World Seal, Ch 17: Inside the World Seal (Patreon)

The portal flowed around Sam like liquid silver light. When he reached the other side, he was standing in the Void.

The starlight was strange here.

The stars existed in most dimensions, but the power of the World Seal was affecting their light, as well as the sense of how far away they were. It felt warped compared to the main dimension.

It was like being in a vast ocean with just a thin layer of water above his head.

For now, everything was still visible, but as soon as he went deeper, the view would become blurrier until it finally disappeared.

The flow of time was nearly the same, but it was a touch slower than Aster Fall.

This was the uppermost layer of the World Seal, a staging point between the world and the deeper realms that Asenya had merged together. She had created some of them as new dimensions inside the Seal, while others were natural ones.

He could tell that this one was nearly the same as the main dimension, but that there was no way to physically reach the world from here. It existed here only as an illusion, something that could be seen but not touched, like a reflection of moonlight in the sky.

It actually did look like a moon. Aster Fall hung in the sky, glowing in ethereal blue and silver, but it was only a mirage. With the right authority, you could teleport to it, similar to the gate that he’d used to arrive, but you couldn’t fly there.

A dimensional barrier was blocking it, one that prevented anyone from actually closing the distance to it. If you had enough power, you might be able to shatter that barrier, but otherwise you needed a key.

This was the first time he’d been inside the World Seal like this, so he took his time looking around. Aster Fall wasn’t the only thing he could see. Even more noticeable was the Nexus in the distance.

The grey vortex felt closer than ever. Its power sent waves of force rippling through the sky.

Unlike the regular dimension, there was no World Core here, but he could still sense its presence. It was exerting a weight on the dimension that kept everything under control.

He tested his communication with it and found that it was as stable as ever, so he went back to examining the area, comparing it to the real version.

Space was twisted in strange ways at the edge of his awareness. Ripples of the distant and real Void, energy from the Nexus, and the occasional strange aura that didn’t fit Aster Fall were hallmarks of this dimension.

It made sense why Asenya had created this buffer zone. This was where energy could be dumped and then gathered by the World Core. Any cracks in dimensional space on Aster Fall probably opened here, and Flaws had to pass through it as well.

If Aster Fall was damaged and broke apart, this dimension also existed to catch it, in a way. In previous Breakings, this area was probably one of the main places where the world was reassembled.

One of the main differences from the real Void was that the chaos winds didn’t blow here. Instead, the Nexus’s energy was everywhere. It was a slow spiral of dimensional forces that ran below the surface, slowly moving outward.

It looked like this area was also a trap for that energy, to keep it contained around the World Core. Even as he determined that, however, he shook his head.

It was obvious the World Seal had been built after the World Core was damaged. This type of dimensional buffer would never have been necessary if it was in its original state. When the Titans built the core, it was capable of balancing that energy all by itself.

Some of the energy here was being gathered by the core, but with the damage it had suffered, it wasn’t as efficient as it should have been.

There were areas around him where that energy was boring through the dimensional wall like a slow acid. In some spots, the World Core was draining it away to strengthen itself and Aster Fall, but in other places, it was moving too quickly.

He could also sense how those spots interacted with Aster Fall, and an awareness of exactly how the world was helping the core repair itself sprang into his mind.

Those points of failure in the dimensional wall turned into two things: Flaws and monsters.

Once they were destroyed on Aster Fall, the energy was partially processed and the World Core could reclaim it more easily. The inhabitants of the world were like assistants, helping to keep everything balanced.

That was why the World Core was so quick to reward those who helped it with Traits and Skills, why it tried to level up combatants as quickly as possible, and why it had the system of Marks to reward more effort.

The World Spirits also had a place in maintaining the balance, dealing with the energy that broke through less directly. They managed the flow of Outsider energy that reached Aster Fall and were responsible for refining it into natural elements or mana crystals.

It was chaotic energy and full of different parts. When it reached the world, it gave rise to wild mana storms like those on the Storm Plains until it was absorbed by the land. The World Spirits oversaw that process, working to concentrate the energy into natural artifacts, elemental crystals, mana stones, and more.

That was the main reason Aster Fall was so rich in natural treasures. Its resources were constantly being restored and new ones added, like a treasure vault that was constantly receiving wealth from the Nexus.

Refining those treasures into artifacts helped to further process them, so the World Core awarded experience for it, which helped all of the crafters on Aster Fall level up and create even more elaborate artifacts, which in turn processed more energy.

It was a virtuous circle.

A clever system, but still a bit slapdash.

For all the damage that escaping energy did, it was only a fraction left over that the World Core couldn’t handle. The majority of the Core’s effort went toward stabilizing the Nexus. The flow of energy between the Core and the Nexus was thousands of times greater.

The Outsiders who broke through Flaws were the ones who managed to avoid the Core’s efforts to block them, using their own tactics to avoid its attention and find weak points.

It made him wonder how many of them had failed over the years and exploded into chaotic energy. Their fragmented auras were the main source of monsters in the world.

