SSD 5.16 - What Makes a Breaker Skill

Hello all!

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And now, the scheduled chapter, as foretold, wahahaha!

I give to you, two pieces of advice:

Firstly, limitations give us something to work toward, and euphoria when we finally exceed them. Accept your limitations, not as the end, but as a place to strive. Truly, you will find yourself unable to accomplish exceed some limitations, but you will never know which are instead a false barrier, ready to fall away, unless you put in enough force and determination.

Secondly, at a certain point, the effort you are putting into pushing against those walls, those barriers, would be better spent elsewhere, simply because that effort would get you more there, than even if one of those walls turned out to be a barrier instead.

Trust not those that tell you something is impossible, but try for yourself, and when your efforts would produce more in another place, have no fear to change your course. It is not failure, to try with true effort, and only then decide that there is a better course.

Heed not the world, for they shall mock you both when you try the impossible, and when you turn away. They cannot be pleased, save when you accomplish that which they deemed could not be done. And even then, they shall mock you at the next barrier, the next perceived failure.

-A’osfa, the Sage, Collected Writings

==Caden==

My preparations before pushing would have made a Lamaze class look tame. Of course, that was appropriate since I was preparing to push space, instead of a baby.

You generally didn’t need to worry that the baby being pushed out might wreak havoc on anything other than the mother’s uterus, both parent’s sleep schedules, their finances, and their eventual sanity as things transitioned into the teenage years in a decade or so.

Once again, I was concerned that it might relocate the local geography in a significant way. Not ideal, under most circumstances, but significantly more concerning when I composed part of that geography.

Wish this stuff came with a manual.

Regardless, near the surface, and some distance away from where I had done my other testing, another completely sealed and empty room was waiting for this test.

Finally ready, I pushed.

Mana flowed out of me, into my aura, and then something twisted space like it was nothing but clay. At the edges, space stretched, as inside the cube, space multiplied.

I only pushed for a single second, but when I was done, the inside was unrecognizable. From both the inside, and outside perspectives, it had suddenly become an area of much lower pressure. Not completely a vacuum, especially when felt from the outside, as the air that was in the original cube was still there, it just was filling a much larger space now.

Normally, the much larger amount of surface inside, relative to where it was hitting the stone outside, would mean that the pressure was maintained. However, when the space inside became large enough, the distance that the air had to travel and the total amount inside being small enough meant that it effectively had less pressure. If I did this in an area exposed to air, the air would rush in to fill things.

To be exact, the single second of effort had created a space with an interior approximately three hundred and fifty feet across, with a total interior space of about 43 million cubic feet.

If the rate was consistent, an hour of work should be able to create a space larger than a cubic mile, with only the attention of a single shard.

That calculation skill does come in handy.

Testing required, but if it holds up, I don’t need to worry about space issues.

Despite my enormous growth, which had continued even after I was lost in soul space for a while, I had never really had room to fully cut loose. It was always going to be a matter of sacrificing one thing to get another. I limited the size of each environment, and when possible cut it into smaller and easily copied chunks that could be used to function as an instanced dungeon. I might be able to manage a few dozen cubic miles of space with everything I had so far, with the rest being needed for structural stability, and to form the killing corridor that led to my core.

That concern might not matter at all, now.

What happens if I start with a larger volume, initially?

The answer was, apparently, nothing. The larger volume of starting air meant that the pressure change wasn’t as severe, but the total added space was still exactly the same. Start with a ten foot cube, and the interior volume increased as though I had suddenly added a three hundred and fifty foot cube. Do the same with a starting cube of one hundred feet, and once again I added the same size of cube to it.

When I let things run continuously, it added that amount each second.

I went back to the first cube, and then slowly added air to it, bringing it to base atmospheric pressure.

As expected, the walls of the exterior started to get very hot, the additional impacts of so much air vibrating the molecules of stone faster in a rising tide of heat. Even filling the entire interior with stone didn’t help with that, as the larger amount of interior surface area still acted in the same way.

Could just use dungeon controls to control the temperature.

I could, but I didn’t want to, if it wasn’t necessary. And the more space I shoved inside one of these, the more intense the heat effect would be, and it might actually become more than the automatic systems could handle. Or just too expensive to maintain. Based on everything I knew, all my automatic dungeon functions used ambient mana for their power. That ambient mana was also what I used to create my vast reserves of mana crystals. That wasn’t a problem, for now, since I was getting fed lots of ambient mana from the volcano.

Don’t know if that is always permanent.

