In the middle of the first dimensional sub-chamber, a massive creature was chained to a table.

The thing had mouth, or any discernible head. It looked like somebody had chopped a fish in half, taken the lower part of the fish, and then grafted it to the top half of a plant. The plant half of the creature strongly resembled a stickman, except that instead of sticks, its upper body was made of thick, green vines, tangled around each other in order to form a rough approximation of a humanoid chest and arms. It seemed to have a pair of eyes attached to its right arm, although I had no idea how any of its biology worked at all.

It was the strangest biological creature I had ever seen, excluding the outsiders that came from the dimension of the black sun.

Even more bizarre was the fact that the creature was still alive.

The second Orthan empire had collapsed hundreds of years ago, and it didn’t seem that this place had been disturbed much since then. While Outsiders might pass through this place from time to time, the dusty halls and unactivated traps in the building certainly suggested that nothing had come to feed this creature recently.

In other words, this creature had somehow been chained to a table for centuries. It had never escaped, and had never been given food or water. Despite that fact it was alive. Absently, I wondered if the creature simply had no natural limit to its lifespan at all, and whether it simply didn’t need food or water. It was hard to guess what was and wasn’t possible in the wider multiverse, after all.

When it saw us, it seemed frightened. It started making strange, shrieking sounds and rattling at its chains, but it was unable to move around. All it accomplished was making some rather loud clattering sounds.

I felt a wave of pity for the creature. If I had been locked up in a dark room for hundreds of years with no food or water, I would have been desperate for something to talk to. However, this creature’s first reaction upon seeing an Orthanoid creature was to start screaming and thrashing. It was obvious that it had suffered a lot before the second Orthan empire collapsed, and it hadn’t forgotten what had been done to it in the following centuries.

I also wondered how intelligent the creature was, and whether it was still sane after all these years.

I checked the creature with my soul-sight, and confirmed that the creature had a soul. It was a distinctly green-blue color, and looked different from the souls that the other Orthanoids I had seen had. However, the difference was surprisingly small. Its soul looked nowhere near as alien as the souls of the outsiders, at least. If it weren’t for its distinct color and slightly odd shape, I would have easily believed that it had a similar soul to Sallia, Felix, Anise, and me.

“Not again! Please, not again!” A voice shrieked inside of my mind, and I blinked in surprise. The creature’s words didn’t sound like words at all - instead, it was more like the creature was sending concepts at me through some sort of telepathic communication. It was hard to translate its thoughts into exact words, but I could still feel the distinct tang of fear in its thoughts. I was able to confirm that the creature was truly terrified of us.

I also had no idea how it was communicating with us. I couldn’t sense any alteration, manifestation, or absorption essence from the creature, so it was either using binding essence, or it was using something else entirely to communicate with us.

However, how it was communicating with us wasn’t what mattered to me.

What mattered was that the creature had communicated with us.

I felt far more sick when I realized that this intelligent creature, capable of communicating and thinking and feeling, had been locked up in this lab for hundreds of years collecting dust. It had been bad enough when I thought the creature was more like an animal. Now that I knew it was intelligent enough to communicate with us, I felt even more disgusted by the scene in front of us.

I looked at Sallia, Felix, and Anise, and I saw similar looks of surprise and horror on their faces. Clearly, the creature hadn’t just communicated with me: everyone in our group had received the same mental communication.

I immediately stopped looking at the creature using my soul-sight, and concentrated on the creature’s nonexistent face.

“Can you communicate with us?” I asked, yelling as loudly as I could into the sub-chamber.

“Not again! Please not again!” the creature shrieked again, ignoring my words. I couldn’t tell if we needed to use some sort of mental communication with it, or if it had somehow lost its mind before we stumbled across it, or if it just didn’t speak our language. All of those options seemed logical. However, the fact that it could communicate with us and we couldn’t say anything back was very troublesome.

Felix frowned, and stared at the air in front of him.

“I… feel something,” he said. “It’s not like alteration essence, manifestation essence, or absorption essence, but it’s something similar. But also very different…” he shook his head, and then looked at the creature. His expression became a mixture of pity and frustration.

