The single step that carried Rain into the Breathless Wasteland stretched into an eternity as his mind automatically adjusted his rate of perception. He could feel the lair’s Arcane aspect crackling like dry static as its paling flowed around his intruding toes. There was no resistance. He knew that same paling would be as impenetrable as tire rubber should the lair—or perhaps the system—wish to forbid him, making the ease of his passage all the more remarkable.

The threads of system-script were clearly responsible.

He could feel them as they interfaced with the script running through his own paling, performing some sort of...authentication. He could see the force they exerted on the barrier, pulling it out of the way. Denial was clearly the default, and the system was overriding it.

Amidst the confirmation of his assumptions, Rain experienced something else—a sensation, disconcerting when slowed down. His body seemed to be stretching as it passed through compressed space. Knowing the names of a few Space Magic skills wasn’t enough to put it into words, so he fell back to Douglas Adams.

It felt unpleasantly like being drunk, with him as the glass of water.

The world went purple as his face entered the barrier, and the sensation grew vastly worse. His leading foot touched down on something solid. As he lifted his trailing leg to follow, he was given something new to think about besides discomfort. Like a switch had been flipped, and with no chance to straddle dimensions as he’d hoped, his awareness of the outside world vanished. The dozens-at-this-point threads of mana that he was projecting through his active aura anchors were pinched off at the same time as the links to his party members were severed. Only his link to Dozer remained, the slime safely tucked away inside his soul.

As it was programmed to after any disruption of its programmed sequence, his Detection macro rebooted. The resulting ping for monsters came back empty, and the manual ping for hydrogen that he followed it up with returned a blazing cloud of a response. The magic said the gas was all around him, extending in all directions, though he was still partly in the barrier. His eyes promptly emerged to take in the same lie, showing him a barren landscape extending off to infinity, with no sign of the barrier except perhaps the faintest shimmer of distortion.

Except it wasn’t barren.

Everything in here was filled with essence, and the system’s presence wound through it all. It was like being inside his own soul.

Except not.

Mana existed inside lairs. Just because he couldn’t see it right now didn’t mean it wasn’t there. And it wasn’t just essence he was seeing, but matter too. Everything besides his body and equipment felt like a hybrid of the two—something not actually that unfamiliar to him. Tel, Crysts, and, to a much lesser extent, the Bank’s high-denomination coinage all felt like that when subjected to sufficient scrutiny.

Before his lagging toes fully cleared the barrier, the system presented him with a dialog.

Breathless Wasteland

Rank 4

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Rain

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