Weeks pass before I come across a third anomaly in the void beyond the instances. Likely a solar system’s mass projecting over to this realm. Until now I just speed up the process letting my direction follow the system’s guidance, but the time for that is over.

Each anomaly was far from me but still close enough that my instruments can detect them.

Counting the instance, I have four points spread tridimensionality, and so I finally manage to precisely position myself on my map and the journey starts in earnest.

I try to turn in a different direction from the one the system was pulling me in.

Its grasp is even more intangible than the Automaton’s and by all intent and purposes can just let it act as gravity and work around it, instead of trying to bypass it I angle my trust to account for it.

And the path I intend to take is roughly 60 degrees away from my previous one.

The system pushes me to sleep with ever increasing insistence, but I just ignore it taking my rest which turns to slightly longer nights than I had grown under to in the instance.

Another fight that I’m struggling with is related to my speed.

Accelerating from nothing to 3 kilometers per second saw absolutely no strain on my soul. That increased continuously all the while in the single digits.

After crossing roughly 10 kps the light strain at moderate acceleration starts to become more pronounced but still something I can persevere under.

But passing 100 kilometers a second becoming the fastest human made object to my knowledge the game changes.

With seemingly exponential strain on my soul for every kilometer I gain, my acceleration slows to a crawl. Such little that I wouldn’t even be able to feel with a thousand points in perception.

That is when I stop concerning myself with a hundred other things and put my attention to figuring out what is really happening.

A thousand guesses, fuelled by very small and cryptic passes of my book all seem disparate and nearly useless. But I work through them.

I try to feel something in space or a force trying to slow me down to no avail. Try as I might I can’t detect anything amiss or artificial restrictions on my speed.

As weeks pass with slow progress, I start to get more and more confident that the pull from the system has nothing to do with what is limiting how fast I can move.

The first hint of an answer pops up when I start exploring my soul with a different perspective. At first, nothing is amiss. The melded state of the formerly different spaces interact with each other. Aether constructs and my resource pools have nothing to do with this. The lights that I would one day reach for once more, to acquire even more capability like the inner world, which from how easy it was in the first step felt like a freebie to spurn me on.

Though as I had come to understand, especially with a few hints gathered from the automaton and Blackwood, these rewards may be encapsulated by the system, but they were fundamentally fueled based on the contents of my own soul. Based on who I was and tied to myself in a much deeper way than anything external the system could provide.

That shift in mentality push me forward.

Sometimes the system rewards were poisoned chalices, but the inner world was something else altogether. And this next step in my soul likely would be in the same magnitude or better. The next light was still some 30 meters away, with me having made little more than 10 percent of the progress needed to attain it, so it made little sense to spend too long focusing on it just yet. It would take a long while, especially given that so much of my progress had been achieved before the system and I partially fueled my first step with Aether.

It was indeed a very long road just for this second step.

It is a wonder that no one as far as Blackwood knew got an inner world during early integration. As I think about that and try to feel the link that my soul likely has with my inner world a new sensation shows up.

A straining, like I’m stretching my tendons to the very edge of my capabilities. But as soon as I take a step back the feedback is muted to the point that even knowing about it, I simply can’t pinpoint its source. It just echoed throughout my soul.

I try to walk back to the edge of my soul once more and let the drawing connection fill my senses once more.

Minutes looking at it even as I vary the rate at which I accelerate confirm hypotheses and a hint of understanding blesses me.

Something so obvious that for a moment I can’t believe that I missed it.

Conservation of momentum.

Dragging thousands or more like millions of tons of material with me has undeniable advantages, but by that same token, I do have to drag all that weight around.

So, this is a small peek at the curtain behind the system’s inner workings.

As long as we were moving slowly enough, it subsidizes all that energy. But anything beyond that was extracted from the user. What amazed me was the mind boggling speed I already achieved in such a short time.

That this energy was coming from somewhere beyond the usual inscrutable ‘system’ magic simply didn’t pass through my head, because the sheer amount of power to speed me up to hundreds of kilometers per second with the mass of the inner world was simply incomprehensible.

My mind goes off on a tangent for a few seconds.

In my best guess, the inner world weighs around 18 megatons multiple by 210 kilometers per second. Though I should square the speed and then divide everything by half.

