Robert was floating in an ocean of black. He couldn't see anything other than himself and the glider. He felt no wind, no light, nothing. He had no idea how he could even see but he did.
If the void could be classified by depth, starting from the liminal void between the void and reality, and the deep void where things men aren't meant to know™ "fthanged", he was in the true void. Nowhere and everywhere. The backstage of reality. The metaphor he had read in the cultist book about bubbles floating in the nothing was too bubbly if compared to this.
He could still feel the puffblooms linked to him. Cotton was in its cage attached to his harness, doing nothing. But Coal was... no. The link was still active but nothing went through.
Robert was an idea. His physical body might as well be an illusion. He might be a man on a glider flying through the void. Or was he still? It didn't matter. The void didn't have Euclidean dimensions. No concept of time or space. It was like an ancient anime he once saw. Present day? Present time? He could only laugh at the idea.
Yet, in all his subjectivity, time and space existed. Matter existed. He existed. Sort of. He couldn't remember how he ended up in the true void, only that he was flying and used his talent and the next thing, he was in the true void. What happened in between was locked behind a mental vault door, labeled as too painful to remember by his subconscious.
His mind's eye slid over the vault door every time he tried to remember. His heart told him he shouldn't even try.
So, he gave up. The embrace of the void was comfortable. It wasn't warm, it wasn't cold. For having those qualities would mean the void had something when it, in truth, had nothing. And it also had everything. Just over there, beyond the veil but on the good side of it, reality awaited.
If he could only get there.
The void was not kind. It was not harsh. It simply was not. To exist in the void was anathema. Robert could very well be the spark that would trigger a Big Bang and spawn a new universe. Or the last dying spark of the previous one. The probabilities were infinite but he started to believe they all converged to zero. Why did it matter?
He was MU. Śūnyatā. Everything and nothing, alpha and omega, God and mortal, matter and energy. But the truth was that Robert was nothing of that because he was incomplete. Undeserving. An intruder. A hatchling dragon trying to devour a titan whole. A paramecium trying to phagocyte a watermelon in one go. A photon pretending to be a black hole.
He didn't belong there. He had a hall pass to the void but he wasn't a creature of the void.
He was "paradox" but he wasn't "zauber".
So, he had to leave.
The Emperor goes where he wants. Dive deeper.
If he could dive deeper, he could also emerge back to the shallow. The Emperor willed and then he moved. Robert felt the vantablack (that was not devouring the multiverse) became a single shade grayer. Slowly but blindingly fast, the blackness became gray. The haze of the collagen floaters inside his eyes gained definition. He saw a straight piece of gray metal right to his side. He saw darker gray rock underneath his belly.
He felt the weight of his body and the glider above him press his stomach against the rock.
Robert was back to the liminal void. He was exactly where he wanted to be but he couldn't remember when he wished he would be there. The vault door forced his mind to go elsewhere.
He extricated an arm out of the glider's controls and conjured his timepiece out of his storage ring. He looked at the time remaining and paled. The beads were all on the side of zero, the code to display an error in the calculation of the time remaining. Was it a glitch caused by his prolonged stay in the true void?
What happened? Robert had no idea.
He crawled out of the glider bed and disassembled the vehicle, stashing it neatly in its bag and then in one of his rings. He didn't get Cotton out of the cage, though. He was afraid the puffbloom would float away in the liminal void and die.
The only thing left was to wait until he came back to reality.
*
*
A strong wind buffeted Robert's face, waking him up. He yawned and saw he was on top of the hill, right next to the metal tower.
"Rise and shine, Mr. Blaze," he heard Amanda's voice. She sounded mad.
Disoriented, Robert looked around. Freddy and Coal pounced, pushing him down. Though he was already on the ground.
"What?"
"'What' what?" Amanda asked. As his sight focused, he stared up. No, he couldn't see anything he shouldn't.
"Give me a moment, please." Robert drawled.
"Freddy, please let me pull Robert back on his feet," Noah requested. "Robert, you are the party healer. Please pull yourself together."
