“What just happened? I thought we were supposed to go put the smack down on the Founder?” Erik looked back and forth between Lily and Caeden. “Now, the portal’s gone. What gives?”

Lily looked toward Caeden as well, having no more idea what had gone wrong than Erik.

“The Founder messed with the portal formation, and I tried to counter his interference. We ended up going back and forth, but he did something at the end. Now both the portals are with the Heartstone. I don’t know what they’re doing there, or what’s actually going on. But it can’t be good.” Caeden explained while he willed his sight to connect to his Soul Anchor.

It started rapidly cycling through forms, trying to find one that connected with what Caeden was looking at. The visual information provided by the eyes of the Cosmic Smith would hopefully give some insight. But the Ki around the sphere formed by the modified Entrance and Exit Blades was chaotic, with weird fluctuations springing up at random.

Trying to parse the complexity was giving Caeden a headache, something he didn’t think could happen with his new body and soul. Something about what he and the Founder had done, combined with the Heartstone, had profoundly changed the Ki on a fundamental level, and it seemed it was in a state of flux, not yet settling into a stable form. And the instability was escalating.

“Whatever we created is fundamentally unstable right now, and it’s getting worse. It might collapse at any time.” Caeden continued to stare at the mess of Ki slowly spinning out of control.

“Oh, well that's good.” Erik laughed. “The portal mess is on top of the Heartstone, right? So the portals blow up and take the Heartstone with it. Maybe whatever happened even destroys the Heartstone forever. Boom, problems solved. Easy.”

Everyone immediately turned to look at him, stunned. Then, as one, they yelled-

“Shut up Erik!”

“What? I’m right!”

Whipping back around, Caeden found that the Ki was spiking higher than ever, before it snapped. All the wild Ki with unknown and headache-inducing properties sucked back into the portal formation with the Heartstone. Rapid and subtle changes cascaded out, dozens of shifts happening in an instant, before they stabilized.

“Oh, shi-”

A massive force imploded the still-cooling corpse of the Magma Titan, sucking it into an ever smaller space. Caeden had to use his shroud to keep from being pulled in along with everything else. And the suction wasn’t lessening, it was only growing ever greater.

“What happened?!” Lily yelled over the howling winds as air was rapidly pulled in by the increasingly intense force.

“I don’t know!” Caeden yelled back, his eyes bleeding thick rainbows of light as he stared at the core of Ki trying to eat them along with everything else. “Everything is being pulled into the core and broken down into Ki, and then it just vanishes. It’s like it’s…” Caeden stopped as the thought struck him.

It was like it was going somewhere else.

The portals, untethered from the Forge, and the Heartstone, primed to suck in enough Ki to revive the Magma Titan. Put them together and you had a mass of Ki primed to suck in everything around it and send it to another dimension. A perpetual machine of destruction eating away at the world.

“We need to get back!” Caeden yelled, grabbing hold of Lily and pulling her along with him toward the Founder’s island-sized base. “That thing isn’t going to stop any time soon!”

It seemed Caeden wasn’t the only one that realized how dire their situation was, because a parade of ghosts flooded out of the dwindling remains of the Magma Titan and stormed toward the now land-locked island. The slowest ones were losing momentum and being pulled back, a fact that chilled Caeden to the bone. He could tell just by looking at them that all of Damon’s ghosts were in their incorporeal state, one that was nigh invulnerable to most things. If they were being pulled in by whatever he and the Founder had made, it was more than a normal physical vacuum at work.

Still, Caeden and his team were miles away, and the ghost incorporeal state seemed to at least reduce the pull on them, so they all made it back to the island’s surface quickly. With less howling wind in their ears and a fair bit more space between them and the problem, Caeden went back to trying to figure out exactly what was going on, beyond the obvious.

“So, it’s sucking in…Everything.” Caeden stared at where the Heartstone used to be. And where his portal Blades should have been. “It’s sucking it all in and turning it into raw Ki. The Heartstone and the Blades are gone as far as I can see. There’s just a hole now. I think they went wherever the Ki is going, which I’m pretty sure is another dimension. Or maybe a different Plane. Not sure yet. I also have no idea if it’s going to stop. We’re honestly pretty lucky that this happened as far from the Pillar as it did. The Ki density out here is way higher, so there’s more for it to eat. Otherwise, I think the affected radius would grow far faster than it is now.”

“What happened?” Damon asked, his expression almost haunted. Caeden couldn’t imagine what he’d experienced, being so much closer to the epicenter. Caeden gave him an abbreviated explanation, enough to satisfy Damon’s need to know, but his focus remained squarely on their new biggest problem.

“Do you think it’s going to create some kind of new Titan in another dimension?” Lily asked.

