My first impression of the building was that the interior was bland. There was a giant desk in front, littered with papers that had long since started crumbling to dust. The decorations in the room were minimal, and the only furniture pieces were a few rotten chairs scattered around the room. It was a surprisingly spartan and simple interior.
Luckily, even though the room had almost nothing useful in it, there was a well-preserved map of the building that lay just behind the counter. Unlike the other papers in the room, the map had been encased in some kind of clear substance that faintly resembled glass. Drawn on the map were six massive rooms and some hallways connecting them. This was quite a bit lower than my original expectation of a 20+ room building. It appeared that I had simply underestimated how large each room was: the six ‘testing fields’ listed on the map were incredibly massive.
The rooms were labeled ‘Field B-1,’ ‘Field B-2,’ and so on.
I looked over the map, and then looked at the three hallways that led out of the room, before I turned back to my friends.
“Which way are we heading first?” I asked.
Sallia studied the map for a moment, before she shrugged. “The papers here are all ruined, so we can’t get any information from them. And the map doesn’t have any indicators of what each room was. How about we just go to room B-1 first, and then work our way up around the building? And if we find any items that could give Wealth Achievement, we give them to Felix and then store them in Miria’s backpack for safekeeping?”
I paused for a moment, looking at Felix. He tried to trace over one of the rooms on the map with his two half-destroyed fingers, and then frowned as he looked at his hand. He sighed, and nodded. “Sounds good to me. But I don’t want every item. Let's just rotate who gets each one. I got the plant core, so Miria should get the next one, then Sallia, and then Anise. And if we get a huge amount of one type of item, we divide it up equally? I can always make items out of the materials we find if or when we get back to Silver City.”
Anise seemed a bit startled when we included her, but then she smiled happily.
“Sounds good,” said Sallia, after a few moments of thought.
We then started walking to Field B-2. We were extremely careful as we walked through the hallways, but we didn’t encounter our first issue until we were halfway through the otherwise empty corridor.
There, we ran into a simple metal door with no handles. It looked exceptionally thick and sturdy, which made me feel more than slightly irritated. It wasn’t alive, so I couldn’t extinguish it, and I couldn’t see anything like a doorknob that would let us open it. And since I had spent a big amount of Alteration Essence stabilizing Felix’s hand, I wasn’t willing to throw more alteration essence at the door unless we had no better option.
“I can try opening it,” said Felix, giving the door a wary look as he started looking more closely at the door. “Be prepared to heal me if something goes horribly wrong, though. It could be trapped.”
Sallia and I immediately nodded, and started preparing whatever healing spells we could.
Felix took a few steps closer to the door, while keeping a careful eye on the floor and walls around him. “I think that patch of floor is shaped a bit oddly. It’s a bit… bumpy,” he said, after a few steps. He pointed at a small patch of metal flooring that was right in front of the door. “It could be a pressure plate or something. Or it could be the right way to open the door. It’s hard to say right now.”
“Does your attunement work?” I asked.
Felix nodded. “The door itself is somehow able to block my attunement, so I can’t mess with it. But the steel plate doesn’t have as much resistance when I try poking at it. But it feels like the plate is shielded from my senses. And what I can see is really complicated. Give me a few minutes. And move back, in case I trigger something that explodes in our face.”
Anise, Sallia, and I took a few steps back, letting Felix use his attunement to fiddle with the metal plate for a few minutes. Felix occasionally asked for our help testing something, such as putting a clod of dirt or a rock onto the metal plate, but otherwise said very little as he stared at the metal plate in the floor. Sallia and I waited in tense silence, holding on to our healing abilities as we prayed that Felix knew what he was doing.
Eventually, Felix grinned.
“All right, I think I was too cautious. It’s not a trap,” he said. “Instead, it’s some kind of authorization plate, or something of the sort. It’s incredibly difficult to interact with the metal plate, but once I actually managed to get past the parts that were ‘shielded’ from my senses, I found a switch located inside of the metal plate. It seems like it’s explicitly made to only activate if someone is standing on top of it. I can also tell that it’s connected to the door, and doesn’t seem connected to anything else. I’m going to try standing on the plate and flipping the switch, since I don’t see anything that might be dangerous.”
I kept some water ready to throw at Felix, just in case he was wrong and needed a healing spell, and I felt Sallia keep her absorption essence ready for a healing ability as well. Then, we waited as Felix stepped onto the metal plate and flicked the switch.
“User @#$KL@#@#. Error detected - cannot connect to user database. Welcome, guest @*#$.” A cheery robotic voice rang out from our surroundings, scaring the crap out of all four of us. I rapidly scanned the area with my soul-sight, but didn’t see a thing, and Sallia went as far as firing some healing at Felix while materializing her sword and jerkily scanning the area several times.
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Despite our concern, the only thing that moved in our surroundings was the massive metal door, which opened with a cheery ka-chunk. Nothing else happened.
“Is… that it?” asked Sallia, slowly lowering her sword.
Anise let out a nervous chuckle and dismissed the magic symbols she had nearly activated.
“I guess we can go in,” said Felix. The four of us took our first steps past the door, and made our way into the first massive dimensional habitat room.
