[NR] Below A Concept - Chapter 645 (Patreon)

Jason sat with his legs crossed and felt the darkness settle over him. It was time to put to use the basement and potentially end up having to respawn for a second time. The System threads would be gone.

As with so many times before, Jason sank into himself and focused on his oft abused pinky. Then with a deft stab of his own Energy, the pinky string almost seems to shatter as the threads that had made it are released. Behind this, Jason pulls upon his own Energy and cultivation, grabbing the finest of lines being put off by his core.

A twist gets them spinning into threads, and behind that another twist turns multiple threads into a string. The first crystal knot is unraveled and Jason puts his personal design into place. Yet still, the strings he has made aren’t stable. Jason pushes through this, no room for doubt.

More string and knots come undone as Jason races to keep up while holding everything in place. Though as the unraveling approaches his elbow, he does something different. This is his body, his [Substance]. The space within? That was his.

The farthest edge is grabbed by the very void of his body. Locked down into place in a way his will alone couldn’t handle. Still, this wasn’t enough. Jason couldn’t spend every moment of his time in NeoRealm focused on keeping the effect in place.

The strings needed to be kept in place by the space itself and not some outside influence forcing it to do so. All the while the System threads had raced past the elbow and towards the shoulder. So, if not from without, from within!

After all, the System controlled the strings and through them, the body. Not the other way around.

Jason pushes himself into the string through the connection to his core. His substance solidifies space from within. The very nature of the strings twist, a product of civilization, strengthens. And the hold on space ascends out of the string itself, grabbing that which is nearby and holding on.

This process isn’t fast. In fact, it is at least half the speed of the System string unraveling.

Jason isn’t sure if this is how others handle things. In fact, seeing as he gets infinite retries while locals have only a single go of it, they can’t be doing this. Though if some of them have, it would be with either the mental ability to hold their own strings in place all at once or stabilize them fast enough to keep up with the unraveling. That or they died. Those at level cap have to go somewhere, after all. And that “somewhere” didn’t seem to be escaping, at least not at a rate that explains there not being more capped locals than those almost there.

Any society where after a certain point, people just don’t die, tends to get too heavy. This world not only had already long-lived races like the elves, but power beget lifespan. However, going by what little is known of those rarified heights, there are, in Jason’s opinion, nowhere near enough cappers.

Jason planned to beat those odds, and He. Would. Not. Let. This. Stop. HIM!

The knots and their special structures put into place to stabilize them in space takes on a new depth. The small threads coming off their corners fray even further, to where Jason loses sight of them. Smaller than anything he has seen the System use.

Though that’s the Catch 22, isn’t it? If he can’t see them, how could he have seen them? Was this the answer all along?

Doesn’t matter. With them connected directly to his core through the strings, Jason can tell that each microscopic tendril was a single concept. No! Below a concept.

It wasn’t tendrils of [Civilization] or [Ascendance]. Jason couldn’t even put what he felt into words. Yet in their minimal atomic nature, Jason was able to catch glimpses of a greater whole. If only he could have focused on this phenomenon.

Yet what little he gleaned propelled his other attempts forward. At what felt like a glacial pace, the difference between how fast the System strings unraveled and the speed at which his own strings stabilized in space began to draw closer.

And in a virtuous cycle, this freed up more of Jason’s consciousness to observe those atomic concepts shards. More than that, as his body’s condition also stabilized, the unraveling of the System strings slowed down as well. It seems that half of what pushed it forward was his own body dying.

In fact, as his strings and knots took over for the System’s, his body strengthened and slowed the unraveling to where his progress matched and exceeded it. This caused a new problem, that of his strings being delayed and stymied by the System’s strings. It seems that there was more to their placement than at first blush.

This problem, however, wasn’t much of one. Jason already had the solution and the required tools in place. As with when he started the unraveling, all it required was to use his Energy threads to attack the weak points of the System strings and manually unravel them. And what do you know, his strings were there already, trying to encroach on the System’s strings.

So with a thought, Jason thrusts his strings forward, their threads infiltrating the System’s and bursting them apart into small shreds of thread. Even better, since the unraveling had passed by his core already, he didn’t have to pass his Energy by the System strings and double it back. Jason only had to pull the Energy directly from his core and push it outward.

Of course, the first limb to be completed was his arm since he started on the end of it. Then his head was next, the other arm, and finally his legs finished at the same time. This wasn’t quite the end, though. There was still a bunch of thread particles from the System hanging around in his void and Jason wasn’t going to stand for it.

So with one final concerted effort, Jason gathers the dregs of the System’s control strings, pushing them into his core and through the portal to the World’s Energy.