“That’s a fair assumption, considering the Heartstone was the center of it and that’s literally the Heartstone’s only purpose. But there’s no real way to know. There were some wild fluctuations going on there before the suction started, and it could have resulted in pretty much anything honestly. The only thing we know this…Ki monstrosity…inherited from the Heartstone is its ability to suck in Ki.” Caeden shrugged. “All I know is that we need to come up with some way to stop it, because I’m not keen on finding out what happens when it's done eating.”

“It’s going to another dimension, right?” Lily countered. “Maybe Erik wasn’t entirely wrong. This whole mess could be a problem for someone else at the end of the day. We’re unbelievably far from the next nearest human life. We could just leave. Let this mess eat the Founder and his stupid island. How likely is it that this thing could pass through the Starry Sea?”

At that, Caeden laughed. “If it could consume the Starry Sea, then it could destroy the whole universe. The Starry Sea is hyper-compacted, liquified Ki. A square inch of that stuff is more Ki than either of us have in our entire bodies.”

Staring at the black hole that was now visible from where they were standing, having removed all the matter in the way, Caeden contemplated the whole thing from a different angle. “You’re probably right, Lil. This is more or less the Founder’s problem. It was created by him, he can deal with it. I was worried about whatever is born from that mess being able to come back through the hole, but you’re right. It’s not like we need to defend this island in any way. It’s a wasteland with monsters far too powerful for it to ever have a human population. If it vanishes, no one would notice, let alone actually care. And even if the biggest, most deadly Magma Titan ever came out of there, it still wouldn’t be able to leave.”

“So we just leave?”

“I think we should go back to the Hearthhome and get more distance. I at least want to ensure that we know what the end result of that mess is. Maybe we can actually figure out how to stop it once my shroud is fully working. Finally. It feels like I’m getting closer.” Caeden grimaced, thoroughly fed up with not knowing what he was actually capable of.

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

Honestly, it was a relief for Caeden to just let this whole mess unfold without trying to somehow ‘solve’ it. The end result of his Blades, the Heartstone, and the Founder’s interference, was touching on metaphysics, Planes, and Dimensions. A topic he would readily admit he had essentially no knowledge on, despite everything he’d experienced. In fact, Caeden was certain that the little experience he had, based on Blade Forge and the process of fixing and creating his new shroud and current soul, was only enough for him to learn that he was woefully unprepared to fix a hole between dimensions.

He would be better off finding a way to convince the researcher, or Kendr as he was apparently called, to deal with it.

That…That might actually work. An idea blossomed in Caeden’s mind. One that essentially thrust this whole mess onto someone else. But it was more of a gamble with massive holes in it. Ones that would be hard to fill. And it probably wasn’t worth it for one continent no one cared about.

“I feel a little bad about just leaving like that, but this really isn't on us to fix.” Lily grumbled, staring at the dimensional hole with her arms crossed. “None of us have the right shrouds to handle that mess. Well, maybe you do, but not right now.”

Caeden laughed at that. “Yeah, if my shroud ends up being able to fix that thing I’m going to do it, but I’m kinda doubting that’ll work out in our favor. That’d just be too convenient.”

Quickly, everyone was gathered up and brought back to the Hearthome a fair distance out over the Starry Sea, away from the continent. From there, Caeden was confident they could watch everything unfold in safety.

“How’s it looking?” Lily asked, sitting down next to Caeden at a bank of monitors, all of them displaying the black hole in different spectrums. The Hearthome was an ancient exploratory ethership, so it had a whole suite of sensors with ranges that would be unmatched in the modern age. The Founder might have made comparable tech, but Caeden doubted it.

“It’s stabilizing. Or I guess I should say that it’s running out of fuel. The hole is spatially locked, so it can’t fall even though it’s eaten all the ground below it, so it kinda carved out a whole sphere around itself. The range is a couple hundred miles, but it doesn’t seem to be able to pull anything in farther out than that.” Caeden explained.

“So what? It’s going to die out? Starve until it stops?” Lily leaned up against him, looking over the monitors as well.

“No idea. From what I can tell, the suction force is increasing, but its range isn’t. Which doesn’t physically make sense, but that’s what we’re getting. Whatever that thing is has an effective radius, but no cap on its output. It’ll keep pulling harder and harder at nothing. All it’s pulling in now is air and ambient Ki, which doesn’t seem to be enough to satisfy the throughput it needs, or else I don’t know why the pull force would be ramping up. Literally, the rate at which air and Ki enter its radius is too slow for it. And the amount of Ki it’s pulling is just…astronomical. Beyond belief. And it's still not enough.”

“So that means…What?” Lily was now frowning at a monitor showing a numerical readout, tracking the amount of Ki that was flowing through the hole. “What’s a KSU?”

“Ki Spatial Unit. It’s how the Hearthome is tracking how much Ki is moving. It’s more a measure of flow than anything, since Ki doesn’t come in explicit amounts, I guess.” Caeden shrugged. He only had a vague understanding of the concept himself.