Ironically, Asenya hadn’t intended any of that to happen. She hadn’t planned for monsters or for any leaks to occur, for World Spirits, or for rare resources to be created.

Those had all occurred as a result of the World Core’s interventions over time. If she saw the world now, she would probably be amazed at what had become of it.

In her time, it had been called the Garden of the Gods, but that was due entirely to the World Core’s ability to assist with Evolution. The world had been more spartan back then, with vast mountains of raw stone and bubbling fields of lava on the edges of the inhabitable lands.

Even with those systems in place, however, the World Seal was still unstable. The energy that the World Core couldn’t handle was slowly eroding it, flooding some parts and destabilizing others.

Combined with the force of the Nexus that was slowly turning everything like a giant corkscrew, it created a wild mess. Some of the subdimensions here had already fragmented and bled into other ones.

He could feel the Nexus’s pull trying to slowly tear him apart. Thanks to his True Dimension body, it couldn’t harm him, but it was still a little unpleasant, like an itch that was hard to scratch.

If he’d come here earlier, it would have been much more difficult to survive. He would have needed some enchantments to protect him from it.

That was probably why there was nothing around him at the moment. Although this was the top level of the Seal, it was difficult for most things to survive here. It was mostly the Void with a current of destructive energy flowing through it.

Time here was nearly the same as Aster Fall, but in some of the deeper areas, it was frozen or moved so quickly that life and death happened in an instant to anyone watching from outside.

Forces from the First War were trapped inside different regions, and to some of them it had only been the blink of an eye. They might have spent thousands or even millions of years in there.

Back when his father nearly died and he threatened to destroy the World Core, the Core had planned to throw him into one of those fast regions as a prison.

A flicker of energy brushed against him. It was a fragment of invisible force that felt familiar. His hand snapped out and seized it. A flicker of silver flames forced the energy to stabilize and made it visible, but not before it left a tiny white line on his skin.

Without his dimensional body, it probably would have sliced his hand off.

When he saw what it was, he frowned and then stored it away in his dimensional bracelet.

It was Asenya’s energy, the same type that she’d left at her workshop. There were shards of it flying everywhere here, probably fragments of a dimensional wall she had erected in the past.

One or more of the subdimensions she’d created must have exploded and left fragments flying everywhere.

That sort of thing was all too common here.

The Dimensional Convergence that was surrounding the Moonlight Relic was basically a spot where a fragmented dimension was pressing against the main one. The interesting part was how it had been targeted there.

Some Outsiders were exerting control of the energy. It was the only way that could happen. It also revealed one of the deeper problems of the World Seal. As the dimensions fragmented, they became loose energy that anyone capable could wield.

That was a serious problem.

Depending on where you were in the World Seal, it was possible to exert Fifth Evolution or possibly even Sixth Evolution energy here. The Nexus was bigger than both and the World Seal was able to withstand the energy as long as it didn’t disturb the primary dimension at the top.

That was what allowed so many beings to be sealed inside here and for it to be used as a prison.

In blunt terms, it meant that if he had to fight inside the seal, he should be able to. He just had to make sure it was in one of the deeper levels.

He’d understood some of what was happening before, but his recent discussions with the World Core and Asenya’s notes had clarified what was happening. Now that he was here and could see it for himself, it was all making sense.

Based on the comments she’d left in those documents, she’d been looking for a way to solve the problem and to fix the energy bleed once and for all. That was the best evidence he had that she was in here somewhere.

She’d believed there was a keyhole somewhere, a center point of the damage that was causing the majority of the instability like a point of rot, and that if she could find it and fix it, that the World Core would be able to heal itself more easily.

She’d theorized that a shard of the Vos’Rekan’s talon might have been left behind in the World Core, or even that an Outsider curse had been embedded in it somewhere, and that one of those was disrupting the core’s self-repair.

If the Titans had been around, she could have asked them for help, but as it turned out, by the time that ancient Vos’Rekan damaged the World Core, they’d basically all gone through to the other side.

Some messages had said they were fighting the war there, and that it was the reason things didn’t get worse, but none of them had ever returned to explain.

That attack had happened near the very end of the war, right before Asenya created the World Seal. She’d done that on her own, as a stop gap measure to help the Core recover and to bring everything to an end.

She was the one who had stopped the war by using the Seal like a giant wall between the two sides. She’d planned for it to be temporary until she could fix the damage and the Titans could prevail, but it had become permanent.

The Titans should have been able to pass back through the Seal without trouble. They were the builders of the World Core, so as soon as it sensed them, it would create an opening, even if doing that harmed something else.

It was a mystery that they hadn’t returned.

All of those considerations were secondary at the moment, however. Right now, he had a simple mission to find her and reset the Seal.

He held up the emerald tracking pendant, looking for any reaction inside it. The gemstone swirled as currents of energy flowed through it, but he couldn’t feel anything. He frowned as he sent more energy into it, making it glow with a bright emerald light that was faintly touched with blue.

