Chapter eleven: The World Inside
Caelum pressed the back of his wrist against his forehead, wiping away the traces of sweat that had formed. The sheer effort of lifting the large wooden frame had left his arms sore.
"Hueh~ at least the hard part is done."
The frame was massive, easily covering a significant portion of the wall in his room. It was sturdy, seemingly made of polished dark wood, giving it an old, regal look that fit perfectly with the importance of what it was about to contain.
Taking a step back, his hands rested on his hips as he observed his handiwork.
"you know, not bad," he said to himself. "like not bad at all."
Then his gaze dropped to the floor, where the painting lay, depicting a strange cosmos. It looked vast as it spread across the paper, its deep blacks swallowed the light in his room, while countless stars shimmered within its depths. The sight was just as breathtaking as when he first finished it.
"Just as I thought, It has to go up inside the frame."
There was no way he was going to let something this significant sit on the floor, 'No. This is the foundation afterall.' foundation of Caelum's hope
He bent down, taking extra care as he lifted the paper. It was large, delicate despite the strength of its existence. Folding it carefully, he brought it toward the frame, ensuring that every part fit perfectly within its borders.
When he secured it inside, a sense of finality washed over him. "It's done! At last, ugh."
His voice carried exhaustion, but there was excitement close to craziness layered beneath it.
His eyes traced over the newly framed artwork. Seeing it mounted like this caelum couldn't help but notice, how different it looked from the classroom painting. "It looks like a portal to another world."
"Well that makes it feel even more real."
The deep and endless void of space, glimmering lights of distant stars.
"Time to enter, but before that..." Caelum glanced at the floor beneath. The quill lay on the floor, right where he had left it after finishing the painting. He bent down, picking it up.
"Actually now that I think about it, even in terms of looks, it doesn't look normal at all!" The quill that completely overturned his life, it looks majestic in every sense.
Standing in front of the framed cosmos, he reached out with his free hand. "Huffff." Taking a long breath His palm pressed against the painting.
Caelum started pouring his willpower, half of it was already used to create the painting with only half remaining
He felt the pull, like invisible threads were wrapping around his body, his willpower began to drain.
His vision became narrow, he was being drawn in by the second.
Caelum didn't have the time to react before the familiar sensation of weightlessness overtook him. his mind fogged briefly, as reality itself bent, twisting around him as his body disappeared from his room.
"Umh..." When his senses came back, he was in a dark and endless tunnel. It was same as when he entered the classroom.
It was a corridor of nothingness, stretching infinitely in all directions. Faint streaks of white light shot past him, brief flashes that illuminated the void for the smallest fraction of a second before vanishing again.
The usual force beyond his understanding had taken hold of him, dragging him deeper as he was pulled in. His heartbeat pounded in his ears with unhealthy excitement, 'This feels way different, it's nothing like entering the classroom painting.'
He lacked the sensation of his physical body in this space, caelum could only think wildly.
'That was smooth compared to this, it was like stepping through a doorway into another space. But this is..' The painting felt vast, Like something enormous had opened up, swallowing him whole.
Caelum could not process the sheer scale of what was happening before the tunnel around him cracked.
The darkness shattered just like glass, it was like reality itself was breaking apart. When Caelum opened his eyes, he was already beyond the cracks.
"This is?" his eyes widened to their limits, and with his mouth agape.
What lay in front of his eyes was an endless starry sky gleaming with colours of all kind.
"Ha..." Caelum started laughing madly, "This is insanity!" He could barely stop his laughter when processing the view he was seeing.
"It's like, it's like I'm standing right at the centre of the universe." He was floting, surrounded by a vast and eatheral horizon. With brilliant lights emitting from the distant stars in the darkness.
He was inside a seemingly unreal Cosmos.
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"This stillness is quite creepy ha?"
Caelum looked everywhere his eyes could reach, standing there with eyes that seemed to sparkal like a child, surrounded by an expanse so incomprehensibly vast that it made every part of him feel infinitesimally small.
Yet, despite its overwhelming size, the place carried a familiarity, the black void stretched outward in every direction, adorned with countless stars that twinkled like frozen embers. Their soft glow illuminated the nothingness, casting faint lights that didn't seem to belong to any single source.
"Even my breath feels oddly weightless, wait....huh?" His face went pale when he realised something.
"There isn't anything like air here....no it's impossible for air to exist in the vacuum of outer space."
"then how am i?" As caelum hung in the empty space like a tshirt left to dry in sunlight, he tried his best to comprehend what was happening.
"Is this because i defined it as 'a place that i can use as i want' or is it because i created this space?" He couldn't pinpoint what the reason was, so he gave up trying to figure it out.
"Well I'm not dead so, it's fine?" The thought of what would have happened if he didn't define this place to be useful sent chills through his whole body.
