‘Now, even if I don’t want to admit it, I have no choice but to say my pillar journey is over.’

In his perception, he could see at the same time the still deep diving Astryde and the crazy alchemist Arik.

Rune stopped trying to understand what Arik was trying to do when he asked him a few months ago directly and got the answer “I’m making bone booze.”

He respected everyone and considered himself the best friend when it came to accepting weird hobbies. He even tried to search the guide for answers but stopped himself when he found a few specializations that seemed too suitable.

He didn’t want to intrude.

With these two still occupied, he ignored Arik and went to Astryde. creating a new cosmic mist generator with a misleading name. Its goal was purely and simply to gather the cosmic mist he created beforehand around it.

With that done, he found a raised place and settled on it. He surrounded himself in cosmic mist and wondered about what to do first.

‘My awareness flow is a background activity. Training my momentum… Don’t want to. Even if it's passive. Entertainment… Don’t feel like it. Intent tinkering? Bait intent? Yes!’

He had his answer in a miraculously short time and created a sphere of baiting orange, an artificial ether color with 3 perfect properties for being his bait color, also called 3 intent affinities depending on his mood.

‘Sigh… It feels a bit lacking, but what can I do? Ether color creation is a field that isn’t as direct as fusing a perfect light bait and a perfect sound bait and being done with it.’

He had this dilemma for 10 seconds before promptly ignoring it and starting to tinker from where he stopped.

‘Yup, stop having too big ambitions stupid me. Start working on perfecting this lackluster bait intent first. Of the three concepts I use though… Blinding, deafening, and threatening… I’ll work with blinding first. No discrimination, just inspiration!’

And so he started working on pushing the blinding concept of his bait intent to equal the bright snowflake that was still hot and clear in his mind.

…

Walking on the street near his university where he was getting his exploration engineer degree, the young-looking Rune was searching for… Something.

The present Rune was passively looking at how this dream was happening, and he still had no lead on where it wanted to go or what it reflected.

It was his second experience in the Dream, and while the street didn’t look anything like the real one he could remember, with completely out-of-place buildings and no people at all, it gave him no hint into what was going on.

A honk suddenly sounded from somewhere.

The young-looking Rune looked behind him, allowing the awareness observing this dream to see a floating truck rushing at him.

Then he was hit and sent flying.

As the world started revolving around him at an extremely fast speed, it seemed he had been sent flying in a very comical fashion.

He hit a wall. And while Rune finally started getting an idea about what this dream was about, the solid concrete wall suddenly fractured and let the human projectile through.

Where did he end up? From what it was seeing, the awareness objectively judged where it was to be the locker room for women, an occupied one.

His idea about this dream not having any sense and being all about nonsense instantly made sense.

So he just admired what his spirit concocted for him. It wasn’t often a human male would get to see an occupied human female locker room after all. Now he at least had something to brag about that he was proud of.

He looked on as the young Rune tried to explain the situation in all seriousness, saying he didn’t control where he ended up, while he was completely flushed, embarrassed by the situation like a normal young man.

Out of nowhere, a blonde woman holding her shirt to her chest came, looking at him in disdain, and then kicked him.

He was sent flying once again.

What followed was a dream that only kept devolving further and further in madness and shame, and while it would keep existing in his mind, he would try and forget it as soon as possible.

With an extremely climactic end he wouldn’t talk about including the power of friendship and heating table, his awareness was swooped up and he got access to his perception sphere again.

He was back.

‘Huhu…’

He was puzzled too.

‘Huhuhu…’

Unable to form a coherent judgment about what he became a witness of, he preferred to stop thinking about it and see if his 2 friends were still doing their own things.

And it seemed that it was truly good timing on his part as Astryde had moved from where she was before. Rune found her sitting at an elevated place like he was as she was brooding on her own and writing things on her connected screen.

‘Anyway, she’ll call if she wants to move.’

The leftover sleepiness vanished from his mind as he readied himself for another month, and the first productive step he took was using his sense invocation to create once again a pair of spiritual eyes.

And he was rewarded for it a few minutes later as he browsed through his to-do list.

*Ding* Awareness Division: Specialized Sense Invocation reached Tier 1 Level 17

‘It’s coming along slowly but surely.’

It had not even been a week since he came back from his tourist trip to the pillar, and already he could feel the flow of awareness from his spirit to his eye sockets intensify at a fast speed.

Where before he needed a bit more than 20 minutes to go from “no eyes” to “all his awareness used apart from the one needed to sustain his perception sphere eyes”, the last cycle he did before going to sleep only took him 15 minutes.

‘And with this last level, it will maybe get under 15 minutes.’

Happy with his background progression speed, he continued searching for what he wanted to do now to occupy himself.

