[Chapter 121. Tiless Space]
Searanox sat in the command center of the War Room, his heavy combat boots propped unceremoniously on the edge of the polished table. His thoughts were caught in a persistent loop, circling a single geographic point to the southeast: the Tidal Terrace. He had already torn that place apart just hours ago, scouring every jagged corner and every hidden, salt-crusted alcove that beca accessible during the low tide. He had co out of that excursion with nothing of significant value—just a few tarnished silver coins recovered from a waterlogged chest.
Carn's words continued to echo in the back of his mind, even after he had spent an hour questioning Iris on the subject. Iris had confird his suspicion: it had likely been a Scroll of Guidance. Such items were exceptionally rare, designed to point the opener toward the thing they truly yearned for most in their current state. The question gnawed at him with a relentless, low-level irritation: why would a scroll reacting to Carn’s desires direct her toward sothing that would "interest her benefactor"? Was her primary desire simply to please him, or was the System playing a much more complex ga?
The harsh light of the afternoon faded into a bruised indigo as evening descended over the tower. Searanox glanced toward the peripheral of his vision, where the Stage 2 counter remained—a constant, unnecessary reminder ticking down the hours until the next wave of chaos.
[System Notification]
─ Stage 2 starts in 06d 8h 17m 42s
He rose from the chair, his boots planting firmly on the War Room's floor with a resounding thud. The thought ca to him as naturally as breathing, cold and calculated: it was ti to test the theory of the Node once and for all.
A travel drone materialized at his casual gesture, its sleek form all sharp angles and humming, suppressed power. He swung himself onto the ATV-like fra, the magitech engines vibrating beneath him. The drone ascended through the central shaft of the tower with controlled precision, erging onto a high-altitude balcony before banking sharply and descending into the sea of green forest below.
At the transport node, Searanox dismounted. He had prepared a small workstation beside the transportation stone in advance. Three specific objects waited there, arranged with scientific neatness: a ceramic bowl with a pin-sized hole at its bottom, a weighted pendulum with a sharpened coal tip, and a focus stone roughly the size of a standard magitech core. He set the pendulum in motion, watching it swing in a perfect, rhythmic arc without touching the surface of the desk. He then filled the bowl with water to a precisely marked line—it was designed to drain in exactly one hour, with quarter-hour marks ticulously carved into the interior.
Grasping the focus stone, he stepped onto the glowing runes of the node. He tossed the stone upward while simultaneously touching the cold surface of the transportation stone, feeling that familiar, nauseating pull as he transitioned into the node space.
Inside, the world was a void of shifting gold and gray. He imdiately summoned his drones—all twelve of them this ti, their forms shimring into existence around him like a swarm of chanical hornets. The Node Guardian began to manifest from a web of golden threads, but this ti, it stood absolutely no chance. A synchronized volley of overcharged shots tore the guardian apart in re seconds.
Staying true to his experintal paraters, he did not kill the entity outright. Just as he had done in previous tests, he broke it into manageable pieces for dismantling, surgically removing its offensive capabilities while leaving the torso untouched to keep the instance active.
As his drones set to work on the tedious task of scavenging, Searanox pulled a foldable chair and a small, sturdy table from his storage ring. He sat down, leaning back to watch the systematic destruction. His gaze drifted once more to the corner of his vision, focusing on the countdown tir.
[System Notification]
─ Stage 2 starts in 06d 8h 8m 36s
He waited for what his internal clock registered as precisely five minutes—a ntal count his internal clock ticking with near-perfect accuracy. He checked the counter again. It remained frozen, not a single second having ticked away. All the elaborate outside preparations with the water bowl and the pendulum suddenly felt redundant. Searanox stared at the unmoving tir with a grim, satisfied smirk.
This book's true ho is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.
`It truly is a space existing outside the conventional bounds of ti.` He thought.