“How’d you figure that out?”

“User manual.” Caeden flicked a finger and another monitor with words scrolling across it. “We taught the Hearthome Central Common a while back, so it automatically translated all the stored material on board. Including the user manual for the sensor array, I guess.”

“Huh,”

“Yup. Still don’t really get how it all works. Like, at all. But I can at least get an idea of what the screens are showing me. And it’s not like I need the details. We’re just making sure that the hole isn’t doing anything we weren’t expecting anyway.”

“And how’s that going?” Lily leaned back in her chair, no longer bothering with the monitors. Caeden would fully admit that half of them were more visual noise than anything useful to him. He just didn’t know enough, and everything was scaled in units he didn’t understand.

“Well, the range limit was kinda surprising. I was assuming that the suction force was based on a spatial vacuum, like a natural force. But it seems like it's closer to a conceptual force, like a shroud Domain. Something related to hunger, probably.” Caeden had been surprised that the Hearthome had sensors that tracked Domain usage really well. It hadn’t pin-pointed what exactly the hole was tied to, but it had narrowed down the options a lot.

“Is that a problem?”

Caeden threw his hands in the air. “No idea. Despite all this-” He waved his hands at the monitors. “-we’re mostly blind to what’s going on. This side of the hole is just eating everything that gets within its range. The Hearthome has no way of telling what’s going on on the other side.”

“So we’re just waiting for it to finish, still.”

“Yup.”

“Soooo…” Lily looked at him, a smirk on her lips. “...Wanna read the user manual together?”

Caeden laughed. “I swear, if Erik or Cat heard you they’d probably tear their hair out.”

“Ugh, don’t I know it. Cat asked me when I was coming this way if we were going to sneak off for some hanky-panky.” Lily rolled her eyes.

“Whatever, not everyone is a sex-pest like they are.” Caeden shrugged. He moved his chair closer to the monitor still actively playing out the manual and hit the button to send it back to the top.

“Yeah, I wonder how they survive these long trips without anyone to hook up with.” Lily laughed.

She was about to move her chair over and sit next to him when one of the other monitors started making loud noises and flashing.

“What’s that?” Since she was closer, Lily reached it first. Caeden was right behind her.

“That’s…odd. Odder, I guess, since nothing about this makes sense.” Caeden frowned, looking over a set of numbers next to a rainbow-hued shifting image that only vaguely resembled the scene around the dimensional hole.

This was the Domain monitor, all the colors rolling across it were visual representations of the intricate dance playing out beneath the Material Plane. Things that even shrouds had a hard time sensing. Currently, the monitor was showing a heavy spike of a particular domain increasing rapidly around the dimensional hole.

“Uhh,” Caeden read the list. “Well, the Hearthhome’s sensors can’t pick out what it is, but with numbers this high, I should be able to get a read on it if I go take a look with the eyes of the Cosmic Smith.”

“So you’re heading back over there?” Lily frowned.

“Just close enough to figure out what’s going on.” Caeden patted her shoulder reassuringly. “The effective radius hasn’t changed in, like, hours. I’d have to be an idiot to get sucked in.”

“...Ok, just take a look and come back. I know we’re kinda treating this a little casually now, but that thing is scary as the unshrouded hells.” Lily stared at the monitors, not looking at him. “I’m going to read that manual more and see if I can’t figure something out.”

Caeden nodded, even though she wasn’t looking at him, and left.

Considering the speed that his Soul Anchor could travel when shifted into a suitable form, Caeden approached the continent and crossed it, possibly even faster than the Hearthome could have. It was less than an hour before he was back at the Founder’s ship.

Rainbow light fell from his eyes like tears as he stared at the dimensional hole. Caeden had felt his proficiency with the eyes of the Cosmic Smith increasing rapidly over the last few hours since the hole had formed, as more and more knowledge came into his mind. He could see clear as the Pillar’s light what was happening.

He just didn’t want to believe it.

Whatever calm he’d felt ever since he’d resolved to let this whole mess work itself out vanished. In its place was a wave of indignation, anger, and even shame. THe wave coalesced into a single sentiment. Fuck it. A wall Caeden didn’t know he’d been holding up in his soul fell apart, and suddenly he could feel the world around him like never before.

However, that didn’t hold his focus. Rather, he bent himself around and pushed. Space folded and broke, and he was standing in front of the Founder, holding him in the air by the throat with his left arm. An arm that looked eerily similar to the Starry Sea. Space bent and broke around it, with black, jagged cracks snapping open and close with an ominous crackling.

“Ok, you dumb asshole. Whatever you did managed to let that stupid Heartstone eat fucking space, and now we’re all in danger, since the integrity of this whole universe is dropping. So you’re going to help me fix it, or I’m going to throw you in there and see what happens. Now Start. Talking.”