Far Closer to Death Than Life (1)
It was my first true defeat.
And worse, an absolute, hopeless loss with no apparent answer in sight.
To be fair, it had been an absurd fight from the beginning. The gulf between our stats was simply too vast. It was like falling below a level threshold in a game, where your attacks fail to register and deal literally zero damage—that was the exact chasm separating me from the Ice Queen. Still, knowing that didn't make the humiliation sting any less.
A hollow laugh slipped from my lips. I had never run into a wall this insurmountable. I needed a breakthrough—some viable way to defeat that queen without blindly pouring countless centuries into grinding stats.
"[Why don't you try treasure hunting?]"
"Treasure hunting?"
Now that caught my attention. Surely she wasn't talking about mundane gold coins.
"[Living creatures aren't the only things forming in this world,]" Belba explained. "[Minerals, precious gems, and all sorts of rare ores are growing out there too. If you bring them to me, I can sell them for you.]"
I caught on immediately. She was proposing a bit of interdimensional commerce—gathering items that were commonplace in this desolate world but fetched exorbitant prices in other dimensions.
"[Precisely.]"
"That's a great idea," I said. "Let's get on it right away."
Why hadn't I thought of that earlier? I brought up the store window and scrolled toward the bottom, browsing the high-tier weapons, armor, and specialized relics. Among them were pieces forged not from ordinary steel, but from exotic, alien metals designed to facilitate the flow of mana or amplify its destructive output.
Standard forged steel couldn't withstand the Ice Queen's assault. Even top-grade alloys would buckle after a few hits. But if I could coat a weapon in mana, the story changed entirely.
Mana possessed no inherent ceiling. Provided an object could withstand the sheer volume channeled through it, it could deflect virtually any blow. My own living, breathing body was living proof of that fact.
Right, let's upgrade my gear first. No matter how I looked at it, that was the quickest route to boosting my combat power in the short term, and I could practice my tracking and detection skills along the way.
There was no need to rush. People had talked endlessly about apocalypses and cosmic stakes, but none of that mattered if I dropped dead beforehand. I just had to take my time and keep moving in the right direction. I wasn't off track yet.
"[That's right,]" Belba chimed in warmly. "[I keep telling you, you're progressing plenty fast. You can afford to take things slowly.]"
"Well, let's not go that far."
"[Good grief...]"
Once I felt my body had sufficiently regenerated, I dusted myself off and stood up. Fine crystals of frost bloomed softly across my bare legs and strands of hair.
My current objective was to turn myself into a living metal detector. To pull that off, I needed the kind of supernatural sensing fantasy natives always threw around—spreading mana outward like a delicate force field to perceive everything in the vicinity.
Frankly, it sounded like nonsense. Channeling mana outside my body was already agonizingly difficult; was that kind of delicate, radar-like manipulation even possible?
I sat cross-legged in the snow for about fifteen minutes, straining to focus, but sensed nothing whatsoever. A creeping doubt began to gnaw at me. What was I even doing? Was this correct, or was I just throwing precious time into the void?
Just as that anxiety began to completely shatter my concentration, Belba shrieked like Archimedes in his bath.
"[There's a theory guidebook in the shop!]"
"...Seriously?!"
"[Yes! It's like a memoir written by a legendary hunter. Since she was a hunter, wouldn't it be packed with helpful insights?]"
I immediately searched the store catalog.
The price was brutal. Ten thousand coins for a single book?
It felt absurdly steep, but turning the thought on its head, it meant an ordinary memoir commanded that staggering value for a reason. Fine. Consider it an investment. Times like this weren't meant for penny-pinching.
With a hammering heart, I finalized the purchase.
A miniature spatial rift torn open in midair. I reached into the opening, and my fingers wrapped snugly around a thick, heavy volume that seemed to fall right into my grasp.
I blew away the accumulated dust with a soft puff. It was a hefty, hardcover tome substantial enough to serve as a brick pillow, bound in a luxurious cover that immediately caught the eye. Intricate alien glyphs from some distant dimension were embossed across the leather.
Ooh... this looks promising.
Its chunky, squared heft reminded me of a giant one-meter birthday present box I had received as a kid. I remembered how ecstatic I was the moment I laid eyes on that massive package. Of course, it turned out to be a cruel prank cooked up by a friend—inside the gigantic box was a solitary box of chocolate sticks, and I lost a friend that day.
A sudden wave of foreboding washed over me.
"It'll be fine. It has to be."
I took a deep breath and cracked the cover.
Page one. A grand, seven-hundred-page leatherbound manuscript. The very first line of this ten-thousand-coin masterpiece read:
“Tuday me and mama and dada et pig! It was tendr!”
Son of a bitch.
"[I am so, so terribly sorry! I had no idea it would start like that...]"
"No, it's fine."
I should have known the moment she said 'diary.' This was on me. So this was what it felt like to watch your life savings vaporize in a bad stock trade.
Of course, I didn't believe the book was entirely worthless. Even if the formatting defied expectations, the survival instincts and lifetime of accumulated wisdom buried inside were bound to be worth far more than ten thousand coins. But that held true only for a scholar with the leisure to meticulously comb through and analyze every rambling entry.
I didn't have that luxury. Worse still, the bitter glacial cold made it nearly impossible to keep the pages exposed. The paper was already crackling, threatening to freeze stiff.
"No choice, then."
I scooped up the little fox curled up beside me, purring softly in its sleep, and gently rubbed its warm fur all over the book. The frost-bitten paper instantly thawed and softened up. Huh. That actually works.
Still, that little trick wouldn't last forever; it was strictly an emergency measure. I made a snap decision to bypass the early chapters and flipped straight to the middle. Reading slowly might have unearthed hidden gems, but time was a luxury I lacked. I needed to extract the most useful insights as quickly as humanly possible.
