was better to ignore the temporary window of easy movement. Avoiding fights might become more of a trap, than an option.

With further [Scry]ing, Erick discovered that higher level monsters were capable of a bit of strategic thinking, with some monsters probing for weakness but running away when they found none.

But those were small facts compared to one major truth.

The tunnel ended after a few hundred more kilometers. After several more hours of walking Erick would finally be able to see something new. He wasn’t sure what it was he was looking at, but the physicality of it all was easy enough to understand.

A white mist hung in the air across the entire path of the tunnel, looking like the thickest clouds anyone would see on the surface, but they obviously weren’t that, at all. The mana stream didn’t seem to care about the cloud wall, for one, for that glowing air continued straight on through the cloud wall, unimpeded.

Another difference was in the cavern wall, starting about a kilometer before the cloud wall. The cavern dipped away in all directions, like someone had beveled the edge with a kilometer-wide slope. It was a perfect bevel, too, for a lot of the land there was able to fully repair itself, for they didn’t have many monster fights, because the monsters before that beveled edge, before that cloudwall, were different.

Mostly, every single monster in the cavern was a unique specimen; each one a Variant of some base beast. But the monsters located on the edge of that bevel were all the same white monster. Each one was humanoid-shaped, but hunched over, standing twenty meters tall at the hunch and covered with white scales that stuck out more like spikes, than as protective coverings. Each beast had a single eye in the center of its thick-necked head, and each one stared forward, at the cavern. They were guardians, for sure.

There had to be maybe exactly a hundred of them, and they all stood in an organized line upon that beveled cavern wall, each half a kilometer away from each other, with the cloud wall behind them and their Domains locked forward. They were obviously working together, but Erick was pretty sure they were monsters, so this was odd. He’d have to confirm their monstrosity with a closer inspection, of course…

Maybe they weren’t monsters?

“Ah.” Erick said, “Right. Let’s try this one.”

[True Viewing Screen].

Erick spied upon the targets again, and nothing changed. The mist remained. The white monsters remained. Not an illusion, then. Or perhaps it was a very, very good illusion? Erick wouldn’t know until he tested them, personally.

But...

Erick told Ophiel, “Okay. So. It seems that someone put those guardians there. But who? And do I care? I might be able to avoid the guardians with burrowing, but that seems like a dangerous game. Who knows what’s past them… I could check though.”

Ophiel chirped. Burrowing was fun.

“Burrowing is fun, yes.” Erick considered. “But, no. We’ll try the front door… But first we’ll watch for now. We’ll see what happens while we rest.” He glanced at his beans, in his bag. “And make some more bean soup.”

- - - -

Erick ate his fourth bowl of bean soup while he watched the world around him, and also the Screen hovering in front. He had noticed a few things in the last hour.

He had also had to kill his black-branch tree neighbor, because the damned thing had wormed into Erick’s [Aura of Unmoving Stone] and burrowed into the Redoubt. A bit of Light dissuasion wasn’t good enough to stop the burrowing, so Erick applied more and more Light to the problem. His new neighbor was a bird of bright gold feathers lined with shadows, and she seemed more preoccupied with hatching her eggs than she was with anything else.

But as for guardians and their cloudwall: Monsters tested that land all the time. Monsters tried to burn and fry and freeze the guardians, tried to do everything they could to eliminate the problem at the end of the tunnel, to open up more space for themselves. But no matter what the monsters did, their spellwork never breached the passive resistances of the guardians’ Domain. A single attacker was not enough, at all. As soon as the guardians reacted, the various monsters all went away, or they were killed.

For every time monstrous spellwork struck a guardian, every single guardian within range turned as one, and fired off blinding beams of light directly at the offending monster. And those beams of light looked eerily similar to [Luminous Beam].

That was only the first oddity. The second oddity was that the guardians didn’t aim to kill. They aimed to injure, and drive off, and they accomplished this rather well.

A third oddity appeared when one monster —a giant floating kraken of air and lightning— started sending ten kilometer long blasts of lightning skittering off of the Domains of many monsters below, to smack into one of the guardians. That lightning actually managed to pierce through the guardian’s Domain. It had been the only attack to do so in the last hour of watching.

The bolt left a small blackened space upon the left shoulder of the intended target, but every single other guardian across the whole beveled edge of the cavern also gained a small blackened spot upon their left shoulder. None of the guardians cared about the damage, for there wasn’t any, but the nearby guardians still sent [Luminous Beam]s back at the attacker. That kraken of lightning and air lost several limbs, but it managed to get away, until one of the monsters near the cavern wall decided they wanted calamari for dinner.

Erick focused on the guardians. He would need a few more examples, but he formed a hypothesis that every single guardian was linked to every other guardian, and that the damage one took, they all took. As he was having that thought, he witnessed several random guardians cast spells upon themselves, erasing the little bit of damage that had been spread to all hundred guardians on the ring. The small black soot spots vanished.

“Linking Domains for strength and sharing damage taken?” Erick guessed.

Ophiel shrugged, chirping a noncommittal chirp.

“Are they summoned [Familiar]s? Using their creator’s Domain?” Erick said, “Or a Domain made specially for them.” He glanced to Ophiel on his shoulder. “I need to make this sort of Domain for you, but you’re already using your maximum two auras at once.”

Ophiel chirped; he was.

“No new Domain for you, just yet.”

Ophiel chirped; shouldn’t try to make any special magic like that right now, anyway.

“You’re right.” Erick breathed deep and then he stood up, saying, “Time to go.”

With nine Ophiel taking to the air around Erick and one remaining on his shoulder, Erick stepped out of the [Obscuring Redoubt], and into the gloomy, rainbow air. His neighbors glanced his way, but they did not attack. The steel and green feathered thing stared at him with a bright, crystalline eye, but did not otherwise move. The golden bird with shadowed feathers glared at him, too, but her wings were spread to cover her small nest of three gold-black eggs.

Erick took to the air, leaving both feathered monsters behind, Ophiels trailing in front and to the sides, each of them tiny and fully covered in [Animadversion]. Easily, and without pause, Erick pulled out from between the oppressive weights of both enemy Domains.

With a soundless, slippery shift, Erick was in the air, under his own power, and far enough away from the cavern wall that the monsters below didn’t care about him anymore. This had been another thing he had learned from watching for a while. In this large space, he could walk above the monsters and they wouldn’t try to kill him. Going along the ground would have been an unnecessary risk.

