I swim into the depths, leaving behind little bits of metal a hopeful trail of nails.

I speed through the astral, my body cutting through the strange liquid of the astral—a subject I must revisit considering my frequent use of ice.

I frown deeply as I consider that, frankly, the ice must come from somewhere. And if I freeze the mysterious fluid that I float in, I can learn more by studying its solid form. I’m certain it isn’t air due to my miserable failure to create any fire.

Either way, I toss my shoulders, stopping my paddling. Momentum will take me where I need to go now.

Once I get back, I’ll have the time and facilities to properly investigate the question. Instead of guesses posed to no one at all.

I sigh.

It sure will be nice not having to offload any and all experiments for later. I can’t exactly experiment while nearly dying from being crushed.

I grimaced, wrinkles crinkling across my face.

although I ended up having to do it anyway to survive.

I casually turn to my backpack, still careening through the air, and grab the plate. I sigh and stare at the crude rune I scratched into its surface. The embodiment of my technique is embedded in the steel.

It was this fallible thing that allowed me to survive. But, while I regret its necessity, it is still beautiful.

Not in the artistic sense, but in its majesty, I cannot see anything but beauty. It is a rock that I forced to spit out enough cold to freeze oceans. And with a little adjustment, I can do it again and again.

And if I can create a rune that's not even in the book, then I can ostensibly create any magical effect. The possibilities are endless, from a boat that creates its own winds to a rock that allows me to telepathically speak with others.

I smile, closing my eyes as I hug the plate to my chest, imagining the wonders I can conjure up with the possibilities contained within.

But I don’t open my eyes for long before they flutter open to a ridiculously bright light show.

A blinding ring of light spinning with the illusory slowness of something truly massive, around a black core so dark it feels like a gash in the fabric of reality. Something that is sadly frighteningly possible in this topsy-turvy place.

All are accentuated by a strange emptiness bordering the two, mildly punctuated by little bits of gray falling into the darkness.

I speed through the air, going at speeds that would destroy the engines of an ordinary spaceship, yet the strange cloud gets no smaller. Its size is so great that the meager distance I cross doesn’t even slightly change my perspective.

I gasp at the sight before promptly turning away. The momentary glance I gave the strange cloud was so bright that it felt like having a dozen lasers shot at my eye.

I feel my body warm up from the radiating light bombarding my skin with something grander than a thousand suns.

I wince; how could this cloud possibly be this bright? The vast majority of clouds barely produce more light than a lava lamp, while this cloud could function as a dual oven and waste disposal unit.

I hold my hands in front of my eyes, and kick as furiously as I can, desperate to get out of its range. If I stay here any longer, it might cook me like a roast ham!

I push far faster than I’ve ever gone, but it still takes hours before my skin finally stops feeling like it was in the middle of an ongoing assault. But strangely enough, as that starts to happen, the light starts going away in a strange manner like a lantern slowly getting closed, and I hesitantly open my eyes.

I see the strange clouds' light get covered, like an eclipse formed from nothing as more and more of its surface is covered by some strange film.

As it disappeared as quickly as it appeared, I stop myself, and with a queer grimace, I start swimming back.

My eyes might be burning due to the intense light, but so do they also burn with desire for the truly singular experience the cloud holds. It might be crazy to try to do anything with a bloom so dangerous that just being nearby almost ripped off my skin, but it’s just so unique.

I can't leave without getting a glimpse of what it truly is, so with a contained yet eager gesture, I unpeel the truly gargantuan cloud.

I find myself amongst the sea of information and reactively filter myself towards the scene, but strangely enough, I bump against strange barriers. Stopping me from seeing what I wish to see. Like how objects, for some reason, refuse to be peeled twice. But more selectively, I frowned, thinking, "Well, what the hell am I supposed to know?

Before the answer solves itself, a strange scene eagerly shoved into my brain.

—

I see a tiny spark bloom from nothing; its very being is the concept of life itself. A grand concept, but it exists only as a tiny dot drifting for countless millennia. It grows as life grows, first slowly but then gaining mass exponentially as life all across the universe erupts.

Its size is terrifying, since all beings' base desire is to live. All other wants pale in comparison to the desperate need to live at any cost. By far the greatest cloud to ever bloom, hanging in the sky of the astral like the sun.

But it doesn't stay like that, a beckoning star radiating the power to live forms instead, and in its center, a tiny black speck appears.

And its birth is that of destruction, for to live is to die, and to climb, you must step on something.

