After Robert deciphered the alien language, dealing with the robo— golems was much easier. He paid them with the chips bought a cheap item from them and moved on. He found the facility map, reading it with his voracious eye (oops, wrong skill, wrong fiction) and filling in the missing parts of his blueprint in the Mind Palace with translucid projections (they would become solid if he actually visited that section. The map could be inaccurate.
That led them to the mission target, the facility core. It was a dense ball of what seemed to be pure Ether script. Robert couldn't tell the material it was made out of.
Now he knew why the mission bounty was heinously high. This core powered the entire facility, generating Ether like a star. Or better, like a real-world artificial core satellite. He always knew they were underpaid for these missions but this was ridiculous. Its value was in the tens of billions of dollars. Heck. With this core, he could make a contraption that would feed raw essence to the gathering facility and power the whole Academy. Free concepts and a gathering chamber in each student's bedroom. Or make a teleportation hub with a worldwide range.
He explained his findings to Amanda. Her response shocked him.
"Let's destroy this shit!" She said straight away.
Robert couldn't sense any doubt or sarcasm in her voice. It left him stupefied. "Why?"
"If it can do what you say it can do, this is ridiculously dangerous. It's too powerful for any faction to hold onto. You only thought about the civilian uses of such a core, but if it can power this fully functional battle station, It can power attack spells and cause chaos. I wouldn't trust the Empress with this device."
Robert thought about destroying the core. His Prescience said it was a really bad idea because it would cause the whole leisure station to blow up. iRobert ran some simulations and found that he could destroy the core if he was a quarter of a mile away and used his main talent instantly.
"Are you sure?" He asked her.
"Yeah. If I was a four-star like Granny, I would try and keep this for myself. But let's be real. I like to live a relatively peaceful life. In my downtime. When I'm not being raked at by a hundred elemental pumas. With this? It would give me unlimited power, but at what cost?" Amanda grinned at him.
Robert nodded, thankful that she resisted the temptation. He still used his spatial senses to make an imprint of the core's inscriptions in his Mind Palace. On a whim, he replaced the sun with the core. The sky of his Mind Palace was becoming crazier with each of the maps and objects he was putting up there. But every unique feature he added was more power to him. The more he grew the Mind Palace, the stronger the benefits he received.
"But first, I want to keep that room for myself," Robert said.
He took her and used his Void Lance to separate the leisure room they found in the middle of the moon space station from the space moon station itself. That caused the whole room to lose power as gravity also stopped affecting the room. Being in the middle of the celestial object realm, it shouldn't have any to begin with. He touched the room and tried to shift into the liminal void. He gained a nothingburger for his efforts. The room was too damn big to move. On one hand, he found a limitation to his talent, on the other hand, he had to leave the room behind.
Robert went back to the core room and fired his Void Lance to create a human-sized tunnel to the center of the space station moon. He went half a mile in, then took Amanda down the tunnel. There, he held her closely and fired a finger-width Zoltraak lance at the core.
It exploded. He used his talent. The stage 2 Serendipity tempering ticked up two percent, a Herculean feat at this stage. His prescience also told him he had failed to account for one little issue. And that was when Robert knew he had fucked up. The explosion shocked the liminal void.
Robert knew from the shockwave that rocked the Gravity Slime Caverns that anything from the real world strong enough to ripple into the liminal void moved at fifteen miles per hour. That was half the baseline running speed of a two-star Arch, before accounting for tempering, talent, and any other abilities.
Amanda, not knowing that, screamed and clung to Robert's armor.
The shockwave from the core's explosion was quickly reaching them. Robert felt himself falling backward as he dove deeper, into the true void. The shockwave moved over them "moments" later.
He shifted back to the near void, watching as the shockwave left behind an ominous pitch-black sphere where the core used to be, along with a fractured and slow-moving mass of dust and sand and metal shavings. The whole realm had been obliterated.
Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.
He felt pain in his star. Amanda yelped in surprise. Wrecking the whole realm, which was both a moon and a space station, granted them a lot of primal Ether. or aura. The pressure to ascend increased but Robert was way stronger than back at the expedition. He pushed it down. Amanda was also experiencing that pressure but at a smaller scale than him.
Robert thought about staying there but the ominous black orb was triggering his danger senses. He instead dove back into the true void and resurfaced on a rooftop at the Puffbloom Islands.
He let go of Amanda and she let her power armor fall backward to lay on the dark gray rooftop. She whooped and screamed from there. "Dammit, did we just wreck a realm? I gained enough aura to ascend already!" She paused and stared at Robert to see if she drew a reaction but only saw the mirrored faceplate of the Minotaur armor. "But I won't."
