Chapter 254: Observation

Chapter 254: Observation

The single step that carried Rain into the Breathless Wasteland stretched into an eternity as his mind automatically adjusted his rate of perception. He could feel the lair’s Arcane aspect crackling like dry static as its paling flowed around his intruding toes. There was no resistance. He knew that same paling would be as impenetrable as tire rubber should the lair—or perhaps the system—wish to forbid him, making the ease of his passage all the more remarkable.

The threads of system-script were clearly responsible.

He could feel them as they interfaced with the script running through his own paling, performing some sort of...authentication. He could see the force they exerted on the barrier, pulling it out of the way. Denial was clearly the default, and the system was overriding it.

Amidst the confirmation of his assumptions, Rain experienced something else—a sensation, disconcerting when slowed down. His body seemed to be stretching as it passed through compressed space. Knowing the names of a few Space Magic skills wasn’t enough to put it into words, so he fell back to Douglas Adams.

It felt unpleasantly like being drunk, with him as the glass of water.

The world went purple as his face entered the barrier, and the sensation grew vastly worse. His leading foot touched down on something solid. As he lifted his trailing leg to follow, he was given something new to think about besides discomfort. Like a switch had been flipped, and with no chance to straddle dimensions as he’d hoped, his awareness of the outside world vanished. The dozens-at-this-point threads of mana that he was projecting through his active aura anchors were pinched off at the same time as the links to his party members were severed. Only his link to Dozer remained, the slime safely tucked away inside his soul.

As it was programmed to after any disruption of its programmed sequence, his Detection macro rebooted. The resulting ping for monsters came back empty, and the manual ping for hydrogen that he followed it up with returned a blazing cloud of a response. The magic said the gas was all around him, extending in all directions, though he was still partly in the barrier. His eyes promptly emerged to take in the same lie, showing him a barren landscape extending off to infinity, with no sign of the barrier except perhaps the faintest shimmer of distortion.

Except it wasn’t barren.

Everything in here was filled with essence, and the system’s presence wound through it all. It was like being inside his own soul.

Except not.

Mana existed inside lairs. Just because he couldn’t see it right now didn’t mean it wasn’t there. And it wasn’t just essence he was seeing, but matter too. Everything besides his body and equipment felt like a hybrid of the two—something not actually that unfamiliar to him. Tel, Crysts, and, to a much lesser extent, the Bank’s high-denomination coinage all felt like that when subjected to sufficient scrutiny.

Before his lagging toes fully cleared the barrier, the system presented him with a dialog.

Breathless Wasteland

Rank 4

32%

Health

Stamina

Mana

Rain

100%

100%

100%

Winding back his perception with a puff of Winter, Rain found the point amidst the authentication sequence where the lair had latched onto him with a thread not unlike those that bound him to his armor. Focusing on it, he found the connection leading off toward the ruins. It was tiny and near transparent, like fishing line, but he was sure he’d be able to follow it straight to the core.

Huh. The core is...an item? Kinda?

Returning his perception to a more reasonable rate, Rain continued his walk forward to make space for the others to follow. Releasing the breath he’d been subconsciously holding, he inhaled deeply from his regulator, getting just a bit of the hydrogen around the seal. The essence part tingled.

Exhaling with a smile, he came to a stop and tilted his head. He was feeling...decompressed. It wasn’t on the same level as letting out your belt after a large meal, but the core of the sensation was similar. He didn’t need to check his essence tracker to know his upkeep cost had been reduced. There was plainly enough of a difference between rank four and rank zero for it to be noticeable. Ducking in here to meditate would be a good way to restore his essence levels, should the need arise.

Neat.

Rain took a few more breaths, soaking in the feeling. However it made him feel, the lair was unquestionably depleted, even more so than its listed integrity would suggest. The hybrid matter’s essence component was invested, and there was only the thinnest impression of residual chaos in the atmosphere. Falling back to metaphor, the temperature was rank-four, but the pressure was effectively zero. He’d need to look again when they got closer in, but he’d put money on the core having not so much as a whiff of refined potential available to fuel its regeneration.

Before he got much further with that train of thought, Bluewash appeared, though it was the connection that Rain perceived first. Unlike a normal party link, this felt like getting lassoed. The connection practically shone as he turned to see the Coresmith emerging from the invisible envelope. The dialog, which he’d left open, updated, and Rain’s eyes widened as he realized he could see exactly where it was pulling its information from.

It’s like looking at raw data packets! The link’s not just a link; it’s script! Runes! Little teeny-tiny runes! I knew it! Ah, there’s her name! And her level! I could already get a guess at vital percentages, but there they are, too, plain as day!

