The colorful tethers extending from his body were still visible to him. While he was relieved that he could use at least one skill, it was also dispiriting that it was the one skill he couldn’t use here.
‘How am I able to even use this…’
Out of all the skills he had, only [Aggregate], or more accurately, the pseudo law technique he was creating from it, was the only thing that appeared to work.
‘But I can’t see the spider’s tethers from here, and even if I combine my skills, if I can’t use them, then what's the point…’
With no way to use it against the spider and with nothing else available, he could only turn to this ability in the hope that it could be his way out. Time passed as he combed through every tether meticulously, but nothing led him any closer to a solution. His gaze moved to the still incomplete tether branching off from [Aggregate], which caused him to frown.
‘For it to still be incomplete… I’ve felt for a while that I just needed a little more, and it would be complete, but progress has been so slow. Why?’
He knew obtaining a law technique wasn’t easy, but being stuck at the finish line was extremely frustrating.
‘It was similar to when I struggled to progress with [Terra Spikes]. I was missing something then, so I could be missing something now.’
He thought long and hard about what that could possibly be but could not arrive at any conclusion. With tethers, he could combine skills, disable skills, and permanently remove them. What else could there be? Did he simply have to refine the technique more?
As time continued to tick by, he grew more and more irritated at his inability to figure it out. He continued looking at the incomplete tether, which swayed left and right as if taunting him for not knowing.
Sol’s eye twitched as he finally lost his patience. ‘Fine, you don’t want to complete yourself on your own? I'll do it for you!’
With his will, he grabbed hold of the incomplete tether and began pulling it in the direction it was heading. It wasn’t able to go very far before the tether became taut, but he continued pulling it.
“Connect to whatever is out there or break in the process!” Sol yelled as he pulled even harder. If the tether broke, he would surely lose all his acquired knowledge regarding manipulating tethers, but with the bigger problem of his impending death, about which he had no idea when it would come, he had no time to consider the consequences.
The tether stretched and extended a few more inches, but it was still not enough. He continued to pull, causing the tether to stretch inch by inch. It was a slow and mentally draining process. He began to sweat as each inch he pulled the tether along became harder than the last. But even so, he did not stop.
It felt like the tether would snap at any moment now, but since he had felt that 20 inches ago, he began to doubt if it would actually snap. It seemed like it would continue to stretch endlessly as long as he continued to pull.
As he stretched the tether for what felt like the hundredth time, he finally saw something, a small glowing dot a foot away from the tether. Seeing the end in sight, he pulled with renewed vigor, but the difficulty of progressing took a toll on him.
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He was completely drenched in sweat, struggling to pull it even one inch further. Sol was only a mere five inches away, but he also felt like he was on the verge of passing out.
He slapped himself awake and yelled, “I’m not giving up here! Not when I’m so close to the end!”
With all his remaining willpower, he grabbed hold of the tether and pulled it with everything he had, stretching it a full five inches and reaching the end in one final effort.
The moment it touched the white dot, the entire tether lit up with a blinding light. Pure power coursed through the tether, but it was too much for the thin tether to handle, so it began expanding as power flowed downward back into Sol, renewing him with what felt like unlimited energy. His mental state and exhausted body recovered instantly, and when he looked back at the tether, he saw it had widened to a full inch, multiple times bigger than any other tether he had.
Alongside the power and energy from the tether, he also received knowledge, causing him to fall to the floor as he tried to comprehend everything it was imbuing into him.
Though it was a painful and excruciatingly slow process for Sol, in reality, it only took a few seconds for everything to occur. Once it was finally over, he slowly rose from the ground, feeling reborn.
“So this is my law technique… finally. Now I understand what I was missing.”
Most of the information bestowed him with exactly what he had lacked to complete the law technique. In addition to disabling and destroying tethers, which had also been greatly enhanced, there was another aspect he had never considered before. With it, he regained hope that there was still a way out of the hallucination.
With his renewed energy, he focused all his willpower on a transparent blue tether, the one for [True Sight (Variant)]. With delicate precision, he began charging it with power while simultaneously pulling the tether to widen it.
The tether began showing signs of cracking, but he repaired the damage as soon as it appeared. The process repeated as the tether slowly expanded. With each centimeter, more and more power coursed from the other end of the tether back to him. It continued to widen until it reached half an inch, at which point he was forced to stop as the tether was reaching its limit. He ceased expanding it but continued controlling the tether so it didn't shrink back to its original size.
With the tether now much wider, the power that flowed through it drastically increased and began causing changes within his body, especially in his eyes. [True Sight (Variant)] had risen beyond its limitations and transformed into a law technique.
‘With this, I can not only see past the hallucinations but break them.’
His eyes began to glow softly with a blue hue, and through them, the world around him began to distort and crack. Furniture was the first to disappear, and the walls followed soon after. After that, it was the people; they all vanished in clouds of pink yellow smoke as if they had never existed.
Jayce, the adventurers, his coworkers, Guildmaster William, even Annabel, all vanished without a trace.
Bit by bit, the world around him began to disappear until only a pinkish yellow void remained. But even that began to crack until it shattered before his eyes.
The next moment, Sol found himself standing at the bottom of a pit, surrounded by pink yellow gas.
‘I’m back.’ he thought as he sat up, examining his surroundings.
The gas tried to pull him back into the hallucination, but its effects were too weak against his glowing eyes.
He didn’t immediately leave the pit, knowing that the spider was likely waiting outside. Instead, he prepared to go into battle, summoning all his magic hands and readying his magic and skills. Once he was ready to fight the Bliss Spider with all he had, he leaped up and burst out of the pit. He aimed all his attacks at the large spider, but just before he unleashed them, he noticed that things had changed.
The entire area was littered with debris covered in blue flames, and on top of that, the Bliss Spider was a few feet away from him, completely frozen solid.
Sol did a double take to make sure it wasn’t some other hallucination or trick, but with his enhanced [True Sight (Variant)], he knew it was very much real.
“It’s already dead?”