The room was subdivided into several smaller chambers, each of which was separated by an incredibly thick metal wall. The walls for each smaller chamber seemed to be impossible to manipulate or interact with using any kind of essence, and also felt very… weird. The taste of spatial and dimensional manipulation was incredibly strong when I got near the walls, and I got the sense that they were much more than they seemed to be. However, when I tried touching a metal wall with my hand, it just felt like regular iron. Most strange of all, however, was the fact that even though the walls were clearly made of some sort of metal, they were perfectly see-through. There were even several chunks of the wall that seemed incredibly thin, and looked almost like windows. These were the only parts of the chamber I could interact with using Alteration Essence: unlike the walls of the chamber, these ‘windows’ let my magical senses poke through them easily.
I scanned the dozen or so sub chambers in the room, before focusing on the one closest to us. Inside of it, I could tell that gravity was different. I was used to gravity always pulling people down, towards the ground.
However, the first chamber was clearly an artificial gravity chamber of some sort. There was a large ring of rocks stuck resting on the ceiling inside of the chamber, and I could see that all sides of the chamber were laced with a metal that had a color somewhere between copper and gold.
Most interesting, however, was what the Alteration essence was doing inside of the chamber. The alteration essence hung inside of the chamber like a cloud of gaseous jello. It neither moved nor dissipated, and simply hung there, unmoving. Its movement, or lack thereof, wasn’t the important part, though.
My understanding of Alteration essence was probably better than the understanding of many shapers, since I had figured out how to ditch the ‘alternate timeline’ nonsense and use a less restrictive mental image for my shaping. However, it was far from perfect. My good talent in Alteration essence couldn’t miraculously bestow me with knowledge of everything the essence could possibly do: it just gave me a better idea of what to do if I tried something weird out.
And as far as I could tell, the alteration essence inside of the chamber wasn’t changing anything as simple as ‘swapping around color’ or ‘changing the way one of my runes worked’ for a bit.
I wasn’t quite sure how it was doing so, but as I looked at the chamber, I was pretty sure that the alteration essence inside of it was warping the laws of reality.
It was hard to get a better idea of what I was feeling, since my magical senses could only give me so much information. But whatever was going on inside of that chamber was like nothing I had ever tried doing with alteration essence before. It was so bizarre and outside of what I was used to seeing alteration essence do that I couldn’t even really understand what I was looking at. I just knew that things were different in that chamber.
“Any idea what’s happening?” asked Sallia. “I see that the chamber is weird, and I can tell it’s filled with alteration essence, but that’s about all I can figure out.”
Felix continued to study the chamber, an expression of rapt fascination on his face. However, he shook his head.
“I have no idea. It definitely doesn’t feel as if it’s regular shaping, but I can’t really sense much else. It’s definitely not an attunement, and it’s not general shaping…” Felix’s eyes glittered with curiosity as he stared at the chamber, before he grinned at me. I grinned back.
Right now, this world had two major abilities that shapers knew how to use. General shaping and attunement. If we discovered a third way to use alteration essence, that would probably get us as much Achievement as discovering how to make magic items. And I would also be able to take the knowledge of how to use the alteration system in different ways with me when we left this world, which was even more important than earning Achievement.
Anise simply glanced at the chamber a few more times, and then shrugged. “I get the feeling that the alteration essence is somehow warping something I can’t see. But that’s all I can tell. You seem better at figuring out what’s going on,” she said, nodding at Felix and me.
“I think it’s altering the laws of reality, or physics, or gravity. Something along those lines,” I said. “Probably. But not just by applying magic to weaken or strengthen gravity, or anything like that.” I said. “I get the feeling that the chamber itself is messing with how gravity works on a fundamental level. It isn’t just making gravity stronger, or weaker, it’s literally changing what creates gravity and why. The entirety of how the laws of physics work behind the scenes has been turned off and swapped out with another set of rules inside of this chamber,” I said. My voice grew in confidence with every word as I probed the chamber with my magical senses. There was still a distinct possibility that I was wrong, or misunderstanding what was happening.
But I was pretty sure I was correct.
This use of shaping pushed my ideas for what alteration essence could do in a totally new direction.
Altering the laws of physics and reality. Even if it was probably incredibly expensive and hard to do, it was an idea that made me really think about what alteration essence was.
Alteration essence altered the world. It didn’t just warp the way my absorption runes worked, or allow me to swap out the magic symbols in a spell mid-cast. At its core, alteration essence was about warping the fabric of reality to suit my needs.
I couldn’t help but wonder what would happen if I was incredibly powerful, and simply swapped out the rules for how ‘gravity’ worked on something as large as a planet. Would the entire planet simply fall apart? Would the entire world simply never have gravity again, leaving everything in a sort of artificially made low-gravity chamber?
What if I didn’t like a particular magic system, or wanted to add a new essence to a certain world?
It seemed like a totally crazy idea, and I doubted it was anywhere near possible even now, but…
What if it was actually possible to do something crazy like change around how physics worked for an entire planet, or even an entire dimension once I got strong enough?
The gravity chamber was one of the weirdest things I had seen so far, but it also got me thinking a lot about what the pinnacle of an alteration essence user was.
And I really liked what I was imagining.