Erick looked ahead, down the way, at the gently curving tunnel that led into darkness, and light. And he felt a bit giddy. The idea of being taken unaware and murdered without even knowing what had caused the murder was getting to him.

He stared across the land, eyeing hundreds of monsters. He glanced left at the hundreds more. He looked up and saw even more deadly Variant beasts. Some controlled territories of multiple square kilometers. Most controlled less—

A bird of fire and ice tried to divebomb him, but Erick responded with cutting light. Half-vaporized frozen chicken fell all around him, carried by its own inertia. The golden shadow bird below snaked some shadows up into the sky, grabbing at the bits of bird to feed to its own chicks; they had hatched while Erick wasn’t looking.

Erick placed one foot in front of the other, with [Lodestar] and [Greater Lightwalk] working in tandem all around him, and Ophiels flying in defensive formation. He began to lightwalk through the cavern, once again, with his head held high. He was trying to avoid unnecessary fights by being up here, but…

He knew that he could murder every single thing in this entire land, if he wanted.

That thought settled his nerves a bit because while it wasn’t a Truth, it was rather close—

He clipped an unseen Domain from a monster down below, and he glared at the offender.

The monster, a massive thing of churning blood and claws and with a Domain that covered multiple square kilometers… retracted his Domain a bit.

Erick continued forward, unimpeded.

Over the next few hours, monsters challenged Erick eleven times. Ten fliers and one ground dweller dared to fight. Erick carved up the lot of them, [Luminous Beam] doing the heavy lifting, while [Fulmination Aura]s helped on cleanup when some monsters proved able to survive having almost all their body and their grand rad vaporized.

- - - -

Both faster and slower than he thought possible, Erick found himself standing in the air three kilometers away from the guardians and their cloud wall. It was much more impressive in person. The rainbow mana stream was barely visible as it passed into the cloudwall, for the clouds were bright white, and that light drowned out almost all others, aside from himself.

The guardians stood at the start of the beveled edge of the cavern. The cloudwall hovered a kilometer beyond them. The guardians themselves were 20 meters tall, and they for sure saw Erick. Their eyes were as big as their heads and they surely saw everything that happened all around them, but they did not seem to care about the speck of light hovering at the edge of their effective range. Other monsters were closer to them than Erick.

Erick dared not get any closer, for now. These things were somewhat autonomous, but there might be an entity beyond them, watching for anomalies.

Erick had an Ophiel switch over to [Physical Domain], but he did not try pressing against any of the other Domains out there. He simply let his presence be known as he took control of all sound for kilometers around—

A particularly large lizard of bright green ooze and shadow controlled the land directly below, and it did not like Erick's gentle touch. It attacked him.

So Erick killed the lizard.

In order to stop another series of reorganizations and a cascade of fights, Erick descended to the cavern wall, taking the monster’s place at the edge of monster territory, butting up directly against the guardians’ collective Domain. Now the guardians looked at him. Now they wondered what he was about. None of the other nearby monsters seemed to care that Erick was in their space, but they would probably start caring if he kept his weakly-empowered [Physical Domain] touching them for much longer.

Erick hurried up and tested the blockade with words, speaking through his [Physical Domain], “Hello. I would like to inquire about—”

Several monsters instantly did not like this, and they expressed themselves in the usual manner.

Erick defended himself while the guardians watched. When the battle was over, Erick’s territory had expanded several-fold, but he had no interest in holding this land, and so opportunists started coming at him from all sides.

At least twenty minutes and exactly thirty-five high level Variant monsters later, the cavern was well on its way to a reorganization, again, with fights breaking out all across the inside of the cavern, spreading back, all the way back to where Erick had come from. But the space directly next to Erick had been resolved. This time, his neighbors accounted for Erick’s gentle-pressure [Physical Domain].

He wasn’t sure where, exactly, but he had reached level 95 somewhere in the massive melee, possibly between the hippo/lizard/tree and the worm/bird/ooze.

Erick returned to questioning the guardians through his [Physical Domain], “Hello. I would like to know what this blockade is about. Please respond. I will wait for a little while for a response, but please do not take too long.”

This time, the monsters all around him did not respond to his words. The guardians didn’t respond either. So Erick summoned a chair and sat down to wait.

As seconds ticked on toward minutes, and minutes piled up, Erick noticed a few more things about the guardians. Each was not a perfect copy of each other; there were small differences here and there, from the arrangement of scale-spikes across their humped backs, to their irises being of slightly different striations. They all breathed in time with each other, though, and none of them had grand cores at their center. They were firmly ‘not monsters’, which was fine. Their shared Domain seemed not-fine, though. There was simply no way past it that Erick could see.

Each one of the guardians perfectly blended their Domain with the ones at their sides, and that power reached all the way toward the mana stream in the center of the cavern, where it seemed to tatter and fray as it touched the thick, rainbow air. Erick certainly wouldn’t be braving the mana stream to get through the blockade, so he needed the guardians to let him pass. Or, more accurately, he needed the people controlling the guardians to let him pass.

… But as time ticked on, Erick was starting to doubt that the guardians had controllers.

Or maybe the controllers were assholes.

Erick asked again, “Hello? I seek to pass this blockade.”

No response; the guardians that stared his way were already staring his way, while the rest stared at the other monsters nearby, waiting for them to make a move.

Erick opened up a hole in the center of Ophiel’s [Unmoving Stone Aura] and sent a different Ophiel burrowing down into the ground with [Stone Travel]. A tunnel ten meters across instantly began to extend down from part of Erick’s power, flowing down into the ground, guided by Ophiel toward the land under and beyond the guardians.

Ophiel hit a wall of Domain power that prevented further movement—

The guardian directly above Ophiel twitched, and the ground collapsed around Erick’s [Familiar], crushing it utterly, breaking the sunform Domain around Ophiel and sending a shock of power back to Erick, like he had touched a live wire. Erick flinched a little, for though he had expected something like that, he did not expect that much strength behind the guardians’ collective Domain. If he had put more power into that Ophiel’s sunform, then he likely would have suffered a real backlash; actual injury.

He sent a second Ophiel into the ground, but this time he had Ophiel go deep, deep into the wall of the cavern, going one kilometer down, then a second, before turning forward and—

Erick was ready for the breaking of his sunform Ophiel this time. He had relaxed that Ophiel’s Domain so he got less feedback, but he still felt the breaking of that Ophiel like a harsh tap on the forehead. He frowned, and then he summoned enough Ophiel to get back up to 10.

This was annoying.

Erick was fed up with whatever the fuck this was.