‘Let’s take it that Astryde will dive again, so no need to go through the backlog of short projects.’

Skipping the dozens and dozens of impulsive whims he noted down that could be done by dedicating a few hours to them, he arrived at the much smaller list of big projects that included intent tinkering and build planning.

‘Huhu. Nothing’s inspiring me. I want to move, but it’s not like-’

His non-existent heart surged as a perfect idea came to him.

‘I can go to the pillar again? And this time…’

Making weird choices that didn’t necessarily involve deep thinking and planning was one of the truest representations of being really free for Rune.

And that’s how on an impulse, he went to Arik, “This is a holdup! Give me your camera! Do you have something on which I can draw big landscapes? Like a big tablet? You have downloaded all the apps on it? Got a pen too? I can make one if you don’t.”

“Again? You’re going again?” The interruption and successive questions stunned him, but against Rune’s burning freedom, he could do nothing and was robbed of everything without being able to put up a fight.

Half an hour of Rune learning to properly wield the camera and check the tablet later, he departed on an impromptu second journey to the pillar after bidding goodbye to Astryde and Arik.

Though this time, he pretty much decided to settle there for more than a few weeks or until he was called back.

…

By the time Rune came back to the pillar and became able to see the place where the bright snowflake environmental event took place, all traces of it had completely vanished. Monsters had filled the place again and that was it.

With a bit more thinking, he realized that there was something important he had to do that he didn’t think of before: Future endless adaptation training.

If all hotspots had environmental events happening on a somewhat regular basis, then it could be a good place to find new adaptations and train in the far future.

He thought that maybe the IGS would have already done research on it, the landing spot of the bone region was close to being a hotspot after all, proven by the fact that events had taken place more than once.

But no. Even after he didn’t find anything on the guide or online and asked Olivia, he only got what was already common and public knowledge in return.

So in addition to taking amazing pictures, drawing bleak landscapes, and fighting monsters voluntarily and sometimes involuntarily, he added a pillar hotspot mini section in his bone region journey diary.

In it, he put all his thoughts related to what was unique about the geological existence of underground pillars, how they seemed to interfere with 3 different environments, how it reflected in the ether all around it, and the place that environmental events took in it all.

He stopped caring about intent tinkering or whatnot, and like that, a few weeks passed.

…

[Astryde: I finished getting everything I wanted.]

This message was sent to Rune as he took a breather from one of his fighting whims, one where he just got wild for no apparent reason other than wanting to go hit things.

‘I hoped it came sooner and later at the same time… Does it mean I actually took a liking to this place? I certainly enjoyed it, that’s for sure. If I forget about those bullies.’

His non-existent blood was still pumping in his mind as he had just come down from a fight against a small squad of 9 energy lives who bullied him to “unsaved important document” level, a very high rung on his personal frustration scale.

Looking through the cosmic mist hiding him, he followed the squad of energy lives with his eyes and wondered how he could neutralize all this concentrated frustration he felt bubbling inside him without being stupid.

He couldn’t use them as kicking platforms.

He couldn’t hurt them enough with a simple hit.

He couldn’t swear at them in a way that they would understand and be hurt by it.

The only reason he even fought them, to begin with, was due to them targeting him while he was having his own fun, so he couldn’t even use logic to explain that he was just training.

He had simply been bullied, and he couldn’t think of a way in which to exert his revenge.

‘Well, let’s forget about it then. One day I’ll just become able to behemoth-style energy lives and be done with it. Can’t do it now in any case!’

Calming himself, he accepted what had taken place and moved on. The first thing he did was to stop following them with his eyes and start to plan his itinerary.

‘Why not go by the ceiling?’

A simple look up and a random thought combined to give birth to the path he took for the next 10 hours, half-discovering a new environment that seemed as interesting as the ground one.

Once he saw the city ruins approximately below him, he just stopped using his momentum to keep him stuck to the ceiling, free-falling through an environment full of ferocious speedsters that had speed and ferocity as their life motto.

This. Would have not been a smart move if not for his cosmic mist.

The 500 kilometers of air separating the ceiling from the ground had a relatively lower monster density compared to what Rune was used to, but it was countered by the fact that it was so much bigger.

The morphologies were also relatively smaller compared to the specimens found on the ground and on the ceiling. Though it didn’t help much when they were targeted by Rune.

Falling at nearly a kilometer per second and with his vision allowing him to plan far-ahead his targets, plus his invisibility, allowed him to have an immense amount of fun colliding feet-first with passing monsters.

‘This one will be the last one!’

Unaware of what was coming towards it, the elongated 3 meters long and 1-meter wide bone fish was peacefully flying, trying to find new prey that would allow it to grow stronger.

Then Rune landed on it.