400 exajoules.

Or near 2000 tsar nuclear bombs. The largest that was ever detonated and even a single one of these makes the mother of all bombs feel like a firecracker.

My mind locks in place. The most intricate, complex web of interlinking systems just halts and shuts down.

But a moment later, I let the world slowly come back.

It’s so unfathomable that I never thought I would come across something like that, and this is likely just a hint of the power some people wielded. Something so beyond comprehension even when it is not really in my control that my mind can’t fully wrap around it.

Analyzing my connection, now very much visible I realize that this isn’t the only way I can accelerate.

I stop my thrusters and let the stretched rope drawback to me. Tying myself to the inner world tether, I turn it on again.

Steam builds up and starts shooting out of my feet. My instruments carefully measured inertial data even as I vary the acceleration rate from what a child’s lungs can sustain, to what only a bullet inside a gun needed to sustain.

I keep at maximum thrust while taking manual control of my Qi and trying to eke out even a smidge more power from the rockets.

A glance at the speedometer, reset to only show the delta in, reveals what I already know is there.

Zero kps. Fair enough, only a minute or so wouldn’t get even close to that considering I’m trying to directly move the entire inner world instead of just myself.

Zero meters per second. Disappointing, but understandable.

Zero millimeters per second. That third line puts the final nail in the coffin. At least if I didn’t improve my trust method by orders of magnitude.

I let the inner world tether loose, and soon it is dragging behind me and echoing the strain throughout my soul once again. I can’t do anything else but proceed as I had until now and let the system bullshit my inner world with some of its magic while paying the price that it demands.

With a small weight off my shoulders, I lay back and look into the inner world ready to interact with a few of the seeds over there. Though people of other minds were aplenty with the goblins, rabbits, wolves and humans that chose to return to earth all in their dwellings.

If I had had the time I could have grown the inner world. From little more than double the width of our village to six or 7 times that. But even this much is already plenty and the back of my mind soon takes to fully expend at least a layer at ground height to the edges of the inner world to give the others more space to work with. After all, for all I knew, they wouldn’t be able to take a single step outside the inner world all until it came the time for the returning people of the instance to leave their void induced hibernation and step into the transformed Earth that the system prepared.

There was a lot unanswered, but one thing is for sure, without preparations if they step in the void now they would fall so deeply asleep I wouldn’t be able to wake them up.

Even the Arch Shaman would draw the system’s attention and if he managed to keep awake, it would be little more than in my incoming trip to the instances. He would have to hold out as long as he could with no resource regen before falling into the System’s forced coma.

Even in my case, with my new fangled resources, the regen only barely trickled in bypassing the restrictions and refilling Vigor, Life, and Qi. Even deep meditation failed to achieve anywhere near the normal regen rates.

But too much expectation wouldn’t do me any good, so I just go back to my deep philosophical talk with a particularly tenatious little seed.

Clay soil is the best.

Sometimes. Easy to absorb most nutrients and it has more uses than most forms of soil, but it dries too easily. In general, fluffy humus soil is better. So soft and comforting.

Two-legged steps on humus and it is not fluffy. Weak. Fragile. Metal implements can cut so easily. Clay soil: the best.

That settles our debate until I can get a better understanding to fill my descriptions. Relying only on his words would seem to be a highly imprecise form of communication, but with each encapsulated word comes images, impressions and even snapshots of his thoughts that lend depth to his words that I had seldom encountered even when reading the best literature back on Earth. Which is an action I hadn't given up on. Even now having gained so much, I was still a voracious reader. I took the time to review the rewritten copies of tens of thousands of books stored in thin copper plates that imitate the earliest computer's paper punched cards.

With just another month or two, I could have probably gotten so much more done. But that would also have delayed my departure even more. And as I was coming to learn, I would not be traveling anywhere close to the speed of light unless I spent millennia accelerating and even that is optimistic. That limitation would be extending my trip from fractions of a year to fractions of a decade in the most optimistic case.

With my entire mind writing and a disintegrating earl grey cup of tea in hand, I start to plan my future.

If I was to have years in the trip back, the least I could do was to properly plan it. To use my time with wisdom and improve in a way that no reward from the system or material treasures could substitute for.

It is time to GROW.

PREPARE

LEARN

GROW