He spoke again into the gloomy air, “I am going to pass this blockade, and if that requires the tearing down of your—” Ah. Wrought? Well, duh. Erick stopped speaking in Ecks, and started talking in Ancient Script, “Hello. I would like to pass your blockade, please.”

One of the guardians looked to him, and this time there was an intelligence behind his eyes as he spoke, “Password?”

… Not much of an intelligence.

Erick couldn’t help but be a bit sarcastic, “I’ll clear this entire tunnel of monsters for you, if that’s what it takes to gain entry.”

“Invalid password. Remove yourself from this area.” The guardian mechanically said, “Do not attempt to cross our blockade or we will respond with violence.”

Erick tried again, “I seek entry into the lands beyond.”

“Invalid password. Remove yourself from this—”

“Yadda yadda yadda.” Erick tried, “Kill all elves!”

“Invalid password. Rem—”

“Triumph of Light!”

“Invalid pass—”

“Suck my dick!”

“Invalid pas—”

“I’ll suck your dick!”

“Invalid pass—”

“Perhaps fuck you in the pussy?”

“Inval—

“I’ll destroy every single one of you!”

“Hostilities detected.”

Erick smiled. A change!

The guardian spoke, “Remove yourself from our vicinity or prepare to meet Rozeta in person.”

“Already met her! Several times.” Erick said, “Pretty cool lady. By the way: I think you stole my magic. How the FUCK do you have [Luminous Beam]?”

The closest guardian began charging; its eye-for-a-head glowing brighter and whiter. This was completely for show, of course. Erick had seen the thing and its cousins instantly fire off [Luminous Beam]s many times already.

Erick wondered if he was being stupid, or if he was just too fed up to care. Could he think about passwords for a bit, and possibly guess the correct one? Likely not.

So Erick stared down the guardians. He held his ground, three kilometers away, glaring at the automaton and four of its neighbors. [Luminous Beam] could hit several kilometers away, but it was best within 100 meters. It’d still do damage at this distance, though, for sure!

If Erick let it.

But [Luminous Beam] was just light and light byproducts.

Erick dropped his [Greater Lightwalk]. He suspended himself in the air with Ophiel’s spellwork, and protections. And then he turned on his own [Physical Domain] instead of using Ophiel’s. [Lodestar] and [Physical Domain] would be enough. These two spells could influence light from two different directions; one Elemental, one physical.

The guardian spoke, “Leave.”

Erick responded, “Fuck you.”

[Luminous Beam]s erupted out of the eyes of the ‘charging’ guardian and four of his neighbors like five directed geysers of white light. They left the Domain of the guardians, and struck the edge of Erick’s power.

And Erick shut them off.

Discord turned half of the light inside out, one half canceling the other. Beta and alpha decay particles turned into twinkling glitters that showered toward Erick, but spun off in every other direction except forward, looking like air bubbles at the base of waterfalls. Erick had never needed to shut off his own [Luminous Beam]s like this before, but he had made the damned spell, and he knew exactly how it worked. Whoever stole this power from him—

Erick held back the guardians’ attacks like he held back his anger. Whoever made this here was probably just some wrought who got Particle Mage because it was the newest, best thing, and then they replaced some normal defenses that were always here. And that was fine. Erick could forgive that.

But an unmanned blockade that killed whoever tried to cross it?

Or worse: A purposefully hostile blockade.

Rage flooded through Erick’s brain like an ocean turning red.

As the enemy Beams ended, Erick spoke with power, “I’m going through this blockade whether you like it or not, so turn off your toys if you don’t want them erased.”

Several more [Luminous Beam]s shot Erick’s way from the seven nearest guardians. He turned them all aside. The monsters near to him began to squawk and roar and slither in agitation as the guardians kept casting at Erick, filling the cavern with bright light. Some of those monsters looked ready to attack the guardians alongside Erick. Some looked ready to eat him after the guardians softened him up. Others ran.

Erick didn’t want to do this, but he did anyway.

[Undertow Star].

Up above, inside Erick’s power and well within range of the guardians, a star began to form. A drop of pure white light sent out inky blackness that was barely visible against the rainbow gloom, but that darkness became visible soon enough. Erick reached forward with his Star, designating the guardians as enemies.

Uh. Failure.

Bah!

Minor twisters of shadow and light impacted the gathered domain of every single guardian half a kilometer away from the target and was rebuffed. [Undertow Star] failed to reach the enemy.

Fine.

Nearby monsters began to screech. Some took to the sky to get away from the conflict. Some ran at their neighbors, and started to fight those neighbors. Some took the exact opposite approach and attacked the guardians on the other side of the cavern, opposite the mana stream from Erick. No one attacked him, though… Aside from the guardians. Apparently the ones that had been looking at him like he was weak were thinking better of that idea.

Nine guardians fired nine beams at Erick, striking his [Physical Domain]. Erick sunk their power into nothing much easier this time, turning light and radiation into scattered sparkles that never got anywhere near him.

Erick thought back to how Ava, the Sewermaster at Candlepoint, spoke of how she had lived in the Underworld, protecting her people from monsters for her entire long, long life, and how the only real problems with living down here were the wrought. They controlled trade routes and patrolled close to the Core so that no one could ever get down here to kill the monsters and gain these high levels. Ava spoke of how the wrought said they prevented people from coming down here for their own good, but Erick was clearly here, and there were no fucking wrought, and the defenses were automated…

So was Ava lying?

Or was Ava being dramatic?

Insular and haughty, the wrought never allowed strangers in their home geodes. They had even sent Erick an invitation to their embassy that was situated outside of their major city, Stratagold; they would not have allowed him inside.

So.

Was there some gods-damned immortal asshole on the other side of these guardians, watching this happen, wondering how far Erick could go against this blockade? Wondering if their own stolen power could stack up to the creator of said power? Probably so.

Erick spoke, and his Domain spoke with him, “I’m going to break your toys now.”

He turned off his [Undertow Star] and let his [Physical Domain] expand, all around, brushing up against everything. He kept it strong against the guardians in front, but he did not press forward; he did not attempt to break them yet and they were not able to break him, for he flowed with their stolen light, swallowing their brightness and turning it to nothing. His Domain expanded in every other direction, though, vibrating hard as it brushed up against the larger monsters who stupidly remained nearby, sending them into an unexpected panic.

They did not fight Erick’s encroachment; they fled.

Amplify filled all of Erick’s aura, the entire thing, except for a small portion around himself that he kept safe with Normalize. Ophiel flocked to this inner protection, keeping their sunforms strong and solid around Erick as Erick turned his Domain to Harmony.

