After investigating the gravity chamber for a while longer, I couldn’t come up with an idea for how it actually worked. Despite the massive ambitions I had started to harbor for the final direction of alteration magic, there was something I was missing about how to use alteration magic to alter the laws of reality.

The chamber itself was also difficult to figure out.

Even though I knew the laws of gravity were somehow different inside of the chamber, we couldn’t quite figure out what was changed. It wasn’t as simple as gravity being ‘reversed’ inside of the chamber, which had been our original guess. Even though there was still a ring of rocks stuck to the ceiling inside of the gravity chamber, other items we tried tossing it would randomly get stuck to the walls, to the bands of copper-gold metal in the sides of the chamber, and would sometimes even hover in midair for seemingly no reason. Where we tossed the clods of dirt and rocks didn’t seem to make a difference. Anytime we tossed anything into the chamber, the item would simply determine that some random spot was ‘down’ and then fall towards it forever. And nobody could figure out how this point was chosen, or how the chamber worked. The only breakthrough we had was when I finally realized that the bands of metal on the sides of the chamber were subtly changing the way the alteration essence inside of the chamber was situated every few seconds.

So, ultimately, we ended up using Sallia’s sword and her exceptional physical strength to pry the strange metal off of the sides of the room. Since we couldn’t figure out what the chamber was supposed to do, and how the bands of metal on the sides of the chamber worked, we decided that we might as well grab the metal and move on. It was probably valuable, after all. After claiming our own chunks of metal, we got a pleasant surprise.

Wealth: Own the equivalent of 3 bars of pure Gravitite

Achievement +200

My Achievement increased from 14,818 to 15,018 in an instant. I looked at Sallia and Felix, who were also grinning, and felt a little relief. We didn’t get any pop-up offering to bring the Gravitite metal back to the Market, which was a shame since Felix might have been able to do something with it. However, it was still a nice discovery. More Achievement was always nice.

After ripping the metal out of the chamber, all of the random trash and debris we had thrown into the chamber fell off of the sides of the chamber and clattered onto the ground. I could still tell that something was weird about how gravity worked inside of the room, but it was obvious that the metal also played a huge role in messing with gravity.

Sallia gave the metal we had procured a curious look, and tried poking the metal with her pinky finger.

“It doesn’t do anything weird if you touch it,” she said. “It just feels like regular metal. We can try experimenting with it a bit.”

After seeing Sallia mess with the metal, and seeing the gravity chamber ‘turn off’ after losing the metal, I also tried poking it with my pinky finger. Sure enough, it just felt like a regular bar of metal once it was outside of the chamber. I tried feeding it a bit of alteration essence to the bar of metal, to see if it did anything interesting outside of the chamber.

For a brief moment after I fed it my alteration essence, the bar seemed like a greedy black hole, and devoured every single speck of energy I had fed it.

And then, interestingly enough, I felt my hand get tugged towards the chunk of metal. It was as if, for a brief moment, the bar of metal had become down and my entire body had started to fall towards it.

Then, the bar of metal ran out of alteration essence, and the gravitational pull disappeared.

It was an incredibly strange sensation.

“The bars themselves can do gravity manipulation?” asked Felix, having seen my experiment.

“That seems to be the case,” I said. “Maybe the changed laws of reality inside of that chamber somehow mess with how the bars of metal work? It doesn’t seem like the bar of metal can do anything except pull stuff towards it when it’s powered by essence. But all of the stuff we threw into the chamber ended up going in weird directions, and almost none of the objects were pulled directly towards the slabs of metal.”

Felix nodded thoughtfully, and started feeding the chunk of copper-gold metal some alteration essence. Just like when I had tried it, his chunk of gravitite began subtly pulling us towards it. Then, he tried the same thing with manifestation essence, and got a similar result.

