Chapter 559

Nick layered the cloak’s enchantments over his suppression, then expanded the domain of imperceptibility to encompass the tall cow-kin at his side. It was a tight fit, given how much larger she was, but he made it work.

He certainly had the mana to spare. What a wonderful thing. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it.

They walked back through the tunnels to the upper dungeon unmolested, as even the minor elementals flitting about couldn’t sense him if he didn’t want them to.

The Vael mages remained clustered around their extraction arrays, arguing over the optimal angles to carve a particularly rich vein of crystals.

Nick and Bora passed within arm’s reach of a green-robed enchanter, leaving them oblivious to their exit.

All the while, Bora looked around in fascination. She was skilled in stealth herself, which gave her enough insight to realize how ridiculous what they were doing was.

Stepping out of the yawning cavern mouth, they found the temperature had risen to only chilly. They kept going a while longer, and only when the first few trees covered them did Bora step out of his protective field, securing the sealed parchment in her spatial pouch.

She offered a respectful nod that carried more meaning than any words could, then turned westward, her long strides carrying her quickly over the rocky ridge.

Nick watched her disappear, then pivoted on his heel and plunged back into the darkness.

He bypassed the busy intersection where the Vael mages had set up, slipping back down the ‘dead end’ until he reached the spot where Bora had fought the second Guardian, then slipped into the narrow fault line she had pointed out.

The fissure dropped sharply, its walls closing in until his shoulders brushed the stone on both sides. He descended for twenty minutes before the passage widened into a bowl-shaped alcove, lit by a single cluster of violet crystals.

With no monsters nearby and the dungeon’s mana thick enough to mask his, Nick settled down.

Before hunting the next Guardian, he wanted to solidify his grasp of spatial spells. They were basic enough that a few uses were all he needed to smooth out the kinks, and the longer he spent in the dungeon, observing their effects, the better his understanding of what was required grew.

He selected a loose chunk of crystal from the floor and set it on the slab before him.

It’d be harder than mere rock, since it held enough mana to count as an enchanted object and was essentially like swinging a weighted sword to build muscle.

The crystal existed here, but his intent demanded it be there. He poured mana into the space around the rock, twisting it into the appropriate spellform, but didn’t activate it yet, instead taking a moment to gauge how it affected his target.

As expected, the mana within the crystal made things harder. Moving physical mass alone was easier than doing the same with energy, and he spent some time pushing and prodding his matrix until he felt it was stable enough to do the job.

His ring was essential to this endeavor. Without such a perfect example of spatial magic, he would have been left fumbling through trial and error, but since he could mold his mana into similar patterns, he had a new configuration in minutes.

A sharp crack echoed through the alcove. The crystal vanished and reappeared in its new position, clattering to the ground.

Nick repeated the process, moving the crystal back and forth, adjusting the distance, forcing his mind to acclimate to the coordinate transition.

Reality fought him, a persistent resistance that made his temples ache. He ignored it, refining the spellform and streamlining the pathways in his mind to reduce the cost until he knew the process well enough to do it without focusing so much.

It was still a far cry from his elemental magics, but it was progress.

That done, he moved on to the basic technique. Some might have thought him foolish for focusing on it any more after developing a better spell, but he remembered Raphael playing with it long after he should have left it behind. Since his biggest problem was control, rather than power, he felt that achieving proficiency with it, too, could only help.

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He extended his hands, focusing on the empty air between two stalagmites, and cast, compressing the distance and forcing space to buckle under his will. The air rippled, forming a lens that bent the crystals’ light.

Once it was clear it was working, he held the fold, testing the tension, learning exactly how much pressure reality could withstand before it shattered.

With his foundation stabilized, Nick sought to push the boundaries. Folding space brought two points together. Relocating an object bypassed the space between them. To create something he could use in battle, he needed to separate reality, severing the connection between two coordinates.

I won’t forget how lethal such spells could be anytime soon. Raphael was weaker than I, even in the Sunlands, but his magic only needed to strike once to bring our enemies low.

He focused on a bead of moisture gathering on the tip of a stalactite above him. The drop swelled at his command, broke free of the stone, and fell.

Nick channeled a razor-thin stream of spatial mana into the air beneath the falling water, seizing the fabric of space and pulling its edges apart. A thin crack appeared in the air.

For a moment, his focus stuttered, and he almost thought he heard whispers, but he quickly regained control and banished his fears. The Void might share some qualities with what he was doing, but it was a fundamentally different force.

The rift, which had been collapsing, quickly regained its structure as he focused on it. The water drop struck it and simply ceased to exist there, falling a foot lower into the void to splash against the floor.