Robert removed his armor by sending it to his dimensional storage ability. "Let's rest for a while. I want to go back to that realm in a few real-time hours and see what happened to it."
Amanda groaned. Her armor clattered as she got back on her feet. "I can't! I think I need to do something. I tried to lay down but now that the danger passed I—" She let out a yawn big enough to let Robert see her tonsils. If she wasn't still wearing armor.
Robert approached. Amanda willed her armor into her storage ring, making it disappear. He grabbed her by the waist. "Let's get some sleep."
Amanda deployed her bed-cube. They climbed inside and activated the darkness enchantment to keep the eternal sunlight of this realm away.
*
*
The next morning, Robert dropped Amanda at the Academy and used his main talent. He swam on the currents of the true void back to that realm. He slowly reduced his depth until he was on the edge between the true and near void. He looked around and saw nothing. Was he even in the right realm? His senses told him that yes. His travels through the void never led him astray, not a single time.
He came closer to the surface. Still nothing. He looked around and saw only an absence of solid matter all around him. He went even closer and was almost in the liminal void. He saw nothing still. Robert came fully into the liminal void and glanced around. He kept himself from falling using telekinesis. Moving around, he sensed a spatial anomaly. It was a passage. 'At least that', he thought.
Donning a sealed environmental suit rated for vacuum, he worked on expanding his Mind Palace, adding a lot of empty space above the ground so he could fit all of his realm maps and scaled tridimensional models. Having iRobert help doubled his speed. Soon, the imprint would more than pay off the time he spent creating it. Once it was time to return he positioned himself next to the passage.
He saw stars all around him and a shining portal leading to the realm before the space realm. The view on the other side was one of utter destruction. The portal lay at the foot of a crater. Robert pushed himself through with telekinesis but a strong wind that blew out of that realm pushed him back. He recast the spell using the deep reserves of his Void Heart and pushed through. On the other side, he noticed the passage was sucking air out of the neighbor realm like a vacuum. The ground was upheaved. Robert saw not a crater but a cone of devastation. The blast reached the passage and went through it, destroying the adjacent passage realm for hundreds of feet.
Returning to the other side, Robert looked around. The starry skin was just as he remembered but he couldn't see anything. Not a single piece of the moon that was also a space station. He searched all around and found fuck all until he looked in the direction of the core.
There, immobile, was a black orb. He only knew it was there because it was a circular spot of black against the starry backdrop. Inspecting it closely, he noticed the black spot was gushing out unaspected Ether. But as it moved, they became Space and Time wisps.
Robert moved toward it with telekinesis but stopped two miles away from it; his prescience was screaming that coming any closer would be devastating. He took a bag of dog food from his spatial storage and dumped it around him in an arc. The food pellets all fell toward the black hol– I mean, spot. Though Robert had a hunch that "black spot" was not the right denomination for this phenomenon. It couldn't be helped. Robert felt that the term that evaded his tongue was the correct one. They gained speed and vanished soon after. Then he tossed the bag upward and watched as it made a parabolic arc and spun away, going around the back and returning in a degenerating orbit.
The dog food bag went around the gravity anomaly a dozen times, speeding up as it fell, stretching, becoming a thin ring of plastic around the black spot, and finally vanishing in a bright flash of light. Robert scratched his head while iRobert consulted a few books on old-world physics.
Yeah. it was as he almost guessed before. It was a black hole. Or at least the magical equivalent. It sucked matter and light and irradiated Ether. It would be a good gathering spot for Robert if not for the inhospitable environment and the threat of falling into that black hole.
*
*
Back on Earth, he visited Yolania.
"The quest failed," he told the artificer. "The target object was destroyed along with the realm. If not for my teleportation, we'd have died."
Yolania nodded, then gave him a sad smile. "Thank goodness you survived. I had a bad feeling about this mission. Do you want to lodge a complaint about the quest giver?"
"No, I didn't see anything in the quest report that hinted at them acting in bad faith. No need for that."
"Your call. I contacted the issuers of the last four big bounties you reserved for yourself, and they agreed to increase the rewards. The amount varies but it was a forty-percent increase in the worst case."
"Great. I'm going to spend a week here on Earth working on some projects. But I want to commission a few more cubes."
Yolania laughed. "You Space Archs. How much capacity did you say your spatial storage has already? It makes the biggest rings look like trinkets."