Robert carried his stack of empty cardboard boxes for half an hour, chuckling at the Manager's reaction. He'd declined the job offer, revealing he was an Arch.
Then he taped the pyramid of boxes together and lifted it as if it was all empty boxes. Which it was but he let the supermarket staff and patrons thinking he had super strength. He had, given that a normal human, a mortal, wouldn't carry this huge stack of boxes.
Away from prying eyes, Robert entered an alley and shifted dimensions with the stack of boxes. No need to discard these useful containers.
And now he had a little less than two days of time to organize his stuff. Back at the supermarket, he started to unpack a few things.
A hand trolley helped him move stuff around. Robert took everything to the outskirts of a public park on district twenty-four. With everything organized, he folded the trolley and moved to district nineteen. If what Jason said was true, people were moving out. He could find some abandoned furniture or even a garage sale to decorate his place in the liminal void.
*
*
Some say "can't argue with free" but Robert surely wanted to. He found lots of abandoned furniture but everything was so dilapidated it was borderline useless. Broken, tarnished, dirty, moldy, and so on. After a thorough search, however, he found enough to decorate a bedroom, living room, dining room, and an office.
The walls of Robert's new place were bedsheets he hung in place and let go. Unless he touched them again, they would stay in place. He didn’t need walls but he also didn’t want to stare at the frozen park all the time. Or worse, frozen people.
People's reflection in the liminal void unnerved Robert. The lack of color and definition pushed them into his uncanny valley, where they looked human-like enough but lacked something quintessential.
But the bedsheet walls weren't a final solution. Robert thought about office paneling, floors, and ceiling. And better furniture. A wardrobe. His new home in the void was a work in progress. If Robert had only one thing, it was time.
*
*
Back in the real world, Robert went to a secluded spot full of vegetation. He sat on a patch of grass and closed his eyes. He entered his Ethercosm and saw his star. It had a bit of grey and a bit of gold, representing the meager amount of time and life energy he gathered.
It also represented the amount of Ether he had to spend in his spells and tempering techniques. Today, his goal was to gather as many wisps as possible.
Diving into the dragon's maw, he left his inner world to enter the Netherecho, a parallel dimension just like his liminal void but much more populated.
Just like the vestiges, the wisps were visually striking. The Plant wisps looked like tree branches that continuously grew, split, sprouted leaves and flowers, and faded at the end. Water wisps were globules of water or cartoon ocean waves, sometimes with googly eyes. Nature wisps looked like a carpet of grass ever flowing under the wind, then changing to wheat, or a rocky valley, and cycling back. Earth wisps were clumps of dirt, or an oddly shaped rock. These kinds of wisps were abundant where Robert sat.
He could see a few Life wisps too. These appeared as pulsating motes of green and gold light, beating in the same rhythm as a heart. Robert went straight to them. He caught one of them and squeezed to break them into Ether particles, which he absorbed into his projection. This form of active gathering was the fastest one but it lacked in range. Robert had to move his Netherecho projection to catch the wisp as if he were using his own physical hands.
He also caught some Plant and Nature wisps in hope of earning a bit of energy on the side. But those of other affinities, even if related, were worth fuck all. He only wasted his precious time.
He saw a few vestiges going about their lives. None too strong and not worth of note. The primer on Archhuman abilities said they he would eventually need to find compatible vestiges to evolve his spells and abilities but that was extremely far away.
To not say he found none, Robert caught two Time wisps near the end of his session. These looked like a grandfather clock with eyes and a mouth and an hourglass, respectively. Since he had depleted the area of useful wisps, he went back to his physical body and started to meditate.
The second way to harvest wisps was to meditate on the element. It could be done from the physical world. The meditation would naturally attract wisps of the chosen element in a bigger range, albeit slower than active gathering.
The advantage was that the wisps came from all directions including from below the earth, a direction active gathering couldn't reach as his projection in the Netherecho couldn't go through solid objects.
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Time wisps were exceedingly rare. The unattuned energy of the Ether would take the affinity of whatever contacted it first. For a wisp of Time to form, it needed to avoid everything else for... Quite some Time.
He hadn't yet found a single wisp for his third affinity. Void. He checked in the liminal void's Netherecho but found it empty. Either no Ether reached that parallel dimension or Void wisps didn't exist.
No. The ATA consultant said that Void spells and tempering techniques were rare and classified. Therefore, Void wisps had to exist. Where would he find them? It had to be in the liminal void.
Feeling he had drained the area of Time and Life wisps; Robert opened his eyes. He checked if someone or something was watching him, then returned to his sitting position.
He memorized his position, then entered the liminal void. As the colors drained from the world around him, he went back to meditation, thinking of the Void.
Hours passed. Robert had no idea how long but he felt one tiny packet of energy approaching from below. As the wisp's presence became bigger, so did the pull of his mind and affinity. He sensed the void wisp. It was an ink splotch, so black it seemed like a hole in reality even in the grayscale world of the liminal void. The void wisp touched him and his soul sucked it into his star. A tiny splotch of pitch black tarnished his star but only increased its brightness.
