Michelle had been quick to agree with the week long trip. The plan was simple; they would enter the tower, get as high as possible, learn everything there was to learn, and gather all the resources they could. Then, they would wait at the entrance to the tower. Either they would fight against the clerics if they made any attempt to kill Greto, and if no attempt was made, they would spend more time preparing for one, whilst being ready to protect those who hadn't wished to cut their ties with the god.

With heavy steps, the trio entered the tower. It was a nostalgic feeling, once again entering the tower again with the two most important people in the world to Evelyn. They were ready, with packed food for a day, various utility items, bedrolls, and the rest of what few tools they might need in their near week long journey. Everything else, they'd get from the tower itself. They would travel light, and make camp on the seventh floor, it would be simple to defend.

The first three floors were passed quickly, all three of them were familiar with the floors, and each had refined their skills since their last climb together. Upon the fourth floor, they encountered their first problem. The slight, but clearly noticeable panic Audrey tried to hide.

"You can stay back if you want," Michelle said to Audrey, who nodded after a moment.

"This floor isn't too bad, once you know the trick. We creak the fire door slightly open, and flood it with water through the gap. From there, we can go through the steam door, the one with the fire-water rune, and we flood it with mud, or the earth-water rune. Then there's a fire-water-earth, and we can flood it with a water-earth-air rune, and so on, until the last room, which has all the five runes on the doors combined. Using the five runes combined just deflects everything, so we need to use force then." Evelyn explained. It was simple enough. Evelyn had long since learned that the golems would be destroyed by what could be considered their opposite elements, the element they were weak to. It wasn't the only way, the steam golem could be condensed to water with an ice rune for example, but it was the fastest and safest way Evelyn knew of.

Sure enough, the plan went smoothly. The first golem, a floating ball of fire, was quickly extinguished. After that was a ball of dense, scorching steam. The mud obliterated it quickly. Behind the next door, there was an orb of liquid hot lava, which was quickly frozen into cracked obsidian with the coldest snow Evelyn had ever felt. By then, even Audrey had joined in the fun.

After destroying what looked like a clear crystal trapping lightning, they entered the final room, prepared for battle. It was a floating mass of gaseous crackles. It looked like a sphere of lightning, or the sun, flowed like water, was hotter than fire, light as the air, and harder than stone. Shards of it near instantly sped towards Evelyn's head, only to be blocked with a disc of her own. They splattered in all directions upon contact, but Evelyn quickly gathered the mass back in front of her palm, blasted it back towards the golem, and increased the speed tenfold with a rune.

The golem of glowing mass exploded upon contact, bursting to all directions with floating liquid heat. Evelyn cooled the air around her before her friends could even react to the sudden heat.

"What-" Audrey gaped.

"Yeah, sorry I didn't leave anything for you. But this isn't the first time I've done this." Evelyn stated simply.

After spending a bit of time gathering their new prizes, the group made their way to the fifth floor.

–

Oliver had waited for nearly five minutes for a response, angering the woman to no end. Muttered complaints of idiots drawing nonsense scribbles in the ground from everyone around hadn't gone unnoticed. Then, finally, Oliver felt the change in the surrounding mana density as a tendril of Tim's Domain extended over the area.

In the very next instant, all the air in the volume shook in union, as the quiet scratch of Tim's voice echoed from all directions. "Tell us more of the goddess threatening you." Oliver saw the shock growing on the woman's face, how everyone's expressions silently morphed to horror, excitement and realization from the half understood words. He hadn't known what to expect Tim would do upon receiving the news, but Oliver knew one thing for certain. His human life wouldn't be as normal as he had thought.

After the spoken words, written English text appeared in front of Oliver's eyes, 'I'll let you handle this, just convince them not to get rid of the tattoos. And if you need help, just send me a second message. You could even speak to me in English while pushing mana through the tattoo if you wanted, it'd be more dramatic than writing.'

