Dimensional Summoner: Infinite Growth in a Leveling Apocalypse

I reached the field an hour before full light on the third day after Liora returned home. Everything was dismantled and packed, with the field cases inside the spatial ring. I spent the first ninety minutes putting equipment down very slowly.

That was the part I had underestimated. Every object placed near the water could create the signal I was trying to control.

Using long poles and thrown guide lines, I positioned the three caged bladders in the second and fourth crop lanes and the gap between them. They formed a rough triangle thirty metres across, its far side pointing away from the greenhouse. Two could be lowered from the southern bund. The third required me to step onto the concrete apron and swing it into position as slowly as my arm would allow.

One cage settled at an angle on a drowned crop ridge, but its hinge still opened fully. Retrieving it would create more disturbance than leaving it imperfect. I let the water settle before continuing.

After each bladder settled, I waited four minutes.

Nothing came.

The main frame went on the dry apron well south of my entry route. I tested the camshaft with the tension lines disconnected, listened to one complete rotation, then attached all three.

Every guide eye received a final check. I pulled each line separately and watched for the corresponding movement through the rifle scope. One cage answered late because its cord had settled around a submerged irrigation marker. A careful sideways pull freed it. If I had discovered that after releasing the counterweight, one third of the false struggle would have remained dead.

Next came the withdrawal route.

I installed the secondary decoy in the shallow channel beside the third greenhouse and ran its trigger cord to a fence post. For the walkway release, I placed a bar through the corroded collar of each middle stanchion and connected both to one doubled line ending twenty metres up the dry path.

I put my weight on the walkway twice before rigging it. The entire plan depended on that span remaining upright until after I crossed.

It held, though it flexed like it resented the decision.

Standing on the apron, I read the abort conditions aloud.

"Guardian past forty metres. At least one withdrawal lane clear. Four minutes of drive remaining before the first cut. Failed valve means no second block."

Then I wound the drum until my shoulders complained and released the pawl.

The counterweight began to descend.

The first heavy lobe produced a double surge in the fourth crop lane, sending a visible ring across the water. Four seconds of stillness followed. The second cage pulsed twice from another point, weaker than the first. Then the two heavier lobes overlapped, producing the impression of a large animal fighting for its life.

Another pause. One weak kick from the third cage.

The first ordinary Lurker left its bed forty seconds later.

A second came from the north. I registered the third only as a wake crossing behind it. All three converged on the two strongest cages, then followed when the cam sequence shifted the apparent struggle southwest.

The irregular sequence kept denying them a single point to investigate. Before one could settle over a cage, a stronger pulse redirected it. The decoy did not make them stupid; it kept presenting a better next signal.

The Level 20 guardian lifted its head beneath the greenhouse wall and remained over the clutch.

It stayed there for two minutes and forty seconds. I lay on the collapsed frame of the third greenhouse without touching the mechanism. The machine was more patient than I was.

The guardian’s head followed each pulse. At the first strong overlap, it rose halfway from the foundation and stopped. The next weak kick drew one forelimb onto the open bed. Then the sequence paused, and the animal backed over its eggs.

I could do nothing. Adding a manual pull would change the pattern I had spent a day constructing and might expose the lines as separate devices. The counterweight continued downward while I watched usable seconds disappear.

The pattern weakened according to schedule. Its pauses lengthened, the kicks lost force, and the apparent prey moved farther from the greenhouse. Eventually, it stopped resembling a fight and began to feel like something dying.

The guardian left.

It emerged low and slow, travelled twenty metres, and stopped. Then it passed forty. When the two strongest cages pulsed together, the guardian committed. It shifted from a stalk into a charge and covered the next fifty metres in seconds.

It crossed the stone marker I had placed on the bund.

I checked the counterweight. By my conservative timing, six minutes and twenty seconds remained—more than the four-minute minimum.

I entered the water.

The safest approach was the western door frame, where the foundation wall dipped and the old threshold sat approximately one metre eighty below the surface. I lowered myself from the walkway rather than stepping in. My body displaced the same volume either way, but a slow descent spread the pressure change across several seconds instead of producing one sharp pulse.

Feline Grace put every movement where I intended it. Predator’s Veil suppressed my sound, scent, and presence. It did nothing to stop the water from moving around my body.

That was why three bladders were creating a much more interesting disturbance seventy metres away.

Visibility beneath the greenhouse was less than a metre. Brown silt hung in the water, and shafts of weak light through the surviving roof panels made the spaces between them darker.

Cold found the gaps in my clothes immediately. I breathed once at the surface, followed the rope down, and refused to hurry when the bottom vanished from view.

I followed the guide rope. The foundation wall remained a dark mass to my left. The clutch lay against its base, so I kept my distance.

The Marrowlace appeared as a change in the floor: original crop-bed soil instead of loose silt, threaded with pale roots. The thickest were as wide as my finger, all interwoven through substrate that had remained stable since before the Merge.

I worked at the outer edge, never coming within three metres of the eggs.

Case one rested on my left, weighted with its valve up. Case two waited on my right.

Trowel on three sides. Knife for the undercut. Both hands beneath the block. Lift, turn left, open the valve, guide the block through, close, and seal.

The soil resisted the trowel more than the rehearsal tray had. Old root fibres and compacted crop bed caught the blade. I could not brace a knee without sending another pulse through the substrate, so every cut came from my wrists and shoulders. The rehearsed order kept me from changing tools too soon.

It felt like forty seconds. It might have been sixty.

The block held. Through the inspection port, the roots remained pale in Pell’s mineral solution.

One.

I allowed myself two seconds, then stored the sealed case and checked the plan again.

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!