The rift-surge began at midnight. The shimmering tear in the sky pulsed like a sick heart, bleeding violent purple light across the campus. Mana density spiked 300%, causing minor reality distortions—doors led to wrong rooms, gravity fluctuated, and whispers echoed from impossible directions.
[Environmental Alert: Astral Rift Surge in progress. Spatial stability: 62% and dropping. Recommended: Activate spatial anchor for emergency recall.]
Damien stood at the entrance to the Foundry Pits, a series of deep, steaming chasms where raw astral energy was channeled into forging chambers. The air tasted of ozone and molten metal. Kiran arrived first, his void aura making the distorted space around him even more unstable.
"You brought the witch," he noted, seeing Lyra approaching with a pack over her shoulder.
"Cookies!" she announced, offering a bag. "Also perception-enhancing pastries. And truth-seeing tarts. Don't eat the purple ones—those are for emergencies."
Kiran ignored her. "What's the plan?"
"Silas's investigation shows four disappearances, all spatial-attuned, all last seen near Forge Chamber," Damien said. "The surge will peak in twenty minutes. We enter, find what's hunting, and eliminate it."
"Or study it," Lyra suggested. "If it's a native spatial entity, the knowledge could be invaluable!"
"Or it could eat your soul," Kiran countered.
They descended into the pits. The heat was intense, but Damien's fire resistance negated it. Lyra wove a cool-mist illusion around them. Kiran used his void to dampen the chaotic mana fluctuations.
Forge Chamber was abandoned, its great smelter cold. But in the center of the room, space was wrong. It looked like a heat haze, but colder. Their spatial anchors—the ones they'd made for class—hummed uncomfortably.
"There," Damien said, his Oculus seeing the truth. "Not a creature. A fold."
A permanent spatial fold, invisible during normal hours, but during surges, it became active. And something was moving inside it.
Lyra's fox-sense tingled. "It's... waiting. It knows we're here."
The fold rippled. From it emerged not a beast, but a concept given form—a Spatial Predation Manifestation. It had no fixed shape. It was a shifting collage of stolen spaces: a piece of corridor here, a fragment of classroom there, all stitched together with glistening, non-Euclidean geometry. At its center floated the pale, frozen faces of the missing students, trapped in crystallized moments of terror.
"By the ancestors," Lyra whispered. "It's made of them."
[Entity Identified: 'Spatial Memory Parasite'. Classification: Astral Anomaly. Threat Level: 3rd Order, 3rd Rank. Ability: Reality Assimilation, Dimensional Folding, Memory Drain.]
Kiran didn't hesitate. With his 3rd order, 1st rank cultivation base, he unleashed a Void Rend, tearing at the creature's form. The void-energy hit... and was absorbed. The parasite ate the nothingness, growing larger.
"It consumes spatial manipulations!" Kiran realized, stumbling back.
The parasite lunged, a corridor-mouth expanding to swallow Lyra. She threw up an illusion of solid rock with her 2nd order 9th rank (Peak), but the parasite passed through it—illusions were just manipulated light and mana, another form of spatial trickery it could consume.
Damien acted. Not with frost, but with absolute stillness. He activated his Domain of the Claimed Cold at maximum, focusing on the space around the parasite rather than the entity itself. He didn't try to freeze the creature; he froze the dimensions it was trying to manipulate.
The effect was immediate. The parasite's shifting form slowed, crystallizing at the edges. It shrieked—a sound of tearing geometry.
"Lyra! Your strongest binding!" Damien ordered.
She nodded, her playful demeanor gone. Her hands flew through signs, and golden foxfire chains erupted from the floor, wrapping around the slowed creature. These weren't illusions—they were conceptual bindings, magic that worked on ideas rather than space.
Kiran saw his opening. Instead of void, he used raw mana—a concussive blast that shattered one of the crystallized spatial fragments. The parasite recoiled, the face of a missing student dissolving into mist.
"It's vulnerable to direct, non-spatial attacks!" Kiran shouted.
The parasite, now wounded and enraged, did something unexpected. It began to unfold reality around them. The chamber walls peeled away like paper, revealing infinite fractal corridors. Gravity spun in multiple directions. They were being pulled into its dimensional labyrinth.
[Warning: Dimensional assimilation in progress. Complete assimilation in 90 seconds.]
Lyra's bindings strained. Kiran's voids were useless. Damien's frost could slow but not stop the unfolding.
Then the System presented an option.
[Analysis: Parasite's core is a 'Spatial Nexus Crystal' formed from condensed stolen spaces. Accessible only during active unfolding.
