Chapter 102
October 24. Day four. Fourth pull. The ritual had become monotonous in its own way. I had stopped waiting. Waiting here, in this frozen void, was a form of madness. I simply executed the protocol with its ironic internal title: "Please. Anything useful."
[Information Package (Rare) received: Mystcraft (Minecraft). Package duration: 24 hours!]
My mind stuttered. Rare. Not Common. Not Uncommon. Rare. That was the first real shift. Possibly an even more significant anomaly in my gray survival routine than the Geo-Navigator had been.
This information package granted the Host knowledge to create and use two types of artifacts, called Books, for inter-dimensional travel, based on the principles of Mystcraft.
Was this actually a way out? The frozen apathy I had wrapped myself in after settling onto the asteroid cracked. I hadn't been expecting a quick rescue or anything like it, but I needed to hold on. I needed to not get ahead of myself. I kept reading.
Key Functions:
Linking Book Creation: The Host gained the ability to craft books from three basic resources: paper, leather, and ink. These books functioned as one-way teleportation anchors. Each book was bound to the world in which it was created, allowing the Host to instantly return to that location from any other dimension.
Descriptive Book Creation: The Host gained the ability to describe, meaning to create, new, empty pocket dimensions.
Limitations and Safety Protocols:
Dimensional Instability: Without deep, esoteric understanding of the nature of dimensions, any Descriptive Book would by default create an unstable world of the Minecraft type.
Decay: These unstable worlds were doomed to entropic collapse. Their lifespan was limited to a matter of days, after which they were completely destroyed.
Utilitarian Use: Unstable worlds were suitable for use as single-use testing grounds for dangerous experiments or as safe sources of basic resources like ore and timber, preventing disruption to the integrity of real worlds.
Risk: Loss of Linking Book. Losing or destroying a Linking Book while inside another dimension, especially an unstable one, would make return impossible. The Host would be trapped.
Risk: Destruction of Descriptive Book. A Descriptive Book was the conceptual core of the world it created. Destroying this book anywhere would result in the immediate and simultaneous destruction of the world itself and everything in it, including the Host.
Note: Fragments of lost knowledge, called rotting paper scraps, might be discovered in these unstable worlds and could be used for further study and improvement of this skill.
I finished reading, and the euphoria, barely born, curdled into something even more bitter and caustic. The System was mocking me. It had handed me a key to salvation. A key that required resources that could not possibly exist within millions of kilometers.
Paper. Leather. Ink. Where the hell was I supposed to get any of that in open space on a block of ice composed of water, carbon, and ammonia?
All right. No panicking. Analyze.
Ink was the simplest. I carefully ran through the newly acquired process of creating a Linking Book in my mind.
There were no critical requirements for the chemical composition of the ink. All that was needed was a pigment and a binding medium capable of carrying my intent. My blood would work.
But paper and leather. Leather was treated animal hide. Impossible.
Paper was compressed cellulose fiber from rice, bamboo, or cotton. All of it required life. This asteroid was dead.
The hope extinguished as quickly as it had flared. Another useless pull. Another twenty-four hours in an ice prison. I could not make something from nothing.
Or could I? As much as I wanted to give up, that was the worst thing I could do. My mind lurched into gear. What was paper? A fibrous structure. What was leather? A durable, flexible organic base. I had neither. But I had myself.
An idea formed. It was insane and revolting, but it was a chance. Just as much of a ghost of a chance as this asteroid had been.
First things first, though. If I was going to make anything, I could not do it on an open surface. I needed a workshop. A sealed one.
Enough drifting. I superheated my body with Extremis. The nano-skin flared white-hot, and I literally began melting my way into the asteroid. The ice did not melt. It exploded, vaporizing on contact. I became a living drill, boring into the frozen heart of the mass. The deeper I went, the safer I would feel. I needed a place where my resources, whatever they turned out to be, would not scatter into the vacuum.
Thirty minutes later, I found what I was looking for. A void. A natural cavity inside the asteroid. I dropped out of the tunnel into darkness. Completely blind with the nanobots still covering my eyes, I carefully felt out the space, grabbing at the walls. It was large, very large. A hundred square meters, possibly more. This would be my stockroom, my laboratory, my shelter. It would do for now.
But first, I needed to seal it. I crawled back into the tunnel. The melted path needed to be plugged. I tore chunks of ice from the cave walls, hauled them into the tunnel, and, dialing Extremis down to a lower heat, welded them together to form a dense plug. I did all of this blind, using the nanobots like climbing gear to grip the uneven ice and keep from drifting away with each push.
That took another hour. Precious Mystcraft time was burning away. But the tunnel was sealed. My cave had become an isolated bubble inside the asteroid. Whatever I brought back would not be blasted into open space.
