Chapter 12 - The Only Chance

What did I do to deserve this? Seriously? Over 8 billion rifts? If I continue like I did until now, I will probably never finish. Not that I have that much time anyways.

413 days to be exact. Well, more or less. I'm pretty sure closing holes will net me extra time, since this is probably the amount of time until this entire dimension irreparably breaks apart. But even then, closing a single rift probably won't gain me much more than a couple seconds extra time.

I can't still quit, right? No? Guessed as much. If nobody does anything, this realm is doomed.

Question is now, how in hell am I going to solve this problem? Judging by the amount of holes existing, they are probably not just on this planet but instead strewn around everywhere in this dimension, however big it may be. Can't be too large if I found already found 2 of 8 billion within roughly 2500 kilometers of each other.

But what can I do? I can't possibly search the entire dimension in 400 days, not to mention that closing rifts also takes at least a little bit of time. There is no way in which the basic search and fix method would benefit me.

But since the most obvious solution is out of question, how else should I go about this? Although I do have a ginormous amount of mana, I don't have that much mana. Not even close. No chance at all.

I could maybe try to get to the edge of the dimension to directly interact with the Dimensional Barrier, but I don't know if there even really is one in the first place. After all, the holes in the Barrier that I'm supposed to patch exist everywhere in space and not just at the "edge of the dimension". This implies that the Dimensional Barrier is everywhere that is inside inside the dimension, or rather, a place is only inside the dimension if it is also part of the Dimension Barrier.

Keeping it short, this approach is unviable simply due to uncertainty. I wouldn't know what to do there anyways, even if it really existed.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

Another approach could be to search for something like a "core of the dimension" or maybe even the World's Will. The best case acenario may even be that the dimension possesses something like an actual consciousness that can be interacted with, but I doubt that is the case. If it can't do more by itself than giving me a rendom quest, It probably won't be helpful at all, even if I were to meet it. It should have all the mana in this dimension for use, so why not use it to defend and heal the Barrier?

Well, almost all the mana inside this dimension is free mana anyways, do it doesn't belong to any entity in the first place. I'm almost starting to think that the only way for me to even get a chance at solving this problem may be also one of the most primitive. Maybe I should simply get more mana. If I find a way to somehow aquire thousands of times more mana than I currently have, I could actually achieve something that wouln't only amount to pouring a single drop of water into an ocean.

But how am I supposed to get so much mana? It's not like I didn't do anything until now. I've been sucking up as much free mana as I could in every single second that I spend in this world until now.

I would need to drastically increase the range in which I can collect mana. The problem is that I basically attract mana through gravitational force originating from mana particles I mutated. This however means that if I increase the 'mass' I use by condensinh even more mana by a factor of X, the effective range will only increase by the square root of X.

Although this doesn't seem that useful at first glance, one can't forget that allthough the radius only increases by the sqare root of X, what expands is actually a sphere, which means that the volume increases with the cube of the radius. This means that if I double the 'mass' used, I should have access to about 2.8 times the amount of mana I had access to before. Like this, the rate of range increase is actually not that bad.

A problem I will have to consider though is the possibility of accidentally creating something along the lines of a 'mana black hole'. Since it doesn't actually attract any light it can't really be considered 'black', but that doesn't matter. What does matter is that I don't know if that can even happen in the first place. In the end, the gravitational force the mana has is only 'virtual' in nature. If the emulated gravitational force actually becomes stronger than the force keeping the mana apart it should technically collapse into a black hole. But since it's still just my own bound mana I should still be able to simply revert the mutation causing the gravitational effect to 'dissolve' the black mana hole.

I will definitely have to try that out, it may be the only real chance I have at succeeding in this damn quest.