It slowly grows in the core of the star of life, fed by its expanding mass, as it emits a strange gray mist from a spinning disk, slowing its growth but corrupting the star.

As it transforms into a ferocious spinning, roiling mass of light, growing indefinitely while also feeding destruction.

And life is being overtaken; one day destruction shall devour entirely the star of life, and all will be black.

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

—

I open my eyes to see nothing; an agonizing void of mad destruction is all I see. I feel a film on my eyes like ink that refuses to leave the world unstained. The desire to mark the world is preventing me from seeing it.

The ink slowly drips off, but my eyes are still closed; I shall be blinded if I look at the light after spending so much time in the dark.

But as my eyes adjust, I open them to see me floating amongst a sea of color, revealing the beauty of the astral plane to my eyes.

I rub my head, groaning from the strangeness of it all, but at the very least I can take solace in the fact. That I actually learned something useful from these damn clouds. Because it appears that one cloud can eat another.

And if they can eat one another and turn into strange new clouds based on which ones eat another. That means that instead of looking for clouds to devour for useful magic, I could instead create them by combining various emotions.

I grab my chin, imagining creating larger clouds of rage or other base emotions by essentially forcing seeds into each other. Thus building myself a better meal.

I know that iron and steel can move emotions, so-

I shake my head, wringing the thought from my mind, before breathing calmly in and returning to my base.

—

I float above the remains of my base, my steel home a battered and bruised mess, the steel twisted into a grotesque mess accentuated by the caked blood of the ants.

All held up by crumpled steel towers over a roiling, shifting mass of meat chitin and hair.

My glorious creation, a defiant stand against the unknown and hostile world I found myself in now an orb of meat.

The steel was covered by a shifting surface of chitin and blended leg hairs, a grotesque carpet of black and red. The surface underneath is roiling with putrid gasses, occasionally expelling a random assortment of limbs before they fall back into the mass. The short-lived hole revealing the inside as a strange mush of flesh, blue blood, and ant guts.

I sigh and wipe my forehead because well it seems like it’ll be some dirty work restoring my base to anything even close to what it was before. Hell it might be easier to just build a new one rather than try to fix what I’ve got.

But either way, I should get onto salvaging what I have. So I momentarily ignore the meat orb and turn to my base, swimming over in broad strokes and coming to the side with a mild speed, freeze myself to a stop. But I wince as I hear an echoing groan; the base not stable enough for random temperature shifts.

I swim over the walls and descend into my base, but I don’t grab the handles like I used to. For of what handles are left, the remainder are covered in a disgusting coating of blood and guts, flecked with the spattering of the insides of the ants as they collided with the base.

I float through the base wincing at each room wrecked, dented, or pierced by corpses before eventually reaching my goal, the steam engine. Its rudimentary shield is caked with miscellaneous pieces of meat and it is dripping with blue blood, but it's still standing strong.

I grab at the edges and pull out my laser, quickly melting off the bits connecting the shield to the hull of the ship.

After melting the edges, I quickly pull back the covering and breathe a sigh of relief when I see that the engine has, at the very least, not been smacked out of existence.

I grab the edge and pull the top off extremely easily, too, due to the low gravity. And take a little peek at its insides.

But I am disappointed with what I see, wincing as I hold up a broken gear. While the impacts didn’t majorly dent the outside, they seem to have broken the more delicate components on the outside. And with the other steam assembly on the steel orb presumably being consumed by the meat, I don’t have any options for intact gears.

I craned my neck up into the queasy sight of the meat orb. Still roiling with heat and gas buildup, the blue blood oozing between the cracks. Unfortunately, the view of the meat planet is frighteningly close.

The pillars attaching my base to the metal core were dented and drawn closer to the surface, and when you mix in the carpet of dead meat, the base is eerily close to the base. Additionally, the increase in mass from all the ant corpses has noticeably increased gravity.

I sigh and look back towards the station. When I rebuild my base, I'll have to extend it further than before. My painstaking efforts to maintain a balance between gravity and the luxuries of weightless interior design have been ruined.

But well all my interior design was ruined by the avalanche of ants. So I grunt and stuff the gears into my tattered backpack, wrapping them in a bit of fabric so that they don’t jiggle. Before carefully laying the backpack on the floor of my base.

I wipe my hands clean before falling into the orbit of the meat planet. But I approach a bit too fast, my eyes snapping wide open as I quickly arrest my fall with a dash of wanderlust magic.

While the goal of the open ceilings previously was to allow me to easily get to the ball of steel, I am understandably quite hesitant to land on the meat planet. It’s shifting mass of blood, chitin, and flesh would be worse than any quicksand you could find at the movies.