Twenty one, then twenty three [Luminous Beam]s vanished into swallowing, chiming power. Soon, the spells of the guardians were but tracer rounds in a tunnel full of thunder. Back and forth, power built.

White light flickered magenta, as though not fully willing to start; not without more time, and more pressure. But every roar, every screech, every rockfall and breaking body added to the noise, and the noise only grew. White light flexed, breaking molecular bonds, creating plasma in spurts and fits until suddenly turning all of Erick’s [Physical Domain] from white to magenta in a single flashing moment.

Rocks broke from the ground, shattering into sand that floated in the sky. Boulders lifted from the breaking cavern and became rocks that shattered further into sand.

Erick could barely see, but he could still see well enough as his Domain shattered the world right out from underneath himself and the guardians—

And the guardians held. Stone reassembled under them. Their Domain pressed against Erick’s, but the guardians did not physically move against him. They did not put real pressure on him, and that preserved distance would be their undoing—

The guardians switched tactics. They began to move forward. Every single guardian took a single step into the tunnel, pressing against every nearby monster, but mostly against Erick’s Domain like an inexorable glacier grinding down the world underneath its power. The [Luminous Beam]s did not stop; they came on even stronger. Closer.

Erick rapidly attempted an experiment he hadn’t tried before. He had four Ophiel drop their [Greater Lightwalk]s and turn on their [Physical Domain] alongside him. Power flooded out into the cavern, shoving back against the encroaching guardians like five extra hands to hold back a thousand; it was not enough.

On the other side of the cavern, a trio of opportunistic monsters launched spells at the guardians; fire, lightning, wind. They didn’t work together, but their power struck the guardians; burning, singeing, cutting. Tiny, barely-there wounds appeared across all of the white guardians. The guardians stopped advancing because of them; they stilled, and solidified their power instead of trying to break Erick.

It would have to be enough. Erick focused his power with his Ophiels, attempting a cooperative cast for the first time. This was probably the wrong time to try this experiment, but Erick knew all the theory. He only needed to put that theory into practice—

Blood poured out of Erick from every orifice and one Ophiel popped as he tried to organize the harmony. He did not stop. He had another Ophiel take over for the popped one and—

It clicked.

Suddenly, in the middle of a maelstrom of flashing, breaking sound, sky, and cavern, Erick linked with his Ophiel, and his Ophiel linked with him in a way they never had before.

It was simple, once he figured it out.

Pure physical power washed outward like a wave of magenta light, blasting into the lands, breaking the world, striking the guardians—

The guardians were an inviolable wall of power, but Erick and his Ophiel smashed into the wall, and that ultimate defense began to chip. Here and there, Erick gained ground. Cracks appeared across the skins of the guardians. Silver blood flowed from sudden wounds. Eyes burst—

Erick broke the wall.

And the wall, once so solid, became wet paper.

Magenta light blasted outward from him and his Ophiel.

The ground fully dropped out from under him, ripping away into sand and then into nothing. Breaking harmony crashed all the way up into the other side of the cavern as magenta power tore in every direction, but mainly forward, evaporating the cloudwall. Power pressed backward into the monsters in the cavern and Kill Notifications spread across Erick’s sight; seen and then ignored.

Erick felt the world through his expanded [Physical Domain], and he felt nothing; no threats, no danger, no stone cavern floor, no continuance of the cavern beyond. No Domains encroached. Nothing survived. Maintaining the link with Ophiel was a joy, though, so he let their power flow a bit more…

But that was enough.

He pulled himself back.

Ophiel disengaged—

Erick winced in pain and Ophiel squawked in phantom feeling as the deeper connection between them returned to something so very shallow by comparison. Their [Physical Domain]s began to interfere, so Erick turned off Ophiels’. Slowly, but quickly, and expanding like a bubble away from himself, Erick turned his surroundings from Amplified Harmony, into Normalized space. And then he turned off his [Physical Domain] and turned on [Greater Lightwalk].

As light returned to his eyes and he could better see through his own senses, he saw the remains of the cavern. He had broken a lot of it. He now hovered in the middle of empty space, below the disturbed-but-reforming mana stream, and in the center of a twenty kilometer scoop of land removed from the world. Everything Erick and Ophiel had touched, they turned to dust and then to mana to join the stream, or perhaps something else had happened, but the stone was simply gone.

And the surviving monsters were quicker on the uptake than Erick. They were already pouring up and out of the broken land—

Erick was too busy to care about those monsters this very second. He turned away from the cavern, to gaze upon that which he had already seen, which had demanded his complete attention. He wasn’t sure where to start understanding what lay before him.

The Core of Veird.

It had to be the Core; there was no other explanation.

It filled half of the world with blue; the most brilliant blue that Erick had ever seen. It was beautiful. It was massive. And yet it was more than that; more than anything his mind could understand with just one glance, or just one stare.

Erick blinked, feeling like minutes had passed gazing at the Core, but he had only been staring for seconds, at the most. He began to break down what he was seeing into actionable intelligence. The Core was, beyond its beauty, a planet-sized entity, with a curvature similar to Earth. Or perhaps it was the size of a moon? Who knew!

There were no clouds upon that blue surface, set hundreds of kilometers away from the interior surface that spread out left, right, front, and back, but there were clouds in the sky all around Erick, between the interior surface of Veird, and the Core.

The Core was like an ocean, and yet it was not. That part got Erick the most, he was sure.

Behind Erick, down below, or above, or whatever, the mana stream from the cavern poured across the sky, down, down, into the Core, like a waterfall, passing into the far distance, becoming smaller than a single thread before it touched down upon the blue surface. The thick, rainbow air twisted into the Core, passing inside without interruption upon that ever-blue surface.

That single mana stream was one of thousands to reach across the gap, between Veird and manaminer, to plunge into the Core, and vanish.

Erick tore his eyes away from the ‘sky’, and looked around, trying to make sense of the rest of this strange land.

It was a world inverted. Mountains, rivers, forests and plains, oceans —actual, real oceans, too— and ponds. Continents. Islands. Everything else in between. Real water poured down falls on mountains, plunging to lakes, inverted. A nearby rainforest displayed —yes, displayed— fruits of every color of the rainbow, and flowers to match. The air smelled of life. Small mammals and dinosaurs and cows were down there, living and existing, except for where Erick had carved a massive hole in the ground. Those that survived Erick’s destruction rushed to get away from whatever further destruction might come. The birds had already taken to the air; Erick imagined they would be chirping and singing if not for his intrusion.

