MAGUS INFINITE

As my consciousness descended into the depths of my soul, it took my shape, and I glanced at the Hollow Room where the darkness was still gathering... I had learned to recreate my shape in the space behind my Anima Depth by watching the Hollow Avatar.

I looked at this darkness for a few moments before I moved on to the room with the lightning shards. After I passed the room for the Moon Fox and the Caelith, I chose not to peer into the room of the Moon Fox, and as far as the Caelith, I was bounced back by an unknown force.

At this time, I knew that these places were not rooms; my mind just insisted on using this architecture, but I understood that I had gained this power too early when I was an Acolyte, and this was what my soul could draw upon to interpret these changes without me going mad.

I entered the room with the lightning shards and looked at the nine frozen bolts of lightning inside them that were hanging in the air at no particular distance. They have hung there since I began collecting them, and until I gained my Lightning Arcanist Title, I could do nothing but look at them.

With the Title active, I could feel them the way you feel a tool in the dark, as if each of them had weight, edge, grain, and without thinking twice, I reached out and put my hand on the first lightning shard I had acquired.

I gasped as my mind was pulled into it, and the name of this shard came to me like a word I had always known and only now had cause to say.

Stillness.

And with the name, the truth, in language that was never mine:

The lightning does not travel. It arrives.

I gasped with realization: every shard was an aspect of my domain, and my domain came to me fractured, and the path ahead had never been so clear to me.

Before I plunged into my memories, I would have just rushed ahead with this feeling that I was getting from the shards, but this feeling was a lie, and I slowly pulled my hand away from the lightning bolt and began the process of breaking it open.

∞

I have opened the Stillness of the Storm several times, using my domain as a hammer, just as I had watched Arcanist do, but this was the trap that Master Halloway was talking about, where I was seeing things as a whole, instead of in parts.

Slowly, I stretched out my domain from my soul. I had grown to a hundred and seventy-five metres as I reached the peak of the Arcanist Tier, and possibly due to the second refinement of my soul.

I did not allow it to fully spread out, so I did not alert the raging demon outside. I just folded it to fit this chamber. With a flick of my wrist, I manifested my familiar notepad and pen, and wrote down

DOMAIN GEOMETRY: 175 Meters, and underlined it twice. I did not need to do this, but if I was going to be going back to my roots, then I had to become a student again and look at magic in pieces and not as the whole as I had been doing all this while, and also because there was something comforting about tradition.

With my domain inside the room, I allowed my senses to permeate it, understanding that the connection with my lightning shards could be found within it.

The first thing that caught my attention was the dust... of course, there was still dust in a Sovereign’s refuge. I don’t know why this made me smile.

I watched the dust that was frozen mid-fall at whatever height it happened to hold, and it stayed there, and I spent an hour looking at dust until I fully noted that not even a single mote crept downward under its own weight.

I had assumed that my domain held things in place, but this was not what holding looked like; for example, when I held up anything with my threads, no matter how small, there was a strain. Nothing here was straining, and the dust was not being held against the pull of the world.

It was as if the dust was somewhere that the pull of the world could not reach it... Wow, this was interesting; it was as if my domain had rules separate from the world around me.

∞

Observing this process for a few more minutes before I decided to move on and I wrote in my book,

Test one: matter.

I separated myself from my domain, while creating a chip of stone with Lightning Edict, I flicked it with my thumb into the stilled space and the stone travelled perhaps four centimetres past the boundary and stopped.

It did not decelerate over those four centimetres. It crossed them at full speed and then simply was not moving. There is no gradient anywhere in the effect. I scratched my head as I wrote down that the boundary is not a wall; this is more like a condition, and the condition applies absolutely and instantly to whatever falls inside it.

Four centimetres of penetration, though. Not zero. Why four? I recorded this observation and deferred it for now.

Test two: propagating energy.

I put a single thread of Loom-lightning into the stilled space, and it hung there like a bright motionless line, going nowhere. Then, as I watched over the next thirty minutes, my eyes kept widening in surprise as I noted that the energy inside my thread of lightning was not decaying.

I had cast this spell more than enough times that I know that without me making a conscious effort to preserve them and without access to lightning essence, a Loom thread left alone unravels in about eleven seconds, and this thread was exactly as bright as the moment I cast it.

That is not stopping energy, because energy would still be lost by the act of stopping itself, but my thread had lost nothing. It was suspended in the act of appearing and was not going anywhere.

Lightning propagates; that is most of what lightning is. At least, this is what it looked like if I was watching it as a whole, and propagation requires somewhere to propagate through. Why was my domain resisting this effect?

I felt the shape of something that almost floored me, and did not chase it yet, and I wrote in my note.

Test three: Anima.

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