“It can use either essence,” he said, after a few moments. “It doesn’t seem to differentiate between which essence is being used at all. It just needs essence to work. More importantly, it also has a pretty strict upper limit to how much energy it can absorb at once. If you try to feed it too much essence, it’ll just waste the excess,” he said. Then, he grinned. “There are some pretty useful applications for this that I can think of, although a lot of them will take some time to make. But for example, if one makes a sword out of this metal, and then feeds it some essence while they swing it towards an enemy, I imagine it could throw a hostile creature off during the fight. If they suddenly start ‘falling’ towards one of our swords in the middle of a fight, it could give us a very useful advantage. And I’m sure there are other ways to use it too.” Felix said, his eyes shining with excitement. “Let me try it. Sallia, hand me your sword. I’ll try adding a layer of Gravitite to the edge. If we’re lucky, maybe we can even take it back to the Market!” Sallia handed him her sword. A few moments later, I saw the copper-gold metal start to bend and deform, warping piece by piece as Felix adjusted its shape using his metal attunement.

At the same time, Felix tried to mess with the shape of Sallia’s sword. However, it seemed that the Market-made item was far more resilient to being changed than the metal we had found.

Felix grunted with effort, glaring at Sallia’s sword, but continued fiddling with it. I could feel alteration essence pouring out of him, and I suspected he had used over half of his alteration essence to try to manipulate Sallia’s weapon.

After a few minutes of concentration, Felix managed to add a few strips of the new copper-gold metal to Sallia’s sword.

“I think it worked! Try it!” He said.

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Sallia gave Felix’s new creation a curious glance, and then tried pointing the tip of her blade at a nearby chair. She dumped a small amount of manifestation essence into the newly added strips of metal, and a moment later, the chair started falling towards her sword. Sallia stopped powering the blade, and casually swung her sword at it.

The chair was neatly sliced in half.

Sallia gave the blade a few more experimental swings, and then gave Felix a big thumbs up.

“I like it!” she said. “Thanks, Felix! I’ll have to practice with it, but I really like it!” she said, and gave him a quick hug.

Felix’s grin widened, and I also felt pretty happy. This was the first time that Felix had created an item that was useful in and of itself. Previously, we had tried out plenty of Felix’s other items: after all, it wasn’t a big deal to give Felix some feedback on how his swords and armor felt if we used them during a training session. However, at least until now, the Market items we had available were simply better than Felix’s items. Felix hadn’t been useless as a combatant, thanks to his spellcasting. However, this was the first time Felix had taken a step down the path he truly wanted to take: the path of a craftsman.

And I could see that Felix realized it too. His grin grew wider and wider, and brighter and brighter, until I wondered if he was trying to become this world’s third sun.

“Congratulations, Felix,” I said, and gave him a huge hug. I didn’t say anything more, because there was nothing else I needed to say.

“You’ve been a huge help in watching me grow and improve,” he said, as he hugged me back. “All three of you,” he said, before hugging Sallia and Anise as well.

We spent a few more minutes celebrating. Felix promised to modify my sword later, once he had more essence ready. After that, we continued exploring the room.

The other sub-chambers of the room all seemed to be testing chambers different gravity configurations. And all of them also had more Gravitite inside of them, which made me feel very excited. We could definitely get a lot more Achievement in this room after we claimed ownership of all the random metal laying around.

But before dismantling them, we spent some time trying to figure out what each chamber had originally been used for. I hadn’t figured out how to ‘alter’ the laws of reality yet, and I was really hoping that observing these chambers in detail would give me the inspiration I was missing. Some of the testing chambers seemed pretty basic, such as one chamber that seemed devoted to figuring out exactly how much gravitite was needed to counteract the gravity pulling us towards the planet. However, some of the chambers we found were even weirder than the first chamber.

One of the chambers, for example, was dedicated to making objects fall forever. At least, that was our best guess about what the chamber was supposed to do. After dropping one of Felix’s boots into the chamber as a test, the boot simply continued to ‘fall’ in circles, somehow never actually hitting any particular part of the walls or the ground. It was almost as if the ‘direction’ gravity made things fall in changed depending on where within the chamber an object was.