And it was all visible. While the Core had a curvature, this ‘Underside’ of Veird had a concave, inverted curvature, and Erick could actually see the oceans and continents and islands of this place as they stretched out along the interior, rising ‘up’ in every direction. Erick gazed all around, and saw cities, too.

There was no darkness in this land; all was light.

The Core might have been an ocean to match half of what floated above it, but the core shed light like an everburning sun. And it was brilliant.

Erick’s stepped up into the air, further inward —or upward?— to get a better look, moving closer to the Core, and thus down, but—

From higher up, he saw cities on mountainsides and upon plains and on islands and a lot more besides, but mostly, he witnessed the mana streams flowing like waterfalls into the Core. And at the base of every stream, there was a valley, and in that valley, there were clouds. They were cloudgates, and they were everywhere. Every single cloudgate was at the bottom of a valley…

Hundreds of thousands of cloudgates, for thousands of kilometers in every direction, and from each one, rose a mana stream.

The only mana stream missing a cloudgate was right below Erick, where he had smashed the gate wide open. Erick had broken a piece of paradise and let in the monsters. He watched as a vine-thing of black bark crawled into the white light of the blue Core, and instantly started chasing down easy prey; a cow on a broken meadow of wildflowers and grass.

But the prey vanished into nothing, escaping the monster without issue.

It was good to know that some of the animals had some defenses, but...

Erick frowned.

He waited a beat for the defenders of this land to show up. To announce with blaring trumpets and booming warnings. To simply appear, and defend. But none of that happened. Someone had to live here, though... Right?

A second monster flew out of the hole, followed rapidly by a rushing third.

Uh.

The cities did not sound for war. Guardians did not jump out of the clouds above. And monsters began to pour into this idyllic land. The animals down below had no defense against these Domain-wielding monsters except to simply vanish, which they did in abundance. Before they vanished, though, Erick noticed that they were animals, for sure. Not a single core amongst any of them. Erick doubted a single one of those cute animals was strong enough to take on the danger Erick had allowed into this space—

No. This didn’t make sense.

Surely this place had better defenses than this?

What the fuck was going on here?

Erick briefly studied the monsters coming in, watching as ten of them rapidly moved into the space. Those ten were but the herald to the actual flood. The ones racing inside quickly realized that they couldn’t kill anything, so they didn’t; they had other tasks, anyway. The vine-like black bark monster raced right past a particularly juicy cow, while the cow vanished from sight. The monster didn’t care about the cow, or about the mice or other small, quickly-vanishing animals; it raced across the land. It had a goal.

In the distance, in the monster’s direction, lay another cloudgate.

With that, Erick rapidly understood the trajectory of every monster. Every single one was each individually aiming for the other cloudgates. Thirty of them were already in the Forest and all of them were headed in different directions. Some of them flew directly at the Core itself...

“Nope,” Erick said.

And then he got to work.

- - - -

An hour and a half and 176 monster kills later…

Erick stood at the side of the cloudgate he had destroyed. The land around him was burned and blasted and broken from all of the recent fights, but most of the damage to the cloudgate and the surrounding land was still because of Erick’s (and Ophiel’s) [Physical Domain]. Erick had basically shaken the world apart, and it showed. Boulders were strewn inside new, craggy valleys, while a formerly idyllic creek flowed water past the edge of a former lake, only to form a messy, muddy pond inside the broken cavern. Erick had yet another moment of surrealness as he gazed upon a right-angle bend in the stream. Gravity was wonky down here, for sure.

He turned his attention back to the greater problem of the hole. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do about this, to stop the ingress of monsters. Perhaps he could plant a Yggdrasil here and hope for the best?

But as time passed, and as the fighting slowed, Erick witnessed the cavern walls begin to mend on their own.

A flush of relief passed from Erick’s shoulders to his toes; he hadn’t broken anything too badly. In another two hours the cavern might even be fully repaired. But that left the problem of the cloudgate itself. Erick had no idea what to do about that. Perhaps he would have to put Yggdrasil here if nothing came to fix the barrier.

Whatever the case, Erick would probably end up killing another hundred monsters as they continued to rush the opening this entire time, trying to get into the land beyond. Even knowing that Erick was up here, even seeing him in the air, and knowing what he had done to every single other monster that came this way, the monsters still came. Erick wanted to call them insane, but they obviously weren’t; or at least they weren’t frothing at the mouth and fighting without regard for themselves.

They were getting sneakier about their invasion. It would have been a problem if Ophiels weren’t positioned everywhere, each with a [Physical Domain] wide open, allowing Erick to ‘feel’ out whatever monsters came through, even if the individual monsters were too small, or too far away, or too hidden to see with all his other senses—

As he had that thought, yet another monster tried to skirt him as he stood there in the sky between the cavern and the Core. This one was another plant-monster, but made of illusions. It slipped through the dirt, trying to remain invisible, but Erick lightstepped toward the monster, directly into the monster’s path. A seemingly quiet stretch of land erupted with twisting vines and fire, trying to immolate him as the monster split in two; one to stay and fight and the other to escape into the paradise all around.

Erick killed both and had to vaporize the remains because it just wouldn’t stay dead otherwise.

He was level 96 now. He returned to the sky over the cavern. He waited.

Another hour passed and another hundred monsters came and died, for though the main army had come through there were always more. The steady stream of attackers never truly stopped, even after the monsters had more than enough land to call their own inside the cavern. They all wanted into this place, and the reason for this desire did escape Erick. Perhaps it was easier for them to soak up mana in this paradise? Or perhaps the stories were true, and the monsters all hated the Script with a fiery passion, and they wanted to come in here and destroy the Core? Melemizargo might be to blame for these suicidal monsters, but he did not show, to help the monsters in their goal, so Erick had no way to know.

Whatever the case, Erick simply didn’t feel like letting the monsters inside this land, and so he stopped their ingress, and that was enough for him. Another hour passed with Erick recasting his [Personal Ward] in the meantime, while he waited for the cavern to repair itself. The beveled edge and most of the cavern beyond had repaired itself in the last ten minutes, so it would be just a few more minutes before—

The beveled edge of the cavern settled itself with a flash of white light, passing across the ground like the sheen of a [Personal Ward] turning on. And then the light settled, and vanished, exactly like a [Personal Ward]. And then a calm mist began to roll up from the paradise jungle all around. Erick stepped into the sky to get a better view of what was happening. After a moment of watching he understood what was happening. He was happy to discover that he wouldn’t need to guard this gate forever.

