The fifth room was creepy.

Not in the same way I imagined the dimension of the black sun was, where, according to the research notes we had found, everything was alive in some fashion. Instead, it was like we had walked into a furnace.

Every single sub-chamber of the fifth room was filled with light and heat. Unlike the other four chambers, the chambers in room five didn’t have any sort of alteration-essence induced changes in the laws of reality at all. Instead, every single sub-chamber was reinforced to a completely ridiculous extent. Whatever metal the sub-chamber walls were made of were probably capable of withstanding a force equivalent to hundreds of Sallias hitting them as hard as they could. And by my estimation, right now, ten to twenty Sallias could probably rip apart iron with their bare hands.

Even more bizarre, however, was what lay inside of the sub-chambers.

The previous sub-chambers had obviously been testing facilities of some sort. The first room had been filled with gravity-testing chambers, the second room had been filled with chambers related to testing some aspect of time, the third room was devoted to housing and imprisoning various life forms, and room four related to miscellaneous organic and material tests.

However, what was contained inside the sub-chambers of room six were giant clumps of light, heat, and mana.

There was no physical matter to speak of. There weren’t even any laws of reality to speak of. As far as I could tell, it was almost like each glob of light, heat, and mana was just… pure, compacted energy and chaos.

And each was also incredibly hot.

The walls were clearly designed to keep the heat inside of each sub-chamber from affecting the rest of the chamber. The floors also like magic items built to cool down people walking on them, and there were dozens of layers of alteration essence-based heat shields surrounding each chamber. There were even a few layers of Prismarium, which made me think that perhaps the material was somehow related to absorbing heat.

It was also clear that the floors and heat-shields weren’t quite doing their job. It was hot.

“What in the world is this?” asked Sallia, glancing at the globs of light and heat.

Very hot. Unpleasant, sent Sekundyrr. Anise nodded in agreement.

Felix grabbed a clod of dirt, and then tried pushing it past some of the layers of shielding.

The layers of magical shielding didn’t seem to restrict physical objects from passing through, so the clod of dirt simply rolled forward. It even rolled through the Prismium layers, which made me feel quite confused. Did the strange rock somehow turn into a gas when it was ‘activated’ or something? And how were we supposed to turn it on?

My questions and confusion about Prismium disappeared when, after passing through the fourth heat-shield, the clod of dirt started to glow orange.

After passing through the fifth heat-shield, it started to look strangely liquified.

After passing through the seventh heat-shield, the clod of dirt burned with a peculiar black-green flame.

And after passing through the eighth heat-shield, the clod of dirt turned directly into molten slag and stopped moving entirely.

I blinked.

I had been thinking that the heat-shields simply weren’t doing their job, but maybe they were doing their job quite well. It was just that whatever the globs of mana, light, and heat were, they were way hotter than I thought they were.

I looked around, hoping to find some research notes. I couldn’t find any paper notes laying around the facility: however, I did find a metal plaque engraved with the words ‘Fragment of an unborn dimension - part 1’ placed in front of the first chamber.

Most of the other metal chambers had similar metal plaques placed near them.

“It seems that they’re literally components of an unborn dimension,” I said, feeling a strange mixture of wonder and bafflement. “But why?”

“I think they were trying to use it as a crafting material,” said Felix, as his eyes started to shine. “I remember reading something about that in the Market, at least. It was… that record of a conversation we stumbled onto last time, I think?” said Felix. “My memory is a little fuzzy, but I remember the conversation we found discussing something about most newborn dimensions imploding, and turning into unstable globs of supermana. or something like that. And how they were amazing crafting materials.”

Felix looked around the room, and a few moments later, he picked up an object that looked like a giant metal pair of tongs. He studied it carefully, and messed with it a few times, before he nodded. “Maybe they used this thing to try to extract bits of the unborn dimension without extracting the whole thing?” he said, shrugging. “I mean, I’m going purely off of guesswork here, but it at least seems reasonable to me.”

“A crafting material?” said Sallia, her eyes widening. “I suddenly have a lot more respect for whoever tried to turn something like this into a sword or something,” she said, glancing at the blob of superhot mana-plasma. “I can’t help but imagine most people just melting into tiny flecks of ash the moment they put it on a forge. And trying to figure out how to melt down an unborn dimension must be nightmarishly difficult.”

I tried analyzing the ‘unborn dimension’ using my magical senses, and was forced to retract them a moment later. Just looking at the dimension had given me a highly unpleasant barrage of different ‘understandings’ of the same thing, which led to a massive headache. However, I could at least understand a little bit more about what I was looking at.

What I had seen before pulling my magical senses away was… complex.

