Amanda laid on the bed, nervous. Robert smiled, trying to reassure her. He leaned forward, putting his hand on her forehead. She breathed heavily. The anticipation, the fear of feeling pain, it was her first time, after all.
"I don't think I'm ready," She mumbled. Her eyes trembled.
"If you want to stop, just say it," Robert replied. "But it was you who said you wanted to do it."
Amanda nodded, then grabbed the bedsheet. She was stiff as a plank.
"It won't hurt," Robert cooed. "Go ahead."
She felt his magic wash over her. Amanda took a deep breath and let it loose inside of her.
*
*
Robert couldn't understand why she was having cold feet right now. He could suppress her pain and he would heal the wounds she might suffer. So, why was she hesitating so much to start using the hundred wet hells? He was sure that if she had done all the tempering she had to, the lightning octopus would get trampled by her. The biggest difficulty with that tempering method was the need for a personal healer. She had him.
He kept Diagnosis running. What Robert saw left him horrified. All of the fluids in her body were churning, chugging, sloshing, and pushing against everything. Muscles ripped, blood vessels burst, it was a ridiculous mess. It reminded him of the minute disintegrations his body suffered while alchemically tempering with the Void affinity. He healed her as fast as he could but it was too much damage.
Not even a couple of minutes before she started, Robert gave the signal to stop tempering. He was already damn low on essence. Amanda cut her own supply to the technique's shell. Robert fixed the lingering damage but she would need around two days to fully recover. On other people, he could only provide normal healing at best. The healed tissue was still weaker than normal tissue.
Amanda was covered in sweat and a small amount of blood that escaped her pores. She didn't feel pain but her body still suffered under the cruel tempering.
"So, did it hurt?"
She poked her tongue at him. Moments later, she fell asleep.
*
*
Two weeks passed on that island.
Noah put Robert and Amanda under a heavy training and body tempering regimen. Strenuous exercises, then light tempering, sparring, and finally, heavy body tempering. After that, it was time to freshen up, eat dinner, and hit the bed.
Robert trained with chronal shear, mental palace, and jade mind, while Amanda finally started with stoneskin, granite bones, and hundred wet hells.
The stoneskin tempering technique required slathering the body with an alchemical paste loaded with Earth essence. Or, for those on a budget, burying oneself in gravel. The Arch then had to absorb the Earth essence into their bodies but keep it from going further than the skin. After each session, they needed to cleanse themselves and stretch the skin close to the point of bleeding. Robert had to assist Amanda during the last part to remove the pain and heal her.
The granite bones tempering technique had two ways to go. The slower method required an intake of minerals and ores, which the Arch had to guide with their essence to deposit on their bones. The faster method was to intentionally shatter the bone and then heal it with an infusion of Earth essence. The difference in tempering speed was monstrous as it only required the Arch to break the bones that really mattered for combat and defense. Like the twenty-two bones forming a human's skull. Understandably, Amanda chose the slow method.
Robert dedicated two of his three years and ten months to building his mental palace. He used the flowers on the islands as a source of inspiration and let his imagination run wild. The field was bigger than twenty football fields now. He felt ready to add one of the bastions.
But he hesitated. He couldn't choose. He wanted Tower of Iron Will for the defensive buffs but he also wanted Intellect fortress. If he went with the latter, he would have a copy of every book he had ever read in that place, which would free him from requiring a physical copy. The idea of having a whole library in his head was too tantalizing.
So, he looked at the vast and idyllic meadow he built and asked himself. Porque no los dos? After he reviewed it further, the recommendation to pick one of the bastions was because building enough room for the two would require decades of dedication. Robert had already spent close to five years just landscaping and he had room for only one of the bastions.
*
*
But drawing pretty flowers and lush trees with mind's eye watercolor was not everything Robert did with his bountiful amount of time.
He also experimented heavily with his talent. He needed to learn how his upgrade worked and what he could do with it. His base talent was mostly passive. Robert could only pick when he would go to the liminal void. The rest was automatic. On the other hand, the evolved talent was entirely subjective. The void was a place with layers.
The first layer was reality, sitting above the void. Or immersed in it if the theories of the cult were to be believed. The second layer, just underneath reality was the liminal void. A contiguous dimension where physical objects and fluids still had substance. These two were safe places for him. Gravity worked; light moved through them. A few entities from the void could visit people in the liminal void but it was safe for Robert. The liminal void had some subjectivity built-in but it had a very small impact. Time in the liminal void passed so slowly objects seemed to freeze in time.
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Living creatures stuck in the liminal void had their ether drained and expelled as Time wisps. Unless they were under the protection of a Void spell or Robert's talent.
He knew of the "true void" and the "deep void". The true void was where he ended up after his gliding mishap. And the deep void was where Mickey took him to gather Void-affinity wisps. After the deep void was a place he was sure he wouldn't return from. The "beyond", a place where terrible Lovecraftian entities lurked.
But there was a gap. He was sure he didn't dive into the true void when he crossed solid objects. He wanted to find out what it was.
Robert focused and activated his new tempering. Jade mind, along with thought acceleration helped him stretch his perception of time. Haste was useless in there. Because everything would happen at his subjective time. What he needed was more detail and faster information processing.
