Would you like to apply [Touch of Elu’var] on the rift?

  Warning: for every positive modifier, the rift would gain a negative modifier.

  Magnitude of all added modifiers depends on the channelled mana.

  Y/N

  No.

  There would be time for experimentation with the exotic skill later but it was more to do with the mana cost than anything else. 150 mana points was a prohibitive amount for Keynes at the moment, and risky. This was after all a rare Level 6 rift.

  Keynes smoothly opened the rift, removing the Overcharged status.

  The rift lost its Overcharged status. Unfortunately, it didn’t have the Alien effect either because of their settlement on the planet. Keynes had hoped that the effect would remain for longer but it seemed the threshold was quite low. It raised some other questions like was there any other difference between a settled and unsettled planet? Neither he nor Alice knew. In truth, it was an issue for Rell and others to tackle, so Keynes didn’t bother himself with it too much.

  “Ready?”Keynes asked. “Let’s go.”

  When he saw the affinity of the rift, his idea of what lay ahead was something like rivers of blood, intestines or other gore elements. Instead, they found a clear night sky with a large shining moon and a sparse forest with a cobbled pathway threading through it.

  “Woah,” Kora said as her spacesuit retracted. Keynes did the same. The air wasn’t just safe to breathe, it was crisp and refreshing. Each breath made him feel at peace. “It looks like a scenery straight from a movie.”

  Above the forest, on a large hill, stood a mediaeval castle. Together with the night sky and the forest, it painted quite a romantic picture.

  “I have to say, this view is really something,” Keynes admitted, finding a growing need to sit down and admire the view.

  “A building inside a rift though?” Kora noted. “That’s new.”

  “Yeah.” Keynes nodded, but paid very little heed to the revelation. Something was off. “Let’s relax for a bit,” he added.

  “Should… sure,” Kora agreed.

  They sighed, inhaling the calming night air of the rift.

  “Hey! You two slackers, snap out of this!” Alice snapped.

  Keynes and Kora shook their heads, dispersing the deep serenity that settled within them. They jumped to their feet, ready to fight. No attack came at them though. After a minute of tension, they relaxed slightly.

  “What’s going on?” Keynes asked. “Were we under a debuff or something?”

  “No,” Alice replied. “It’s the air. Its quality is off the charts. It made your bodies relax.”

  “It’s dangerous,” Kora said.

  “And sounds like a debuff to me,” Keynes added. But his status didn’t show any debuffs nor his [Pure Body] reacted to any outside effect. That left only one explanation.

  “This air is so good that it is actually harmful to us,” Kora realised the same thing.

  “Indeed,” Alice confirmed. “If you brought any Low Level ascender here, they would be paralysed by the bliss of this place. It applies to other things as well like consumables, fragrances or even simple things like light from the sun. A Level 1 entering a Level 50 rift would die in an instant just to spiritual energy alone.”

  “So, High Level stuff isn’t always good then,” Keynes said.

  “The dose makes the poison,” Kora said.

  An old adage indicating a basic principle of toxicology. Keynes had come across it when he was doing his research about the Foxgloves.

  “Yes,” Alice said. “For ordinary ascenders at the Medium stage, the safe limit should be five Levels, but I have a strong ‘feeling’ that at the Higher Levels, things might become a little bit more unpredictable. A Perfect State ascender at the Superior stage should easily be safe up to ten Levels.”Alice’s tone changed, becoming troubled and thoughtful. “But there are going to be outliers where non-harmful and neutral components of rifts will affect ascenders of the same Level.”

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  “It’s fine.” Waved Alice’s worries away. “Once we’re aware of the impact of the air on us, it’s easy to keep it bay.”

  Kora agreed.

  “Let’s see what a Level 6 rift has to offer.”

  “And check out the castle,” Kora added.

  “Yeah, that. I wonder,” Keynes said. “Could the castle be a special rift encounter or was it a permanent feature of the rift?”

  “I’m not sure,” Alice admitted.

  They entered the path that led into the forest. Keynes activated [Night Sight] just in case. Keeping the spell up was dirty cheap with a cost of a few mana points per hour, which was easily offset by natural mana regeneration.

  “It doesn’t feel like a rift,” Kora said as they traversed the calm forest. Keynes had to agree but it didn’t put him at ease. The forest didn’t feel like a forest. It felt… cultivated. At least according to his trait.

  There was too much space between trees, allowing the moonlight to reach the ground. In most cases, the ground too, was sparsely covered by grass and low bushes. A true forest was a messy battleground of nature where every inch of space was fought over by plants and animals.

  Not here. The nature here was at peace. No animal or insect sound, which was quite normal for rifts but felt unnatural here. Interesting. It was worth studying for the future gardening projects Keynes and Kora wanted to kick off.

  Another interesting and a little concerning issue was the blood affinity. Where was it?

  Keynes felt the attack because there was nothing physical so see. Kora dodged an instant later.

  “Invisible attack?” Kora muttered as they hid behind a tree.

  Not only that, Keynes didn’t sense anyone within a hundred metre radius.

  “Alice, any clue where the monster is?” Keynes asked.

  “No, but the attack seemed to come outside of the range of my senses,” she answered.