With that confirmation, he retrieved a thick, spiral-bound notebook from his storage ring and seated himself at the small table. As he settled in, a cargo drone hovered over and dropped the dismantled front section of the magitech golem's heavy cannon onto the table beside him.
He lifted the heavy piece, setting it directly in front of him. The wood of the portable table groaned under the imnse weight but held firm. All the outer fibers and protective plates had been stripped away by the drones, leaving only the raw, intricate skeleton of the weapon behind.
Searanox began the painstaking process of docunting the symbols etched into the dark tal. While the inherent knowledge bestowed by the System helped him identify basic components and energy conduits, these symbols—which he had started calling Runes—were sothing else entirely. They were dense, geotric, and layered. Within an hour, he had filled half a page, then a full page.
Hours passed unnoticed in the silence of the node as his notebook filled up. He drew two runes per line, leaving ample space for ticulous notes beside each one. He was completely absorbed, the outside world and its looming Stage 2 forgotten in the face of this chanical puzzle. His drones had been dismissed long ago, returned to the void of his storage.
Multiple hours into his research, he pulled a single-edged dagger from his storage ring to test the conductivity of the tal. Its spine was serrated, crafted of a black steel that gave off a faint, sickly greenish sheen—a Corroded Fang he had recovered from a Burrowing Depths chest on a previous run.
That discovery had confird a theory of his: common items were not actually rare within the dungeons themselves, provided one cleared them frequently enough. He had found this specific blade twice in under twenty runs. The first had co during his loot-boosted run; the second he had found just a few runs prior.
He shook his head, pushing the secondary thought aside. `Not the ti…` Searanox chuckled softly to himself, a dry, raspy sound in the void. "Not the ti…" he muttered aloud, finishing the thought in his mind. `All I have is ti right now. All the ti in the world.`
Over what his mind eventually registered as several consecutive days of isolation, he began the process of rebuilding the golem's cannon. He worked with agonizing slowness, etching the runes into the new tal housing exactly as they appeared on the original, ensuring every line and every curve was a perfect replica.
He stopped occasionally to check the only clock that mattered.
[System Notification]
─ Stage 2 starts in 06d 8h 8m 34s
The counter for the second stage showed that a grand total of two entire seconds had passed in the outside world. He was slightly surprised; he had expected total stasis. It was not easy to asure the passage of ti without a sun or a clock, and the longer he stayed, the more his perception began to bleed together—but he knew, with the certainty of his own fatigue, that it had been at least four days.
`It is not completely frozen… the ratio seems to be roughly one second for every two days spent inside.`
He pulled out a smaller notebook and scribbled down his findings regarding the temporal dilation of the node space before storing it again. It was a tactical advantage he couldn't even begin to quantify yet.
Then, he went back to his primary project: a scaled-down version of the golem's arm cannon, built at a precise scale of one to five. Before him on the table lay a skeletal structure roughly half a ter in length, featuring very fine, delicate markings etched into its recycled tal fra. The socket for the power core was still the sa size as the original, as he lacked the tools or the knowledge to shrink the physical dinsions of a magitech core.
Searanox slowly, carefully dropped the core into the custom-fit socket. As the stone settled into the housing, it pulsed once with a deep, thrumming light. The flash traveled along the etched runes like water through a channel, lighting up the entire assembly all the way to the focusing crystal embedded in the front.
`It didn't explode. That is a success in itself, I suppose.`
[System Notification]
─ You have successfully replicated a known magitech schematic
─ You have acquired the [Job] Arcane Artificer [Level 1]
`That is interesting.` Was all he had ti to think before a sudden, searing pain flashed through his mind.
He groaned, clenching his jaw and holding his head as a massive flood of raw information and technical knowledge was forcibly imprinted into his subconscious. The pain was sharp and white, but it faded almost as quickly as it had appeared, leaving him leaning against the table, slightly dizzy and breathing hard.
"I will never..." he gasped, rubbing his temples as the new blueprints settled into his mind. "I will never get used to that feeling."
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