“Because Tarny’s not here, and I’m trying to be better about delegating,” Rain said, resettling the tank on his back and reaching for the core.

“Gently!” Bluewash hissed.

Rain paused to give her a reassuring nod, then let his fingers brush against the core, bringing it into even sharper focus to his senses. At a guess, it contained the equivalent of about 10 MESS— more than he expected, given its physical size. When you factored in all of the soul around them, lairs clearly held far more essence than an awakened of a similar level. That made sense. A lair could awaken seven individuals and make an accolade on the side. It had him wondering whether essence monsters were the same way.

Releasing the core, which hadn’t shown the slightest shred of awareness, he turned to Bluewash once more. “How much Arcane mana does it need to get back to full?”

“I don’t have the right skill to tell you that, but about a million. It varies from lair to lair.”

“Of course it does,” Rain said.

“Is Ameliah going to take Elemental Refinement?” Sana asked.

Rain shook his head. “No. She’s busy enough. I might, though. I’ve been saving a skill point since Vestvall.”

“You’re saving a skill point?” Bluewash asked in horror.

“Right?” Carten asked.

Rain ignored them both. “Before I decide to spend it, I want to see if there’s another way. We know lairs recover over time naturally, and I can literally see this one drawing in essence from outside. I know it won’t accept untyped mana, but if I give it raw potential, it might be able to refine the particular type of mana it needs. The question is how long it will take.”

“Don’t push anything directly into the core,” Bluewash warned. “It might be three-hundred and forty-seven years old, but compared to a silverplate, it’s a baby.”

“I wasn’t planning to use silver-rank essence, but point taken,” Rain said.

Slipping into his soul, he entered his storage facility, his avatar warping in front of a tank holding rank-four potential.

As general procedure, he kept a thousand units of each rank up to the mid-twenties on hand should it be needed. A thousand units at this rank equated to 16 kESS, which wouldn’t be enough for the core to recover its mana if it did it at the same efficiency as a person. Fortunately, the quantity of essence in the tank was less important than the fact that it was plumbed into his distribution system.

Taking a moment to purge the lines of higher-rank potential, Rain switched over the feed, then returned to his body and began to vent.

Slowly, mind.

More than able to keep up, his refinement stack kicked on, drawing from his vastly larger stockpile of chaos to refill what he was losing. Carefully monitoring the flow of essence around him, Rain smiled as he saw that the potential wasn’t degrading back to chaos as it would have outside. It seemed the lair had no problems with taking its essence prechewed. With no direction from him, the energy began wafting toward the core, gathering around it in a misty cloud only he and Sana across from him—by her awed expression—could see.

“Anything with Mana Sight?” Rain asked without looking away.

“I can’t tell,” Bluewash said. “If it’s regenerating, it’s not fast.”

“It will probably take time,” Rain said, cutting off the flow. He didn’t want to give it more than it could handle. “We’ll watch it for a few minutes, and if we still can’t tell by then, we’ll come back tomorrow and look.“

“We done after that, then?” Carten asked, tapping the spare tank he held. “Really don’t want to have to use this.”

“Almost,” Rain said, scratching his ear as he considered what else they could try. Before he got very far, he froze as a powerful soul jammed itself into his awareness. He turned just in time for his hair to be blown back by the thunderous gale of Velika’s arrival. The former Citizen wasn’t wearing an Ascension coat, but she had the single pip of an Aspirant pinned to the collar of her tan linen shirt along with her specialist’s cross. Both were jarring to see.

He still hadn’t gotten over the fact that she’d asked to join. Or the fact that he’d allowed it.

“You’ve been avoiding me,” Velika said, her voice sounding normal with the air she’d carried from outside. Her tone, though, was utterly frigid, and her scarred, gold-level soul was bubbling with repressed rage.

Rain calmly removed his regulator. “Hello Velika. You look better, and your speed seems to be recovering.”

“I look like shit, and I feel like a wheeled mule,” Velika said. “What’s wrong with your voice? And why is mine starting to sound just like it? Fucking Arcane lairs.”

“Bad air,” Rain said simply, choosing discretion over reminding her that she wasn’t supposed to be in here. There were multiple signs. And guards. And procedure. He gestured with his regulator. “It’s not toxic, but you’ll suffocate without one of these. We can talk outside.”

“Fine, then,” Velika snapped. “Now, though. Not tomorrow or next week or when it’s convenient.”

“After you, then,” Rain said. He glanced aside to see both Carten and Sana trying to hide behind Bluewash, which was going about as well as you’d expect. He held back a sigh. “Good work, everyone. Looks like we’re done for today.”