The Third Portal: Chapter Thirty-Seven

I watched as Dusk closed her eyes in front of the open rift to the shadow realm, extended her hands, and began to pull. Dawn’s magic joined her own, the golden light suffusing her small form. There was a sharp tug as the shadows stirred, then vanished, dissolving away into a burst of tiny energetic motes. Dusk let out a tired sigh, but opened her eyes and slowly flew to sit on my shoulder. 

“It’s done?” I asked, and she nodded, then curled up, yawning and saying that she needed to sleep in order to finish the process. It had been a while since she’d eaten anything so large that it needed her to sleep, but she had also been straining to remap a lot of her internals recently, which probably had played a part in this taking so much out of her. 

Dawn sunk into her spirit, folding into the tiny form on my shoulder, and I somehow knew she was assisting in the process… somehow. I didn’t know how she was assisting, nor how I knew that she was, but I did know that she was. 

“We’ll check it out later,” I said, then pulsed my Internal Pocketwatch to check the time, frowning. Our detour hadn’t been that long, but we were more than two thirds of the way through the time that we had until the slaughter spirit was released. 

“Actually, how about you all head into Dusk,” I said, waving a hand and opening a portal to her realm. “I’m going to have to book it to the next few if we want to make it before we run out of time. I’m the fastest out of all of us, and can probably just evade the undead. I promise if I sense anything potent, I’ll make a stop.” 

After they piled in, bringing the sleeping form of Dusk with them, I rolled my shoulders, rotated my head, and threw myself forward with all the strength I had. I teleported and pushed off again, throwing myself into the air, where I locked myself in place and foxstepped again. 

Within moments, I was blurring across the landscape, throwing myself forward with bodily strength, catching myself, and teleporting. An undead bird threw itself at me, but I knocked it aside with Briarthreads and kept teleporting forward. Nothing in the area outside of the currently trapped slaughters spirit could even come close to the speed I had, and in minutes, I’d arrived at the facility, opened a portal back to dusk, and called on the ghost of the scientist enchanter. 

This facility had also been looted, completely and utterly, and there wasn’t even much fuel for us to collect still within the massive enchantments. Unlike with before, the looters had even managed to break open the glassy orb, and ripped out a bunch of the components. The fact that there was a skeleton draped over the orb suggested that at least one of them had either been killed by the orb’s defenses, or had been killed by the other looters. There was no ghost, so I was guessing the nexus point had been the thing that had killed him, but it was a pure guess on my part, and I wasn’t about to waste the temporal mana to check. 

I grabbed the handful of components that I could, then tucked everyone away in Dusk and set off again. I blitzed through more middle class neighborhoods, until I arrived at a poorer part of the city. There was a part of me that felt awful that I wasn’t able to stop and collect the faint flickers of death energy that I thought might be ghosts, and I promised myself that if I came back, I would stop by to collect as many of them as I could. 

Once again, the array node in the poorer part of the city had been hidden, and with Dawn occupied, it took us a while to find it. I ran Placid Mind the entire time, pushing out any influence that touched on my mind, which was what eventually let us find the hidden stairwell. It was in the back of a dilapidated wooden structure that I thought might have once been a bar or a pub of some sort. It made me wonder if the pub or the array had been there first, but once again, I wasn’t willing to waste the time to check. I needed second gate time mana for Foxstep and Immovable Lock. 

By now, we were moving like a well oiled machine: Liz, Ed, and Kene moved the large tubes of fuel into the portal opened for Dusk while I tore the array apart for components and tossed them in. Then I was off again, running through the poorer region of the city as it gradually became more well-built stone buildings into the middle class, and then towards the rich part of the city. I was getting near when I felt a source of power that was potent, familiar, and also incredibly strange, all at once. 

I skidded to a halt on the rooftop that I had teleported onto, and even had to catch myself with Immovable Lock so that my momentum didn’t throw me off the side of the roof. Once I was stable, I turned and began chasing down the power I’d felt. 

Because I recognized what it was, and even why it was here: the starfall. 

The massive starfall had stretched from the Isle of Crysite, where I was now, across the ocean and the lower tip of Mossford, before ending just south of Delitone. I’d caught the very edge of it, and it had brought with it some very strange things: the symbiote staff, spiritual metals, star seeds, and of course, Dawn herself.

Most of what fell was collected by smallfolk or wild animals, who absorbed the power into themselves, but since this area had been under the rule of a spirit willing to attack almost anything, the only things that could have stumbled across the power that I was sensing were bugs and the undead. 

