The path wound upwards, each step taking them further from the river in the distance. The landscape transformed as they climbed.
Tangled underbrush giving way to brittle grass and scattered stone, the air growing thinner and charged with an electric tension.
Sam walked at the front, map in hand, muttering to himself as he traced their route. Everyone could feel it—pressure building in the air, in the stone beneath their feet. Like something buried deep was stirring.
Hours passed in contemplative silence. The team had settled into a rhythm of constant mana circulation.
I've absorbed a lot of different things since the Tower of Trials. Even in this short period of time people have managed to unearth all sorts of strange materials. AJ thought to himself.
His gelatinous form clung to Sam's back, he could feel the vibration of every footstep, every shift in Sam's breathing.
The astralite reacts to mana in a way I still don't understand. It's almost as if it's... listening.
He'd tried replicating a pure astralite shard earlier that morning, but the copy degraded—it was too unstable
His glowmelt replica, on the other hand, was just fine. It pulsed faintly in a jar strapped to Lily's belt, cool and silent.
Glowmelt is simple. Liquid light. Useful for stealth, traps, and maybe marking a path. Can't say the same for astralite or etherium. The etherium's structure is complicated. Every time I try to recreate it, it starts pulling in my mana—then collapses in on itself.
AJ continued his attempts at reproducing the various new materials, slowly figuring out their properties and potential uses.
It's pulling mana in and trying to store it. The storing process is pretty unstable as is, let alone when I'm trying to reproduce it. It might be good as some kind of battery if I can work it out. Or with the right instabilities it could become a bomb.
His form pulsed faintly at the thought.
Then there was the stormspun silk—a single thread of it which Lily had managed to steal from right under the merchant's eyes.
He couldn't recreate it, the material contained traces of the lightning it was conditioned by. That wasn't something he could understand for now.
I need more samples. Learning from lots of examples is much easier. It's a shame we won't be able to gather any more of it in the foreseeable future.
---
Ethan broke the silence with a low whistle as they crested the next hill.
"There," he said, pointing with his axe.
Towers of jagged blackstone rose into the sky, half-shrouded in storm clouds. Lightning flickered across the highest peaks.
"We're not going all the way in," Sam reminded them. "We get in close, grab a sample of whatever the Sect is trying to dig up, then get the hell out of here in the direction of the safe zone."
"Quick snatch and run," Ethan muttered. "Should be exciting."
"Won't be that simple," Victor said flatly. "They're not idiots and this thing sounds pretty important to them, there'll be guards."
"Which is why we're sneaking in," Sam said.
AJ rippled quietly against Sam's back. "I can get close. I'm small, I should be able to absorb some of the material without anyone noticing."
Lily looked back at him. "What if it's something you can't absorb?"
AJ hesitated. He hadn't considered that possibility. Are there things I can't absorb?
"Even if I can't absorb it I can just take it with me."
---
The land died as they neared the dig site.
What had been sparse grass and scattered boulders gave way to a wasteland of cracked stone and gravel, the ground unnaturally smooth in patches—as if something had scoured it clean.
No insects buzzed. No birds circled overhead. Even the wind seemed to avoid this place, leaving the air thick and stagnant.
Sam signalled for the others to crouch behind a ridge of weathered rock. Below them, the Obsidian Sect's camp sprawled across the barren basin.
A series of rough-hewn trenches cut into the earth, converging at a central pit where a dozen figures in blackened leather armour toiled.
Makeshift cranes—ropes and pulleys attached to wooden frames—hovered over the pit, hauling up buckets of gravel.
Tents of patched hide and scorched canvas ringed the excavation site, their surfaces marked with the Sect's symbol: A dark pillar covered in simple runes.
At the camp's edge, two guards leaned on spears tipped with a strange dark material, their eyes scanning the emptiness. Too disciplined for mercenaries, they must be sect-trained.
Victor's voice was barely a whisper. "They're not just digging, they're refining it too."
Victor pointed to a smelting station near the tents: a furnace belching black smoke, where workers shovelled gravel into crucibles.
The resulting ingots—irregular, and dark as polished slate—were stacked in crates under armed watch.
Their surfaces shimmered, distorting the area around them, as if the air itself recoiled from touching them.
Lily's eyes were fixed on the ingots. "That's not any regular ore," she murmured. "Look how it's distorting the area around it. Like it's... pushing the world away."
She was right. Where the ingots lay, the ground seemed subtly wrong—not darkened, but warped, as though viewed through flawed glass.