I sighed, and patted Felix’s arm.

I had hoped that Felix’s first interaction with binding essence would be special somehow. That it would fill him with wonder and excitement, and make him feel even more driven to learn how to use his primary essence and grow. Instead, his first encounter with what appeared to be binding essence was in the middle of this horrific situation. Not only that, but Felix’s current body probably had zero compatibility with binding essence, and we had no Ability that would let him remold his body to become compatible with binding essence. I had previously thought that Sallia’s introduction to her core magic System had been bad, because of how much emotional pain she had gone through in our first world. But Felix’s introduction to his main essence was even worse.

“Can you understand anything we’re saying?” I asked again, hoping that it would somehow understand if I just kept trying to communicate with it. If it’s mind had been lost before we got here, perhaps certain keywords could trigger a response? “We can set you free, if you don’t attack us.” I said. If there was a safe way to release it, I didn’t mind helping the creature before we moved on.

“Not again! Please not again!” Screeched the creature into my mind, as if it were completely and utterly unaware of my words.

I sighed.

My attempts at communication were going very poorly.

The creature was probably using some form of binding essence to communicate, and I had no access whatsoever to binding essence right now.

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“Miria, do you have any ideas for how to talk to it?” asked Anise. She had a rather sad expression as she looked at the chained up creature.

“I’m thinking about it,” I said, trying to see if there were any notes that had survived that might tell us how to talk to the creature.

But just like in the previous two rooms, the notes in this room had been written down on pieces of paper. And none of that paper had been preserved through the centuries as anything more than dust.

If the old Orthans had discovered a way to communicate with the creature, they hadn’t left any hints behind.

I turned towards Felix and Sallia, hoping one of them had an idea.

Sallia rubbed her forehead in thought, and Felix kept looking around the room, as if hoping to find a solution to the problem.

Then, I got an idea.

Even though I had no access to binding essence, and I had no idea what principles were used for telepathic communication, that didn’t mean it was impossible to communicate.

I looked at the two small black dots on the right side of the creature’s body. I hoped the black dots were eyes, or my idea wouldn’t work.

Then, I used my absorption essence to create a few madness-inducing bubbles. Before the creature saw them, I used alteration essence to change the nature of the mental influence my water bubbles exerted upon other creatures.

Instead of causing a creature to desire to join with the water and lose themself inside of it, I warped my bubbles to communicate a feeling of peace, friendliness, and clarity. It was a bit difficult for me to change my runes so drastically, from causing madness to causing mental peace, but it still only took me a few moments.

Then, with my alterations complete, I floated my water bubbles into the creature’s field of vision.

The creature’s screeching calmed down considerably, although it seemed rather confused by my attempt to communicate. However I was glad that the creature didn’t seem as terrified as before. Nobody moved while we let the creature adapt to my ‘peace’ bubbles.

After a few minutes of us standing around waiting, it stopped shrieking completely.

No cutting? Not hurt? Asked the creature.

I amplified the feeling of peace inside of my communication bubbles, and at the same time, I felt myself starting to relax.

I hadn’t been sure if my little trick would work, but it seemed that I could at least communicate basic ideas and emotions with the chained up creature. I was probably communicating with it in the same way a baby or toddler would, and just ‘shouting’ basic emotions at it. But I seriously doubted I was going to get any more precise thoughts across to the creature right now, given the fact that I barely knew what I was doing.

Not hurt. Please free! The creature’s fear seemed to dissipate, and its shrieking turned into a plea for freedom instead.

I turned to the others, just to make sure they were okay with my decision before I tried anything else.

“I’m happy to break its chains and set it free t. Does anyone object?” I asked.

“Not in the slightest,” said Felix.

“The sooner we can set this thing free, the better,” said Sallia. “But I think we should check to make sure it won’t attack us after we set it free first. Just in case. I have no idea how strong this thing is, and getting a promise that it won’t hurt us seems like a reasonable condition for releasing it.”