'I was way too careless, tsk.' After shaking the chilly sensation off by slapping his cheeks with his hands, caelum moved his fingers and legs.
"Though the body feels normal enough." He was floating in a suspended space held by some kind of force.
It wasn't like he was standing on an invisible platform, firmly placed in the middle of space itself. He was floating like a fish in the air.
"Alright. Focus, focus, focus, focus." His voice flew into the abyss, swallowed by the void around him. But logically, that should have been impossible.
"I never could have guessed, that i will be able to hear my own voice in a vast outer-space." Because of his definition for the space to be of use to him, the painting world seemed to violate all the rules of nature.
His lips curled up. "This place really is frozen, isn't it?"
It wasn't just the stillness of the cosmos around him, There was no movement at all. The stars did flicker, but that was due to caelum defining them to flicker
The darkness was frozen, the entire space felt like a painting in itself, existing in a state of suspended existence. He pinched his glabella as a thought struck him.
"Ah yes…. time isn't flowing here."
He brought his hand down from his glabella and rubbed his chin, turning the idea over in his head. 'If time didn't flow, no did time even exist in this place?'
It wasn't just that things were unmoving or that nothing was changing. The concept of time itself had never been established here.
That should have been too overwhelming for a human brain but, the only thing Caelum could think was. "That makes sense, actually."
This wasn't Earth nor this was reality, this was a world he had drawn. If he had never defined time, then of course it wouldn't exist here. He shook his head.
"I don't think I will even surviv, if I tried to make something as abstract as time."
That idea alone was enough to make him grimace. Even the classroom painting had been an insane effort to create. It was familiar and It was something that had once existed. He just reconstructed it from memory, but it was still frozen in time.
But making a liner flow of time, that was a whole other beast. "To try and create something so fundamental when I live my life depended on medicines. Hah!" Even though it sounded crazy, the idea was still stuck in caelum's mind.
'Would that be possible if I could properly move past the limit and breakthrough?
But he quickly removed all unnecessary ideas, "Yeah, let's not think about something as abstract as time for now."
"Last time when i tried to expand the inside of the classroom painting, it sucked me dry but.." Caelum carefully thought. "Maybe it was because i used my raw willpower instead of using the quill?"
When he glanced at the quill, his mind felt at ease, as long as he had the quill, nothing could go wrong, an unspoken thrill coursed through his veins.
It was the same feeling that kept him awake for nights. The same feeling that made him throw every bit of caution aside when using the quill, in favor of pushing forward.
The undeniable excitement of seeing what else he could do. "It doesn't seem like coming inside consumes much willpower."
'Creating things drains me more than entering the paintings?' Even when he entered inside this time, he barely felt like anything at all.
He turned his gaze back toward the vast, empty space ahead of him. He the raised the quill, pressing its tip into the void itself.
His voice carried determination. "Alright. Let's make this place more stable."
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Caelum could still feel a chill down his spine, when he pressed the quill into the void. When the ink touched the air, his willpower surged forward, leaving his body in waves.
Black lines etched themselves into the empty space, forming delicate strokes that floated like glowing filaments of energy.
Each stroke devoured his strength and chipped away at his reserves. The lines connected, weaving an intricate framework into existence. They flickered like unstable neon lights before solidifying, marking the edges of something tangible in this endless empty space.
Soon a boundary formed, separating the area from the void around him. When the final stroke took form, the ink expanded outward, stretching and warping, redefining the laws of the space surrounding him.
A sharp tug rattled through Caelum's chest, his body swayed when his balance wavered. "It's done. It should be the limits of what I can do with the willpower i have left."
Before him stood a pure white chamber, roughly 300 square feet in size. With the remaining willpower, caelum manifested a simple room of pure whiteness.
Caelum hovered just above it, still suspended in the space, Taking a breath, he willed himself downward, descending on the white room. When his feet touched the newly-formed floor, an audible click was heard.
The pressure inside the room felt different from the cosmos outside, it was lighter. The weight of a place that existed to comfort ones mind and body. And that's how caelum has defined this place.
"I should, huff..., go back for now and rest." But before he could even register his surrounding, a sharp pain slammed into his chest.
"what the?Ughhhh!" Caelum staggered, his hand instinctively gripped his shirt, he fell on his knees.
His vision blurred instantly. The world around him tilted, spinning wildly. A burst of raw, invisible force erupted from his body.
"Ahghhh!." Caelum screamed out of his lungs, feeling a pain that was inhumanly strong, eating away at his thought process.
CRACK!
The very space around him rippled, an overwhelming surge of energy exploding outward. His scream tore through the silence as his body convulsed.
A tidal wave of pure, transparent willpower blasted into the air, swirling violently before dissipating into the Cosmos outside the white room.
His vision whitened and his nerves burned, his consciousness teetered on the edge of collapse.
But through the chaos and uncontrollable eruption of power, One thing became abundantly clear.
He was breaking through.