Chapter 533: Endless Fog
I stepped into the fog. Immediately, I felt as if everything about the world had changed.
Reality was immaterial. The laws of physics were immaterial. Magic was immaterial. Nothing was ‘real’ here except for fog. My very body creaked and groaned as the incoherent, fleshy aspects of my body rejected their own shape, and sought to become one with the fog surrounding me.
It felt painful… and yet, there was a faint sense of familiarity to it. It was as if I had experienced something very similar in the past. It only took me a few seconds of thinking to realize what this reminded me of.
It reminded me of the living universe that had invaded Anise’s home dimension. The one that had killed all of us merely by looking at us. It had been several hundred years since we had been killed in such a ridiculous manner… but the memory of being swatted to death like flies by a being beyond our understanding had created an unbreakable memory for me, which had persisted to this day.
At that moment, I confirmed my earlier suspicion. The fog pillar was definitely an existence that had at least one skill at Law Grade 1 or above. I also confirmed something else, which I hadn’t realized. The living universe that had killed us last time probably had some kind of conceptual skill as well. I vaguely remembered that the way it had killed us was due to our biology literally fighting itself. Every single drop of blood, tendon, and piece of bone in our bodies had tried to sprout its own, independent form of life, and within seconds the whole system had just collapsed. The feeling at this moment, inside of the fog pillar’s domain, was very similar - although at the very least I didn’t feel like my bones, ligaments, and organs were trying to sprout limbs and run away.
Perhaps the living universe had some kind of ‘life’ related conceptual skill?
I shook my head, and focused. The living universe wasn’t relevant to me anymore. It was spectacularly unlikely I would ever encounter it again. What I needed to do was make the most of the opportunity in front of me right now.
The laws of reality hidden within the fog.
I tried moving, but my arms and legs didn’t behave. It felt like I was trying to drag them through thick tar. My ligaments and organs weren’t working the way they should.
I tried to frown, and confirmed that even my facial muscles weren’t moving the way they were supposed to. I started pouring a very small amount of healing magic into my body, and quickly confirmed that I could move again.
“It seems you’ve finished acquainting yourself with my domain. Now, try to find the core of yourself. Not the biological side of you - the conceptual side. Find it and try to push back against my fog with that piece of you. It should behave kind of like a muscle - the more you train it, the better it will become.”
I blinked in surprise. This was the first time the fog pillar had used an analogy related to human biology correctly! I felt weirdly proud of it for finally getting something right.
I focused on myself. I did as the fog pillar instructed, and tried to find the ‘core’ of what I was. Not my biology. Not my brain. Not even my soul. Something else. A side to me that was neither physical or magical. Something that existed purely on a conceptual level. A small kernel of something very human, and very important to me. In many ways, it was the core of who I truly was - not just because my abilities said so, but because it was something I’d always held onto.
Hope.
Even as the fog tried to break down my body and convert me into fog, a much greater part of my mind held itself together through sheer hope that I could endure and improve. The concept of hope helped me persist. To fight for the people I cared about - because even though this was a training regime and not a real fight, I was still hoping to improve here. Whether I grew stronger or not might directly decide the lives of my friends and I in the near future - so I had to work harder, if I wanted my own hopes for the future to sprout.
The fog warred with my own concept of hope, and after a few seconds of silent struggle, I felt the pressure of the fog start to dampen. It was still pushing down on my existence, like gravity that had been amplified dozens of times - but I could still think, move, and fight back. I wasn’t being assimilated by the fog anymore. I used the little core of hope inside of my body to push back against the fog.
“It seems that you finally found the core of what you are. Now, I’m going to create a second, much weaker well of ‘hope’ in your surroundings. All I’m going to do is create a few thoughts, and then isolate them and put them near you. I want you to try looking for it. This isn’t something you’ll be able to find with your physical senses at all, or even your essence related senses - but it’s the core, underlying theme of what I want you to learn here.”
“Got it,” I said. I squeezed my eyes shut, and I started to feel around my environment for the concept of ‘hope.’
