I focused my vision on Anise’s voice, trying to figure out what she had discovered. Anise pointed at one of the pillars, and I felt confused. I didn’t see anything there. It was a solid column of stone.
The others in the group seemed to share my confusion, and shot puzzled expressions at Anise. Anise seemed to realize we couldn’t see what she was pointing at. A moment later, an image appeared in our friendship bracelets.
One of the pillars contained a little pocket inside of it. But Anise couldn’t see it with her regular eyes - she had found it through her essence sense. Even to her essence sense, it was incredibly faint.
And oddly enough, nobody else could see it with their essence sense. Without Anise’s help, it seemed like a normal pillar. I didn't know whether Anise could see it because she was 'Zelyrian' or because of her affinity for manifestation essence. But nobody else could detect it.
“Are you sure there’s something there?” asked Old Mo, glancing at the spot on the pillar that Anise was pointing at. Unlike us, he couldn’t look at the images Anise had sent over the communication bracelets,. As far as he knew, he was looking at a stone pillar.
Anise nodded. “It’s definitely there. I can’t reach it. Normally, I’d climb up, but…” Anise gestured towards her stump. Her arm was starting to regrow on its own, as {Pheonix’s Last Stand} amplified her regeneration. But her arm was nowhere near regrown yet. “Miria doesn’t have the essence to fix my arm yet.”
Old Mo nodded. “All right, I’ll poke at it. If you’re sure,” he said. He hopped onto the pillar with surprising agility and climbed up. Anise called directions out to him, and after a bit of fumbling around, he managed to locate the right spot.
A moment later, he frowned.
“I don’t feel anyth-” before he could finish speaking, I heard something crackle. Then the pillar changed colors. Old Mo clambered down the pillar, as it started to glow bright orange. Manifestation essence flooded into the pillar.
Anise stepped closer to the pillar, and the essence inside seemed to react to her presence. Manifestation essence stopped flooding into the pillar, and instead gathered closer to her.
“Is it hostile?” asked Old Mo, fingering his gun as he glanced at me.
“I don’t… think so?” I said.
The pillar stopped glowing and seemed to shrink without changing shapes. My brain started to hurt as a contradiction unfolded in the space in front of me. To my spatial senses, the pyramid had become similar to a black hole for a moment.
Finally, I realized that the stone pillar wasn’t shrinking. Somehow, the space in front of me was bending and contorting, as the pillar reached to somewhere else. I concentrated on it using my spatial senses to figure out what it was doing.
It seemed to be using some sort of portal-like ability.
A moment later, the spatial contortions around the pillar disappeared. The room was almost exactly the same as before, but now there was a glowing stone cube present. It flew through the air, and stopped right in front of Anise’s face. I stared at the little fist-sized stone cube in awe.
It crackled with manifestation essence. It had hundreds of times more essence than I did. And all that essence was inside of a stone cube the size of my fist. I had no idea how the Zelyrians had managed that, but it gave me a new appreciation for their mastery of magic.
“What do you think this thing is?” asked Anise as she reached out to touch it.
The moment she took it, something changed.
It felt like our surroundings had… lost something. The pyramid was somehow less than before. Instead, part of the pyramid now felt connected to Anise. The moment I saw something latch on to Anise, I panicked. I scanned the strange connection between the pyramid and Anise to try to figure out if it was malevolent. Then I relaxed. It felt more like… Anise had donned a suit of armor. Nothing fundamental about her had changed - she was just connected to the pyramid now. It almost felt like the pyramid acknowledge her.
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I felt relieved, and then looked at our surroundings. After Anise connected to the pyramid, the essence in our surroundings was going crazy.
The pyramid walls stopped looking like nothing more than ordinary stone. Now it felt like someone had wrapped a handful of starlight inside of each stone. I didn’t know how else to describe it. The starlight didn’t feel like an actual star. It felt like someone had taken the idea of a star out of a children’s nursery rhyme and then poured it into the pyramid's walls. The starlight was gentle, and had no connection to heat or mass at all. It was something I didn’t usually associate with manifestation essence. The manifestation essence of our previous world had felt more like a math equation - there was only one ‘correct’ version of it. I had thought that this was an innate property of manifestation essence. The essence usage I saw in this pyramid… challenged my understanding a bit. The starlight in the walls felt very different from what I believed a star should look like.
The images that I had been inspecting were also part of the pyramid's essence network. Before, the pictures had been simple murals adorning the walls. Now, I could see that they were much more important than simple murals.
Somehow, the Zelyrians had turned paintings into a part of their magic system. I had no idea how that was even possible, but it was obvious that they had done it. I also didn't know what the paintings were actually doing. All I knew was that it was woven into the rest of the magic in our surroundings. I had a sneaking suspicion that removing even one painting would cause the pyramid to implode. Even with one of the four walls of this room left bare, the essence in our surroundings was incomplete.
A very small part of me wondered if there was anything I could learn from these paintings. I had to shake the thought away. I had too many other projects to focus on right now. I still needed to learn shapeshifting and illusions before I added more to my plate. The fact that they were specialties of my essence, but I relied on absorption essence to handle both, was embarrassing.
Finally, the essence in our surroundings calmed down. The manifestation essence was still present, but it was no longer roiling like boiling water. It had stabilized.
Anise smiled brightly at the stone.
I couldn’t help but agree.
Anise and Felix seemed to feel the same fear. Felix set me down on the floor before running towards the entrance of the pyramid. Meanwhile, Anise rushed to the glowing wall. She tried to be calm about it, but I could tell she was rushing. The idea of the horde of worldstriders rushing in to finish us off was terrifying.
Anise started poking at the wall with the stone cube. Felix returned a minute later.
“They still can’t get in,” he said, and everyone heaved a sigh of relief. “But we should still hurry up.”
I saw Anise's hands stop shaking, and her work became less frantic.
Less than a minute later, I heard a clicking sound as the stone cube sank into thin air. A moment later, it re-emerged. The entire side of the pyramid slid open, leaving a gaping hole in reality in its place.
On the other side of the wall was a much larger room. There was an awful lot of spatial magic folded into it, and while I only understood a bit of it, I was certain that the room wasn’t in the pyramid . It was halfway between this pocket dimension and reality, somehow.
Sitting in the center of the room was a golden throne. I looked at Anise, who swallowed in nervousness, and a moment later, we moved into the room.