Chapter 495: Gate
The organization of our flight attempt was rushed - but there was no other choice. That was because only a few minutes after we started gathering, I noticed something. In the distance, souls were starting to appear.
Incredibly strong ones. It wasn’t that they were close to us - in fact, they were still impossibly far away. However, when I tried to observe the life force of things in our surroundings, the amount of life force present in those distant ‘candles of life’ was like a sun. Even though they weren’t getting closer to us yet, I was pretty sure I knew exactly what they were. The Universal Tree had already shown how little regard it had for the lives of people in occupied territory, and I suspected these overwhelmingly powerful life forces were meant to be the final cleanup operation for this dimension. The moment they got moving, I didn’t think we would have any chance to resist at all. I had no idea what Grade of [Fortitude] they would have according to the Market’s System, but I was sure that even if every single mage and warrior in our entire alliance exhausted themselves while the enemy just sat there, we still probably couldn’t kill them.
With that kind of power mismatch, there was no way to resist or even hold them off. So we had to flee. Quickly. before the enemy came and finished us off for good.
When I shared my findings with the other members of the alliance, it spurred everyone else to work even faster. People who had children ushered them towards our village-bearing beast, while the spatial Mages and I pushed through every single plan we could make as quickly as possible. We didn’t have a strong way to plan against every contingency - we had neither the power nor the time. However, we needed to get out now. It was just lucky that this dimension had already had a pretty firmly established concept of travel between worlds. It meant that the people of this dimensional cluster already understood what we needed to accomplish, at least in rough terms. Even if nobody knew exactly how to get our needs accomplished, we all knew what our objective was and had at least a few old legends about how to do it.
Partway through our preparations, I also realized that I could contribute far more to this endeavor than I had expected. This was because the Skill I had acquired from killing the wooden butterfly was a Skill rooted in the foundation of dimensional travel. That thought hadn’t quite sunk into me while I was planning and discussing things with the mayors earlier, but when I checked the spatial coordinates given to me by that ability, I realized that the skill was a lot more unique than I had given it credit for being.
Originally, I had overlooked the Skill because I had thought it wouldn’t work. I had originally assumed that my ‘spatial coordinates’ were tied to the land itself. After all, I was pretty sure that the planet we lived on revolved around the sun, and probably spun on its axis too. Most legends I heard from the [Priest] indicated that in the past, planar travellers had done some inspection of our dimension and confirmed we lived on a spinning planet, and I’d never had reason to doubt that belief. Despite the fact that we were hurtling through the endless void of space and spinning around, my spatial coordinates had never tried to teleport me off of the planet and into space. Therefore, I had assumed that my spatial anchors somehow tied themselves to the continent itself when I set them up.
Evidently, that was not the case. Apparently, the spatial anchors had changed location quite significantly during the time we were hurtling through the ocean of souls - but my spatial anchors had ultimately refused to come all the way with us. The moment they tried to exit our home dimension, they had frozen in place. In other words, my Skill offered us a way to flee from this dimension and at least return to the dimensional cluster we came from.
Of course, this also had a major issue - the question of what we would find on the other side. Our entire planet, and the rest of our dimension, had been ripped out of its former habitat and dragged into the universal tree. If we returned, what would we find in our former home? Would we just teleport into the ocean of souls? Or into outer space? If either of those happened, I suspected most of the children we were trying to save would die. The local System made people much stronger, more resilient, and more capable of enduring pain and damage in order to survive, but there were limits to how many levels a child could have obtained. To survive the ocean of souls without assistance, people would need way more levels than they could have plausibly obtained at a young age.
To counteract that, our group had two plans in place. The first plan was rough, but the idea was basically to piggyback off of my original portal, use the talents of the other spatial mages, and then connect to the wider network of gates between planes in order to hop to another world - hopefully one that was a little bit less hostile to all forms of life. The other plan was more of a contingency plan, in case the first one didn’t work - but it was a lot less reliable and a lot more likely to get people killed, so all of us were hoping it didn’t come to that.
