Time is still a blur with being touched so deeply by the Void, so how long I had worked to clean Miasma into Mana and taking over Space to create a kind of Domain for myself I do not know. The World itself has rather mundane things to offer. Air was a mixture of gases in a pressurized form. Some Dust and Water particles I did get too. My Miasma reacts with them in predictable ways. The one Intent is to heat things up. Burning, destroying, erasing and other intents have a rather similar source. If I put something inside this Miasma it starts to vibrate with high force. The bonds between Atoms seem to be way more susceptible to break and bond anew and create… well, fire! It was one of the favorite past times of many Mages. Fire was the go to when it came to attacking anything that had no Fire affinity. Many things had Fire affinity, and I wonder if it was because the Miasma had so much of this kind of Intent. How much in this other world is Fire affinity I can not ascertain right now, as I am in the middle of a miasmic Storm and everything is present in extreme quantities.
The progress is rather looking good, as I have a better look at my present position and I even found ground. Hovering around this… Well I should just call it Portal… hovering around the Portal is rather a lot of miasma and It seems I am close to if not the center of the storm. The Ground itself is not perturbed by the Storm. It is Miasma that wrecks havoc, not wind. The World itself is still for the most part even if there is a slightly strong breeze. Something LIVING I did not find until now.
What is positive for the better part is the taken over Mana seems to slowly ebb the storm around my Portal and with my domain slowly getting bigger and more dense, Miasma gets slowly converted to my Rule.
The Portal got more Stable and even a bit bigger with time. I do not know if it is because of my presence on both sides now or the transport of different Materials around, but it helps. It is hard to use Mana as an appendage to get some Dirt inside my World, but for now it is not that necessary to have too much of that stuff in there. The strangeness of my world is much more concerning. Using the little bit of matter I had gathered I slung it in one direction to see where it would go, as my consciousness should stop at some point. So with the Portal as a fixed point I watched it move through me until it came back from the other end. The World is a Loop with no start nor end. So the next would be to measure how far it is but it was rather… Impossible without some kind of ruler or other way to put points into this place.
So I go to the other side with my awareness and raised my Domain to get a better understanding of this place.
…
I got confused with myself now. With the way I think of the World, my World, the Domain and what is mine and what not I need to sort my own reasoning for what is what to better my Understanding to all. So I should create some Synonyms for my own thinking and hope I do not mess with those too much. Now let me start:
- Myself - My consciousness. What it entails should be my Soul, but right now it is hard to understand how I even can think without a body. So I refer to my thoughts to myself.
- My Realm - The World where I exist. The one Myself started from. Way better than World, as there is no World only things I have taken or the Miasma it came from.
- The World - The World behind the Portal. It is not clear what this place really is, but I at least have more of an Understanding of how it is different than my Realm or the World I was banished from.
- Portal – Well the Portal is clear. It is the Hole between my Realm and the other World I have dubbed ‘the World’
- My Miasma/Mana – The one I came with. It is subtly different than the World provides and even if it mixes, it does not blend. Like some sort of Law is different and with this the World does not allow it to be part of it.
- The Worlds Miasma/Mana – Well, the other side of the Coin. Miasma and Mana from this world, that is slightly different. It is like Gears with slightly different Size. The original Gears can work perfectly with the Clockwork of the World, while the foreign Gears grind hard and have a hard time to catch. What the difference is, I can hardly say. It looks the same but feels different. The most difference is I can take my claim from it away and the World accepts it back as its own.
This should make it easier to sort my thoughts. At first the strange circumstance about my Miasma and the worlds Miasma. Mine I can not let go. It is like tar on me and does not let go. At the same time it it has a natural drift back to the Portal like it does not belong. To be honest it really does not belong. The Portal itself seems to have a harder time to let things through into the World or my Realm if they are supposed to belong on the other side to begin with. Mana travels easier than Miasma as it is more flexible. The Intent makes Miasma unbending and can not do what it could if it were Mana. Letting the worlds mana go from my grasp it gets blown away through the miasmic storm and vanishes. If it has my grasp it can be blown around until it reaches the end of my claimed space, and it gets some kind of pull the further away it gets from that space. I can bend the Space in some direction but has the same pull and gets into an equilibrium around the Portal as a Sphere.
New Synonym:
- My Domain – The Place I own in Space around the Portal. Inside I can move all claimed Mana and Miasma freely and am able to convert unclaimed Miasma even without pulling it into my Realm, although with more resistance.
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All the Mana I convert helps with my Grindstones, as I now have different Grindstones with different Intents split into different kind of Aspects. By changing the Form into kind of Cones I can use multiple Intents to heighten the Effect, as Miasma is way more complex than first thought. Every single miasmic particle of Mana is different, like some kind of angry snowflake. A perfect opposite does not always exist and will not break it into mana without. The method of grinding it just heightens the Chance it happens. Now the Chances are a bit more skewed towards destruction than before.
My Mana bubble grows and I can now more or less see the surface of this place. There is much Wasteland around me, and I do not know if the whole World looks like this or if this is some kind of dead place. For the Prospect of Life it does not look good, but would be a positive for a foothold until I reach my goal. For the time I should try again to absorb more soil for further experiments and tests.