He focused and willed himself to slowly increase his "depth" along the void axis. The shadows of the real world lost focus. Jade mind helped him keep his cool as his natural reaction was the same as anyone diving underneath the water. Go back to the surface and breathe. Or, in his case, stay as close to reality as possible. He took his time and steadied himself. He went until the cabin walls became see-through. Along with everything else. He hadn't a choice of what to look at and what to look through. As the things he was looking at started to lose meaning, Robert stopped.
He willed himself to go back up for just a little. He could see the objects around his current location and a faint outline of what was behind them. But when he tried to walk through a wall, he felt some resistance. Another notch down and he got to walk through the wall with the faintest feeling of touch as he did.
Now he wanted to test to see if he would manage to do something he was eager to try.
Robert willed himself to go up. Nothing happened. He wished he could go above the cabin. He felt the pull of his talent to take him deeper. He had to let himself sink lower and back to that state where it was hard to tell what he was looking at as several outlines and different shades of gray clashed. He wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a Roman amphora and a woman's waist.
Then he willed himself to move. Not on his own two feet but by demanding his talent to take him there. It was rather tiresome mental gymnastics because his mind didn't believe it was possible. It took Robert several attempts during his time in the liminal void to finally move an inch across the near void. But when he moved an inch, he moved a yard.
Soon, the reality conceptually above him was blurring past. Thrilled by this newfound freedom, he soared up and stopped. The trauma of his first flight returned and it took jade mind a while to calm him down. Though it was good training material for his most recent tempering technique, he could live without those feelings.
Robert dared take a step upward. And another. Soon, he was floating ten feet above the outline of the ground. Robert looked up and his heart froze. The island above was a series of scribbles. It was like a child drew several circles on the same spot with a pen and then scratched over them.
Overwhelmed, Robert moved closer to reality and let the gravity slowly take him back down.
He took notes.
Underneath the liminal void was what Robert dubbed the "near void". Matter stopped being tangible. Opaque objects became translucent. Entities in the near void could walk through solid objects. Gravity ceased to affect entities.
The most important discovery was that the near void allowed for adjustable distances from reality. Distance here meant how deep one was in the void, not one of the three Euclidean dimensions. Try as he might, he couldn't get closer to reality than the liminal void. He conjectured it was as close to reality as one could get and still be considered in the void.
One point made him worry his theory was wrong. While he could measure depth in the near void by how blurred and transparent reality was, he had no way of telling up from down in the true void. He had no point of reference. It either had depth and he lacked the instruments to measure it, or it was like the liminal void and it had a set depth (which he marked as depth zero in his arbitrary scale). But it was not the bottom. That he called either the deep void or the beyond.
He also wrote down instructions for an experiment he wasn't willing to risk. If the void connected and touched all of reality and the true void had no concept of distance other than depth, what stopped him from diving from this island here and emerging back on Earth?
His current observations led to three conflicting hypotheses. Either each realm had its own void, which he felt wasn't true. Or, more likely, his own mind and attachment to reality stopped him from doing so. He believed Earth was unreachable and so it was. A third one was that all of this he called near or true void were still all parts of the liminal void. His talent didn’t let him go into the real void. Or couldn't grant him access.
Finally, one piece of evidence supported the case for hypothesis three. He tried to access the Netherecho in all the depths he could access but never reached the place where Mickey took him once. The place with a stream of Void wisps.
*
*
Finally, it was time to move to the next island. They went to the platform at the edge of the current island. Robert flinched when he saw the numbers.
The next island was two hundred miles away, six miles below, at an angle of thirty degrees. They would fly with the sun almost in front of them.
"I see you've noticed that the shadow gauge isn't transparent," Noah said as he studied his pupils' looks of concern. "There's a mirror addon to let you see the front of the gadget."
"Professor Actus," Amanda called.
"Yes, Ms. Samson?" Noah replied with a playful tone.
"Two hundred miles? Isn't it too far away for a drop of only six miles?"
"Yes, it is, which is why I had us do that drop lower exercise. In this trip, we will need to watch our angle of descent as well. If you look at the shadow gauge, you'll find it also tells you the inclination of your glider."
"It's still too far," She protested. "Surely there's islands in between here and there, right?"
"Yes, but the island-hopping path is more than three times as far. Its better if we fly straight ahead."
Robert fidgeted with the hem of his jacket. He used jade mind to keep his trauma in check.
"You are stronger than ever, Amanda. You can do it. Let's assemble our gliders and go through the pre-flight check."
Robert remained still while the two of them assembled their vehicles. Noah noticed it and approached.
"What's wrong?"
"I don’t need the glider, Noah."
Noah's scalp moved as he raised his eyebrows. "Really? Can you cross this chasm with your evolved talent alone?"
"Yes," he said with a wavering voice.
"Back and forth?"
"Yes, but no passengers yet."
"Understandable. If you can, then go now. There's a platform on the other side leading to a nearby island. Go there, read the numbers on it, and come back to report. If you get them correctly, then you can skip the glider."
Robert used his talent. Adjusting the depth in the near void to the exact point where gravity no longer existed, he willed himself to move forward.