Markets and Multiverses (A Serial Transmigration LitRPG) Chapter 132: Dimensional Habitat Facility (7)

The fifth room was creepy.

Not in the sa way I imagined the dinsion of the black sun was, where, according to the research notes we had found, everything was alive in so fashion. Instead, it was like we had walked into a furnace.

Every single sub-chamber of the fifth room was filled with light and heat. Unlike the other four chambers, the chambers in room five didn’t have any sort of alteration-essence induced changes in the laws of reality at all. Instead, every single sub-chamber was reinforced to a completely ridiculous extent. Whatever tal the sub-chamber walls were made of were probably capable of withstanding a force equivalent to hundreds of Sallias hitting them as hard as they could. And by my estimation, right now, ten to twenty Sallias could probably rip apart iron with their bare hands.

Even more bizarre, however, was what lay inside of the sub-chambers.

The previous sub-chambers had obviously been testing facilities of so sort. The first room had been filled with gravity-testing chambers, the second room had been filled with chambers related to testing so aspect of ti, the third room was devoted to housing and imprisoning various life forms, and room four related to miscellaneous organic and material tests.

However, what was contained inside the sub-chambers of room six were giant clumps of light, heat, and mana.

There was no physical matter to speak of. There weren’t even any laws of reality to speak of. As far as I could tell, it was almost like each glob of light, heat, and mana was just… pure, compacted energy and chaos.

And each was also incredibly hot.

The walls were clearly designed to keep the heat inside of each sub-chamber from affecting the rest of the chamber. The floors also like magic items built to cool down people walking on them, and there were dozens of layers of alteration essence-based heat shields surrounding each chamber. There were even a few layers of Prismarium, which made think that perhaps the material was sohow related to absorbing heat.

It was also clear that the floors and heat-shields weren’t quite doing their job. It was hot.

“What in the world is this?” asked Sallia, glancing at the globs of light and heat.

Very hot. Unpleasant, sent Sekundyrr. Anise nodded in agreent.

Felix grabbed a clod of dirt, and then tried pushing it past so of the layers of shielding.

The layers of magical shielding didn’t seem to restrict physical objects from passing through, so the clod of dirt simply rolled forward. It even rolled through the Prismium layers, which made feel quite confused. Did the strange rock sohow turn into a gas when it was ‘activated’ or sothing? And how were we supposed to turn it on?

My questions and confusion about Prismium disappeared when, after passing through the fourth heat-shield, the clod of dirt started to glow orange.

After passing through the fifth heat-shield, it started to look strangely liquified.

After passing through the seventh heat-shield, the clod of dirt burned with a peculiar black-green fla.

And after passing through the eighth heat-shield, the clod of dirt turned directly into molten slag and stopped moving entirely.

I blinked.

I had been thinking that the heat-shields simply weren’t doing their job, but maybe they were doing their job quite well. It was just that whatever the globs of mana, light, and heat were, they were way hotter than I thought they were.

I looked around, hoping to find so research notes. I couldn’t find any paper notes laying around the facility: however, I did find a tal plaque engraved with the words ‘Fragnt of an unborn dinsion - part 1’ placed in front of the first chamber.

Most of the other tal chambers had similar tal plaques placed near them.

“It seems that they’re literally components of an unborn dinsion,” I said, feeling a strange mixture of wonder and bafflent. “But why?”

“I think they were trying to use it as a crafting material,” said Felix, as his eyes started to shine. “I rember reading sothing about that in the Market, at least. It was… that record of a conversation we stumbled onto last ti, I think?” said Felix. “My mory is a little fuzzy, but I rember the conversation we found discussing sothing about most newborn dinsions imploding, and turning into unstable globs of supermana. or sothing like that. And how they were amazing crafting materials.”

Felix looked around the room, and a few monts later, he picked up an object that looked like a giant tal pair of tongs. He studied it carefully, and ssed with it a few tis, before he nodded. “Maybe they used this thing to try to extract bits of the unborn dinsion without extracting the whole thing?” he said, shrugging. “I an, I’m going purely off of guesswork here, but it at least seems reasonable to .”

“A crafting material?” said Sallia, her eyes widening. “I suddenly have a lot more respect for whoever tried to turn sothing like this into a sword or sothing,” she said, glancing at the blob of superhot mana-plasma. “I can’t help but imagine most people just lting into tiny flecks of ash the mont they put it on a forge. And trying to figure out how to lt down an unborn dinsion must be nightmarishly difficult.”

I tried analyzing the ‘unborn dinsion’ using my magical senses, and was forced to retract them a mont later. Just looking at the dinsion had given a highly unpleasant barrage of different ‘understandings’ of the sa thing, which led to a massive headache. However, I could at least understand a little bit more about what I was looking at.

What I had seen before pulling my magical senses away was… complex.

