The Third Portal: Chapter Thirty-Six

I glanced at Dusk. 

“I don’t suppose you could just absorb it? That would let us break in at our leisure.” 

She let out a complex sound that layered the lapping of waves against the shore with the cawing of a bird and rustling of branches to try and explain that no, she couldn’t. The integration of so much external territory in the creation of the gates had more or less strained her to her limits. 

If this was an ordinary chunk of steel, sure, but it was too energy dense and warded for her to break through. If it had been an extraspatial vault that contained its own planar weave, she could have integrated it into herself without too much difficulty. If she had more available internal manipulation, but that would have to wait until fourth gate, and she wasn’t ready for that breakthrough.

If, if, if. Ultimately, though, it was just too strong, warded, and real for her to absorb.

“Not a problem, though it would have been nice…We’re here for the array, we should take care of that first,” I said. “We can come back for the vault another time.” 

Liz sighed and knocked on the door, then nodded. 

“Yeah, I agree. This looks like a thick plate of null-steel. None of us are wardbreakers, so if Dusk can’t just zorp it up, then it’s too much of a waste to try and blast through the defenses.” 

“Zorp?” Kene asked, arching an eyebrow. 

“It’s a word,” Liz defended. 

“What would I find if I looked that up in the dictionary?”

“Dictionaries don’t define language,” she countered. 

They bickered back and forth as we left, and I just shook my head, tail twitching. Ed seemed amused by watching, but when Liz tried to rope him in, he just held up his hands. 

“I’m not part of this,” he said. 

Hannah tugged on my death mana and manifested. 

“Okay, but at what point does it become defined?” she asked. “Like, I could say orange is just another word for mage, but if I’m the only person in the world who uses it, then does it matter? And other people already use orange for a color and a fruit.” 

I resisted the urge to bury my face in my hands. 

The argument over what defined a word, how it factored into the monolinguistic spell, and if that meant that the builders of the spell were the ultimate arbiters of wordcraft lasted all the way until we’d mostly left the wealthy district of the city behind. I wasn’t even sure that wordcraft was a real word, but there was no way I would bring that up. 

We did find another couple of mana sources, as well as kill a handful of undead as we continued to move through the area. The creatures were seemingly either aware that the slaughter spirit was gone, or else had never been particularly bothered by said spirit, because as we moved into yet another middle class neighborhood, they became thicker and thicker. Kene wound up running out of the bonemelting acid they’d been using, and was forced to step into a purely healing and supporting role, while Ed pinned them down for Liz to kill, and I scouted ahead with my senses and teleportations. 

The mass of undead in the area did result in fewer death mana sources, as they’d mostly been consumed, but the ones that we did find were usually much more potent, as they were too strong for the weak undead to process. There was even a tooth fragment that radiated sixth gate density, which I suspected could fetch a decent amount when we got back. 

The other good find in the area happened when I caught a somewhat familiar tingling in my spatial senses, and teleported over to it. It was inside one of the less dilapidated buildings. I was guessing that it had once been an office complex, complete with a manmade pond and water feature to convince the workers that being in an office wasn’t so bad. After a moment, Dusk whistled in recognition – it was a shadow realm. 

“Mal?” Kene called out. 

“Over here!” I said, then teleported back in front of them. “I found a shadow realm.” 

“Huh,” Liz said, while Ed tilted his head and waited for me to explain what they were. I screwed up my face as I tried to remember what Orykson had said about them, then put on my best Orykson impression. 

“Even the worst made astral plane is ten billion times better than a shadow realm, because shadow realms are shadows of existing space, are tethered to a singular spot, and because I’m convinced of the superiority of spatial magic.” 

Dusk started laughing so hard she almost fell off her cloud, and I grinned. 

“But yeah, that’s the gist of it. This one feels a lot smaller and less tethered than the one that the Ghost Market is held in, but it’s still something. Though I’m surprised that you’re not more interested, Liz, given you use shadow magic.” 

“I don’t really use Shadowstep, or lean into any of the somewhat spatially aligned aspects of lunar magic,” Liz said with a shrug. “I use my shoes for mobility, and will probably add Foxstep into my Tower when I’m an Arcanist, but until then, I can’t really make use of it.” 

“There still could be loot inside,” Kene pointed out. “It’s going to have a naturally higher concentration of magic, by virtue of being a magical space.”

“Oh!” Liz said, brightening. I ran my hands through the space, looking for the entry point. After a couple seconds of searching, I tore it open and stepped through, tensing my defensive spells. There probably weren’t any undead on the other side, since it took a degree of reasoning and stronger mana manipulation to slip in and out, but it was better to be prepared than it was to get stabbed by an undead boar or something of the sort. 