Even if it was, I didn’t know if it was possible to cut off that source.

Once I had a city, I should be able to siphon off massive amounts of ambient mana from the population, or just charge them mana for various services.

Hmm, could make the adventurers pay a little mana for the teleport functionality. Now that I can actually put up signs they will understand, too.

Could make it so they can pay the mana cost in advance…

I waved off the idea, useful though it might be.

Something for later.

For now, I was trying to be more efficient. I could use arrays to strengthen the materials that made the walls of the dungeon, but that would once again draw from the ambient mana. With my new abilities to manipulate space, I should be able to create some truly powerful defenses and structural supports. An arc of spacial compression, laid along areas as needed, would function as an indestructible support for any matter that rested on it.

In fact…

A similar effect should be possible when something transitioned from the interior of the larger space, to the outside.

Which might offer a solution to my overheating problem. Though a different shape would work better.

For the next test, I tried a hollow sphere, rather than a cube.

I worked just as well as the cube, though verifying that the total volume being added took me a bit longer.

Doing this type of algebra took me a little longer mentally, if nothing else, though it was still far faster than it should have been, feeling like a calculator was helping me get the work done.

Huh…

When I had gone to do the calculation, the digits of pi had come to me without any effort, and I felt like I could easily have kept adding in the digits.

Which is odd, since this is more digits of pi than I had even remembered to put on my little stone records.

It was hard to say if this was memory enhancement, since I had definitely seen pi out to at least a hundred digits in some math textbook, or just being fed to me directly by the skill.

Eh, guess I will see.

For now, all the digits that suddenly seemed so easy to recall were transcribed onto a tablet of stone, just as a future reference.

The most important thing, for the moment, was that the volume being added to the sphere was the same as the cubes.

Probably more efficient to use oblong or circular shapes, most of the time, anyway. Otherwise, I am going to be producing massive wastes of overhead and underground space.

I filled the hollow sphere with stone, noting the expected rise in temperature in the adjacent stone at the boundary.

Going to need a way to define all this. Normally just for my own sake, but I’m going to need to talk to Exsan about how this works. Zidaun too, maybe. If I figure out a way to make him an actual partner… Or if I simply cannot.

That was a fear of mine. That I was attached to slaves and that there was no way to free them. That it would kill them, or drive them insane, or simply become empty shells without that connection. People could talk about death being better than being enslaved, but they could say that right up until someone clapped them in chains and asked if they would rather die than do something they were told them to do. And things were even more morally ambiguous here, as they didn’t know they were enslaved.

Stupid Gordian knots. And no convenient sword, either.

For the moment, I waved it away.

Right, need to find a good way to define all this shit. Well, start with the edge, I suppose. Something I don’t usually use as a word, but means the same thing. Terminus? That means boundary, right? Think it means end, too, but it still works well enough. I suppose that a boundary, or an edge, is always the end of one thing, leading into another, no matter which direction it is crossed.

Okay, so what… The outer terminus for something outside the effected area, but touching it, and inner terminus for something inside that is pushing against the exterior.

I took a moment, reviewing how complicated that line of thought had been.

Yep, exactly why I am making fucking definitions.

Okay, so what about the two types? Areas of deleted space, versus created space? Yep, still awkward. Need some form of shorthand.

I took a few minutes to think about it, ultimately drawing on my science background. I chose vesicle, as in the tiny bubbles of gas or storage organs, to describe a collapsed space, and pocket for areas that were smaller on the outside, as a shorthand for pocket dimension.

What is the opposite of a pocket, anyway? A hat, maybe, as it covers something, but stores nothing? That would have gotten confusing, though, considering the whole magician’s hat thing, which generally does function as a pocket dimension.

Either that or some eldritch portal, where hands appear to snatch random rabbits away for a moment, only to put it back a few moments later.

I could imagine it now. From the rabbit’s perspective, it would essentially be an alien abduction.

‘And then, this claw with five digits snatched me up by the ears, pulling me through a black portal. Then, there I was, suspended in the air, as this enormous creature held me up. As far as I could see, more of the creatures shouted and ritually brought their hands together. It was terrifying. The one holding me bared his teeth at me, and I thought he was going to rip me apart, but he just pushed me back through the black portal and I was back here.’

‘Yeah, sure, whatever you say…’ one of the other rabbits said sarcastically.

I grinned, shaking my head.

Pretty sure I was supposed to be in the middle of something, even before my terminology crisis came to a head.

The pocket, filled with stone, was exceptionally hot in the outer terminus, glowing red with infrared and going up to the visible spectrum.