But regardless of my hesitation, I must approach the mass of meat and blood. Because while the purpose of this whole mess was to create a source of gravity amongst this empty plane, I was also hoping to, you know, use the goddamn thing!

Ugh, I dodge a spout of blood, guts, and chitin as the hot, roiling surface of the meat spits out a gout of body parts, like the coronal mass ejection of a star if you switched beautiful plasma with random ant parts.

I stomp on nothing in a spin of frustration. Because I can't build anything on the meat planet right now. It moves too quickly and violently, so if I want to use it for anything other than sightseeing, I will need to reach the cord and attach buildings to it.

I grimace, but I bear the weight as I summon forth a terrible heat. The heat beam arcs out into the mass of flesh, hair, and chitin, only to do precisely nothing.

I glare at the meat planet in dismay as I realize that all I’m doing is cooking it!

I see the oil separate and the blood evaporate as some of the meat starts to turn a crispy brown. I frantically wipe away at my face, incredibly tempted to eat it, despite the fact that it looks as if someone made ground beef by punching a cow.

I shake my head, ridding myself of the foolish thought. Because, frankly, who knows what the hell is going on in there? I have hypothesized that bacteria just flat out doesn’t exist here, but frankly, I’m not going to risk it. Thank whatever gods are out there that I can’t smell anything here because it must stink to high hells!

Either way, after that annoying thought, I refire the heat beam holding it in place so that I may drill my way to the steel. My beam of pure heat burrows through the flesh, but whenever any flesh is taken away, the surrounding bits flow in and patch up the hole.

I try again and again to burn away the flesh from my glorious creation, but all I manage to do is make a mess. In a fit of anger, I swam far, far away. Enough so that gravity does not force me into the planet of meat.

Ugh, what can I do to solve this? Blasting it with my heat beam definitely isn’t working. The strong effect of gravity near the metal core means that any broken matter just flows back into the mass of meat.

But wait, why am I trying to break it? The most obvious solution is to just move the meat away.

I grab my chin and pace in my thoughts as I think. Because I don’t believe that I could afford to do so. I can’t throw away any resource, much less something as rare as biological material. And while I might not have a use for it right now, it is essentially enough biological fuel to form a gravity field.

That is utterly ridiculous. I was only able to accomplish the same feat as the former clashing ant armies in a barely reasonable time frame due to the immense density of steel.

Plus, even if I could move it, what would I use? Wind waves might work, but depending on the strength, the meat either blasts away one day to return in a repeat of the ant avalanche or it falls right back into the mass.

I might be able to slowly siphon off the meat by just grabbing it and moving it away, but it would be slow and still waste a meteor's worth of meat.

Well, what other tools do I have at my disposal? Well, I know that the platform for the base is still functioning, even if barely, so if I were to make a metal platform that doesn’t rest on the meat but rests above it, it could work.

But wait, how would I attach it? If I attached it to the beams suspending the base above the meat planet, it would fall apart; the entire point of my creation is that it generates gravity. And I can’t reach the core; hell, I just futilely attempted to drill toward it.

But it does bring to mind another solution: if the problem with the meat planet is that it’s moving too much, why not stop it from doing that?

I have an unlimited supply of magic ice, and while it might not be the best to stand on due to the cold aura the ice gives off, I can build things on top that are less cold.

Yeah, it seems that making a shell of ice around the planet would be best to both preserve the valuable meat and still have a surface to stand on.

I glance around and look at myself, then turn back, slightly pissed at my descent into the star. Before starting to build momentum as I race back to the meat planet.

I do a grand flyby of the meat planet before turning around and going again. Slowly painting the planet of meat in ice, one stroke at a time.

—

I sit on a crude chair made of steel, relishing the still somewhat unfamiliar sensation of gravity. In a box of thick steel, I see from the singular window/door a carpet of ice covering a red, fleshy planet. The room is small, but it is enough. I will have a new base soon enough, but before that, I need to get some work done.

A smile expands across my face as I pry open the book, seeing characters I learned about in my little jaunt as I flip through it all. I stare at the book of runes, my infinite notebook and pen in hand, and muse to myself. There is no point in trying to recreate the old; it would only bring me pain to see the ghost of my old home.

Destruction clears away the chaff, and with its gift, I shall make a new base. Better, stronger, and most importantly, filled with enough magical runes that it could rival the energy of a nuclear explosion.

So I squint at the book and peel back its mysteries.