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

"What was that?" The teenager broke the silence.

"Was that the god himself?" One man in the crowd quietly asked. More to himself than anything.

"You didn't use any runes! How did you conjure the writing?" Another person shouted.

"You can talk with Greto? I've only seen that kind of writing in the tower." The woman cautiously questioned.

Oliver let out a long sigh. "Greto?" He asked. Oliver was pretty sure he'd come across a cult worshiping Tim of all people. Sure, he'd given them the runes, and Tim was egotistic enough to call himself god-like, but for others actually to worship Tim. And now Oliver was probably seen as some sort of prophet.

–

I was happy to leave Oliver to deal with the public opinion of the nearby village, as I was too preoccupied to think of a way to deal with them. And I had a simple, very good reason for that. With my earlier musings, I had come up with a bright idea. So far I had been going about detecting space based on what I know. I knew mass warped space, so I had been trying to essentially control space with non-matter mass, which I hadn't figured out. I had tried many different ways to detect mass by itself, or the curve of space, but it was all naught. But what if what I knew was wrong, or misunderstood.

With that conclusion, I had been attempting to detect space by itself, the absence of everything. The longer I tried, the more I concentrated, the more my senses started to tingle, to actually itch. And I eventually gave up. I could feel spots of nothing for the slightest moment, but the moment I noticed them, they weren't nothing anymore, but instead something.

And finally I had come to a realization. What I was feeling, the nothing, wasn't space. Space was something, it had position, it was space, something with laws of physics and what not that stayed, or hopefully stayed, constant throughout the universe. For space to even exist, energy was needed. It didn't explain what the nothing was, or how I could even sense it, but that was a mystery for another day, it freaked me out slightly too much.

With my revelation, I started focusing on the something that wasn't nothing. I concentrated my attention on the absolute smallest scale I had ever focused on, the absolute chaos of nonsensical physics I couldn't even begin to understand. Then I focused on my new idea of space, it was energy, laws, the very base that made it possible for everything to exist, and focused on an even smaller point. There wasn't anything in the space, other than the bits of nothing that flashed out of existence, and itched away from my attention. I focused on what wasn't nothing, on the idea of space, the fabric of reality, until finally I tried moving it.

The space moved, dragged away with my mana, and left a hole in existence. After a brief moment of pain, I could feel more of the something in where I had moved it to, and less of it, much less, where the nothing had been moments before. And for the first time, I was terrified. I was genuinely frightened by my own power. I was pretty sure I had just torn a hole in reality, and felt, sensed the hole. The pain hadn't been much, it was like a quick pinch, but I was an incorporeal soul inhabiting a domain of mana. I shouldn't be able to feel pain.

After calming down, my curiosity got the better of me. If I was right, and the something was really space, I had just achieved a major goal. I tried to move some of it again, but this time I didn't take all the space from one volume, instead leaving part of it behind. I successfully moved it without tearing a hole, and felt no pain. The result was five times the something in the same 'volume'.

I zoomed my focus out, scaled my attention to the size of hundreds of atoms. I tried moving most of the something to one spot, and observed the atoms move about. It was probably the most curious thing I'd ever come across. The something was space, but it wasn't only that, it was time too. The amount of volume, and the speed of time's passage tied together, or that was at least the only thing that made sense. I could feel two atoms on either side of the condensed space, and one atom moving across the condensed space. The atom moving through the space had collided with one atom before colliding with another atom on the other side. I felt the time it took, and in that time the atom seemed to move a distance of one unspecified unit. But I could also feel the atom with the mana in the condensed space, where the atom moved at seemingly the same velocity, only ten times the distance and took ten times as long. I felt both at the same time, and it was bizarre.

I am unsure how, or even if, I could properly put it in words. But the more space is condensed, the faster time moved in that space relative to outside of that space. If I had mana in and out of the space, I could feel both simultaneously. I was well outside my understanding of physics, but I would learn. I could definitely work with that.