"[I'm reading along with you!]"
Focus.
Page 411, dead center.
“Successfully hunted the colossal dimensional beast. The specimen, bearing six hundred million tentacles, continuously bombarded its target’s mind with—”
Skip. Instantly.
Even a cursory glance told me this was leagues beyond anything I could tackle right now. I'd just commit to memory that the creature with six hundred million tentacles was weak to plasma railguns. Flipping back a few pages...
“...My husband is dead. The work of a collops.”
I nearly hurled the book across the snow. An irrational surge of irritation spiked through my chest.
"Seriously, why?" I grumbled aloud. "Why would you write personal drama in your own journal? Shouldn't a diary obviously record techniques for dispersing mana to detect environmental targets?"
"[No, that is decidedly not normal for a diary.]"
I know. Shut up.
How much time passed after that? Whenever the pages froze stiff, I gave the fox a quick rub against the parchment, taking advantage of the brief thaw to speed-read like a maniac. By the time the exhausted little creature flopped onto its back with all four paws in the air, and the once-pristine book was reduced to tattered rags, I finally stumbled upon what I had been searching for.
“The amethyst flower was buried underground. That is why the wave did not reach it, no matter how wide I spread it. I asked Mama. Mama told me that I had to go down there myself.”
Contrary to my expectations, the practical revelations were clustered in the earliest chapters. From the age of five to seven—a period when she was still clumsy with energy and stumbling through countless trial-and-error mistakes—she had jotted down truly invaluable details.
Did this mean my mana control was on par with a toddler's? My pride took a slight hit.
Nevertheless, I had secured the critical keyword: wave.
She deliberately compressed mana into a single focal point and detonated it, perceiving any entity that the expanding pulse washed over. That certainly required far less continuous output than trying to forcefully sustain a mana field from start to finish. The only catch was that the expanding shockwave couldn't carry raw kinetic force.
Hmm...
I closed my eyes, running the simulation in my head. What would happen if I packed my immense mana into a single point and blew it up?
"I'd die."
My mana reserves were already freakishly bloated compared to my physical durability. Blindly copying her method was suicide. I had to pivot my thinking. I had gathered enough clues; now I just needed to piece the puzzle together into a working method.
What if I approached it from another angle? What if mana and kinetic force were inherently inseparable—meaning the energy Eris Orwell wielded wasn't mana at all?
"...Belba."
"[Yes?]"
"Do those dimensional monsters possess Dimensional Power too?"
Thinking back, nowhere in the journal had she explicitly written the word 'mana.' It had to be Dimensional Power. An energy similar to mana, yet devoid of physical mass; transparent, capable of diffusing endlessly across the environment. From everything I had felt, Dimensional Power fit every single one of those criteria.
"[They do!]" Belba confirmed eagerly. "[Every dimensional beast harbors Dimensional Power within its core.]"
The moment she said it, the latent Dimensional Power nestled deep within me thrummed into sharp relief. Why hadn't I noticed it before? Perhaps because I had been so preoccupied with the warning that it heralded the apocalypse that I had pushed it completely out of my mind until now.
I shut my eyes and concentrated my awareness inward.
"[However, the amount beasts carry is minuscule,]" Belba added cautiously. "[Pure Dimension Stones are extraordinarily rare.]"
If the author had pulled off miraculous sensory feats with merely a trace of Dimensional Power, there was no reason I couldn't do the same. After all, I had absorbed energy directly from a pristine Dimension Stone itself.
Slowly, deliberately, I coaxed the Dimensional Power outward. Because its behavior mirrored mana in almost every respect, manipulating it posed little trouble. Once I gathered the dispersed power, I established an anchor at its core and applied an inward gravitational pull.
The transparent mist coalesced, compressing tighter and tighter until it shrank into a microscopic, pinpoint singularity.
Now came the tricky part: detonating it omnidirectionally, sending it as far and as fast as humanly possible. Yet relying purely on Dimensional Power lacked the explosive kick needed for that kind of reach.
After a moment's hesitation, I slipped an infinitesimal speck of mana straight into the center of the compressed point. Just as expected of two energies sharing similar natures, they fused seamlessly, blending as if they had always belonged together.
That mana would serve as my gunpowder—the catalyst to detonate the otherwise placid Dimensional Power. If my calculations held, that tiny fleck of mana would expand my detection radius at least threefold.
Maintaining absolute focus, I ignited the mana.
Zzzzzzt—!
In the next instant, a sweep of Dimensional Power laced with trace mana rippled across the terrain.
"Guh—hurk!"
My head snapped violently back. Every drop of mana circulating through my body went berserk, crashing into wild, uncontrollable turbulence.
My hypothesis was dead wrong. I had assumed the mana would act as a clean propellant, launching the tightly compressed Dimensional Power outward into the distance. Instead, the two energies had bonded far more intimately than I anticipated. They fused into an unnatural, catastrophic hybrid shockwave that slammed directly back into me.
Like a blast of invisible radiation sweeping through my flesh, the backdraft twisted and shredded my internal organs. Even though the mana component was negligible, penetrating my defenses without resistance produced an impact beyond my wildest nightmares.
My chin dropped toward my chest. Blood poured unceasingly from my slack, parted lips, splattering crimson across the pristine snow.
"Ugh... krrk..."
I'm going to die.
My body couldn't endure this. I had wanted to hoard my remaining coins, but without intervention, death was a certainty. The internal hemorrhaging was too severe.
"Po... potion... hurry...!" I choked out through the thick metallic flood rising up my throat.
"[WHAT IN THE WORLD DID YOU DO THIS TIME, SERIOUSLLYYYY?!]"
Belba's tearful, frantic shriek pierced straight through my ringing ears, shrill and sharp enough to shatter glass.