Lets see how this works.

The stone of the outer terminus dissolved into nothingness at my command. Or rather, was shoved into storage. Wonder if it stays hot in there? Relative to the amount of stone contained within, the amount I was removing was minuscule.

When I was done, a sphere of stone appeared to hang suspended in midair. The air, of course, started to heat up immediately.

Still replaces dissolved stone with air, for some reason. Still not sure where that air even comes from. Entirely possible that a tiny amount of the stone is actually destroyed to produce an equivalent volume of air, I suppose. Or maybe there are vast amounts of air in my storage. Though there wasn’t any air in my storage when I first did this, all the way back with Tam… At least probably. I didn’t even have the skill then.

I turned my focus back to the suspended ball of stone, where it appeared to defy gravity. Which it was, sort of. There were hundreds of cubic feet or stone inside the pocket sphere, but it was only a ten foot sphere at the terminus. In order for all that stone to leave, it would need to compress, massively. It was a reverse of the original effect I had seen with the outer terminus of a vesicle. So, against that attempted compression, the stone simply stayed in place, held up against the force of gravity.

From the perspective of the stone, this was no different then staying in place when it was at the bottom of a mountain. That stone didn’t move, because while the force of the stone above it, an entire mountain, might be titanic, it was buoyed up by the stone beneath it. Which was held by the stone beneath it, and so on.

The source of the upward force on the stone might be different than normal, but all that mattered was that the integrity of the stone was sufficient to hold against gravity.

Should scale up well, too. While there might be more weight total, it will be spread out over a larger interior volume.

For now, it was time to deal with the heat problem.

A quick application of the vacuum environmental setting, and the air was gone.

Still no idea where that goes. Air is still mass, System, can’t just decide it should be created or destroyed out of nothing.

I turned off the setting, and vacuum remained.

Now separated by a gap of vacuum, the surrounding stone was still heating, but much much slower.

Ultimately, left long enough, the interior of the pockets would get very cold. The larger they were, the colder they would get. Right, makes sense. Pockets naturally freeze, and vesicles naturally heat, until they reach some equilibrium.

Next step, material testing.

Coating the inner terminus, and the shell around the vacuum of the outer terminus, with various materials was easy enough. I even chose the best material, for both, on my first attempt.

Mainly because humanity had already been to space.

I pictured a satellite, and gold foil wrapped around metal struts and shining in the light of an unfiltered sun was the first thing that popped into my head.

So, an incredibly smooth layer of gold soon covered both.

Of course, I tested with a ton of other materials, and tried non-polished surfaces, as well, but it turned out that perfectly smooth gold really was the best material. Not just to reflect infrared radiation from the pocket, but also to ensure that the outer layers of the pocket was emitting as little heat radiation as possible.

Honestly, I thought I would need different materials for each of those effects. Makes gold foil an amazing insulator in a vacuum.

It wasn’t perfect, of course, but I didn’t think that was actually possible.

All I needed was to make the transfer of heat so slow that using ambient mana to maintain the temperatures was essentially free.

I stopped for a moment as a thought struck me.

I would be able to stop all the normal radiation from moving out of the pockets, but wouldn’t be able to do anything about the mana. And, just as I had seen before, to the world it would seem like there was a much higher density of mana inside, so that would flow outwards...

Except, inside each pocket, would be living things, all producing their own mana. A small bit of my own mana went into plants and animals when they were mutating, but they gave much more back in the end. And my own aura, spread through…

Wait.

My aura looked normal inside both the pockets and vesicles.

Guess it automatically compensated?

And I had failed to notice.

Not sure if it just moved aura around or automatically made more for the pockets and unwove the aura when I made vesicles.

I’ll need to check the mana expenditure when doing each.

Admittedly, checking mana expenditure was probably something dungeons would normally do obsessively. I had certainly been careful with it until I figured out how to turn ambient mana into something I could harvest and store.

Still, this had the potential to solve that problem.

Every pocket with living organisms would be generating mana, and then that mana would flow out of the pocket, raising the overall level of ambient mana for the rest of the dungeon.

They are mana generators, on a large scale.

It hadn’t just solved my space problems, the skill looked like it would solve any mana problems, as well.

Build enough of these, and I will never run out of mana. Even if I had to start over, somewhere without the ridiculous mana from the volcano, I could still build everything I wanted.

Yeah, I can see why this qualified as a breaker skill. Use it properly, and it breaks a dungeon’s normal limitations.