I hovered in the center of absolute, primordial darkness. Silence. Safety. That meant I could begin executing the plan. The plan with the working title: "Unpleasant, but Necessary."
Settling onto the ice floor to stabilize my body, I sent a precise command through the neural interface to the nanobots along my back. I ordered them to cut my skin into perfectly flat sheets.
The first sheet. The sensation was repulsive. It wasn't the pain, since Extremis suppressed that almost instantly, but the sensation of being cut itself. The nanobots worked like precision scalpels, shaving away dermis. Extremis immediately began regenerating the wounds. One sheet. Two. Five. The nanobots carefully transferred each sheet to the area around my abdomen, building a neat stack.
I needed two books. A Linking Book to bring back. A Descriptive Book to leave. Five pages each. Ten total. I went through that procedure ten times.
The skin sheets, preserved by carbon-lattice nanobots in a nano-container pressed against my abdomen, were fresh, if that word could even apply to one's own freshly harvested skin. I took the risk and extended one of them out into the cave. The sheet instantly froze and became as brittle as frost-covered parchment. That wasn't what I needed. The books had to remain flexible, which meant all the work would have to happen inside the nano-container.
On to the next step. Writing the world. First, the Linking Book. Created in this cave, it would bind me specifically to this place. It would be my anchor, my device for returning to this dead block of ice.
I visualized the Mystcraft symbols and began transferring them to paper using the nanobots. My blood, drawn by the nanobots from a nearby artery, served as ink. The nanobots themselves were the pen. My own skin was the paper. The result resembled a typewriter, but orders of magnitude more complex and considerably more gothic.
It took time, but I finally laid down the last symbol. I felt it. That new Mystcrafter's instinct confirmed the book was finished. It worked. I allowed myself a faint smile in the darkness. Yes, a book was a book. It did not matter that my own skin served as cover and pages, or that my blood served as ink. The Necronomicon had supposedly been written much the same way, according to stories from my previous world.
I shook off that thought and moved on to the Descriptive Book. I had no deep understanding of dimensional mechanics, so my book would default to creating an unstable world. I checked the System timer. Eighteen hours remained. It was unpleasant, knowing the world would exist only as long as the skill remained active, but it was better than nothing.
Over the next hour, I created the Descriptive Book. It was ready. For the first time in these endless days, I felt alive. The apathy had retreated. I had a goal. I had a plan.
Both grim books rested in the nano-container, pressed tight against my body and shielded from the vacuum. There was no point in wasting time.
I mentally activated the Descriptive Book. The sensation was like being turned inside out. It was not teleportation. It was not a jump. Reality folded in on itself, then snapped open again.
And then there was ground. There was ground under my feet, not ice.
I took the risk. I allowed myself a brief moment to disperse the nanobots from one eye. The first thing I saw was light. The second thing I registered was sound. Wind. The third was taking a breath, which completely dispersed the nanobots from my face.
"There is an atmosphere here," I exhaled. My own voice, which I had not heard in more than three days, sounded strange to me. It was dry, cracked, and flat. That was fine. The emotions were raging on the inside, and they were mostly pleasant ones.
Now I needed to analyze. I needed to understand what exactly this unstable world was. I looked up. The sky rippled like an old television with a bad signal. Clouds shifted between gray and white, then suddenly slashed through with orange streaks. It was a paradise for an impressionist and a nightmare for an epileptic. A gust of wind hit my face. It was cold. Then, without any transition, it flipped to scorching. Rain began to fall horizontally.
Right. The weather here wasn't just unstable. It was broken. And the world itself was Minecraft, as if it were real. There were square trees, square blocks of stone, dirt, ore, and other materials. Entire sections of the world, which I understood as chunks, appeared to be cut away, exposing pure void. Other sections were inserted entirely in the wrong places. A patch of desert hung suspended in the air above a forest.
This was like an anarchy server from Minecraft. I'd never been a player of that sandbox game, but as a longtime YouTube viewer, I'd stumbled across videos about it. The chaos of 2B2T in particular had been featured in one of them. Who would have guessed I'd end up in something like this in real life.
And there was another thing. Minecraft was a living world with biomes, seas, wildlife, animals, and enemies. Here, though, it wasn't just empty. It was dead.
The world was dying, and I could feel it through my new, temporary Mystcrafter sense.
I felt the rot in the very fabric of this dimension. If I stayed here even a second past what the System had allotted me, the world would be wiped out, and I would be wiped out with it.
But the key question, my core experiment, remained open. Would the resources I carried back to the asteroid be wiped out along with this world, or would they become real once torn from it?
I'd find out in sixteen hours and fifty-seven minutes. For now, I needed to stop staring and get to work.