The other nearby cloudgates, dozens of kilometers away, sent streamers of fog across the land, like white wind. Those clouds joined the mist already flowing out from the nearby plants of this paradise, to filter into the cavern, to fill in the beveled edge of the tunnel, and then stabilize, becoming a cloying fogbank.

Monsters still tried to bust through that fog, though Erick only needed to deal with a few before he wasn’t needed anymore. Suddenly, small guardians stepped out of the clouds, onto the bevel, and began ruthlessly murdering every encroaching monster with copious amounts of [Luminous Beam]. A few of the guardians died to claw and fang and spell, but the ones that survived grew with every passing second. Without warning, their Sharing Domain appeared across the entire remaining guardian force, linking them to each other and to the rapidly closing clouds. And that was the end of their losses.

Erick stepped back, back into the sky, further away from the clouds. He watched as the clouds swirled and piled upon each other, almost occluding sight of the tunnel, and of the fights on the other side. But another sneaky monster got past the guardians by flying close to the mana stream. Such a tactic wasn’t good enough. All that chimeric monster managed to do was strike head-first into the rapidly closing clouds. The guardians on the other side switched to targeting the chimera, their [Luminous Beam]s coming in from ten different sides—

And that was all Erick saw of that. The clouds swirled together, closing off the tunnel of monsters from paradise. The mana stream in the center was the only thing to get through the barrier, anymore. It flowed directly up and out of the cloudgate; a shimmering, inverted waterfall of thick, rainbow air.

Erick waited there, in the air beyond the cloudgate, for something else to happen. For some breakthrough monster. For Melemizargo himself to appear. But as minutes passed, the cloudgate stabilized even more. The nearby forest was already mostly regrown across the formerly destroyed land. Birds appeared in the sky, flying free like nothing had happened. Mice and deer and cows came back to paradise, stepping out from behind nothing, simply appearing out of nowhere.

This paradise was strange, in a lot of ways. This land enforced order upon the world, and upon itself. Perhaps it created life, too. Or maybe it just allowed life to hide whenever that life wanted to hide.

Erick saw no people, though, but perhaps the people were simply hiding, too.

A city of pink stone clung to that mountain over there, but Erick had not seen any people at all so far. Erick wasn’t sure about anything at the moment, but he would find out. If nothing else, this land was a lot calmer than everywhere else. Perhaps he could actually rest for a while? That might be nice. He had been going strong for at least two days, but it might have been longer. But then again, perhaps everything here was a lie, and some strange force was just waiting for Erick to lower his guard.

He’d find out if that was the case, too.

Erick stepped higher into the sky to get a better look at everything. The inverted world rose up in the distance like he was at the bottom of an impossibly large bowl. Yet again, Erick marveled at it all. The sheer size of it! The scattered cities and mountain ranges and forests and plains and coastlines and oceans were all so distant that they all but disappeared behind the depth of air, and wispy clouds, long before the horizon of the Core obscured everything beyond its absolute blueness.

Erick turned around a few times, looking for a suitable target. He found one; a city of silver upon a mountain in the distance. It was one of the smaller places within view, but it wasn’t too small. It would serve.

- - - -

The small silver village was rather perfect for ten or so families and their farming and living needs. It was completely devoid of active life while simultaneously showing all the signs that people did, indeed, live here. Other than that incongruity, Erick could easily see himself living here if he had no other obligations.

The streets were solid silver stones, while the walls were silver-flecked stone, and the roofs were of pure silver. Despite the odd building material, the style seemed very ‘desert-like’, with little in the way of adornment and with an eye toward the thickness of walls for temperature control. This place certainly didn’t look like it needed thick walls for defense, for there was absolutely no nod toward that aspect of life, at all. No walls around the place. No barriers anywhere. This place could have been a village back on a mountain on Earth, actually. Perhaps somewhere in Japan, or in the mountains of North Carolina.

Rain seemed to be a concern, though Erick saw no rain clouds anywhere in the inverted sky, and he could see pretty darned far. An affectation, perhaps? Whatever the case, the roofs had architecturally beautiful gutters, with curled corners and sculpted downspouts in the shapes of fish.

The town had more water concerns than non-existent rain, though, for silver stone waterways followed alongside main street and two of the side streets, serving as waterways for a creek. Every house in the town even had a little watering hole beside their house where the creek swirled deep and fish held steady. Small grasses grew in those deeper spots.

The source of the creek was a beautiful little pond above the city, while a little further up the mountain lay the spring. The whole water system was obviously well tended, with little shrines all throughout the village itself, but up here were many more shrines, alongside little flower beds growing the most beautiful, fragrant red flowers.

Erick tried not to smell the flowers. He had been in full sunform this whole time, approaching this place like it was a trap. His sunform had not faltered. He had not returned to his physical body. But he could still smell the flowers. They were red splashes of life against the green and blues and silvers of the land.

From everything Erick could see, with all his sights and his Domain of Light gently touching everything, and with what his Ophiel were reporting, the flowers didn’t seem dangerous, and this land was clear of people.

He didn’t believe any of that for a single second.

Erick spoke, “Nice pond.”

He waited a beat.

Nothing happened.

He turned and went back to the center of the village where he tested the waters by turning back into his physical form. Still, nothing happened.

“Okay then.”

Erick contemplated what he was going to do, now. First, he was starting to feel funny, but this was due to exhaustion.

… He checked himself a few times to make sure that what he was feeling was, for sure, exhaustion. And it was. Almost immediately following that series of thoughts Erick decided that he was hungry, and this place was loaded, and he was going to eat something good, dammit. [Cleanse] had turned nothing to thick air, after all. So now, it was time to feast.

His first stop was by the bakery, which was probably more like the house of a neighborhood granny who made bread out of everyone’s flour. The baker, whoever they were, had many different breads sitting beside the window and Erick copied a nice, big loaf. It was soft. It was delicious. Erick saw another target, and after another [Cleanse] check, he copied some cheeses and meats that had been inside the kitchen of a house across the street. He grabbed a great big beer mug and copied it, then he copied a keg from a brewer who was obviously brewing as a hobby.

It was so very, very good.

Erick ate copies of every single thing in the entire village that looked even remotely delicious, from the cookies out of one jar to the honey cakes from the village elder’s big house at the end of the main street. He even sampled a copy of the most expensive-looking wine in the cellar of the elder’s house.

