7-13. Overstepping
A cacophony of noise washed over Elijah, forcing him awake. He clamped his hands over his ears, though the gesture did nothing to protect him from the avalanche of formless sound. That was when he realized that the noise – if that was even the right word – was no audible thing. Rather, it was in his own Mind, the result of being overwhelmed by the weight of near-infinite feedback from the world around him.
If taking the Connection specialization had given him a whisper of insight into the natural world, then what he currently felt was like being beaten over the head with a club.
Repeatedly and without end.
His Mind was like jelly, and his body hung limp, suspended in the center of the cave. He could feel everything around him, and to a boundless degree that completely engulfed his every thought.
For what felt like an eternity – but was likely only a few minutes – Elijah couldn’t move. He couldn’t think. And he had no hope of recovery. However, with every passing second, he began to instinctively acclimate. At some point, he regained enough consciousness to take control, and he used every trick he’d learned in recent years. He siphoned some of the stimuli into its own facet, sorting it in such a way as to disregard all but the broadest strokes.
And that was when he realized something truly daunting.
It didn’t come from One with Nature or his domain. Instead, the stimuli originated from a tiny area only a few inches from his skin. It was like his Soul had breached the bounds of his body – which, given what he’d done during his cultivation, sounded precisely what was happening – and it remained exposed, like a raw nerve.
Only, there were thousands of them, and they gave him so much insight into his surroundings that it made him question his understanding of the world. The volume of such a space was barely more than three cubic feet, but to Elijah, it felt like he had an entire world laid out before inner eye. Not only could he perceive subatomic particles like electrons and neutrons, but he couldn’t help but peer far deeper. Quarks, if he remembered his physics correctly, though he was in no mental state to make that distinction.
There were much smaller particles, too, though Elijah had only a passing knowledge of what those might be.
In any case, he was far more concerned with the ethera.
Tiny threads of energy lay beneath everything, connecting it all with a web of power. It was denser in some places, but far more diffuse in others. Elijah’s focus strayed to the space between. Because there was something else there.
He couldn’t truly perceive it, but something – maybe just basic intuition – told him that he’d only barely scratched the surface.
Then, it all disappeared as a notification appeared before his inner eye:
| For your protection, your Soul has been shielded from the outside world. Due to your extraordinary efforts, you have been granted an early evolution to the spell, One with Nature.
|