It was a shame I had no proper inventory. Its loss felt like yet another amputation. The single System slot didn't even work for the Linking Book. I had tried. Fine. I had my superhuman physical stats. I had thermokinesis and trillions of nanobots. I'd just have to make a lot of trips.
There was no time to hunt for diamonds or gold or whatever else was considered valuable in Minecraft. I wouldn't have recognized them anyway. My geology was at zero. The priority was to stock my cave with a variety. The more diverse my resources, the better prepared I'd be for whatever the System threw at me next.
I tried punching a tree with my bare hands. It yielded, but didn't break into blocks. The wood remained intact, just square in cross-section. That was even better. I activated the nanobots along my forearm, forming a high-frequency plasma cutter. The tree toppled, severed almost at the roots. A few more minutes of work turned the first trunk into a rough but sturdy crate. Then the grind began.
I started hauling everything in sight into the crate. Stone. Iron. Coal. Some metals with a strange violet sheen that I couldn't identify with my limited knowledge. There were even crystals, faintly glowing from within. I had to crack them apart with my bare hands and pack the fragments inside.
An hour later, the crate was full. I estimated the weight at several tons. Easy. I hoisted the crate onto my shoulders, sealed my body with the nanobots, went blind again, and mentally activated the Linking Book made from my skin. A moment of inside-out disorientation, and I was back in the frozen darkness of the cave on the asteroid.
The wooden crate exploded into splinters before it even touched the ice floor, throwing me slightly off-balance. Right. Vacuum. I couldn't even grasp such basic facts right now. Fortunately, most of the crate's contents simply scattered through the cave in a cloud of debris. After groping around for a couple of minutes, I confirmed that while the ores were extremely cold and brittle, they were intact, and the crystals were entirely unchanged. I needed to adjust my strategy. Without wasting a second, I activated the Descriptive Book again. Another flash. Minecraft again. The process resumed, modified.
Instead of wooden crates, I began using the nanobots to construct something like an ultra-thin, ultra-strong bag. A very small one. Several tons were no longer an option, but a hundred kilograms or so fit fine. Hour after hour. Bag after bag. I worked like a man possessed. My cave on the asteroid slowly filled with brittle and not-so-brittle resources from a dying world. It was a solid haul, but I couldn't shake the feeling it was desperately insufficient.
At some point, I came across fruit. Slightly angular apples hanging from square branches. My first reaction was hunger, not physical hunger, as the caloric capsules had long since solved that problem, but psychological hunger. The desire to eat something real. I broke one open. Instinctively, I sniffed it. It smelled like an apple.
I raised it to my mouth and stopped. What if the instability of this dying world was contagious? What if it spread to me through the fruit? It sounded absurd. "I think I have PTSD," I muttered into the void.
But this was not pure paranoia. It was cold calculation. This world was conceptually unstable. Risking my survival for a moment of enjoyment wasn't worth it. I didn't have the Gourmet Master skill right now. I couldn't test the fruit. Better to stay hungry and be guaranteed alive. The important thing was that this paranoid caution wouldn't eventually devolve into absurdity.
I tossed the apple, grabbed the final bag, and returned to the cave, where the bag dispersed instantly, the nanobots returned to my body, and the resources scattered. Less than a minute remained on the skill's timer.
I floated next to a random stone suspended in midair and pressed my hand against it. I began counting down the seconds alongside the System window. "Please, System, don't take this chance from me." Ten, nine... I felt the Mystcraft skill beginning to fade. Two, one...
A flash. Not in my eyes, but in my mind. The connection to the books was severed. I reached into the nano-container on my abdomen. The Linking Book and the Descriptive Book had lost their properties. They were now simply pieces of my skin with dried blood on them. The Minecraft world was destroyed. The Mystcraft skill was gone.
But the stone under my hand was still there. Solid, cold, brittle, but most importantly, real. That was a success.
The conclusion was that the unstable world hadn't been created purely by the System. The System had given me a tool: the book. It had been a catalyst. But the world the book created had been a real physical manifestation, however temporary, which meant everything I extracted from it had become real as well. Loopholes existed. If something similar came up in the future, I would have to squeeze every last drop from it.
For now, it was already October 25. Time for the fifth pull.
---
[Ancient One POV]
Her lesson had concluded. She had delivered the simple truths of energy flows to talented but impatient novices. The woman born under the name Yao, now known to the initiated world by the title of the Ancient One, returned to the silence of her chambers.
Her first act was to open an astral portal. It was invisible to the ordinary eye but clear to her own eye. This version of the portal was ideal for reconnaissance. The Earth Sorcerer Supreme's thousand-year vigil consisted of myriad such obligations, not all of them pleasant. Prying into the lives of other sentient beings was exhausting, but at times absolutely necessary.