Unfortunately, healing magic couldn't heal emotional damage. But Robert came back to his senses after a few minutes.
"Is everyone accounted for?" He asked.
"Yes," Noah replied. "Three humans, one Taulusian, and two tame puffblooms. Mysteriously so."
"What happened?" Amanda asked as she approached and clasped her hand over Robert's wrist.
"I used my talent mid-flight," Robert replied. "And the glider came along. I can't remember why I did that but I think I believed the glider would remain behind. Oh."
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He unwittingly made a dramatic pause. Amanda leaned closer as her curiosity got the best of her.
"What is it?" She half-begged, half-demanded.
"In the liminal void, the haze that obscures the other islands doesn't exist. I can see all the islands, including the copies underneath us. And above. Sorry. Not copies. I think I even saw my own glider from above. Not sure, though. My memories are hazy and I feel like I should put this incident behind me."
"Nobody will blame you," Noah said with a hand on Robert's shoulder. "What happened to your glider?"
Robert searched his rings, then produced the requested item. He offered it to Noah. "Here."
"You keep it." Noah pushed the glider back.
"Don't want to," he said with a shake of his head.
Robert didn't even want to hold the glider. His hands started to shake. Something repressed deep inside his mind started to come out. He felt weightless and then falling. He felt the speed, the dread.
Robert screamed as he tossed the glider away. Amanda screamed and jumped. Noah caught the bundle deftly. Freddy pushed Robert down and laid on him, keeping the man pinned under a hundred and fifty pounds of alien hound.
He calmed down as the vault doors closed and licked once again. on the edge of his consciousness, he heard Amanda cry.
*
*
Noah could feel the psychic distress Robert felt. His mask had this big drawback, it couldn't be removed, but it allowed him to do things that were otherwise impossible. Despite everything, it was still a boon if he weighed the pros and cons.
Right now, he had a golden opportunity. Some spells and techniques couldn't be learned unless the pupil was in the right state of mind. Holy affinity spells were the most common offender. Some, for example, required extreme acts, like charity, fasting for forty days in a desert, celibacy, or a vow to never again do harm to any creature.
Before this trip, he took care to get every material that was beneficial for his pupils. Including some forgotten, forbidden, or unusual manuals for their affinities. He didn't expect to get much use out of these.
Myanmar had a cabal of Archhumans who centered around Mental and Dark affinities. They had some extreme techniques. One of them forged a strong mind out of suffering. They torment their disciples until they reach a state close to madness, then get them to rebuild their minds. Just like metal needed to be red-hot to be forged, so did the mind needed to be put in complete disarray for this Mental tempering technique.
He had no intention of putting Robert through the wringer and intentionally causing distress. But to let this opportunity go to waste was something he couldn't do. It would be a disservice to his students.
Noah crouched next to Robert.
"Robert. Listen to me. I want you to cycle Mental essence around your mind. You will do it just like you do with your lavi flows tempering but instead of Life essence around your body, it will go only around your head. Let your thoughts wander. Cycle the essence and let it interact with your mind. Blink if you understand."
*
*
Robert heard Noah's words as far whispers. Only after a few seconds to digest them, he understood what he meant and blinked. Slowly, he did as Noah asked. Somehow, he got the impression that the mask's blue eye could see inside of him. It felt like he was using a milder version of thought acceleration but also sleeping but also conscious. Lavi flows, the stage zero Life tempering, alleviated fatigue, sped up natural regeneration, soothed inflammation, and better distributed nutrients around the body.
This improvised technique did something similar. Robert was in a meditative, lucid trance-like state. Some trains of thought became clearer, some subconscious issues resolved, memories solidified, he could even visualize himself having a dream in the background as if he was asleep.
Robert welcomed the clarity. His body relaxed.
"Good," Noah continued. "Keep the essence going. Focus on how it affects you. Think of all you wish it could do to better your mental state. Use your thought acceleration spell."
