It’s been 90 days since Damon’s bittersweet return to Earth.
He never expected any grand welcome. He didn’t have parades or even familiar faces in mind when he was going back, but even he didn’t expect to end up not just a single being’s enemy but the enemy of the system itself, forced to fight against his own kind.
And of course, as fate would have it, his cursed luck didn’t get much better after leaving the citadel. Every single human he encountered attacked him on sight. So much so that after only an hour on Earth, he walked into the first rift he saw, trying to catch his breath.
In hindsight, monsters were a much better company.
No pointless conversations or cries for help as he cut them down. They simply attacked and died, without any of the unnecessary drama.
The last three months, however, were more than just killing monsters.
Damon had no need to search for more creatures to kill. The main reason behind why he entered the rift in the first place was to learn more about them. His and Yuki’s journey across countless worlds never left his mind. If the number of potential rifts and worlds out there were truly infinite, then finding their way back was nothing but a stroke of luck.
And if there was anything he hated, it was leaving things up to luck.
Right now, he was through his 9th, maybe 10th world, which he studied extensively before trying to leave.
He could’ve gone faster if he wanted to, most rifts posed no challenge, so going through them was nothing more than a walk in the park to him. The problem was the absorption part. With his mana almost reaching 20 thousand, his body was struggling to keep up. He put every single stat point and rift shard he received into vitality, but even that was of no use against rift cores, which granted him over 1 thousand mana each.
Luckily, he was slowly getting the hang of it.
The way rifts created a connection between two worlds wasn’t much different from how he teleported using Shadow Step, or how the citadels had a teleportation device leading to the ground beneath them.
With his Heavenly Comprehension, he could track those faint traces of mana that the rift cores left behind. Each was only a fragment of a second long before he, too, would get pulled into a foreign world, but at how fast his mind now processed things, it was more than enough to get him started on learning the truth behind it.
Now, sitting on a large, red boulder near a rift core that was still untouched and surrounded by a few dozen slain monsters, Damon was pondering over a question he hadn’t thought of before.
Using his Shadow Step ability was pretty straightforward, he saw the destination and reached for it using Shadow Manipulation, using it as a bridge between spaces. In the same way, the teleportation device had two ends, both connecting different places in space.
Rifts were different.
There was no apparent destination in sight, nothing he could copy or follow as to where it led.
"Tskk..." he clicked his tongue in frustration. He was missing something, something he couldn’t even name.
He turned toward one of the monsters, which were still alive, sprawled across the ground and unmoving as though hoping he wouldn’t notice them. "What do you think? Any suggestions?"
The monster’s breath caught as Damon’s eyes landed on it.
Damon frowned slightly as he looked at it.
"Your damn eyes are open, you—" he caught himself, realising he was trying to have a conversation with a monster with no vocal cords. "Forget it."
He turned back toward the rift core, watching it with his Heavenly Comprehension still active.
Its slow ripples offered no answers to Damon’s questions, and the way light and air bent around it offered no advice.
The same question still burned in his mind.
How does it navigate between different worlds?
He could teleport all over the rift if he wished to, using Shadow Step was enough to achieve that. All he had to do was see the place once and simply reach for it.
Suddenly, an idea dawned on him.
He had already seen Earth countless times, in the same way he saw Ayame’s world.
Of course, the Shadow Step couldn’t reach them. As deep as his mana reserves were, the ability wasn’t made for interstellar distances.
But what if it could?
Right now, Shadow Step was nothing more than just a fragment of Shadow Manipulation. But what if it became its own ability?
The idea was ridiculous, to say the least. This wasn’t like evolving his already existing class, or even copying the class he already had and recreating it for his summon, this meant creating a completely new ability from scratch with nothing but a faint blueprint of how his Shadow Step worked as a guide.
His heart began to hammer in anticipation as he rose to his feet. He couldn’t remember the last time he felt it beat so loud.
He took one last, almost victorious look at the monster hiding between the corpses of its slain people and stepped into his domain.
The second he was met with the freezing cold of his castle, he began weaving.
Damon started with what he knew, which was the Shadow Step.
The mechanics of how the ability worked lay bare in his mind, a guide which he used as he began to weave a new ability into an empty space before him.
Of course, there was nothing to truly copy, just a mechanic which he understood, and now he had to put it into threads.
The mana cost was brutal.
A single second of weaving was worth at least a thousand points, far more than anything he had ever experienced.
Some of the threads resisted him in a way they never had before. As if he were building something that wasn’t meant to exist. He ignored the sensation and pushed through until every single one of his preimagined threads clicked into place and a loud notification rang clearly in his head.
[You have received a New Ability: Dimensional Step]