I chained together several foxsteps until I landed in front of what I’d felt. 

A meteor had landed and smashed into one of the buildings that had once been standing here. Its roof had caved in, and the walls had buckled and broken under the force of the impact, falling around the building in an oval shape. 

The entire mess felt incredibly chaotic, but I could feel a small, almost miniscule, spark of deep mana in its center. The bands of connections, and resonance with my eyes, the kirin’s spell within my spirit, and the feeling of the ninelight morels made me certain that this was some sort of fortune artifact, not entirely unlike a lushloam. 

Unlike the seeds, however, this didn’t feel like a forest at all. It instead emanated the feelings of… cleansing. If the seeds were twined around life, this seemed to be focused around abnegation mana, though even then, I wasn’t sure. It gave a strong sense of other powers, as if calling energies in. Then again, that was what a lushloam seed did – it provided energies into your body or spells perfectly, not unlike what the Beastbody Guild’s spells did, or my own Magister’s Body. Only unlike those, it seemingly created the energy itself, rather than drawing on existing power.

I wanted to get a good look at the artifact or seed or whatever it was, but it was buried under a mountain of rubble. I flicked open a portal to see Ed, Liz, and Hannah playing Terragon Scales, a card game I’d never been able to get a handle on but that Ed enjoyed. Ed rose quickly. 

“Everything okay?” he asked tersely. 

“Oh, I’m fine,” I said, waving my hands. “Totally fine. I just need help moving rock and stone.” 

With Ed’s legacy, Stoneshape spell, and gravity magic, as well as my own physical muscle, we managed to shift the mounds of collapsed ceiling and interiors, until I finally revealed a smooth, gray… thing. 

It was vaguely egg shaped, and was an utterly unnatural shade of gray. It wasn’t polished like metal, nor rough like stone, nor matte like paint, and it wasn’t anywhere between. It was smooth to the point of absurdity, and even picking it up was a challenge, as it kept sliding out of my hands whenever I tried. When I finally did manage to pick it up, it compressed slightly, almost as if it were about to become a liquid and melt through my skin, but stopping a moment shy of actually losing total cohesion. 

Kene rushed forward with one of the mason jars I used for alchemy, and I gently tilted the gray ball inside, where it rolled around nearly four dozen times before it lost its momentum and stopped.

“What is it?” Liz and I both asked in unison, though I was looking at Kene directly, and Liz was speaking into the air. 

“I don’t know,” Kene said. “I can’t even get a good sense for what it feels like.” 

“It’s kind of like a lushloam seed, but not?” I offered. “Not sure if that’s helpful?” 

“Not… really,” Kene admitted. “We’ll have to get it appraised when we get back.” 

“Or ask Meadow about it,” Ed suggested.

We all poked at it for a few more moments, before I slipped it into the vault, closed the portal, and took off again. I pulsed Internal Pocketwatch and cursed – even with the increase in speed thanks to me solo running, moving across such large swathes of land had still taken up time. It was going to be tight if I wanted to be able to comfortably drop the gourd and retreat. 

I put everything I could into my foxsteps, zipping and blurring across the landscape while also converting a portion of spatial mana from Harvest Distance into temporal, in order to keep myself as topped up as possible. 

The middle class neighborhood slowly began to transform into an upper class one, and I forced myself to ignore a handful of the mana sources that had been nurtured in the stronger death mana of the environment, as well as dodging the undead, which seemed to be heavy in this part of the city as well. 

Unlike in the other rich person neighborhood where the enchanter ghost had been, this array was out in the open, much like it had been in the two middle class districts of the city, and as I entered, I let out a groan. 

The entire place had been absolutely looted. 

Every single part of the facility had been systematically disassembled and stripped for parts. Even the control desks and panels had been opened up, and had their mana generators and batteries removed. The tanks of fuel were all completely gone, and when I went to the places where active tanks had been, even they’d been swapped with completely empty tanks in order to get every last drop of the expensive alchemical ingredients possible. 

It might not have been looting in the traditional sense of the wood, and it might have looked cleaner and nicer than the smashed up boards and windows of some of the other facilities, but it was still looting. In a way, it was even worse and more destroyed than any of the other arrays.

The nexus orb had been cut from its supporting cables, and the cables had also been removed from the wall, presumably to be sold or re-used for their high level of mana conductivity, but thankfully, none of them had the pass to be able to open the orb, and they’d lacked the destructive power to force it open. I quickly broke the ball open and started rifling through its internals. 

Then I felt the first crack form.