Chapter 50: Sealed Space

CH50 Sealed Space

***

The Singularities had taken away all the gains Alex had hoped to get from the cavern.

Sure, he hadn’t a chance in hell of taking even one percent of the Mana Stones and Elemental Crystals, much less the three-metre Bonsai tree, but it still hurt to watch everything get sucked away.

And worst of all—it was a ’mistake’ he caused.

About five minutes passed. Nothing happened.

A vein popped in Alex’s forehead.

’You swallowed all that mana and you expect me to believe it was for nothing?’ He was indignant.

He focused on his Mindspace, where the OmniRune Core now floated peacefully. It had returned to its Greater Rune form.

It was as if the chaos it caused in its Interspatial Storage Formation form had been nothing more than an illusion. But the now-barren cavern said otherwise.

Alex connected to the OmniRune Core to figure out what had just happened.

To his surprise, the Greater Rune now held a permanent new form within it.

Joining the Mana Gathering Formation before it, the Interspatial Storage Formation—or at least something resembling it—was now a new structure the OmniRune Core could assume.

Alex noticed a few subtle differences between the formation he had reprogrammed and the final form the OmniRune Core had taken.

’Looks like... some of my reprogramming was repurposed. The output... seems weaker, but the scope seems to have been expanded?’ he mused, trying to make sense of the changes.

Whatever the case, he recognised that the introduced redundancies—ones that weakened his reprogrammed formation—may have been the reason he escaped calamity.

An empty cavern might have been the least of his problems had the original formation worked the way he intended.

’I still have a lot to learn about Runes and formation arrays... especially ones that affect reality,’ Alex admitted to himself solemnly.

This sobering realisation caused him to hesitate.

But then...

Clap!

Alex suddenly slapped his cheeks with both hands.

’Now’s not the time to chicken out. Whether I like it or not, this thing is floating in my Mindspace. I can’t bury my head in the sand and pretend it isn’t there. Better to confront it now and figure out how to control it.’

Despite his tough words, Alex still did his due diligence. He examined the formation again—carefully.

He confirmed there were no components that might lead to his death, or trigger the end of the world—at least, none that he could detect.

’Here goes nothing.’

Alex took a deep breath—and activated the formation.

Dum~

The space in front of him pulsed.

He instinctively braced for an explosion—but nothing of the sort happened.

Instead, light shimmered across the air... and a spatial gate formed.

Alex was stunned.

’It’s... quite stable,’ he thought as he examined it.

From his time with portals at the Enclave, Alex could tell that this gate—wherever it led—was stable. Which meant it would support two-way travel.

After a moment’s hesitation, Alex stepped through the gate.

To his astonishment, he found himself standing in an open field, the ground covered in short grass, and a clear sky stretching overhead.

Alex was certain this wasn’t a true space.

The clear sky without a sun told him all he needed to know.

This was a Sealed Space.

’...like what one would find inside an Interspatial device.’ His eyes glittered.

He was beginning to understand what had truly happened.

In the distance, he spotted the only other living thing in this quiet space—aside from the fake grass.

The Bonsai tree.

The tree that had been swallowed by the Singularity looked completely unharmed. In fact, it seemed to be in better shape than before, its leaves rustling gently with a lush, verdant glow.

The golden energy it had once radiated, however, was no longer present.

Alex walked up to the tree and placed his hand on its trunk. Then...

Nothing.

Nothing happened.

Alex smiled wryly.

It was as he expected.

Either the tree had expended whatever mysterious energy it had used to elevate his perception earlier, or the shift in location had disrupted its state. Whatever the case, he wouldn’t be ascending to a higher state of being anytime soon.

That said, one mystery had been solved: the fate of the Bonsai tree.

Now, Alex turned his attention to the next enigma—this space itself.

’Nullcore crystals are mined from planar rift zones. And what makes up the bulk of debris in planar rifts... are fragments of dead planes and shattered remnants of semi-planes and other pocket realms,’ Alex mused.

He pulled up the original formation he’d copied from the Nullcore orb from his memories.

’If I assume, based on this, that Nullcore fragments are crystallised remnants of these broken realms, then the formation I copied must be a constrained version of the rune logic used to form and sustain an independent space—at least on the level of a semi-plane or even a plane.

’These constraints probably exist to keep the Nullcore stable, preserving just enough of its spatial properties to act as a storage medium—without destabilising into nothingness.’

He took a breath.

’In that case... when I removed what I thought were redundancies, I was actually restoring the rune logic to its original, unshackled form. Where I believed I was creating a small storage space, I was, in truth, writing a rune logic set that instructed reality to generate an entirely new, independent space.’

Alex paused, brow furrowing.

Even he found the conclusion hard to believe. And yet, the evidence surrounding him was undeniable.

’Come to think of it, the idea’s not that far-fetched. I mean, I don’t fully understand the mechanics, but science has outlined how the universe formed—at least in theory. The actual process is intuitively simple. The real challenge has always been the energy requirement.’

His eyes narrowed in thought.

’So if I follow that same reasoning, then of course the rune logic was relatively simple to write. It’s just code—instructions. But providing the energy to make it happen? That’s where it becomes nearly impossible.

’Case in point: this space. It’s essentially a pocket dimension shaped like a rectangular cuboid—25 metres long, 10 metres wide, and 4 metres high. It has no real sky, only an illusion born from the residual birthing energy... and it still required the mana from an entire high-grade mana mine to create.

’A mine that could fuel an entire nation with hundreds of millions—maybe billions—of people, including millions of mana-hungry mages, for at least five years... all spent just to make this. A thousand cubic METRES of hollow space.’

He let the implications settle in.

’And if that’s the cost of creating a tiny pocket dimension, how much energy would it take to make a proper semi-plane? One that spans, say, a million cubic KILOMETRES? Or worse, a full-scale plane—tens or hundreds of billions of cubic KILOMETRES in volume?’

The thought alone made Alex feel dizzy.

It put into perspective just how insane the experiment he’d attempted was.

If the formation hadn’t ’corrected’ itself—if it had activated the way he originally coded it—then the only possible source of energy would’ve been the Subspace itself.

And even that might not have been enough to complete the process.

’In hindsight... I was an idiot. A lucky one—but still an idiot,’ Alex muttered to himself.

***