While it is nice to have so much Mana to use for this endeavor of excavating, it happens to come to my Notice, that Mana gets turned into more Miasma by moving dirt through Levitation. This Miasma is again unruly and would need to be ground down. Rather ineffective, if I have to do it again and again, so I should try to do the same with Miasma. Although I can not stop the Intent of the Miasma, I can construct out of Miasma with the Intent to Levitate an saturated area. The effect is Promising, although not perfect, as the Dirt gets flung in every direction. With more fine tuning the flow is mostly in one direction and the dirt starts to create a mount slowly dragging in more Dirt from the sides towards and up to the Portal. With enough pressure from the Intent it gets pushed through, and inside my Realm I can convert it rather easily. The only few problems are, I have to hold the Miasma in check and my Miasma works counter productive to the native one.
More experimenting shows more promising aspects about using native Miasma and my Mana. As it mixes but not fully interact with one another it can hold the built miasmic Structure in place and leaves me with more attention to other things. More experiments show more possibilities. One of such is creating a kind of synthetic obsidian. Using Miasma that was intended to burn things. I can heat up and start reactions between the Soil to burn it into this kind of Obsidian like Material. If I am able to smelt rock, I should be able to process it in more ways than this.
…
While experimenting with all the possible uses of the Miasma, the Storm is finally ebbing. Having Mana within Miasma slows the strange force down quite a bit and I notice even new things falling into my domain. Some kind of dead leaf finally arrive in my perspective. Seems like it is thoroughly dead, but the Structure is still standing. Inside the Storm it would crumble to dust in no time, but now it starts to slowly accept some things without degrading them to nothing.
What this means is at least a good thing. There is something more than Wasteland to explore. But until the Storm is low enough, it will be impossible for things to travel into this hostile place. As long as this is the fact I should start more projects. The Portal is rather vulnerable and I do not know if some kind of beings can seal it, as I do not know anything about Portals into other dimensions. If it is like teleportation or magical gateways, they can be interrupted. If something seals this hole I do not know if it can be reopened or I am sealed away for good. At first an Obsidian Shell should be the first thing I try. Using different types of Miasma I am able to create a flow of Magma creating some Pillars of Obsidian. Connecting is harder, as putting Magma into the seams between those Pillars often heats them unevenly and cracks them. The first try of an enclosure was not really good, but as I get better it should be possible to create something way more stable. Although it is rather unwieldy the Eggshell I now have should help for the time. Sadly I need to keep some holes, as Obsidian has some insulating properties against Miasma and Mana. The flow need to be unimpeded, so I can still expand.
…
More and more of the Wasteland is in my presence and I get more former Life to see. More leafs have been found, but still they are totally dead, like the former one. Miasma in such strong storms are horrible for life in general. It can be looked like high radiation. While weak Miasma creates mutations, stronger leads to death, and the kind around me is so volatile it does not even let life exist. What I am doing right now is more a kind of environmental change. What this will create, can be good but also catastrophic for the place I now reside in. Who knows what will happen to the World when I have created my own Domain large enough for my liking.
At the same time I have been digging deeper. The rock below the dead soil seems to be volcanic in nature but has strange aspects I can not identify. It is like ingrained into the Stone is yet another Law of another World, but it is so faint, I can only notice the ‘smell’ of it. This World gets weirder and weirder.
At least the training with the controlled Miasma has bore fruit. The more I learn about the Miasma the easier it gets to manipulate it the way I want. It becomes a way of instinctual movement of Mana, like how moving muscles is for animals. Maybe someday I'll just have to think of something and it happens out of reflex. But for the time I have to work my will to model what I want, and focus to sustain it.
My time is split in expanding, exploring and experimenting. While expanding is simply grinding Mana out of Miasma and slowly claiming space, exploring is more interesting. The deeper I explore into the earth, the stronger the third Law gets. Something is below this place, but it is way too deep for now. On the other mana tendril the area around the Portal seems to slowly rise in every direction.
Experimentation starts to have great effects about my way to perceive my surroundings. While my main way to perceive my surrounding is touch with Mana and Miasma, with different Aspects of Miasma there are reactions with more than just matter. I can now feel Light and with this I should have the ability to see beyond my Domain sooner or later. Right now there is more of the feeling of if light is there, what enables me to know when it is bright and when it is not. There is a day and night cycle.
Slowly breaking into such simple things like ‘there is light’ or ‘the dirt is wet’ is somehow sad, but at the same time it starts to help me feel alive, even if I do not even know what I really am. Better stop thinking about that again and work on what is in front of me or better yet outside the Portal for me to explore.
…
3 cycles of Night and Day later I seem to have now the miasmic Storm under control. The third Law under the soil seems to aggravate it, but by me pressing against it, there is a significant slowing down. At the same time I can now see. Better I have a lens out of Miasma reacting to light and I can interpret the reactions. Although colors are still beyond me, there is a way to focus now and direction too. What is being shown is a crater. It is a very old crater already filled with different kinds of sand and dirt. How old this crater is I can not directly say, but it looks old. Measures seem to be more on the huge side. Around 4 or 5 kilometers in radius, if the scale of the World I perceive is right. Hard to be sure while I do not have any kind of measurement.
My next goal is now getting to the rim of the crater. My second Goal is to understand what is behind the crater walls, but until now it is nice to see some kind of new environment.