He kept doing the technique for a long while. He let himself lose track of time. The improvised technique was wasteful. If it were a proper tempering…
Robert dove into his Ethercosm and crystallized his idea. A new shell wove itself before him as dull silver bands of runes faded into existence and laid themselves in the shape of a sphere. They were still more transparent than solid, though. But the technique improved. The essence cycle wasted less energy and the benefits became bigger.
His perception, clarity, and sharpness of thought sharpened. They didn't improve but just like a dull blade that was put to the grindstone by expert hands, his mind became the best it could. His breathing and heart rate slowed down. His reconstruction spell activated instinctively at its highest setting. Supernatural-quality healing flooded Robert's system.
Strong, high-quality healing magic could replace lost neurons. it could even regrow brain mass. But the synapses, the data stored in these neurons was irrecoverable. And people suffered tiny, minute amounts of brain damage as they lived. It wasn't important until they accumulated throughout the decades and caused catastrophic failure later in a human's life. Because the brain had redundancies. A memory was stored as a wave pattern across most of the brain. These waves overlapped and the fine interaction between them formed the psyche and the individual. Even if a portion of the brain was damaged, it could, in theory, be recreated by using the healthy parts to infer what was missing from the wave pattern.
Where Mental and Life magic synergized, both matter and data were restored. Reconstruction forced the body to spend the biomass stored to create new replacement neurons and the new unnamed tempering technique smoothed out the brain wave pattern by directing these new neurons to take the shapes and form the synapses they should have.
Forgotten memories returned. Details of his childhood long lost. Feelings, interactions, words spoken and unspoken. Robert was forced to experience all that once again.
Robert opened his eyes. He saw Freddy's snout and the clouds floating above. Freddy was real, the clouds were not. The realm had its fair share of water vapors but it didn't form clouds like that. Otherwise, the islands would be covered in fog as the whole place had no gradient of air pressure.
He was getting low on essence. Running two tempering techniques and a couple of spells for several minutes, plus what he spent since this morning was taxing his reserves. Robert turned thought acceleration off, then waited for Reconstruct to finish its job, then stopped cycling the tempering technique.
The memories of his gliding ordeal were back but they didn't hurt that much anymore. The descent, the shift to the true void. His return. He understood what his talent's evolution really meant.
It wasn't just ignoring physical boundaries. He could fully detach himself from reality and come back. He returned to this place next to the tower because that was where he wanted to go. He went to the other side of the cabin walls for the same reason.
But what if he wanted to go to somewhere further away, like the park where he lived with Mickey for a while? No. Not yet. He would have to go too deep into the void and he really shouldn't encounter the things lurking in there before he was ready.
"Hey, buddy, I want to get up," Robert said as he tapped Freddy's side.
"You sure?" Freddy woofed.
"Yes, I am."
*
*
They made their way to the island's cabin.
"It seems you figured out the Jade Mind tempering technique," Noah said. "The issue with that one is that it can only be learned when you bring the mind back from a state of utter disarray."
That sounded like a thin-veiled excuse for something Noah spun out of thin cloth on the spot. He read a lot of books on Mental magic and never saw anything closely related to this jade mind tempering. Noah might've read his mind or his facial expression.
"I see you doubt me. Here, read this book," Noah handed Robert a tome he took from his storage ring. "It's in Burmese, though."
"I can decipher it. Later," Robert said as he greedily put the book in his own ring the moment Noah let go of it.
"Our libraries usually don't keep books in other languages," Noah continued.
"Do understand anything the book is saying?" Amanda asked.
"Oh, yes. Miss Amanda," Noah replied with a pep in his voice. "Remember that I am fluent in over six... dozens... forms of communication."
Robert saw Noah's ears twitch in the way they did whenever the teacher smiled. But why did he pause at the dozens? And why did the phrase sound rehearsed?
"What are you talking about?" Amanda reacted with suspicion. "Do you actually speak more than seventy-two languages?"
"Yes, I meant exactly that," Noah said with another ear-raising smirk.