The good news is that apparently whatever barrier prevented creatures from leaving through open portals also apparently blocked outside creatures and attacks from coming in through it. The bad news was that I can’t get out while the hobgoblin is still around.
I tried throwing some space-bolts out through the portal, as I had done against the alligator, but they fizzled out within the hobgoblin’s lightning aura. Unlike against the flesh alligator ( or Caro Lacerta, as it’s officially called), the hobgoblin had a tangible aura, which made it much better suited for defending against foreign mana, especially since I’m a full two ranks lower than it.
There’s no way this hobgoblin is the same one that governed the goblin tribe; At least not mentally. The hobgoblin king wouldn’t be randomly attacking my dead corpse, even if it does know I’m immortal. It would be waiting for me to resurrect, then striking me down, or it would bring me into a trap of some kind. All it’s doing now is exhausting its mana and tiring itself out.
It was too primal, too unstable, as if the voice had finally wormed its way in and erased what little sentience it still had. My future, I guess.
Regardless, it’ll still take a while for the hobgoblin to run out of mana, so I’ll be stuck here a while… What should I do in the meantime?
I suppose I should consider ranking up. The adventurers mentioned that it might put me out for a week or two, which would be a problem if I want to catch up to Tishina before she leaves, but they also suggested putting it off would be dangerous. Regardless, I should at least start figuring out what it will mean for me to rank up.
I don’t know what it will do to my subspace, but if Tishina’s supposed new abilities are anything to go by, I doubt the changes will be small. Then again, my powers within the subspace itself seem disconnected from what should be possible at my rank.
There are far too many possibilities to consider, and I know little about the process, but it seems the ancients had a hand in my power’s artificial creation, so perhaps they will know something I don’t.
I portaled over to the ancients’ cave, took their form, then transferred some mana into the ‘source array’, as they showed me I could do in place of physical matter. “Ancients, I come seeking advice. It is almost time for me to rank up, and I wish to partake in your knowledge beforehand.” I said through the mental link it offered.
A loud, harsh, cacophony of words indistinguishable from a piercing shriek was their mental response. I held my head in my wings, and cut off the connection to stop the noise. One of the ancients took note, and started communicating using the spell from our first meeting.
“Our apologies. We should have warned you of the dangers of using the mental connection for communication without training.”
“Why didn’t that happen before, back when I was using the link to communicate with the goblins?”
“Before, your connection was limited to translation. The goblins spoke, their voices were transferred to us through the link, where we translated them to your tongue and sent the words back. What you just attempted was to use the link for communication with all of us, wherein you were forced to withstand the full brunt of the hivemind’s thoughts. There are several orders of magnitude difference between the difficulty of those tasks. More, if you attempted to do so with the rest of our species. Though as we mentioned before, the alchemical link does not work outside this space. You’d have to resort solely to magic to communicate outside of this space.”
I could almost feel the contempt they held at the word magic. “What do you have against magic? Though you called it a crutch, there is no denying it has allowed us humanoids to shape ourselves and our lives for the better.”
“Perhaps it has eased the burden of learning, but it’s a false knowledge. A falsity, made with the purpose of spreading and empowering that thing’s influence. It will be taken back one day, and it will doom us all.”
Why does this sound familiar? “Are you referring to neutral mana and its connection to monsters? Or perhaps… Is this related to the second catacalysm?”
“There is no such thing as neutral mana, nor magic. They are one and the same; The black sun’s influence over the world. The illusion of power, the illusion of knowledge, but it’s all that thing’s doing. The black sun taints you with its promise of growth and ascendance, as it did to us.
Most of your kind merely presumed it was real, that magic was your own power, simply because they have not experienced the first cataclysm, nor heard the whispers and trickery of its voice. They will learn the errors of their ways in the aftermath of the second cataclysm, as we had after the first.”
And it all clicked into place. The rising mana levels. The second cataclysm. My powers. The ancients’ forcing themselves into my subspace.
“You plan to shelter yourselves within me, and wait out the second cataclysm.”
“Close, but not quite. We can’t ‘wait out’ the second cataclysm. Once it ends, all that will be left is you, and the empty space left behind by the black sun as its existence tears the universe apart.”
…
“If you need some time before we move back to your original question —”
“Why me? Why not just an enchanted subspace or something.”
“Though we had a few requirements for the base creature of our project, why and when you specifically were chosen is a question for Sozdatel. He was the one who chose you. Though we started this project, his contributions have not been small.
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As for why a person was used, there are limits to what we could do with this space if we used standard enchantments. Normally, standard enchantments can never grow once built, and are generally limited to a single ‘attunement’. Magical engineering allows you to combine those enchantments into something more, but they weren’t enough. Even space enchantments that slightly alter reality within them are limited to a few minor changes. However, there is one exception: artificial monsters. Specifically, those that use other monsters as their base.”
“Like how golems use elementals as their base?”
“Yes, though in the case of golems they are still mostly the same creature in the end. A closer example would be the early dryad-based mana wells. By altering the corpse of one or many creatures into another, you can create something greater than the sum of its parts.
Though, even a single amalgamation was not enough. In order to create a vessel that would eventually be capable of truly breaking free from the constraints of the black sun, we needed to go deeper. Amalgamations within amalgamations.