  “Shit.” Keynes rewound his memory finding the moment of attack appeared on his radar. It indeed came outside of the hundred metres he could sense. “A sniper type monster? Is that even a thing?”

  “In a rift anything can be a thing.”

  Another attack came at them and this time it went through the tree as if the tree didn’t exist. It left no mark on it but Keynes was sure that if he or Kora were hit by it, they would be in trouble.

  The good thing was that the invisible attack considerably slowed down as it neared them, giving them enough time to evade.

  Keynes jumped out of the cover. With two shots, he was able to triangulate where the attacks originated. But even with [Night Sight] he saw nothing but trees in that direction.

  “We must get close to the monsters,” he shouted to Kora. “It clearly prefers to fight over a distance. Alice, try to scout it out.”

  Kora followed him. Their inhuman speed carried them forward. Trees blurred around. For once, the space between trees worked to their advantage.

  The invisible attack came again. This time from a different direction but the timing was substantially off and the shot didn’t even come close.

  More than one monster? Or is it the same one but moving about? The latter was unlikely.

  Here, Alice said in Keynes’s mind. I think I found something.

  Using the bond as a compass, Keynes led Kora to the location indicated by Alice.

  The spiritual companion was floating above a metre high boulder. At first glance, the rock looked ordinary but Keynes’s spiritual sense told him a different story. This thing was anything but ordinary.

  “The surface of the boulder,” Kora said. “It isn’t natural formation.”

  They both felt the attack but its velocity was off the charts, it hit the boulder before they could even twitch a muscle, then bounced off it and hit Keynes in the shoulder. He stumbled, unsure what happened. His left arm was numb from the shoulder down. But there was no blood. No wound.

  What the hell is this?

  Both of them reacted on instinct, shooting for a cover. But then, they remembered that the invisible attack hadn’t respected physical objects like a tree. Hiding was pointless…

  Unless… it wasn’t. Keynes knew the trajectory of the shot. If it bounced off the boulder, maybe it was capable of stopping it.

  “Keynes, we should retreat. You can’t fight like this. And if any more of these attacks get us, we’re going to be in real trouble.”

  Keynes shook his head.

  “This is only a Level 6 rift, Kora. It cannot be this hard—”

  Another attack bounced off the boulder then shot toward Keynes. Even at the peak of alertness, Keynes was still grazed by it. His cheek started to get numb.

  “That confirms the position of the shooter at least,” he said. “Let’s hide behind the boulder on the other side. If I’m correct, the boulder will provide the cover.”

  “If not?” Kora asked.

  “We’ll improvise then.”

  They rushed toward the boulder just as the next attack came. This one felt half-baked though. Is the shooter growing impatient or do they know we figured out the trick?

  It also meant they somehow saw Keynes and Kora.

  The low energy of the attack translated to its lower velocity, making it easy to dodge. They got behind the boulder. Its size was barely enough to provide the cover to them but it had to do.

  “Any idea what kind of attack it is?” Kora asked when they managed to take a breather. “Because I don’t feel any affinity from it. Just sharp spiritual energy. That can’t be just spiritual energy though.”

  “Shooting pure spiritual energy at this distance? Fuck no. Not even Shaper is capable of something so ridiculous. It must be a spell.”

  “I concur,” Alice added. “It is some kind of tranquilising spell, purely immaterial.”

  “Like [Mana Shot]?” Keynes asked.

  “No. Materiality of magic is a spectrum. On one end you will find fully material spells and as you move toward the other end, you will get to the spells that have no physicality whatsoever.”

  “Magic? Huh, I haven’t heard that word since I was a kid and my mom read me bedtime stories,” Keynes said.

  Another shot came and hit the boulder, proving Keynes right. It bounced off in almost the same direction it had come from. If Keynes was wrong they wouldn’t have enough time to dodge the attack. However, he wasn’t as much concerned with it now as he’d been a few minutes ago. [Pure Body] even in its passive form was swiftly breaking down the Numbness debuff. He was sure that activating the skill would remove the debuff completely.

  “I heard some people use the word magic when the first rift spells appeared but never gave it much thought,” Kora admitted.

  “For some reason,” Alice said, a little unsure. “The concept of magic feels obscure and yet relevant in this situation. You can think of magic as the effect of spiritual energy on the physical world.”

  “Sounds unnecessary, to be honest,” Keynes said. “Anyway, let’s focus on the issue at hand. First, there is a monster that has an immaterial and invisible range attack. Second, it uses this weird boulder to redirect its attacks. We must kill the monster then get this rock back to our base…”

  “You’re mistaken about magic,” Alice interrupted him.

  “Huh?”

  “I’m not fully grasping the concept yet, perhaps when you hit Level 6 or 7 as Perfect Ascender I will, but I am sure that magic is a bridge between the raw spiritual energy and spells…”

  “Okay.” Keynes raised his hand in defeat. “But this is not the place and time to debate the nature or importance of magic, right?”

  “Right.”

  Kora gave Keynes a questioning look. Of course, she wasn’t familiar with Alice’s weird antics. Though, to be perfectly honest, Alice changed since the day she had appeared to him at the hunting ground at Emerald Lake in France.

  Still, she was a weirdo.

  “Now, let’s find and eliminate this annoying monster.”