“Are you certain about this?”

A junior researcher asks me the next day. I glance at him before turning my gaze away to the formation dozens of meters wide being fed mana directly from a couple of batteries I grew underneath it. With a nod, I reply:

“Yeah, I’m sure. When Merlin and the others get here to help keep the portal stable, I’m going through.”

“But for all you know, you will die.”

“My gut says I will be just fine and we sent everything we could to test it already. Now we either abandon the idea or we take the next step.” I say, not mentioning that the roots that went through were more connected to me than most people realized and they didn’t suffer any adverse effects.

“Technically, we could let someone’s pet roam around and explore inside…. but he is right.” Burges begins to say to me but finishes while looking at the junior researcher.

“So send someone more disposable than yourself,” he pleads. “If you die…”

“And who would you classify as more disposable than me?”

“Anyone in the village except maybe half a dozen people at your level, if we lose you, we lose too much. Your plants, your knowledge, your book, your….”

“Perhaps you are right, but I have the best chances of survival out of just about everyone. I can’t in good conscience let someone else go in my place.”

We all go over everything again in the last few minutes before the others arrive, checking each and every single rune placement and the dozens of carefully positioned screens. One large and 11 smaller screens placed in a circle slightly angled for maximum stability. A direct connection to the mana battery and a carefully balanced formation on the ground for the skill level of each of the 26 mages joining us to keep the spheric ‘portal’ stable while mass is going through it, something required for the larger portals.

We don’t find a single rune even an inch away from where it should be and we proceed with the experiment. I stand some 5 meters back from the middle of the formation waiting as mana flows into the channels. I can feel it not only because of my sensitivity to mana with the Mana Manipulation skill but through the bonds with the roots and my perception field. Everything overlaps and gives me a god’s eye view of all less than 50 meters away, and the torrent of mana being channeled I only felt in the midst of battle with dozens of mages. This larger portal is simply ravenous.

The two batteries only have enough mana for 3 minutes and change with the portal drinking well over 500 mana per second. We have enough mages to handle anything including both Burges and Merlin, so I am not worried. Only the most catastrophic and unpredictable of changes would be dangerous, anything else they could forcefully smooth out and provide mana for the few seconds needed for my return.

Five seconds pass and the distortion that started as a small dot slowly grows to a beachball size and eventually gets almost as tall as myself.

I pat my hands on the wooden armor with all the runic protections I could think of. It isn’t focused on sheer power, but on allowing me to retain my mobility while providing decent protection.

“Checking audio.” I hear in my ear with the modified comm rune. The entire suit acts as an antenna allowing greater range. Though there are still limits, all the tests we did indicate my rune works just as well on the other side as on our own instance while the portal is open.

“Your voice is clear and everything is working as it should,” I reply.

As the sphere gets to the maximum size and slowly starts to look like a partially reflective silverish mirror but still allowing us to see through, I prepare to run into it.

“You can go when you are ready.”

I take a deep breath four paces from ‘it’ and in a second I’m running. I jump in lowering my head and tucking my legs to hit the middle of it and I feel like I’m being rent apart for an instant.

I keep my perception field running just a few inches from myself but even then the headache I managed to keep down for the last few days hits me full blast. Gritting my teeth, I don’t let up. There is something for me there. Someplace that is neither our village nor the Netherworld visible through the cracks in reality, but it fades as I hit the ground on the other side. It all happens in an instant, but with adrenaline rushing through my veins the transition seemed to last an eternity.

“Nash, do you copy?”

“Yes, transmission still clear,” I answer while looking around and taking a step. The terrain looks so very similar to our own village and turning I see the edge of the clearing much better than what the screen allowed us to see.

A moment later, the very world seems to change. A strange sensation grips me like nothing I ever felt before. I expel my mana and extend my perception field instinctively, but I can’t place it. I’m being pulled somewhere, not in any physical direction, but a pressure on my very being.

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I remember what Agnis and the other rabbits go through every night, and I can imagine this being how they feel. I know what this feels like from the outside, but experiencing the pull on my own body is something novel.

I try to hold myself in place for an instant longer, but I simply don’t have the leverage. I’m not standing in my inner world where I control the very space and the system can’t interfere too much, I’m just being kicked out of where I don’t belong, someplace where I’m not supposed to be.

Before the sucking sensation drags me out of the Netherworld my suspicions are proven correct as me an orange screen pops up in front of me. A bright orange nobody else mentioned. Each of us has slightly different system screens, but all of them are invariably blue.

Entity not recognized - out of bounds.

Returning to Main-instance.

0min 03sec

And just like that, the seconds go by and I’m back at the village.

No fanfare, no struggle, no action I could take, except maybe entering again.

“Shut it down,” I say with the comm operators only meters away, surprised with my voice echoing in their ears as they stare at me poping in existence in front of them.