As we had worked our way through the facility and investigated more and more things related to other dimensions, I had started to get a better understanding of how dimensional laws worked. Normally, dimensions had certain laws that dictated how things worked inside of them. For example, a dimension might have a certain set of laws that ensured that ‘all objects create gravity based on their mass,’ or ‘Gravity is only created when Gravitite is fed a certain amount of essence.’ Every single dimension had laws that dictated how reality worked, and some dimensions were capable of sustaining life, while some weren’t.

However, every single room we had investigated so far had dimensional laws that were, at the very least, coherent. While I may not have been able to investigate in-depth what those laws were, I had at least been able to sense that they were there and didn’t directly contradict each other.

The ‘unborn dimension’ was very different.

It felt like it had dozens of different laws about how some principles of reality worked. And several of those principles were the polar opposites each other.

My magical senses felt as if they were trying to tell me that gravity and heat were the same thing, and also weren’t the same thing. Time flowed at ten times the same rate inside of the ‘unborn dimension,’ and also flowed at half the speed of our current time rate. It was like heat was light, but light was actually water, which was actually cold.

The way that reality itself worked was unstable inside of the glob of mana, so instead of becoming a fully built dimension, the whole thing had just imploded into a contradictory mass of conflicting laws of reality, all held together by a completely ridiculous amount of mana.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

I couldn’t help but wonder how much of the unborn dimension was even stored in this room. Dimensions were massive, after all. Was this even a trillionth of a percent of the full unborn dimension? What would it look like if someone took an entire unborn dimension and tried to turn that into some sort of magic item? The tiny fragments in these rooms already made me feel like I was boiling alive.

Felix tried taking the massive set of tongs and moving it closer to the glob of mana, but the tongs started to melt as they got past the first few layers of heat shields. Felix frowned, and then shook his head.

“It’s been neglected for too long,” he said, shaking his head as he looked at the tongs. “Or I’m mistaken in what they were supposed to do. I don’t think we have any way to safely extract even a few drops of the unborn dimension. Shame. I imagine we could probably get a crazy amount of Achievement for owning it, but… I don’t see any way at all we can access it.”

“Maybe it’s for the best. We have no good way to cool it down,” said Sallia.

“Maybe Miria could cool it down with her ocean magic?” asked Anise.

I experimentally sent out a wisp of alteration essence at the unborn dimension, just to see if I could cool it down, and then shook my head.

“I think it would probably take a few thousand years to get it to a temperature that wouldn’t melt us on contact with it,” I said. “There is no way I can cool it down on any practical timescale at all.”

Anise looked a bit disappointed, but she nodded.

The five of us kicked around the room for a while longer, observing the various chunks of ‘unborn dimension’ that were stored in the room. But we couldn’t think of any way to take advantage of the unborn dimension chunks, at least without turning ourselves into subatomic ash. Eventually, we gave up.

After that, we decided to take a break for several hours before moving on to the sixth room. We already knew it might be dangerous in the sixth room, and I was running low on alteration essence. Felix’s fingers were also still partially missing.

We apologized to Sekundyrr, and explained why we needed to return it to an environment it could survive in without our assistance. Sekundyrr seemed grumpy, and asked that we at least put it in a different cell than the one it had spent the last several centuries in.

We agreed, and then camped out in room three a short distance away from Sekundyrr. Even if we had to return it to a prison cell for a while, we could at least let whoever was on watch duty chat with it for a while.

When we woke up in the morning, everyone was fairly recharged. I took advantage of my significantly replenished alteration essence reserves and restored our group’s various physical ailments, such as Felix’s fingers. After we waited for my alteration essence to replenish again, we were ready to go. We left Sekundyrr behind, since this wasn’t just a bit dangerous - there was a good chance we would be walking into a battlefield, if something had gone wrong.

It was time to enter the final room.

The room related to dimension six.

The home of the black sun.

When we stepped into the final room of the dimensional habitat facility, I felt as if something was watching me.

Not just one thing, in fact. It was almost like the walls themselves were alive, peering at me from the corners of my eyes and preparing to attack me the moment I turned my back on them.

Anise shivered.

“I do not like this room,” she said.

Sallia nodded wordlessly, and pulled out her weapon.

I looked around, trying to figure out whether the walls were really alive and watching me. It wasn’t something I would have originally been wary of, but after the research notes we had found in room four, I was very aware of the potential for random objects to attack me after being exposed to dimension six’s dimensional laws.

I didn’t see anything, so after a moment, I swapped to my soul-sight.

The walls were not alive, thankfully. However, plenty of other things in the room were alive.