A figure had emerged from the largest tent—tall, gaunt, his face obscured by a mask of beaten metal. He barked an order, and the workers scrambled faster.
They decided to wait and watch the camp. They wanted to learn the guard rotations, and look for windows when the dig site was left unattended.
A few hours later, as night was approaching, they made camp beneath a stone overhang.
The wind howled higher up the slope, sharp and cold, laced with electric static. It set Lily's nerves on edge, made Victor's knife buzz faintly where it leaned against the rock.
"Tomorrow," Sam said, not looking away from the map, "we approach the lower edge of the dig site. We won't make contact under any circumstances. AJ will sneak in, absorb or grab some of the material and leave."
"Why not make contact? Maybe create a distraction?" Lily asked, in a confused tone.
"They might not be open to talk," Victor spoke up. "If this material is important enough to them they could try to kill us simply because we know the mine's location."
The others nodded in agreement, not everyone was so ruthless but the Obsidian Sect was very ambitious. Ambitious people can do things most people would never consider, all in the name of success, whatever that looks like to them.
---
After confirming the night watch rotation they slowly went to sleep, thinking about tomorrow's raid, the safe zone, Maria, or whatever else crossed their minds.
AJ didn't sleep in the usual sense, but he did enter a dormant state—his core drifting in stillness whilst his body relaxed, flattening out into a puddle.
He had managed to recreate a small shard of astralite. He worked out how to allow the ore to consume mana and store it without collapsing before he could finish the creation process.
Rather than reabsorbing it immediately like he usually did he kept the astralite, letting it float within him. He planned to study it further, he wanted to learn more about its properties and uses.
As he drifted off to sleep the astralite shard gently pulsed. Then again.
Then—everything changed.
AJ floated in space, as he observed a construct unlike anything he could comprehend—a forge built on a stellar scale.
At its centre burned a star, suspended in place like a heart exposed to open space. It pulsed with contained fury, its surface rippling with arcs of gold and crimson plasma.
Five titanic pylons encircled it, positioned like points on a compass. One below the star and four spaced evenly around its equator, forming a perfect spatial symmetry.
Each pylon was a cathedral of machinery, covered in massive coils, shifting plates, and latticework veins that carried raw power like blood.
At the apex above the star floated the refinement core—a dark, spherical structure roughly the size of the gas giant, Jupiter. This construct was being used to transform the star.
The core pulsed with rhythmic energy, feeding huge amounts of energy into the five pylons. Each pylon, in turn, focused that energy into a beam, directed inward.
Five radiant lances piercing the star from all angles. The beams didn't destroy. They compressed.
The star was folding in on itself. Its surface darkened. Its corona flared violently, then stabilised. With every second, it shrank, growing denser—approaching the moment of transformation.
AJ didn't need to be told what came next. The star was meant to crystallise—refined, condensed, and channelled into the refinement core, where it would become something new.
It was working.
Until it wasn't.
The star began to pulse violently, as if it were a living creature resisting its fate.
Even AJ could feel it. A mistake was made. They no longer held control.
The star went supernova.
Light devoured everything.
AJ watched as the pylons and the refinement core were destroyed beyond recognition. Some orbs were sent flying out, scattering in different directions into the void.
Each one burning a different colour: crimson, violet, gold, blue. These were presumably the final product, what that star was supposed to become before it exploded.
---
AJ woke with a low shudder, his form quivering for half a second before pulling back into shape.
The astralite at his core had stopped pulsing—but it hadn't gone silent.
He could still feel it. A resonance. An echo.
He shifted slightly, letting the events he had just witnessed settle into his mind.
That wasn't a dream. It was a memory... or a recording. The astralite had stored a scene and then let him see it.
He remained still, trying to piece it together. The forge, the star, the failure—and those orbs flung into the dark. There were dozens of them.
What were they? Weapons? Tools? Something else?
Those orbs... what if one of them reached Earth?
The thought struck like a ripple through his mass. What if the Wish Event wasn't an act of God? What if it was somehow caused by one of those things?
He didn't know. He couldn't know.
But he'd seen a piece of it now. And he couldn't unsee it.
Sam stirred slightly beside him, murmuring something in his sleep. Lily curled tighter into her blanket, a faint frown on her face.
Victor remained upright, still half-awake, eyes open just enough to catch movement.
For now, he let himself flatten out again, drifting on the edge of awareness. Letting the others sleep. Tomorrow, they would rob the Obsidian Sect's mine.