“What happened?” Merlin asks me looking at where I appeared, some 3 meters ahead of the spheric portal.

“The system showed me an orange screen and kicked me out. Apparently, we are not supposed to venture on the other side.”

“And here I was thinking we would have an opportunity to learn more about the Netherworld and the mobs from there.”

“We should change the name, during the night when the rabbits are there it turns into a beautiful place. The place doesn't deserve such a gloomy name.” One of the operators chimes in, but everyone ignores the comment. We have more important things to discuss.

Me, Burges and Merlin move away before I sit on the ground massaging my temples. The greater my mental stats the more I seem to be haunted by sources of pain, but this time it was worth it. I try to hold in my mind the other place as with a louder swosh than any of the previous portals, it shuts down.

Burges asks me. “Do you think there is any chance of bypassing this system's restrictions?”

“Maybe we can somehow trick the system, but don’t count on it,” I say.

“Can we forcefully stay there?” Asks Merlin.

“I have felt a similar pull before, not on myself, but I’m fairly sure that it is the same phenomenon and if I’m right we don’t have the ‘leverage’ or attachment points to force ourselves to stay there. In the future…. maybe, but for now I think sending people over is pointless.”

“Where did you see something similar?” Asks Merlin.

I lift my hand and a small root formation appears around us isolating the space and not letting the others listen in.

“You two remember my inner world?”

“Yeah,” they reply at the same time.

“I placed a colony of rabbits there and the system tries to pull them out. I ‘control the space’, so I only need to exert my will and the system stops after a few seconds. By now I can do it automatically, but in the Netherworld as it tries to drag me back here it’s like… wind. No matter how strong I am, all it needs is to overcome my weight and I become helpless. Experiment if you want, but I don’t think there is much to be gained by sending people through.”

“We can run through it all more calmly later,” Burges says. “Did you find out anything else?”

“No, not in the immediate surroundings, well… I could see the terrain more clearly and it’s very similar to our village just without any buildings. But that is not what caught my attention, when I was going through I saw an interesting place. Another village hidden through the cracks of reality or something, I just don't have the words to describe it. It lasted only a moment, but I know it’s there.”

“Well we have a lot of experimentation to do, why don’t we reconvene in a few days? It’s disappointing that you didn't manage to explore the other side, but we have a lot that we don’t know, like how to change the place we connect to.”

“I don’t think it can be changed, but that doesn’t matter.” Says Merlin

“What do you mean?” Asks Burges.

“Long answer short. Look at where Nash came back to. Exactly the same place as on the other side translated to our instance.”

“I noticed that; you think it isn’t random?” I ask Merlin.

“No, I don’t.”

We keep in touch for another few minutes and draw plans for the next couple of days. Though I soon leave all that by the wayside as I focus on the question nagging me.

What was that village?

I fix my posture and get comfortable for a long meditation session as I spin Aether around me following the natural patterns and draw all my resources: health, stamina, mana, and vigor while keeping absolutely still.

After a minute taking slow deep breaths, I send the resources to my head as I imagine the blood vessels expanding and rifling through every single one of my neurons trying to recall exactly what happened in the instant of transition.

If Merlin was right and by moving to predetermined places, we could move the spot we open the portal to, perhaps what I had found was another instance. Maybe we are not actually moving someplace else, but just breaching reality in a spot with several worlds overlapping each other.

The place I saw was not the luscious grass fields and sunny place rabbits are summoned to. I don’t know how, but while keeping my perception field at just one inch away from my skin I could see meters away in the other place. That was probably some weird interference from the spatial distortions.

The reason for my headaches may just be that anytime I perceive a distortion I’m just being fed much more information than I can process, not something inherently from spatial manipulation, just a by-product.

I let go of all my thoughts and run through my memory stream. Just let it flow from one activity to the next, then repeat looking for what is missing, again and again and again.

I don’t succeed in finding out much more, but each time I go through, a picture, no, a sculpture, a model of the place is being built in my mind. The details are fuzzy, but I can make out a single place very clearly, a dwelling.

A little room that looks like the one demolished to open the area in the exact place it used to stand. So taking Merlin’s thought a couple of steps further, all the instances are overlapping each other. And if we can cross to the Netherworld, why couldn’t we figure out how to access this other instance.

It will probably be even harder as the system didn’t give us the exact combination of runes like the ones heading to the Netherworld used to teleport the wolves and rabbits, but if I could perceive it, there must be a way and I will find it.

Now imagine if instead of relying on a single instance’s information, we could talk and maybe even cross between instances. Even if the system wanted to keep throwing us back to our original instance, specialty goods, knowledge and expertise could be shared if we managed to open portals to other instances.

Laying back on the ground, I look at the sky.

I will see this other instance’s sky. We will learn so much from each other. We will grow together.