It was as it is now. Or rather, as it had been a few hours ago. The western continent. The surge of dark energy had been tiny, almost imperceptible against the general noise of the planet. But it was dirty, like a drop of concentrated ink in crystal-clear water. It had left behind the taste of rot and conceptual entropy.
Dormammu.
He was one of those who could not be ignored, no matter how small his manifestation was. Especially in this world, a world that is shielded not only by a natural mystical barrier but also by the additional protection of higher beings. Dormammu could not act directly upon Earth, but he had never stopped trying. For several centuries now, he had been pursuing his foul schemes through indirect means, and she, as Guardian, could not allow him to succeed at whatever he was planning. Regrettably, the true thoughts of a Faltine Greater Being were perhaps beyond her comprehension, even after a thousand years.
The portal she opened to the coordinates of the surge revealed a technology laboratory. Yes, that was the most concise description. It was empty, which meant she could enter in person.
She did not cast spells in the conventional sense. She wove her will. First, a simple veil of invisibility. Then a more complex working of interference, a new pattern she had developed, which she sent through the astral portal to envelop the laboratory in an information bubble. Cameras, motion sensors, and audio recorders all went blind and deaf. Only then did she open a full physical portal and step through.
The first thing she felt was not the artifact. It was webbing. And beneath the webbing, the artifact. The cursed one, to be precise.
Dormammu, indeed. His foul signature permeated the boots despite their containment. Fortunately, someone had already contained them. The webbing resembled Arachne's work in its properties, yet it was not hers. This was something else entirely. Totemic.
The webbing had isolated the boots, suppressing one of their most insidious properties: a soul-trap charm that clouded the judgment and perception of anyone who touched them. The boots whispered across the astral plane, and their whisper proved especially seductive to mages. Dormammu knew precisely what he was doing. It was the perfect trap for a scholar of the mystic arts. The moment such a person reached out to examine the artifact, which appeared unremarkable at first glance, he or she would fall directly into the Faltine's sights. Using the artifact as an anchor, the Faltine himself could rip a curious mage from Earth and drag him or her straight into the Dark Dimension.
The fate awaiting such a mage was grim indeed. More often than not, the victim would become Dormammu's puppet, returning to Earth with a singular purpose: to tear open a rift in reality large enough for a full-scale invasion. In the past decade alone, the Ancient One had personally intercepted and destroyed seven such puppets. By all appearances, an eighth had just been created. She needed only to determine who had been caught.
With a touch of the jade amulet at her throat, a blazing astral third eye opened upon the Ancient One's forehead. The Eye of Agamotto. It was time to find out what had happened here.
Time flowed backward. She saw them. Four people had left the building recently. Two men. She recognized the aura of one, the dark-skinned man, though he did not know her. Nick Fury, one of those she was duty-bound to monitor as a Guardian. And two young people, a man and a woman. Spider Totems, both of them. Interesting. It had been the young man who sealed the artifact. He had sensed the danger radiating from it. He was powerful, possessed of magical potential. The option was worth considering. No, she needed to focus. What had happened before they arrived?
She rewound further. And then there was nothing. Not darkness, not a magical barrier, simply nothing. The boots stood in the laboratory. A moment earlier, there was a gap, as if that fragment of the past had never existed. For the first time in over a thousand years of practice, the Eye of Agamotto, which could see through illusions and the very fabric of time, had stumbled. Even the most complex conceptual concealments left ripples and distortions. This was a Blind Spot.
The situation was no longer merely unusual. It had become dangerous.
She made a circular gesture. Beneath the table holding the boots, an oval portal opened, leading to an isolated storage vault in Kamar-Taj. The table dropped through along with the boots. It was safer this way.
At that same instant, the building's security systems erupted into a deafening alarm. The Ancient One was mildly surprised. Her interference bubble had apparently failed to account for some kind of weight sensor or similar technological safeguard. She shrugged, ignoring the flashing lights, opened a return portal and stepped back into her chambers.
Meditation. For the next several weeks, she would be more vigilant than she had been in a very long time. Allowing a puppet of Dormammu onto the planet was equivalent to placing the entire planet in his sights. And now, with the emergence of this Blind Spot, whatever or whoever it was, the stakes had become higher still.
She opened one more portal, small and astral. Tibet. Stephen Strange. He was already there, questioning the locals. In a few weeks, he would arrive here, as planned.
The Ancient One sat in the lotus position and closed her eyes. The Third Eye opened again on her forehead. Searching for the Blind Spot itself was pointless, but she would search for the distortions it left behind. They had to exist. That was a fundamental law of the universe.
If nothing suspicious occurred in the next few weeks, she would have to reveal herself to Fury or to the Totems.
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