[Proposed Action: Use host's Glacial Devourer to consume the unfolding process itself, following the spatial threads back to the core.
[Risk: Spiritual disintegration if assimilation completes first.
[Probability of Success: 41%.
41%. Better than he'd had in the Emberfall Canyon.
"Both of you! Give me everything you have!" Damien commanded. "Not at the creature—at me! Amplify my connection to this space!"
Kiran stared. "You'll die!"
"Now!" Damien roared, a note of something beyond cold calculation in his voice—the will to conquer even impossible odds.
Lyra acted first. She placed her hands on Damien's back, her foxfire flowing into him, not as attack but as resonance—amplifying his spiritual presence, making him more "real" to the unfolding reality.
Kiran cursed, then placed his hands opposite Lyra. Void energy, the opposite of amplification, flowed in—but carefully modulated. He wasn't amplifying Damien; he was creating a perfect negative anchor, making Damien the only stable point in the collapsing reality.
The combination was electric. Damien felt his consciousness expand. He could see the spatial threads, the fractal patterns of the unfolding. He could see the glimmering core, buried in infinite reflections.
He unleashed Glacial Devourer, but not on energy. On concepts. On the very idea of "unfolding space." He imposed the concept of "absolute, frozen containment."
The threads leading to the core began to frost over. The parasite screamed, trying to fold back in on itself, to protect its core.
Damien pushed harder. He followed the freezing threads, his consciousness racing through collapsing dimensions. He saw flashes of the students' final moments—their terror, their spatial powers being ripped away.
Then he found it: the Spatial Nexus Crystal, a perfect diamond of compressed realities, each facet showing a stolen place and time.
He didn't try to take it. He did what the System had taught him, what his Constitution craved.
He ate it.
The crystal shattered in his spiritual grasp. Not into pieces, but into pure, raw spatial essence. It flooded into him, a tsunami of folded dimensions and stolen places.
[ALERT: CONSUMING PRIMORDIAL SPATIAL ESSENCE!]
[GLACIAL-PHOENIX CONSTITUTION EVOLVING!]
[INTEGRATION: 5% → 22%!]
The parasite dissolved, its stolen spaces returning to their proper places in reality. The four missing students—alive but comatose—appeared on the chamber floor. The folding stopped.
Damien collapsed, his body steaming with spatial energy that crystallized into frost on his skin. Kiran caught him, the void-user's arms shaking from strain.
"What... what are you?" Kiran whispered, genuine awe in his voice for the first time.
Lyra checked the students. "Alive. Their spatial talents are gone, but they're alive." She looked at Damien with new understanding.
Damien's status flickered before his eyes:
[CULTIVATION BREAKTHROUGH!]
[Damien Karyon: 3rd Order, 1st Rank (Spatial Unlocking)!]
[Mana Reserves: 1200/1200 (New Maximum)]
[New Ability Unlocked: 'Rime-Slip' (Short-range spatial teleport via frozen coordinates)]
[Glacial-Phoenix Constitution: 'Spatial Integration' sub-path unlocked!]
He stood, new power thrumming in his veins. Space felt different now—not empty, but full of potential coordinates he could freeze and traverse.
Academy guards burst into the chamber, drawn by the energy surge. They found four unconscious students, three exhausted first-years, and a chamber permanently scarred with frost patterns that seemed to exist in multiple dimensions simultaneously.
Professor Halcyon arrived minutes later, his four eyes wide. "By the Folded Realms... you children fought a Spatial Parasite? And won?"
"We did," Kiran said, his usual arrogance replaced by grim respect. "He won," he corrected, nodding at Damien.
Halcyon examined the frost patterns. "This is... this is stabilized spatial scarring. You haven't just defeated it—you've integrated some of its nature." He looked at Damien with something between fear and excitement. "Young man, you may be the first true Spatial-Frost cultivator in recorded history."
As they were escorted out for debriefing, Lyra walked close to Damien. "That was amazing and terrifying," she whispered. "But next time? More cookies, less almost-getting-unmade."
Kiran fell into step on Damien's other side. "You consumed spatial essence. That shouldn't be possible."
"Many things shouldn't be possible," Damien said. "Yet they happen."
For a moment, the three of them walked in silence—the void-user, the fox-witch, and the frost-conqueror who had just begun to taste the dimensions. The Academy thought it was teaching them. But in the dark of the Foundry Pits, they had taught each other something more valuable: in the face of true annihilation, even rivals could become pillars.
And Damien had gained his first true taste of a Singularity's power—not Void, but the spatial fabric that Void sought to erase. The feast was just beginning.