None of us could figure out why in the world the old Orthans had bothered trying to make a chamber for that, but we were more than happy to steal the gravitite inside of the chamber.

The other chambers all seemed to have similar ideas in mind. They were all dedicated to testing some aspect of gravity and how it worked, as well as messing with Gravitite. We looted every single speck of metal we could get our hands on.

Wealth: Own the equivalent of 12 bars of pure Gravitite

Achievement +400

Which brought my Achievement to 15,418 total out of the 24,000 or so that I needed.

600 Achievement for the first chamber we investigated in this massive complex of facilities wasn’t bad at all. After we had seen the massive field of traps outside of the facility, I was keenly aware of how dangerous this place could be. However, the rewards were equally excellent, and made it easier to justify pushing ahead more.

We quickly moved to room B-2 afterwards.

Much like the first room, chamber B-2 was organized as a massive set of sub-rooms, each of which seemed devoted to testing some particular aspect of the world.

However, as I looked at each chamber, I started to realize that this area was clearly devoted to a completely different dimension than the first room. Within each chamber of the firstroom, as far as we could tell, the laws of reality hadn’t been too different from those of the world we currently lived in. Chemicals probably worked in mostly the same way, air seemed similar, and I was willing to bet that on an atomic level, things were probably at least similar to the rest of this world. Apart from gravity, the first room had been fairly normal.

However, the chambers in the second major room were hard to wrap my head around.

For some reason, inside of each chamber that we investigated, the world itself seemed…

Silent.

Frozen.

Dead.

I wasn’t sure what law of reality had been changed in each chamber, until I tried throwing a clod of dirt into one of the chambers to see what happened.

Then, to my surprise, the clod of dirt froze the moment it crossed the threshold of the first chamber. It was as if it had suddenly run into the world’s most sticky patch of air.

The rest of the clod of dirt crumbled, and quickly turned into a spray of dirt and dust. However, anytime a piece of dirt or debris made contact with the chamber in front of us, it also stopped moving.

“I think that the chamber is missing… time?” said Felix. “Maybe? It looks like anything that goes into the chambers of this room just get frozen in time. At least, that’s my best guess. I could be totally wrong though.”

I gave the chamber a closer look, and then tried tossing a few more things at it, just to see what happened. After a few tries, I was convinced that Felix was probably right. The chamber in front of us seemed to just freeze whatever it came in contact with. It didn’t seem to matter what I threw at it - no matter what, the moment it crossed the threshold of the chamber, it would simply freeze. Even Felix’s market boot got stuck at the threshold of the chamber. Luckily, he could simply dematerialize it and rematerialize it again. Whatever the strange dimensional chamber in front of us was doing, it couldn’t disable the Market’s item features. However, apart from Market items, retrieving other items from the still and dead dimensional chambers in front of us was practically impossible.

The three of us looked around, to see if we could find any loot similar to the gold-bronze metal from the first chamber or any research notes that had survived to the present day. Sadly, the second chamber was rather lacking in useful items that we could claim ownership of. Although an area frozen in time was interesting to look at, I doubted we would learn anything just by watching the chamber for an extended period of time, and I still couldn’t figure out how to manipulate the laws of reality using alteration essence. Any research notes that had been present had long crumbled to dust. We were also quite a bit more worried about messing with the chambers in this room, since if we froze ourselves in time somehow, we would probably just stop moving or thinking until this world ended. And given how bad things seemed to be on the surface right now, I seriously doubted that would take more than a few decades.

After inspecting various timestopped chambers, we started heading to Chamber B-3. Felix deactivated another authorization roadblock on the way, and we didn’t encounter any other obstacles. However, Chamber B-3 was different from the first two chambers.

Much like the first two chambers, it was filled with various sub-chambers, all of which were structured similarly to the other rooms.

However, in the first sub-chamber we looked at, we found a creature was imprisoned inside of it.