Occasionally, he left behind an extra copy of what he found delicious. The elder didn’t get a copy of their wine, but they did get a double copy of the keg of beer from the microbrewer. That beer maker got four copies of their well-made beer, because it was the best damned thing Erick had ever tasted…

Or perhaps he was simply overindulging after at least three days of the most hellish, grueling, personal disaster he had ever had to walk through. He had let much of the danger of the last few days wash over him by simply killing everything more, and harder, with bigger explosions of light and as much personal strength as he could muster, but it had been tough. He had almost died a hundred times. No one else he knew would have survived that—

Maybe the Headmaster could make it down here. But. No? That guy had Scion of Willpower, if the stories were to be believed. He would lose steam rather fast if he had to go through all of those monsters like Erick had… But maybe Kirginitharp could? What the fuck did Erick know? Not much, when he really thought about it.

Maybe Killzone could make it? Erick didn’t know too much about that guy.

Jane would have died. No Domain meant death down here.

But maybe none of them could have made it, either. Erick had encountered not a single wrought in that entire tunnel, and he had expected to see someone, but there had been no one. Not a single person! Maybe no one in their right mind ever ventured into that series of tunnels. Maybe Erick had been dropped into a true death zone.

And yet, he survived. He made it here. How? Strength, he supposed. But then again he cheated, too. There were not many spells like [Luminous Beam], after all. Nothing had any truly good defenses against the magics he made, because they had never before existed on Veird. He had invented that new, physical spell, himself! And even when he encountered the guardians using [Luminous Beam] against him, Erick was able to overcome that, too, because he knew how the spell worked.

How long had those guardians been using [Luminous Beam]? Did some wrought make those guardians and give them Erick’s spell? Or did Rozeta make those guardians and give them Erick’s spells, because they were damned good spells that broke everything they were pointed at?

Ahh…

Exhaustion.

He was tired.

He wanted to sleep.

Erick stumbled a bit as he walked down the gently curving street. He wasn’t drunk. He wasn’t even buzzed. He was too high strung at the moment and maybe, possibly, this land wasn’t a trap. Maybe he could let down his guard. This certainly seemed like paradise. There was certainly some fuckery going on with animals vanishing when they were threatened, and coming back out when they were not, and maybe that extended to the people who lived here, but there was nothing Erick could do about that.

If any unseen onlooker wanted him dead, he was absolutely sure that they could do that. The people here had to have defenders, right? Hidden defenders?

Whatever.

Sleep.

He needed sleep.

Erick stopped in the center of the main street, and spoke to the air, “Terribly sorry for my uninvited intrusion. I will not bother you overlong. If you have something you want more of, leave it by the door by the bed I choose to sleep in… Wherever that might be.” He looked around and spotted his target. “That house will do. If the occupants object, tell me now, or forever hold your peace.”

Erick waited a beat.

Nothing happened.

Erick walked over and entered the chosen house, saying, “I appreciate your hospitality. Have a keg of beer as a gift.” He set down the keg he was carrying and went to his chosen room.

The house was comfortably sized, with three bedrooms and a main living room; it was certainly not the elder’s big house at the end of the street, with obvious guest rooms and pre-heated hot tubs and silk sheets on their cloud-like beds. This room was more comfortable, and more easily defended, which is why Erick picked this smaller place.

He even chose the room near the back, because it had a small window overlooking a small backyard, and the room was unadorned with any personal effects, unlike the other two rooms, and unlike almost every other room in the small silver village. Those other rooms had small paintings of people and charms with names on them and clothes in dressers and in closets. But this room seemed like a guest room; it was practically empty of all personal effects.

Whatever the case, the bed was fantastic. This was not unusual, though. It seemed every bed in this entire village was as comfortable as a dense cloud. This particular example of finery had nice sheets, too, and nice pillows, though they were not silk. They were simple cotton, which was much more Erick’s style. The door to the room was as thick as any other door in any other house, but most rooms in most houses didn’t have doors, and there were no locks anywhere. The people of this village gave a nod toward privacy, but not any care at all toward security.

After placing some [Prismatic Ward]s with Ophiel (enough to alert Jane and others up top that he was alive) and [Cleanse]ing himself, Erick sat on the bed. He breathed out. In a flashing moment, he realized that he was glad that he was out of that cavern. Really glad. Fantastically happy to be out of that rainbow gloom.

Erick laid down on the bed and sighed. He brushed away some stress tears, wondering what everyone else was doing, wondering how long it had been since he had seen Jane, wondering about lost time, and about accidentally turning into a monster—

That last one was both a figurative and literal worry. Erick checked himself for rads hourly, and he continued to do so all the while he was in that prismatic gloom. He had often needed to pluck those poisons from his body before they got too big, or too close to his heart. Having a [Personal Ward] active helped to prevent some rad formation, but not all.

It hadn’t been too painful to rip them from his body every hour, but changing half to light and half to physical was tricky and there was blood involved. He didn’t simply just rip them out from his chest like he did that one time, back with the orcols and the shadelings at Treehome; he had learned a bit better since then.

Erick sighed.

As he lay there on that strange bed, covered in protective spells but feeling more exposed than ever, Erick had more thoughts. He needed to find a spot for Yggdrasil, tomorrow. He probably could have done that tonight and slept atop his defensive [Familiar] instead of here, wherever ‘here’ was, but who knew what would happen if he tried to summon Yggdrasil in this land. Would Yggdrasil drain Erick of everything he had, again? Would it be worse this time? It would probably be worse—

No. It definitely would be worse.

Erick would worry about that tomorrow. The summoning would be worse, but he could deal with that. For now, Erick metaphorically tucked his worries into bed; they would keep till tomorrow. Maybe after some sleep he’d be able to handle his worries better. Maybe. Probably.

He closed his eyes—

He shot up in bed and—

Nothing… Nothing was there. He was safe. Even with the invisible intangible people all around, looking at him… Honestly, aside from the clues that people lived here, there was nothing telling him that people actually lived here. Nothing moved when he wasn’t looking, and that was a big clue that he might be safe.

Maybe he was being too paranoid—

Nope. He wasn’t being paranoid at all. The animals were clearly capable of turning immaterial. The people could probably do this, too.

So Erick glanced at the window, and at the nothing out there, and he spoke to the air, “If you have something you want me to copy, please leave it outside. I have to sleep, and I would appreciate some privacy. Good night.”

He laid down.

Eventually, he slept.

- - - -

Ophiel watched.