For several minutes, I felt around like a blind man searching for specific image drawn on a painting. I couldn’t see or feel anything. I had no idea what I was even looking for. Everything around me just felt like fog - and every single second, I also had to maintain my tenuous understanding of the concept of ‘hope’ just to avoid assimilation.While it made it easier for me to feel the connection between me and the concept of hope, it also distracted me because I had to keep pushing back against the pervasive fog.
Eventually, I found what I was looking for. In the distance, there was a wisp of something other than fog in my environment. It was faint, and I got the feeling that the fog pillar had made it faint on purpose to make me hone my senses a bit more. Still, I had found it.
I immediately pointed towards the wisp of the concept of hope.
“Good. You’re finally starting to see the world through the lens of the conceptual. Now, I think that it would be best if you tried to tie this into that other strange set of abilities that I’ve seen you use a few times - specifically, those weird runes on the surface of your skin. The abilities you’ve displayed so far already feel as if they feed into each other - but the feedback loop is incomplete and inefficient. Of course, if you truly believe this is a mistake, I can try to help you move things in a different direction instead.”
“I’ll follow your judgement.” If a Grade Law-1 entity who specialized in conceptual abilities thought that a certain direction was best for me, who was I to disagree? Besides, its words weren’t wrong. I had already linked together my two abilities when I had created a way for Extinguish to grant me new Skills. It’s just that at the moment, the way the two abilities interacted with each other was somewhat one-sided - but it was evident that didn’t need to be true. I also didn’t feel that linking my two main abilities together was a bad thing. When I had used the Market’s services to ‘restrict’ my Skill-stealing ability to only work with extinguish, it had granted me two new skill slots. If I could get similar levels of power by linking things together, I would be more than happy to make such tradeoffs.
“Do you have any kind of special eyesight, based on those peculiar runes? I’ve seen you react to environments much further away than your eyes should be able to detect, so I’ve been wondering for a while. If you have any kind of special sight, please turn it on now. If not, tell me and I’ll think of another way.”
I activated my spatial sight. Then, before the pillar had time to say anything, I began trying to fuse my new, conceptual vision into my already-existing dimensional vision. Using both different kinds of vision at the same time was difficult, and it felt like trying to juggle with one hand and play an instrument with another - but it wasn’t impossible.
After several seconds of testing, my vision flickered, and then lapsed into nothingness. It felt like I was in a void, floating in the center of it. There were only two other things that existed in this void - fog, and hope. Around the edges of this void, I could also detect the concept of space, and other concepts underpinning the way reality as a whole worked, such as gravity, time, and dozens of other, less obvious things that were no less important, but much harder for me to detect. It was like seeing a completely distorted, nearly incomprehensible version of reality. The world was no longer governed by physics, or shapes, or distance - instead, it was like a jumble of different ideas, all mashed together in a chaotic tableau of meaning, thought, and identity. I had a hard time believing that this had any sort of relationship with the real world at all. It was just too… strange. And yet, a part of me felt as if I had simply seen something I had always instinctually known was there - that this underlying conceptual aspect of reality had always been there, and I had always been aware of it, just in less detail.
“Good. I can feel it. You’ve seen the world through the conceptual. Now try walking outside of the training field, but keep hold of this sensation. This field is meant to make it easier to see the conceptual, but the first thing we need to do is wean you off of it. Otherwise, your progress will be limited.”
I did as the fog pillar instructed, and walked outside of the training field. For a brief moment, even though I was outside of the fog training field, my vision remained locked into my vision of the concepts of the world. I could see an incredibly rich, complicated tapestry of different concepts in every direction. Just beneath us, there was a pervasive field of more fog, mixed with other things. Soil. Life. Trees. Sand. There were even hints of other, greater concepts that didn’t have the space to flourish, such as Forests, Time, Oceans, and more. I had thought that things were complicated inside of the fog pillar’s training field, but now I realized that it was barely even a single percent of the total chaos that lay outside of it. I suspected that if I stepped outside of the fog pillar’s territory, it would get even more complicated.
Then, my vision of the conceptual faded. The sheer complication of trying to observe the world outside of the training field made it impossible for me to keep my vision going.
“You held onto it for about half a second. That isn’t bad, but I expect much more.” said the fog pillar.
I nodded. I wasn’t sure what use this skill had yet - but I was eager to see what use it had as well. It looked like I was going to spend a lot of time working on this for the next few weeks.