Satisfied, Robert intensified his meditation. Before he made it back to the real world, he caught three other Void wisps. Considering his gathering cost less than a moment in real life, it was quite the haul.
*
*
Robert had spent the entire day gathering and organizing his pantry in the liminal void. The food would last forever because he didn't have to eat while in the void.
But he wanted to, nonetheless. Robert turned on a portable stove and lit it. Removing his hand from the stove, he gasped as the flames froze in time. Robert stared at the marvelous sight. Fire, suspended in space, like a crystalline and ephemeral sculpture. He touched the base of the gas canister and the fire resumed burning.
He spent a moment watching the flames stop and go as he removed contact. He placed a strip if cloth under the gas canister and stepped on the other end on the ground. This way, the contact requirement was satisfied.
Then, he opened a can of concentrated soup and mixed it with water. While the soup boiled, he wondered how the gas was burning if the void had no air. Or did it? Another thing that changed in this new world. Fire was an element, not just a chemical reaction.
One theory was that Robert was contaminating the liminal void. Every time he entered, the air in his lungs was left behind when he exhaled. But he didn't have a vacuum in his lungs when he exited the liminal void. That would be painful.
But the void wasn't entirely empty anymore.
He let the soup cool for a while, then drank it. With a full belly, he went to sleep in his second-hand bed.
*
*
Robert woke up still in the void. Had he transitioned back to the real world, his alarm would've rung. It will ring unless he stopped it in time.
He stretched and checked himself. No aches, no need to visit the toilet. And he was still with a full stomach. Though he went to the liminal void with body, mind, and soul, his biological functions stopped while he was there. No digestion, no excretion, and, probably, no aging. But that latter one was only a hope. The fact he still needed to sleep hinted at how complex the process was. Sleep was something to rejuvenate both body and mind, perhaps even the soul. Robert knew that he could skip sleep in the real world and only catch his Zs in the liminal void.
The best part was that people wouldn't even think it strange. Archhumans came in all shapes and forms. Eating rocks, shitting bricks, laying eggs? Yes. Robert was sure all of these existed. Heck, he even knew of one Arch that had the Poop affinity. He worked in the city's sanitation company and was very well paid. The amount of sewage he could treat justified the money he earned, because dealing with it using conventional methods would be much more expensive.
But...
Poop affinity.
Damn. He was sure the Poop wisps looked like poop emojis.
And as Robert checked on his star's progress, he could only imagine how many Poop wisps the guy caught during his work hours. And he hated it made him envious.
Soon, Robert was out of the liminal void and back to the middle of the park. In the same position as he entered. That part was especially important. He had a contingency plan to tell that his talent was teleportation if people ever caught him going from place A to place B in the blink of an eye. Although he wasn't sure how the government would treat teleporters. It was one thing he could try to gather information on.
Before he could use any spell or technique, he needed to build a shell for it. Diving into his Ethercosm, Robert started to work. Following the scrolls' instructions, he wove spherical shells made of interwoven runes. He had five of them. One each for his tempering techniques and spells. Chronal shearing, Vitae Infusion, Minor haste, Minor slow, and Mending pulse. To evolve the abilities, he first needed to consolidate the shells through use and then trap a vestige inside.
With the energy he had, Robert decided to work on his tempering techniques. Vitae infusion and chronal shearing. Tempering techniques were a bitch to train. They usually involved doing harm to one's body with Ether and then letting it recover. The body would become stronger and infused with the Affinity's energy.
It was painstakingly slow. And painful. Unless the person had a way to heal the damage that didn't revert the technique's lingering effect, they had to wait for it to heal naturally.
This was where wealth paid a big part. You could use baths and ointments to ease the absorption and alleviate the pain. And with an on-call healer or high-quality potions, the process could be accelerated by orders of magnitude.
Robert had nothing of that. Surely, he had the potential to become a healer but mending pulse wouldn't help. He needed to get a stronger spell or to evolve mending pulse. And both solutions took a lot of time. Real world time.
His body functions halted while inside the liminal void. Using tempering techniques in there was dumb. And if he couldn't heal before his next visit, he would spend the whole time hurting.
With that in mind, he pushed chronal shearing aside and focused on vitae infusion. Robert opened the scroll and studied it several times in the liminal void. Sure, he had all steps right, Robert started.
He pushed Life-attuned Ether into his body and overflowed his flesh with it. He then had to hold the Ether in place and force it to seep into his cells. The first victim was his left hand. He felt the hand burn, freeze, shock, and bloat. The Life energy forced every nerve end to fire. Robert had to endure. He could let go when the energy was entirely gone.
He did it once and felt the energy in his star hit rock bottom. He needed to gather more as he only had enough for a small body part like his hand.
It was like a car had run over his hand. It was purple, swollen, and aching. He didn't even try to move it.
Robert waited, sitting on the grass and watching life go about its business around him.
He should train the mending pulse spell. Minimal or not, any healing was welcome right now.