Unexpectedly, like the majority of those he did this attack on during his fall, either it had a really flimsy energy armor, or it had amazing momentum reflexes, or simply, it didn’t cancel impact strength as the human projectile failed to deliver all the strength it had stored and the monster was sent flying to the side, leaving him to plunge in direction of the ever-approaching city ruins.

With Rune’s momentum efficiency giving him a maximum of 536 meters per second of control, he couldn’t change his trajectory just like that, and even if he could, it was only a training game for him.

‘Why are they all so slippery! Am I just forgetting something primordial to an invisible diving attack?! Where can I learn it!’

*Ding* Spiritual Fundamental: Momentum Manipulation reached Tier 4 Level 23

‘It doesn’t change anything!’

He knew by heart what 1% additional efficiency to his momentum did, it gave him 1,67 meters per second of supplementary momentum control. In other words: Doesn’t change anything by itself.

‘Sigh… Why am I trying so hard when it keeps failing? I need to pick my opponents correctly, going against speedsters is rightly asking for trouble.’

With no more aerial monsters that he was able to see below him, he accelerated to 100% of his strength while scanning to see if he could see Arik of Astryde.

‘Oh. There’s really one…’

Surprisingly and against his expectations, he could see an immobile energy-radiating figure in an elevated place.

‘How should I make my entrance? A cool invisible one? A simple visible landing? An explosive announcement one? A colorful entrance?’

Undecided about how to make it, he went for a simple visible entrance by dispelling his cosmic mist cover, finding arriving from the sky a very cool way to make a return after an unknown amount of weeks of absence.

When his perception sphere reached the ground and saw a humanoid skeleton he easily identified as Astryde, she also saw him.

Ten seconds later, he landed softly not far from her after a cool deceleration.

“I’m back!”

And he did a cool pose by making a double victory sign with his two hands’ bony fingers.

Finding the occasion perfect for it, he let his spiritual eyes’ awareness go back to his spirit as he started exercising his awareness flow again.

“You’re back,” she didn’t even look up as she replied to him, she only stopped using her connected screen, “How was your little month-long holiday?”

“Month-long? It really didn’t seem that long, I’m even ready for some more action. All in all, it was enjoyable, I think I was just in the right mood at the right place?” Rune answered honestly, then asked in turn, “And you? My trip was a month-long, but yours was months with an ‘s’.”

“Same, it was enjoyable. The right mood at the right place pretty much sums it up for me. I’ll speak about everything shortly so don’t ask for more details, our options are really hectic if you want to know,” she teased him a bit in response while making sure he heard in her tone that she was proud of what she had done.

Interested for good reasons, he swept through his perception and tried to find Arik. Rune found him quickly, but…

“Ok. What’s Arik doing?” He asked, thinking Astryde had more chance of having a logical answer than what he could come up with alone.

“Doing weird sh*t online,” she gave him the imaginary middle finger instantaneously.

He looked at her and remained silent for a few seconds, “This answer is so general for Arik that I’m impressed you even said it.”

Astryde looked a bit upset at being accused like that, “He’s been at it for days, seriously. When I sent you a message he was already like that. Ask him, go online, whatever, the situation of the IGS doesn’t have much to do with us now that we are so far lost.”

“Oh,” Rune felt mental chills go through him, “I felt chills, it was so cool the way you said it. Though for Arik’s sake, let’s cast a vote about whether to interrupt him or not. He’ll thank us. I’m for interrupting him!”

“Seconded.”

“Arik! Our vote has decided it’s time for you to come. Get your bony ass up here, I want to know what mother Astryde has prepared for us.”

The mock democratic vote act over, he spoke to Arik’s perception and informed him about the situation in a joking manner.

But he didn’t lift his head, answer, or make any signs pointing towards him having listened.

“Is he addicted? Did he find love?” Not one to be shy with friends, Rune didn’t even consider the possibility that he had maybe turned off his perception sphere, he knew Arik, and he would never do that.

“Let’s have our reunion where Arik is then, I didn’t interrupt something by the way, right?” He invited Astryde to follow as he went there physically with a few well-placed steps.

Not receiving any response even as he closed in, he just took it upon himself and sat next to him, not even 30 centimeters away, and put his arms over Arik’s bony shoulders.

Then he used his perception to read his screen, adapting his reading speed to Arik’s one to understand what he was researching so intensely.

‘We received new forms and everyone is hard at work reworking the… Gem ranks are impossible to reach no matter how you calculate… I don’t know why they started it without an AI core overseeing the transition, did they hide the news of one being made? No matter how… Why would it also apply to administrator-type jobs? It’s… I found identical rank systems in the board archives…’

“The AREC reform? Did they give more details about how it’s going to happen?” He asked expectantly, the target of his question was obvious.