The final problem we ran into during our planning phase was essence costs. I needed to establish two anchor points in order to hop to and from dimensions, and that meant that I needed to build a new anchor point in our current location before I could open a gate between here and our old place. Combined with the cost of interdimensional teleportation, and keeping some essence for scenarios where something went wrong turned out to be a pipe dream. After all, I just didn’t have the essence to fuel the whole thing.
This turned out to be the biggest problem. The local System did not have any form of mana sharing - or at least, no consistent way to do so. There were a few feats that could let people donate their mana to other people, but people who had actually taken those feats were quite rare. Even if an extra twenty or thirty mages donated their mana pools to me, I seriously doubted it would be enough. I had no idea what kind of essence quantity I even needed to fuel this entire gate, but I had a feeling that it would be way, way more than I had ever handled before.
That was when Felix had a new idea.
<Miria, your Eldritch half lets you manipulate outcomes that give people hope, right?>
<Yeah. Why? It still costs essence to use, and as far as abilities go, it’s honestly on the worse side in raw energy efficiency. It lets me create weird outcomes, but I can’t use it to wish more essence into existence - I tried that already.>
<Maybe it can let you bend the ways people can share essence with each other?> asked Felix. <After all, there is no inherent law of the multiverse that prevents people from sharing essence, or utilizing external forms of essence. I can confirm that in the Market, plenty of technology there runs off of essence, while there’s also plenty that runs off of coal, electricity, or any number of other sources of energy. People here just lack the technique to do so. I think that’s something you could probably manipulate using the concept of hope, especially since most of the people here are desperately hoping that you can at least protect their children - and possibly them as well.>
I paused. Felix’s suggestion was a good one. The concept of hope really was versatile, and perhaps I simply hadn’t been giving my eldritch side enough credit in terms of what it could do with the right fuel.
A moment later, an idea for how to set the stage and get my ability working came to me. I would look quite foolish if this didn’t work, but we would all die if it didn’t anyway. I had to try it.
I stepped right into the center of the clearing, where spatial mages, children, terrified parents, and warriors were gathered. I sent a mental request to Anise, who quickly set up a voice amplification spell for me to ensure that everyone in the area could hear me.
“I’m sorry to ask this of you when things are already so dire, but I need mana. I have a way to absorb whatever mana you send at me, and we’ll need enough to get this gate open.”
It didn’t take long before my first volunteer arrived. He was an older man, and he held the hands of a little girl - she appeared to be around eight years old. He didn’t say a word - he just sent mana towards me. I tried absorbing it using the concept of hope to latch on to the mana, and immediately, I could feel the man’s hopes.
All he wanted was for the little girl to live. I could sense a few stray emotions attached to him - his longing for a missing wife, her last moments before a wave of fire had taken her away from him, his love for his daughter, his hope that she could get somewhere safe…
Kind of like my own father.
His hope for a better future for his daughter, as well as my attachment to the concept of hope, let me absorb the man’s mana even though neither of us had any actual technique, skill, or feat that should have let mana-sharing be possible.
I smiled.
“Thank you,” I said.
After him, more came. The people of other towns in the alliance quickly sent me wave after wave of mana. I absorbed wisps of mana until I felt sick - until my essence pools creaked in protest as I stuffed them with far more mana than they were meant to hold. But it was worth it.
With the help of the townsfolk, I finally grunted in pain, and even as my essence pools screamed in pain, I managed to channel almost everything I had into a single Skill.
A giant hole in reality tore open in front of my eyes. I immediately began to leak mana at an unprecedented rate. If this had been my own mana reserves, just maintaining this gate would have eaten through my mana reserves in seconds. However, with all of the mana other people had given me, I could sustain it for several minutes, and still have enough essence left over to handle emergencies.
Since I had the best knowledge of how other dimensions worked, and my healing magic to keep myself alive in case of an emergency, I was the first one to step through the portal.