What I found was… Remarkably bland and normal. Most of the lake had been shadowed and thus existed within the realm, as had a small portion of the building. The grass was slightly shorter and less unkempt than it had been in the real world. The reason for it was quickly apparent, as I spotted one of the rabbits in my vision hop towards me. There was a surge of third gate death magic as it used some sort of intense sensory spell on me, then faded away. It hopped forward, then back, then scanned me again, before it decided to ignore me and munch on some of the grass. 

The rest of my companions appeared next to me a moment later, and I heard Ed let out a soft ‘awww’, as he took in the rabbit. Dusk looked around and pointed out several more of them. 

“These are the bunnies that I saw with my psychometry,” I said, “I’m glad that they weren’t all murked by the slaughter spirit.” 

The rabbit near me used its sensory spell again, sweeping over the others in the group, and I glanced down at it. I began to pour my own mana senses into the rabbit’s magic, examining the arrays I could feel within its body. Most of its first gate seemed to be ordinary sensory spells, nothing like the strange third gate one that I’d been examining, and nothing that Analyze Death couldn’t already give me a more polished version of. 

Its second gate seemed to focus around its bone horn. The horn was somewhat like hair, or the white of the nails, truly something dead, with only the tiniest dregs of life energy running through it, and the rabbit’s spells seemed focused around allowing them to use the horn to defend themselves, as well as a really strange veiling spell that made their whole body feel like picked clean bones. It made sense for a prey animal, I supposed, especially if their hunters usually had strong mana senses.

The third gate brought with it several changes to the bone structure of the creatures, which seemed absurdly advanced, allowing them to use dead bone inside of their own body without harming them, and layering thin amounts of dead bone over living bone in a rotating fashion. The entire early third gate was filled with spells that worked on those internal dead bones. It went well over my head, but I was sure a better field biologist than me would have been fascinated by the implications. 

No, the thing that caught my attention was the spell that seemed to mostly be dominating their mid-third gate – a sensory spell. It connected into their first gate senses, and seemed to be designed to look at something on a more spiritual level. 

It almost reminded me of Analyze Mana-Garden, or the fourth gate ritual spell that border security used that could scan the structure of a spirit to find a person’s legacy and garden. But the messiness of evolved magic was fully on display here, as instead of giving a neat, concise result, it seemed to look at everything as a whole and give a more generalist impression, giving vibes about a person’s mana-garden, legacy, and if I was right, personality. 

I was guessing that was why the rabbit had needed to scan me twice – my gestalt spirit had thrown it off. 

The weave of the spell was heavy with death, mental, and knowledge, with traces of solar, lunar, life, and telluric. It meant I could probably fit it into my death gate, or maybe the beastgate, though I was less sure there. Much like how the beastgate could fail with something like blink fox mana, for being too simple, this might be stradling that line. It would also have been stradling a line with mental and knowledge, if I hadn’t built such large reserves through my runelight lens. As was, I was pretty confident I could fit it in my death gate. 

I pulled a pad of paper and a pen from Dusk and began sketching the spell out.I was tempted to cast the spell now to try it out, but I restrained myself. The spell was fairly large, and my mid-third gate was being eaten up by Fungal Armor. Still, the moment that I broke into peak-third gate, I was absolutely going to be giving it a shot.

“Babe?” Kene said, and I looked up at them. “You were spacing out.” 

“Oh,” I said, tucking the paper away. “Sorry. The rabbit has some interesting spells.” 

Ed snorted and ruffled my hair, so I flicked his forehead. 

“Rude!”

“So, any treasures worth taking?” Liz asked. 

Dusk whistled that she couldn’t sense anything, and I felt my face grow flushed as I remembered why we’d entered. I flared my senses and spread them out around me. There were dozens of rabbits, several of whom were underground, presumably in their warren. A part of me was a little disappointed they didn’t also have any spells laid into their warren I could learn. Then again, what would I even do with them?

I could also sense a flicker in the fragments of the building that had been shadowed, and quickly layered Placid Mind over myself. As I shoved off the impulse, I could sense a handful of beings with spatial, temporal, mental, and abnegation mana inside. They seemed to be using a veiling spell of some sort, and it was  a good one. There was also a single potent source of lunar mana at the bottom of the pond, which I pointed at. 

“Some sort of mana source or natural treasure there, but that’s it. I suspect that the residents of the shadow realm already ate any mana sources they could use. There are also some weird creatures in the office building. I wanna check them out real quick before we leave. Anyone care to join me?”

Before anyone else could respond, Dusk cut in, pointing out that this was exactly one of the cases she’d talked about when she’d said she couldn’t eat the vault. This shadow realm had its own planar membrane. Sure, it was small, but we were still on a time crunch. She could eat it, saving the bunnies, the creatures in the office, and fetching the treasure all at once! 

“Could’a said that before we stepped in,” Ed said, shaking his head. Dusk blew raspberries at him, then flew over and started – ineffectually – pushing us out of the shadow realm.