Having discovered what he could think of for now with haven reproduction Ozzy moved on. He could easily take action to add more squares to his haven than even Benjamin had now that he had discovered this work around, but he’d already decided that wouldn’t be his only focus. He did take a few minutes to at least finish the left side of his pathway though. He didn’t want to solely focus on gathering strength and increasing his territory. Yet this would easily net him more than he’d gain in several days if all he had to rely on was growing significantly stronger to overcome the increasing strength of either the rats or imps. So it was worth the minor investment. Though he decided to learn what he could while spending that time. Instead of doing one square at a time he went for six to even out the side in one go.

First he tested inside of his haven. Extending his domain to the six empty locations to the left of the path he directed his haven to move all six of the path tiles next to them over. Sure enough that whole section of the path jumped over. With a smile on his face he repositioned them, then jumped into the first rat haven once more. This time he massacred the next six rats all at once with a combination of his domain extensions. and found himself squashed to the ground suddenly. He’d completely forgotten about the restrictive size of the membrane surrounding this haven. Luckily he didn’t need to move his body for the next portion.

Moving the six portions of domain he lined them up along the pathway to fill in the gap of grass tiles then initiated the same process he’d gone through twice before. Although he couldn’t actually hear anything coming from it the rat haven gave off something that felt like a groan. Despite the odd feeling the process did complete without any obvious damage or consequences. This time the squares appeared not right next to the rat haven but in the places he’d indicated with his domain. Seeing the huge jump in tiles made him grin and a little jolt of pride washed over him. He nearly went on expanding his haven right there but while it would be nice to have more room to work in he didn’t want to get caught up in just one thing right now. Especially since the things he wanted to move on would more directly help him grow in strength. Where adding tiles was more a convenience.

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Before starting any new testing he planted a seed on each grass tile, and not just the topside. With now sixteen grass tiles, and utilizing the underside as well he had thirty two places to grow trees. Granted most of them were still sprouting but with what would come next that wouldn’t be the case for long. Turning back to the connected rat havens he began another slaughter. Though as with observing the haven reproduction it wasn’t the actual focus. While testing the haven’s reproduction he’d also been examining the rats appearing inside them and how a kind of wave would ripple along the haven's domain right before, and he wanted to try to understand what it was. To that end he also started absorbing each core into his domain as he gathered it.

The process wasn’t a very fast one. Kill the rats and wait wasn’t exactly an eventful or interesting activity. Not wanting to waste any time he also started utilizing the stockpile of cores he’d gathered earlier. There wasn’t any reason to let them sit when he could be improving himself. Especially if he had to sit there anyway while waiting for the rats to reappear. He also needed to see the havens more clearly if he was going to understand what was going on with them.

The first discovery he stumbled upon wasn’t at all due to his ever improving metaphysical sight, or the control of his domain. Rather it was due wholly to the fact that he was watching all five of the havens at once. The wave that pre-empted the rat’s appearance didn’t just show up on the haven in which the rat appeared. In fact the further down the line he looked the sooner the wave showed up before the rat appeared in one of the havens. While that information was interesting it didn’t tell him enough to understand what was happening. What it did do was suggest that Cederick was, at least partially, correct about how these bonded havens worked. That they were working together to ‘summon’ or capture their occupants. Whichever way they did it.

There wasn’t an immediate and obvious next step to take with this as with examining the previous experiments he’d run. While it was rather logical to go from seeing a haven receive a square from another to then see if that haven can in turn provide one to another. Once seeing it couldn't, the next logical step being to see if a new occupant showing up allowed the same havens to provide another square. And so on until he’d made quite the discovery. With this current process of observation all he could do was kill the rats and watch.

While watching was all he could do it didn’t mean he couldn’t adjust what he was paying attention to. Once he’d seen that a change occurred sequentially from one rat haven to the next until one finally received a rat he was able to start watching further down the line to start with. Which eventually did result in a new observation. After the ripple of energy passed over the boundary of a haven the energy inside the domain increased. Which was curious as it only happened when the haven didn’t accept the rat. In fact he found that when the haven was the one that received the rat its energy actually decreased.

As only one person watching the process it was hard to catch what was happening in more than one place at a time. Despite the multiple extensions he was able to use he still only had one mind and only so much attention to spread around. Though with enough repetition he was finally able to catch more of the pattern. The energy increase a haven received appeared to come from the next haven down the line, not the rat as it passed by. It was almost as if the havens were bartering for the rat. Passing it on in exchange for energy if the rat wasn’t large enough for the haven in question. When a haven did accept the rat it would thus have a deficit of energy initially though the rat over time would produce significantly more energy than the haven lost. Even when he killed the rat the equation still worked out in the green. With how fast a new rat could appear that was actually heavily in favor when killing it.