Anise looked at Sallia thoughtfully, and then nodded. “I didn’t think of that, but I agree with Sallia,” she said.

I did my best to communicate the feeling of inquiry, or questioning with my emotion-bubbles. Then, I tried to embed a feeling of peace into my emotional bubbles as well.

Peace? Why question not hurt? Cut and hurt? HURT! The creature’s mental communication seemed to turn back into an incoherent mess of terrified sobbing, and I winced.

Clearly, my communication attempt hadn’t worked, and instead, the creature was afraid of us again. I felt very bad.

Still, I tried again. Instead of just relying on babbling emotions and vague ideas at the other party, I turned to Anise.

“Anise, can you perform a lightshow with me?” I asked.

“Lightshow? What’s a lightshow?” said Anise.

“What I want to do is create an image, made entirely out of light. We don’t have any understanding of the magic symbol for light, and it’s really hard to communicate with the creature by babbling emotions at it. I figure maybe we can add some visual aids and help it figure out what we’re asking.” I sighed, and glanced at the creature’s odd biology again. “I really hope its eyes are designed to do things like see the world in color…”

Anise thought about it for a moment, and then nodded. “As long as I have a flat surface to concentrate my spell on, I can create a picture made out of light. Does that work?”

“Perfect,” I said.

After that, Anise and I got to work. Anise constructed a sort of collage of projector slide images onto the wall directly in front of the creature’s eyes, showing images of us releasing it, and then followed up by showing images of the creature attacking us or waddling out of its cage. Meanwhile, I babbled emotions like ‘friendship’ ‘peace’ ‘violence?’ and ‘agreement’ at the other party at the appropriate times, in hopes that some of our communication attempts were getting through.

No hurt. If free, friend. Please let go home, sent the creature, after nearly ten minutes of failed communication.

That was good enough for me.

Now, the problem was how to actually free the creature.

I didn’t mind losing a little bit of my hand experimenting, so I started out by sticking the tip of my pinky finger through one of the windows in the dimensional chamber into the room where the creature was held.

Immediately, I felt as if I had somehow stuck my finger into water. The way air worked, the way air pressure worked, and possibly, even the way atoms and molecules were joined together at the atomic level were different inside of the chamber. I couldn’t pinpoint how, and I had no idea what exactly was different. But I knew for sure that the dimensional laws inside of the chamber had dimensional laws unlike those I was used to.

And my finger did not like it.

It felt like I had stuck my finger into a vat of ice. It also felt like my finger was boiling.

I have absolutely no idea why either of these things were happening, but it was clear that the laws of reality inside of the dimensional subchamber did not agree with my biology.

I hissed in pain, and decided that in a few seconds, I was going to pull out my finger if it didn’t explode. I wanted to test the effects of the chamber on my flesh, but I also preferred not to need to regrow my finger later.

Fortunately, the effects didn’t get much worse. Even though my finger was definitely in a lot of pain, it wasn’t unbearable.

A few seconds later, I pulled my finger out. It was now slightly blue.

“Did it hurt?” asked Sallia, as she looked at my finger and winced.

I nodded.

“Give me your finger.”

I obediently gave Sallia access to my hand, and she inspected my pinky finger for a few seconds before I felt some absorption essence start to seep into my injury.

I breathed a sigh of relief, and the blue discoloration on my skin quickly faded away.

“All right, my healing ability can mitigate the issues created by the dimensional laws in that chamber. I’m going to go in, cut that creature free, and then run back. If something goes wrong, use the gravitite to pull me out or attack the creature with magic, if needed,” said Sallia. I quickly materialized my dimensional backpack and pulled out a massive chunk of gravitite, before we all got ready.

Then, she leapt through one of the windows, ran up to the creature, and used her Market sword to slice apart the chains holding the creature down. Luckily, whatever its chains were made of were not resistant to my Market-sword, and she was able to slice through them like they were butter. She quickly returned to the window and leapt back outside of the chamber, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

Sallia was safe, and the strange creature was free.