No matter how we made it, we were still limited to a few minor changes within each creation. But those small changes still added up. Our first iteration was still naught but an empty space. Nothing more than a box stuffed within another creature, as most space-aligned subspaces are, with one difference: the black sun could not see within it. It took a century and ten iterations before even the most basic function of alchemy — The source array’s ability to absorb mana that has already been deconstructed — Worked.
Unfortunately, we did not understand the depths of the black sun's knowledge by this point. We assumed that just keeping the project out of the black sun’s sight, removed by several layers of subspaces built within each other, would be enough to prevent the black sun from being alerted to our project. We were wrong.” The ancient looked away, and with the help of his fellow ancients, began constructing a new spell.
I began to feel sleepy, and was transported to another dream.I still retained my form in the dream, matching the monstrified ancient who inserted himself into the dream beside me. This time, rather than being in the middle of space beside the black sun, I was on a planet.
We stood, floating in the air overlooking a group of ancients surrounding an amorphous blob of bone, leather, stone, fire, and most elements I could think of. Balls of light floated into the air around us, illuminating the area under the night sky… No, not the night. The sun was high in the sky, but it shone no light down upon the planet.
The ancient one beside me reminisced in the memory, narrating as they indulged in their nostalgia. “FractiDomi. Our home. My species’ birthplace. We were in the middle of the tenth iteration when it happened. I cannot simplify everything being said within our hivemind, but I can translate the important bits.”
“Iteration ten appears stable.” I heard within my mind, the voice slightly different from the one the ancient beside me spoke in. It would be hard to differentiate them, as the ancient ones were all supposedly identical, so the minute differences in their voices must have been made for my sake. “Entering now.”
A select few of the ancients stood in front of the monster as it stirred from its slumber, then walked into it, forcing themselves within its subspace as Athro Gofod had shown in her second class.
Like a dream within a dream, an image of the tenth iteration’s subspace overlaid the flesh-monster. The ancients entered the subspace, and immediately began drawing a few alchemical arrays in the air. Once completed, the arrays shone brightly, and began to suck the ambient mana within the subspace into them. Though, as soon as they hit the edges of the source array, and entered the funnel array, the mana dissipated back into the air.
“My brethren, we have succeeded with stage one. The source array is working as predicted. We can begin work on iteration ele—”
A crack spread across the subspace as the flesh-monster roared. The monster rapidly decomposed as more and more fractures appeared within the subspace.
“The subspace is rapidly destabilizing. Abort mission!”
The ancients moved to the walls of the subspace and attempted to break out, but their efforts were in vain. The subspace fractured again and again, before it and the creature it resided in suddenly turned to dust, alongside the ancients within.
“At first, we thought we made a miscalculation that cost them their lives, and us a century of work. If only.’
A crack opened in the air millions of miles away from FractiDomi, and what exited from it eclipsed even the black sun in size. It had a body that looked vaguely humanoid, covered in rocks and magma. In the place of a face was a writhing mass of feelers, and behind it were wings so enormous and bright that they could only be made of stars themselves — ripped from the cosmos for mere aesthetics, plundering an incalculable number of lifeforms into eternal darkness.
It approached FractiDomi, bending the space around it to travel faster than light itself. As it approached, its sheer mass overcame the planet’s gravity, ripping the planet apart.
The ancients upon the planet tried as they could to escape or communicate through their hivemind, but their spells sputtered and died as the dream slowly faded back to the present.
“The first S class monster, and the black sun’s executioner. You may know it as antecessoris spatium polypus. Though, it could never hope to have destroyed our planet as it did. The black sun’s power over magic is absolute, and it merely nullified the effects of magic in the area it felt something interfering with its control.
As we now know, the black sun is slumbering. Rather than consciously looking for interference in its ‘magic’, it has built in some safeguards into magic itself. Depending on the level of interference, it can automatically nullify the magic of any being with a certain level of sentience in the area. Then, it sends monsters as a part of those safeguards.
And we attempted alchemy, among the gravest offenses within those safeguards. For our offense of attempting alchemy, the act of tampering with the building blocks of reality, it sentenced the planet to death.
As we learned that day, only humanoids — those whose sapience have not been tampered with by the voice — can be used as the base of the project. Otherwise, the black sun’s safeguards will activate.
Though full humans and other sapient species that were around before the black sun can be used in the creation of artificial monsters, they can’t be used as the base. Yet humanoid monsters — those who are born of and cannot exist without magic — are too intertwined with the black sun to use. Thus, every base has to be a half-breed such as yourself.”
I pondered for a minute at the reveal of my creation before an obvious controdiction occurred to me. “You said those whose sapience has been tampered with by the voice cannot be used as part of the project. But I’m a blue mage. Why don’t I qualify?”
The ancient’s expression turned dark. “You do qualify. Or rather, you will eventually. That’s why we begged you to turn back. We wanted you to live your life while you still had the chance. But it’s too late for that now. You cannot delay your rank-up much longer, and once you go through with it, the clock will truly start ticking. Soon enough, the black sun will find you. Thus, you must prepare accordingly. Grow strong enough within that time to survive, even when the black sun takes its magic from you. And if you wish to save the rest of your planet, you will soon have to say your goodbyes.”