Chapter 243 - Four-dimensional Perspective

"My head hurts from thinking about it." I rubbed my forehead. "Wait, Ghost, does it all mean that anyone can go back and forth to Under Hills? Even if the fey inside it probably won't be happy."

"It's not so simple. You have to know where you go, after all. When you bend space, you have to know what and how you bend. If you don't know how to reach Under Hills, you won't. Just try it and you will understand."

"Reach… You mean, just look at it?"

Ghost nodded. "Yes! Like you'd peek at any far—away place. Or not even that far away—if we look from a four-dimensional perspective, it isn't far at all."

I shrugged. With how much I understood about these spatial shenanigans after Ghost's explanation, I doubted I will understand more after doing this—it was more likely that I will get a severe migraine. But nothing stopped me from trying, anyway.

I closed my eyes for full concentration and looked at the space through my well. The space itself was an immobile, solid thing. Like a paper on which the world was drawn. Smooth and clean… I supposed it could be wrinkled and folded if you wanted to, but I liked it as it was. I also knew that I could create holes in it fairly easily, but I had no idea what good it will do to me.

But from what Ghost said, there was another layer, somewhere under it. I tried to look deeper, to look around… but it was all the same smooth sheet, no matter where my gaze went. After a dozen minutes of absolutely fruitless search, I gave up.

"I see nothing like you described. It's just smooth space everywhere."

Ghost nodded sagely. "Exactly. It's not far, but it's not so close that anyone could just see it… I wish I had some way to show you the difference…" He furrowed his brows, then suddenly jumped up from his seat. "Oh, I do! Wait a minute, I will bring this thing."

I sat in a state of a slight confusion and growing curiosity as Ghost rushed out of the room towards his bedroom, where I knew he had stored many curiosities he gathered over the course of his long life only to forget about them later.

When he returned, he had a simple wooden box in his hand, the most remarkable feature of which were the engravings on its lid and the elaborate seal I could feel embedded in its walls. Ghost placed it on the table with a loud clang and waved a hand in the air to disperse the illusion he created earlier.

"I think I used it to store something in the past, but I checked it now—its empty. Can you tell, my student, what it's for?"

I take a better look at the box. The seal on it looked vaguely familiar… And the space next to it wasn't as smooth as everywhere else. "It's bigger on inside than on the outside." I concluded, raising my eyes at Ghost. "Right?"

He beamed. "Correct! Not by much, but it is. How could you tell?"

"I've seen a seal that had common parts with the one on this thing back in the Eternalroot coven, back when we investigated the demon." It was months ago, but these days were hard, if not impossible, to forget. "Plus, the surrounding space looks weird."

"It does. Can you see how it goes in two layers? Now, let me put something inside…" Ghost looked around the table, snatched a stray pencil. When he opened the box to put it in, I saw that the bottom of it was a good dozen centimetres below the level of the tabletop it stood on. "Can you see the pencil?"

I watched it all that time, and finding it even behind all these spatial folds was simple. "Yeah, sure. It's just there… But hey, I couldn't see Staghead when he was teleporting the same way."

"He wasn't teleporting the same way. The way he was teleporting is more like…" Ghost looked around again. This time, his victim was a leftover cracker. But instead of putting it into a box normally, he did a weird thing. I saw him pulling on a space until there was a crack in which he shoved the cookie… and then I saw it reappearing in the box. Visually, it was as if he just made a cookie disappear in the thin air. "That."

I blinked. Even though Ghost pierced the space right in front of my eyes, the journey of the cookie was anything but straightforward. After all, the space he pierced was in one place… and the box was in another.

Oh, that migraine I wasn't afraid of was creeping in.

"It's much less straightforward when you don't go through the entrance. You really have to know where are you aiming at. This box is just there, so I can get to it bypassing the opening point with ease, but if it was in another room, I'd already have difficulties. Do you get it now, Diana?"

"The thing I understand the most now, teacher, is that teleportation is hard," I admitted honestly. "So unless I find an entrance to Under Hills, I won't be able to get inside or to track Staghead when he teleports in and out. But how could one stop him? What are dimensional locks?"

"Ah, that. Thanks for reminding me… I got distracted a little here, didn't I?" Ghost chuckled. "Dimensional locks… That I don't know how to do, so I can only try to explain to the best of my ability. There are two types: long-term and short-term. The long-term ones are usually made as amulets. But the point is simple. Space by itself has nothing in it preventing you from pocking at it. It restores itself, yes, but any witch can make cracks in it if they want. But what if it had it?"

"But how can you prevent a witch from pocking into anything at all?"