His senses ranged outward for hundreds of miles, searching for any resonance that might mark a trail. After a moment, he felt something, but it wasn’t coming from the pendant.

The dimension shuddered as a faint red glow appeared at the edge of his sight. He released the pendant as he looked toward it, his eyes narrowing.

The light felt familiar and he could tell it wasn’t something that belonged here. He could also tell that it actually wasn’t in this dimension, at least not yet. The energy was so powerful that the edge of light was traveling ahead of the real force, like the wind breaking around a spear point.

Was that a Flaw?

A sense of puzzlement flashed through his mind as he searched his memories for where he’d seen this type of light before, but he didn’t let that delay him. If there was something strange happening inside the World Seal, he might as well go see what it was.

At the rate it was approaching, it would be here soon.

There was no way that it was going to help the current state of affairs, so he decided to stop it. If it was a Flaw, it would be interesting to study the process from inside the World Seal.

He disappeared in a streak of silver light as he headed straight for it.

Teleporting inside the Seal was different from outside. His path led down through other dimensions rather than across distance.

It was easiest to think of Aster Fall as being up and the rest of the Seal as down. There was also horizontal movement across the dimensional planes, but that was less important.

He crossed three dimensional barriers as he headed toward the red light. Each one felt like a smaller version of the portal that had brought him here.

He was crossing vast distances and different layers of compressed time. Thanks to his authority from Asenya, none of it slowed him down, but it did go to show that the red light was very far away.

But also that it was extremely fast.

At the rate it was approaching, it would only be a day or so before it reached the upper layer of the Seal.

A moment later, he detected a stronger signature and adjusted his path. Two more dimensional barriers flowed around him and then he could see the light clearly.

As soon as he did, he realized where he’d seen it before. A grim expression drew his lips down into a frown.

This was the same light as that red comet he’d seen while traveling home from the Path of Stars. It had been years since he’d seen it, but the memory of that strange red light in the distance was still with him.

That had been long ago, so it was clearly a different invasion, but the energy signature was a match. They were both from the same source.

The implications of that event and how far away it was in the Void wasn’t lost on him. It meant that the Outsiders might have a way to reach farther into the galaxy than he’d expected and to avoid Aster Fall.

Either that, or the energy they released had broken through and then shot away into the Void on its own, dissipating very far from the Nexus, but he’d have to look into that later.

Right now, he needed to deal with this one.

In his view, the red light quickly resolved into a bolt of energy like a spear. It had a sharp point at the front edge that was tearing through the dimension and a long tail behind it. A vortex of shattered dimensional energy accompanied it.

It didn’t look like a transportation attempt, but rather like a ballista bolt that was fired into the World Seal, something designed to tear through the defenses and do as much damage as possible. Someone had decided that just sending in invaders was useless.

This was a direct attack on the World Seal itself.

Searching for Asenya was his main goal here, but he couldn’t ignore this.

A moment later, his eyes narrowed in dark confusion as he caught sight of two figures at the end of the red tail. Based on the way they were trying to hang on, they were clearly not supposed to be there.

He could see them easily as his sight pierced through the storm of dimensional fragments around the comet’s tail. They were humanoid, with short dark horns rising up from their foreheads, and elegant features, but there was something savage in their expressions and the way they held themselves.

One of them was clearly in the early Fifth Evolution, while the other was in the late Fourth. They were powerful enough that they were exerting a heavy force on the dimensional space around them, making it shake in protest.

They were inside a bubble of dimensional force that was crackling with broken orange runes and red Blood energy, which had half fused into the comet’s tail. It looked like they had tried to hitch a ride.

They had to be either invaders or prisoners from the World Seal trying to escape, but that wasn’t what got his attention. When he recognized their race, his eyes widened.

Voidborn.

It was the same race he’d been before he became an Astral Titan.

They were the lords of the Outsiders, a race that was similar in status to Astral Titans. Whenever they appeared on Aster Fall, it basically guaranteed a Breaking.

Their leaders during the First War were the Three Demons of legend: Blood, Passion, and Shattered Skies.

Besides his old face in a mirror, he’d never seen one of them in person. He’d known that Outsiders were imprisoned in the Seal, but he hadn’t expected to run into two Voidborn the moment he arrived.

Nor to see them clinging to the tail of this red comet.

Whoever launched this thing had either gotten lucky or they’d improved their aim, but either way it was bad news. There was enough power in the comet that it could break through to the other side of the World Seal, and unlike the first, this one was heading directly toward Aster Fall.

He wasn’t sure what would happen if the comet hit the world, but he had no intention of finding out. Even if it did nothing, if those two Voidborn reached the other side, they would set off a Breaking on their own.

He had to stop it.

A wave of silver flames gathered around his avatar as he sent the information back to his main body and prepared for battle. The Void roared in response, shuddering under the force of energy he was gathering.

Then he leapt forward in a streak of silver light, heading straight for the comet.