The first thing I noticed was that space itself was alive. Inside of each sub-chamber, a yawning black void animated by a soul seemed to be staring straight at us. And there were also a few other miscellaneous souls scattered throughout each sub-chamber. A few drops of blood floating inside of one of the chambers was alive, and each drop of blood had grown to the size of my fist. In another sub-chamber, a pen, the ink inside of it, and a stack of papers were glaring at us as if they wanted to rip our bodies apart and investigate our organs.

Almost every single sub-chamber had its own share of strange, dangerous-looking life forms.

“Each sub-chamber is filled with souls,” I said, after a few moments. Then, I frowned.

I felt the voids in each sub-chamber start to mess with space somehow. The flavor of dimensional manipulation polluted my tongue like cloying acid, sweet and bitter and disgusting all at once. The air in front of us seemed to ripple, faintly enough that I could barely see it.

I opened my mouth and started tasting the air around us in greater detail, before decisively clamping my jaws shut near Sallia’s neck.

A string of broken space collapsed apart, like a bubble popping. Several strands of broken space fell to the floor, where I stopped tasting them. For a moment, I thought I had shut off the creature’s attack.

Then, my eyes widened as I saw a new pitch-black soul appear on the floor in front of us. It was noodle shaped, and much weaker than the previous attack. But it was clearly alive.

“Get out of the room!” I said, nearly growling, before I chewed up a few more spatial attacks targeting our group.

Everyone else nodded, and we immediately retreated back towards room 5. However, I could still feel tendrils of spatial manipulation reaching towards us as we moved away. I quickly used my fifth rune ability to bite them all to shreds, but little broken fragments of space seemed to stick around even after I cut off each attack.

Sallia laughed bitterly. “The Orthans… really had no clue what they were doing when they explored the Multiverse. Even though they were very successful in exploring their first five dimensions, their holding cells don’t even work for the stuff from the sixth dimension. The fact that the stuff inside hasn’t left already seems to be because they didn’t feel like it”

“Are you doing all right, Miria?” asked Anise.

I nodded, although I kept using my teeth to shred apart spatial probes and attempts to connect with our bodies. The shredded bits of space were starting to gain souls of their own, and I didn’t have enough alteration essence to kill everything. I thought about it for a moment, before I turned towards Sallia’s sword. “Try the gravitite!” I said in between chomps. I had no idea whether the gravitite would allow Sallia’s sword to cut through the little sentient strings of broken space, but we needed to deal with them before they attacked us.

Sallia experimentally tried slicing at the air in front of her, directly slicing into one of the air ripples while powering her sword with some essence.

Nothing happened.

Before Sallia could curse, Anise formed a fourth-circle spell I had never seen before. It used two magic symbols I didn’t recognize, in addition to several other components, such as stone, transform, light, and speed. As I used my fifth rune ability to hold off the encroaching chunks of broken space, Anise finished forming all 85 magic symbols for a standard fourth-circle spell in just a few seconds.

A black beam of light shot out of Anise’s hands, before touching the air in front of her. And then, everything seemed to slow down, as if it had been locked in place.

Including the strange, noodle-shaped spatial distortions that were somehow alive.

Anise gave me a cheeky grin.

I immediately started spraying extinguishes at the creatures, doing my best to off a few of them. I ignored my System notifications - I could deal with them later. After a moment of hesitation, Felix grinned.

“Miria, give me some Gravitite! A lot of it!” He said.

I immediately tossed him a huge hunk of Gravitite.

He flooded the gravitite with mana, making it pull and tear at everything in the room.

And then, he threw the Gravitite directly towards one of the fragments of an unborn dimension.

All of the spatial noodle creatures were dragged through a few layers of heat shields, where they were promptly melted into nothing. Since they were just living spatial distortions, their body weight was practically nothing, and whatever the Gravitite was made of, it was able to influence even the conceptual creatures of dimension six.

“I got kill notificiations. We should have dealt with them successfully,” said Felix, after a few moments. He grinned.

“Nice job!” I said, trying to taste the air around us for any further spatial distortions. At the same time, I flashed a grin at Felix and Anise. It was nice to see them doing their own amazing things.

Luckily, it seemed like the living chunks of void inside of room six had exhausted themselves. If we wanted to kill them, now would probably be the idea chance, but I was rather afraid of the other strange creatures in the room launching their own attacks at us.

“The living bits of empty space probably aren’t the only dangers in that room. I don’t know if it’s a good idea to explore room six at all,” Sallia said.

I nodded.

“Let’s just grab Sekundyrr and go,” said Anise.

Everyone else nodded, and we quickly picked up Sekundyrr and started running towards the entrance of the building.

We had probably gotten everything we could out of the Dimensional Habitat Facility. We needed to go deeper into the city now. We still hadn’t found a way to cut off this dimension’s connection to the world of the black sun, or a way to revive the use of magic items. So we needed to go deeper, until we succeeded or perished.