- - - -

Erick woke up with a shaking start, slamming on his lightform. He endured the passing of another Script Second, then he turned on his [Lodestar]. Nothing attacked in the meantime, and as more and more nothing happened, Erick’s mind settled down. He glanced through his Ophiel and saw the world around him.

Nothing had changed.

Nothing was on fire.

All was well with the world.

And not a single thing had moved from where he had put it. The extra keg of beer in the front room was still there. The copied foods were still out in the village where Erick had found them. Nothing had been placed in front of his closed door.

A bird twittered again outside Erick’s window—

Ah. The bird had woken him. Or, more accurately, Ophiel’s interest in the bird’s melodic chirping had bled into Erick and that had woken him. Erick returned to his physical form and sat back down onto the bed—

His [Personal Ward] was gone and his bladder and the rest of his digestive tract was very full. Bloated. Not sick, though. Just… Not the best. A recast of his defenses made him feel a bit better, but only after going out into the forest and doing his morning routine did he feel like a person again. He would have used a bathroom inside the village, but for some reason, that seemed too much.

With head held high, Erick lightstepped back into town. Nothing had killed him in the middle of the night. So…

This was fine?

Erick decided to start the morning off right. It was time to use the hot tubs at the elder’s mansion, and to partake of all the guest food laid out for all the non-apparent guests.

- - - -

Soaking in perpetually hot water while drinking tea and eating a lime scone, Erick let some of his worries float away on the gentle steam that lifted from the massive hot tub.

Erick had actually dreamed of having a hot tub for a while. Ever since he landed on Veird and realized getting a hot tub was not only possible, but that it was easy, too. All he had to do was actually go through the trouble to make one. Why hadn’t he? No idea.

Perhaps there had been no need. And it would have been odd, anyway. Everyone in Spur used the Baths when they wanted to enjoy a dip, and who was Erick to want to have his own, private space? A deviant, for sure.

The baths of Spur had hot tubs aplenty along with communal baths and pools in their warehouse-sized location. Erick had only gone there once, though. He had been too shy about his ‘dad bod’ when compared to everyone else. Now, though? Now he had a quite fantastic body —as Linxel could attest— but Erick still couldn’t go to the baths because it would be embarrassing for a whole host of different reasons. With his Vitality and Blessing of Rozeta his body did a lot of teenage-like things these days and he did not need to experience that particular trauma ever again.

Ah. So many little, large traumas. So little time to get over them all.

Anyway.

The view from the elder mansion’s hot tub was magnificent. This hot tub was obviously made for comfort, with its angled walls and in-built stone seating, and to show off the mountainside beyond the village. This room was half exposed to the open air, with fragrant flowers planted in a stone garden right outside that added a floral ambiance to the experience. Beyond all that, the forested mountain dropped away to a deep, forested valley. The view of the other mountains and of the gentle rise in the land was mostly unobstructed.

Past the nearest lands lay a minor ocean, and a string of islands, along with a particularly large cloudgate. Perhaps the elder had built this house in this way to view the cloudgate in the distance? It was a nice view, even knowing that there were a fuckton of monsters on the other side of that barrier, waiting to break through and invade this paradise.

Erick turned his attention back to the strings of islands out there. Maybe Yggdrasil would like to be on an island? He probably would, if it was freshwater. Saltwater? Maybe not so much. The saltwater of Veird wasn’t as salty as the saltwater of Earth, but it still had a salt content to it that could be uncomfortable for most trees.

Erick would check on all that soon enough, when he was ready to endure whatever trauma that would bring. But for now… The scent of morning filled his senses, and it was good.

He still wondered about the people who lived here. But… Maybe no one lived here?

One odd, telling thing that Erick had noticed, but somewhat foolishly disregarded until now, was that the manasphere of this place was different from the manasphere of the Surface, or the Underworld. The usual eyes and mouths and dangers visible in the ethereal swirls and flows of the mana were not present down here. The manasphere here was clean. It was completely empty of ‘psychic impressions’, if you wanted to call them that.

Erick had never heard anyone call those illusions ‘psychic impressions’, but as he had that strange thought, calling them psychic impressions seemed appropriate, so that’s what he would call them.

With this new intrigue on his mind, Erick sent Ophiels to look at the world while he had another copy of a scone. Was this entire land clear of psychic impressions? Soon, Erick found out that his casual observation proved to be true everywhere he looked. Even the animals that came and went from reality like they were slipping through dimensions did not leave impressions on the manasphere.

… Hmm. Dimensions, eh?

But Dimensional Magic was Banned? Capital ‘B’ Banned, too. One of the three Foundational Bans of the Script. Dimensional; Banned to prevent another Sundering. Infinitesimal; Banned to prevent the direct manipulation of mana. And Propagation; Banned to prevent spellwork from spreading past the initial cast.

Hmm.

Ah. Well. Whatever.

But that led Erick to another thought about mana; about his mana sense.

Erick decided to do something that he probably should have done last night, before he went to bed. He pushed his mana sense outward, then sideways. He glanced to the past, and saw a world unchanging until his own arrival. The bread from the granny remained in the window. The beer from the brewer remained where Erick had found it…

Huh.

Odd.

With a bit of stress, Erick pushed his sight into the distant past, glancing everywhere. He saw himself asleep for what he gauged to be nearly a full day, which was a bit much, but he guessed he needed it. He also saw that this village had been the exact same for at least a month... Unchanging. Clothes remained where they were to this day. The hot tub remained hot for all time.

Erick pushed his sense to two months ago.

Erick sat up in the hot tub.

Teressa could manually [Witness] to two months into the past, no problem, and further than that with all the various techniques she was still mastering. But Erick topped out at a month. At least he had topped out at a month; that was before he came here. This personal limitation was because of all the interference of moving people and shifting magics and all that stuff all interfered with [Witness], and Erick wasn’t that good at that spellcraft just yet. But here, in this village?

There was no interference.

The manasphere was clean.

Erick gazed back three months, and then four, and then five. Eight months; that was as far into the past as he could see. Beyond that it was like looking out across this inverted world and trying to see a distant continent through thousands upon thousands of kilometers of air; the natural density of that air and the random clouds that held in the air prevented all sight.

Nothing had changed in this land in the last 8 months. Probably a lot longer than that, too.

Erick looked at his ‘freshly baked scone’ and the ‘fresh tea’ and the ‘clean, hot water’ in the tub.

Was this shit actually ancient?

… Well, Erick’s copies weren’t. He had another bite. It was a pretty good scone.