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Despite the much slower progress with this adventure it seemed every observation was leading to related discoveries. Now that he understood there was an exchange of energy when the rats were passed down he was able to see that the havens were constantly exchanging energy, though at a much lower rate. Not just through his own haven but somehow directly to one another. While watching this process more closely he was able to see there was an energy wave that propagated from the middle of the haven, not the membrane. He only initially detected it in an exchange of a rat, but then he could feel a constant flow of energy coming from the center of the square.

It felt a bit like a very low power motor was just under the surface of a body of water and there was a slight distortion on the surface by the influx of water. Now that he knew where to look he could narrow down his focus. And with the constant pressure emanating he was able to narrow down its location quite well since he didn’t need to wait only for a rat to pass by causing a large wave. Though for a while that was where he got stuck again. His metaphorical hand would wave back and forth over the space he could feel the energy coming from and it was as if it was appearing from nowhere. For some reason it took him far longer than he’d like to admit to remember that he was capable of infiltrating more than just three dimensions with his new senses.

That too only took him so far. He still had trouble contemplating let alone interacting with something extradimensional. He had some success in twisting his point of view through the extension of his domain into at least one additional plane and slowly articulating it in either direction of that new axis. Luckily he’d still been sitting in the recliner or he was pretty sure he would have fallen over as he did so. The results of the mind bending exercise was only a slight lip he could feel in the surface of reality right where the energy originated. No matter the speed or strength he used he couldn’t reach into this lip or interact with it. At least not at the angle he was trying to access it from.

Repeating the nausea-inducing turn to another point of attack he tried again. Then again a few minutes later from a different one. Eventually he tried so many different planes that he was pretty sure he ended up circling back to the same ones he’d tried before. Pausing in his search he let a few cycles of rat genocide and abiogenesis pass by. Just feeling the edge of whatever this was ever so slowly. Which eventually made him realize what he was feeling wasn’t unfamiliar to him. Broadening his scope he turned to the edge of the havens and realized this was the same thing. This was just another surface to the havens domain. More exciting than that was he already knew how to traverse the edge of nothingness at the border of a domain.

When he’d reached out to the second rat for the first time he’d been able to do so by essentially following the node blindly instead of trying to direct exactly where his domain moved. Refocusing onto the little domain edge at the center again he tried his luck once more. Gathering his domain around it he closed off the senses of direction and sight coming from it and instead of trying to find a specific angle in which to move he followed the flow of energy. The sensation was a bit like falling down. Only instead of just down it was also spreading out in every direction at once.

The expected feeling like he’d arrived somewhere never seemed to appear. His domain kept falling and expanding into whatever this nothingness was. Not only that but it felt like it was moving faster the further he went. Pulling his domain to a stop he slowly cracked his sight from it open. For a moment he didn’t react as he tried to decipher what he was seeing. During that moment his senses from the extension of himself continued to widen. Which only served to make the sights harder to understand. There indeed was an immeasurable void beyond the boundary he’d overstepped. There was nothingness in every conceivable direction. Something about this place seemed to force his domain to perceive each and every possible dimension all at once. Though at the same time at the edges of his awareness there was some detail just beyond what he could see. Each time he turned his attention toward any of those details it was as if an entirely new endless nothingness was presented to him.

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Ozzy wasn’t sure when he reeled back from the unending menagerie of entirely empty universes that whirled and spun any time he tried to focus on whatever he sensed lay beyond them. Nor was he sure when he’d vomited over the side of his recliner. He thankfully didn’t remember falling into the resulting puddle or the time it took to dry on his cheek as he lay in it. What he did remember of the whole ordeal was sensations he hadn’t realized he was experiencing at the time. Sensations that were coming from much closer to the surface of the infinitesimal lip he’d tripped into.

There was a presence there which seemed to ask him something he was sure didn’t take the form of words. Though it was a very basic and instinctual question. The same question that all unfamiliar entities asked one another upon meeting. Like a wolf happening across a bear in the woods. They would freeze and eye one another and without saying a thing evaluate one another. Like a wolf finding a bear mindlessly reeling and vomiting on the ground the presence had quietly and calmly stepped backward from the connection. Allowing Ozzy to have his moment of existential horror in peace.

While he wasn’t sure what he’d been looking for with all of this, he was pretty sure he’d found something worth it. Despite the disgusting side effects of the discovery. Regardless of it’s worth he needed a break before he tried that trip again to confirm what he’d found. If only to settle his nerves and clean the vomit from his cheek.