As we had worked our way through the facility and investigated more and more things related to other dinsions, I had started to get a better understanding of how dinsional laws worked. Normally, dinsions had certain laws that dictated how things worked inside of them. For example, a dinsion might have a certain set of laws that ensured that ‘all objects create gravity based on their mass,’ or ‘Gravity is only created when Gravitite is fed a certain amount of essence.’ Every single dinsion had laws that dictated how reality worked, and so dinsions were capable of sustaining life, while so weren’t.

However, every single room we had investigated so far had dinsional laws that were, at the very least, coherent. While I may not have been able to investigate in-depth what those laws were, I had at least been able to sense that they were there and didn’t directly contradict each other.

The ‘unborn dinsion’ was very different.

It felt like it had dozens of different laws about how so principles of reality worked. And several of those principles were the polar opposites each other.

My magical senses felt as if they were trying to tell that gravity and heat were the sa thing, and also weren’t the sa thing. Ti flowed at ten tis the sa rate inside of the ‘unborn dinsion,’ and also flowed at half the speed of our current ti rate. It was like heat was light, but light was actually water, which was actually cold.

The way that reality itself worked was unstable inside of the glob of mana, so instead of becoming a fully built dinsion, the whole thing had just imploded into a contradictory mass of conflicting laws of reality, all held together by a completely ridiculous amount of mana.

I couldn’t help but wonder how much of the unborn dinsion was even stored in this room. Dinsions were massive, after all. Was this even a trillionth of a percent of the full unborn dinsion? What would it look like if soone took an entire unborn dinsion and tried to turn that into so sort of magic item? The tiny fragnts in these rooms already made feel like I was boiling alive.

Felix tried taking the massive set of tongs and moving it closer to the glob of mana, but the tongs started to lt as they got past the first few layers of heat shields. Felix frowned, and then shook his head.

“It’s been neglected for too long,” he said, shaking his head as he looked at the tongs. “Or I’m mistaken in what they were supposed to do. I don’t think we have any way to safely extract even a few drops of the unborn dinsion. Sha. I imagine we could probably get a crazy amount of Achievent for owning it, but… I don’t see any way at all we can access it.”

“Maybe it’s for the best. We have no good way to cool it down,” said Sallia.

“Maybe Miria could cool it down with her ocean magic?” asked Anise.

I experintally sent out a wisp of alteration essence at the unborn dinsion, just to see if I could cool it down, and then shook my head.

“I think it would probably take a few thousand years to get it to a temperature that wouldn’t lt us on contact with it,” I said. “There is no way I can cool it down on any practical tiscale at all.”

Anise looked a bit disappointed, but she nodded.

The five of us kicked around the room for a while longer, observing the various chunks of ‘unborn dinsion’ that were stored in the room. But we couldn’t think of any way to take advantage of the unborn dinsion chunks, at least without turning ourselves into subatomic ash. Eventually, we gave up.

After that, we decided to take a break for several hours before moving on to the sixth room. We already knew it might be dangerous in the sixth room, and I was running low on alteration essence. Felix’s fingers were also still partially missing.

We apologized to Sekundyrr, and explained why we needed to return it to an environnt it could survive in without our assistance. Sekundyrr seed grumpy, and asked that we at least put it in a different cell than the one it had spent the last several centuries in.

We agreed, and then camped out in room three a short distance away from Sekundyrr. Even if we had to return it to a prison cell for a while, we could at least let whoever was on watch duty chat with it for a while.

When we woke up in the morning, everyone was fairly recharged. I took advantage of my significantly replenished alteration essence reserves and restored our group’s various physical ailnts, such as Felix’s fingers. After we waited for my alteration essence to replenish again, we were ready to go. We left Sekundyrr behind, since this wasn’t just a bit dangerous - there was a good chance we would be walking into a battlefield, if sothing had gone wrong.

It was ti to enter the final room.

The room related to dinsion six.

The ho of the black sun.

When we stepped into the final room of the dinsional habitat facility, I felt as if sothing was watching .

Not just one thing, in fact. It was almost like the walls themselves were alive, peering at from the corners of my eyes and preparing to attack the mont I turned my back on them.

Anise shivered.

“I do not like this room,” she said.

Sallia nodded wordlessly, and pulled out her weapon.

I looked around, trying to figure out whether the walls were really alive and watching . It wasn’t sothing I would have originally been wary of, but after the research notes we had found in room four, I was very aware of the potential for random objects to attack after being exposed to dinsion six’s dinsional laws.

I didn’t see anything, so after a mont, I swapped to my soul-sight.

The walls were not alive, thankfully. However, plenty of other things in the room were alive.