He had created a localized tear, a momentary lapse in physical continuity. The mental drain was still far too high for such a basic spell, once again reminding him that he truly needed to get his hands on a beast with the right affinity, but he had enough power to spare.

Satisfied with his progress, Nick rose from the slab, brushed the dust from his coat, and continued his descent in search of the right prey.

Under normal circumstances, the Starlit Caves were already expansive. The dungeon's formation had warped them, stretching distances to impossible extremes.

Nick walked for miles, and the space grew increasingly surreal. He traversed spiral tunnels that looped back on themselves like a tangled ribbon, and crossed chasms where gravity pulled at a horizontal angle, forcing him to walk along the rock walls.

Throughout his descent, he studied the phenomena, learned what was possible with the right understanding, and tried to replicate the effects with his basic spells.

After his last attempt, which barely made a stone fall sideways, he set aside his experiments and prepared to welcome his newest challengers.

A pack of multi-legged hounds emerged from a field of warped stalagmites. Their hairless bodies were covered in a flexible, translucent hide that revealed the silvery musculature beneath. They had no eyes, relying instead on sensory organs clustered around their gaping, needle-filled maws.

As the first charged, its form blurred, bypassing the intervening twenty yards and materializing directly at Nick’s right, its jaws snapping shut on empty air as he casually stepped aside.

The beasts were naturally gifted with short-range relocation. Not teleportation, unfortunately, but he was clearly on the right track.

Nick caught it in a telekinetic vice and lifted it off the floor. The remaining five blinked across the cavern, appearing above and behind him in a coordinated ambush, forcing him to unleash a shockwave that shattered their fragile bone structures mid-air.

The broken bodies dropped to the stone, and notifications appeared in his mind’s eye; he waved them away after noticing he was nearing the next level.

He lowered the surviving hound, pinning it firmly against a flat rock. The creature thrashed, trying to shift position, but Nick flooded the area with dense mana, suppressing the attempt and locking the beast in place.

A thought was enough to form a scalpel of cutting winds over his index finger. He drew the blade down its chest, parting the translucent hide and peeling back the ribcage.

“Let’s see what makes you tick," he murmured, ignoring the howling. He wanted to understand the biological mechanics of a spatial shift. While the creature wasn’t wholly physical, it was still tethered to reality, so its body must interact with its abilities.

The core rested near the base of its throat, glowing with silvery light. Nick traced the mana channels radiating from the gem and found they were not linear. Instead, they formed complex loops, tying themselves into knots that forced the beast's energy to cross over itself.

It was, in essence, a biological representation of a spatial fold, an organic machine designed to slip through the cracks of reality without any true understanding of how it was doing it.

With a smile, he memorized the pathways’ structure, knowing the insight would prove invaluable to his progress. Once he was done, he severed the hound’s head with a flick of his wrist, ending its struggles, and harvested the cores from the pack.

They hovered around level fifty-five. Useful, but completely insufficient as fuel for a grafting ritual.

Still, he made sure to collect the bodies. Perhaps studying them once he got his affinity would tell him more. “At the very least, they should sell well. I know for a fact that creatures capable of spatial magic are in high demand because their bodies are used to create various artifacts.”

Nick traveled for another hour as the spatial warping grew so severe it induced a low-grade vertigo even in him, forcing him to levitate and rely on his esoteric senses. He descended a spiraling staircase of fractured bedrock, stepped through a natural archway, and entered the third Guardian's domain.

It has to be. The mana here is much denser.

Gravity had no fixed direction here. Shards of crystal and massive boulders floated freely, drifting as if through currents. The ceiling, floor, and walls were indistinguishable, forming a continuous landscape.

In the center of the floating debris, the Guardian waited.

This one took the shape of a predatory feline, easily the size of a merchant’s wagon. Its body was woven from a silhouette of warped space that bent light around its edges. Within the dark outline of its form, hundreds of tiny, brilliant violet stars pulsed and shifted, orbiting a blinding central core in its chest.

“A bit stronger than the others,” he said, unable to hide his grin. This was, without a doubt, a beast worthy of becoming part of him.

It wasn’t the best he could have gone for. As a Prestige class, it took a great deal of power to affect any change to his soul, and if he had been able to obtain something of similar strength, the results would have been much better.

But such a target was unlikely to comply, and he needed the creature alive to extract all the benefits. Thus, this worked just fine.

He’d have to develop the affinity on his own once he had it, but Nick had never been afraid of hard work.

Sensing his approach, the beast padded silently through the air. It swiped a claw at a drifting boulder, and a ripple cleaved the rock in half, the two pieces drifting apart with perfectly smooth, mirrored surfaces.

Its head turned toward where he was floating, and it evaluated him for a long moment, showing more intelligence than his last two fellows combined.

It vanished with a crack, and the battle was on.