The first thing I noticed was that space itself was alive. Inside of each sub-chamber, a yawning black void animated by a soul seed to be staring straight at us. And there were also a few other miscellaneous souls scattered throughout each sub-chamber. A few drops of blood floating inside of one of the chambers was alive, and each drop of blood had grown to the size of my fist. In another sub-chamber, a pen, the ink inside of it, and a stack of papers were glaring at us as if they wanted to rip our bodies apart and investigate our organs.

Almost every single sub-chamber had its own share of strange, dangerous-looking life forms.

“Each sub-chamber is filled with souls,” I said, after a few monts. Then, I frowned.

I felt the voids in each sub-chamber start to ss with space sohow. The flavor of dinsional manipulation polluted my tongue like cloying acid, sweet and bitter and disgusting all at once. The air in front of us seed to ripple, faintly enough that I could barely see it.

I opened my mouth and started tasting the air around us in greater detail, before decisively clamping my jaws shut near Sallia’s neck.

A string of broken space collapsed apart, like a bubble popping. Several strands of broken space fell to the floor, where I stopped tasting them. For a mont, I thought I had shut off the creature’s attack.

Then, my eyes widened as I saw a new pitch-black soul appear on the floor in front of us. It was noodle shaped, and much weaker than the previous attack. But it was clearly alive.

“Get out of the room!” I said, nearly growling, before I chewed up a few more spatial attacks targeting our group.

Everyone else nodded, and we imdiately retreated back towards room 5. However, I could still feel tendrils of spatial manipulation reaching towards us as we moved away. I quickly used my fifth rune ability to bite them all to shreds, but little broken fragnts of space seed to stick around even after I cut off each attack.

Sallia laughed bitterly. “The Orthans… really had no clue what they were doing when they explored the Multiverse. Even though they were very successful in exploring their first five dinsions, their holding cells don’t even work for the stuff from the sixth dinsion. The fact that the stuff inside hasn’t left already seems to be because they didn’t feel like it”

“Are you doing all right, Miria?” asked Anise.

I nodded, although I kept using my teeth to shred apart spatial probes and attempts to connect with our bodies. The shredded bits of space were starting to gain souls of their own, and I didn’t have enough alteration essence to kill everything. I thought about it for a mont, before I turned towards Sallia’s sword. “Try the gravitite!” I said in between chomps. I had no idea whether the gravitite would allow Sallia’s sword to cut through the little sentient strings of broken space, but we needed to deal with them before they attacked us.

Sallia experintally tried slicing at the air in front of her, directly slicing into one of the air ripples while powering her sword with so essence.

Nothing happened.

Before Sallia could curse, Anise ford a fourth-circle spell I had never seen before. It used two magic symbols I didn’t recognize, in addition to several other components, such as stone, transform, light, and speed. As I used my fifth rune ability to hold off the encroaching chunks of broken space, Anise finished forming all 85 magic symbols for a standard fourth-circle spell in just a few seconds.

A black beam of light shot out of Anise’s hands, before touching the air in front of her. And then, everything seed to slow down, as if it had been locked in place.

Including the strange, noodle-shaped spatial distortions that were sohow alive.

Anise gave a cheeky grin.

I imdiately started spraying extinguishes at the creatures, doing my best to off a few of them. I ignored my System notifications - I could deal with them later. After a mont of hesitation, Felix grinned.

“Miria, give so Gravitite! A lot of it!” He said.

I imdiately tossed him a huge hunk of Gravitite.

He flooded the gravitite with mana, making it pull and tear at everything in the room.

And then, he threw the Gravitite directly towards one of the fragnts of an unborn dinsion.

All of the spatial noodle creatures were dragged through a few layers of heat shields, where they were promptly lted into nothing. Since they were just living spatial distortions, their body weight was practically nothing, and whatever the Gravitite was made of, it was able to influence even the conceptual creatures of dinsion six.

“I got kill notificiations. We should have dealt with them successfully,” said Felix, after a few monts. He grinned.

“Nice job!” I said, trying to taste the air around us for any further spatial distortions. At the sa ti, I flashed a grin at Felix and Anise. It was nice to see them doing their own amazing things.

Luckily, it seed like the living chunks of void inside of room six had exhausted themselves. If we wanted to kill them, now would probably be the idea chance, but I was rather afraid of the other strange creatures in the room launching their own attacks at us.

“The living bits of empty space probably aren’t the only dangers in that room. I don’t know if it’s a good idea to explore room six at all,” Sallia said.

I nodded.

“Let’s just grab Sekundyrr and go,” said Anise.

Everyone else nodded, and we quickly picked up Sekundyrr and started running towards the entrance of the building.

We had probably gotten everything we could out of the Dinsional Habitat Facility. We needed to go deeper into the city now. We still hadn’t found a way to cut off this dinsion’s connection to the world of the black sun, or a way to revive the use of magic items. So we needed to go deeper, until we succeeded or perished.