Chapter 250 - Mind and Space! Part-4

{15th July 1992}

{Rigel's POV}

When the tome shifted to the next seam, I expected more dissection, another set of surgical halts and starts. Instead, the memories moved faster, seamlessly transitioning from one stage of experiment regarding the newly found anchor point to the next.

—

Dhanvantri's first step beyond the soul-clone was modest. He began by trying to make the tether do something besides act as a leash. If the tether was a cord tying consciousness to his body, serving as insurance to return to it, could he nudge the other end and make the cord pull the world around it?

He sat in the middle of his chamber, eyes closed, palms flat on his knees. The air hummed. He didn't speak a single word—no loud incantation, nothing like wand waving theatrics—and sent an extra blaze of mana down the tether. It was less a forceful push and more a suggestion: his intent blazing to move himself instead of going back.

The effect was not immediate, but it did move him. His body, originally frozen, blinked a few inches along aether. It was a soft movement that he would have missed easily if he had not been paying attention. He frowned, went back to his body to note the changes, recorded his attempts, and tried again.

'Anchors can respond to intent. They are like a fulcrum for the local frame of reference.'

That phrasing—fulcrum—was important. It meant the anchor wasn't just a tether. It was also the hinge around which a mind measured its own position in the world. If you could leverage the anchor, you could move into the local space.

—

The next experiments were reckless and elegant. He trained the soul-clone to move with intent and to pull the tether through angles along the local space. The clone would float ahead—ten paces, twenty—then focus its will back along the thin silver line. The body experienced a new sensation: a small jerk, as if the world had hiccupped and shifted itself a fraction of an inch along the way. Objects near the tether line were displaced, as if briefly unconvinced of their own coordinates before they settled down.

Dhanvantri called this phenomenon space folding. He was using his soul clone to leverage the anchor point in his mind, moving along an invisible line and destabilizing his world for just a fraction of a moment.

At first, the movements were small—an inch here, a handspan there. He catalogued the deformation: the fold radius, the mana density required to stabilize it and facilitate the move, the time the fold could hold before it experienced a pushback, and the moment of magic ended.

—

A simple idea was already outlined: create a node in space-time anchored to the soul point, skew the immediate metric, and then step through the skew.

The next breakthrough came unexpectedly. Dhanvantri wondered if he could skip the soul-clone entirely—move the body by manipulating the anchor directly. He followed the same first step that separated mind from body, but instead of detaching, he fixed his intent on movement.

For days, he failed. The tether resisted, his body trembled, and the wards around him cracked under the stress. Then, one evening, it happened.

The chamber vanished.

He reappeared suspended in open sky.

There was no sound at first—only stillness. The world itself seemed to pause for him. Birds hung mid-flap, clouds drifted like heavy cloth; even the wind moved sluggishly, as if he were watching a slow-motion illusion. Time was stretched thin.

Before panic could set in, gravity remembered him. He plummeted. A reflexive charm fired, halting the fall in a jolt of mana that left his limbs trembling.

He hovered there, high above the mountains, watching the valley below with something between terror and exhilaration. Far below, the silver line of a river glimmered like a cut vein. The edges of his vision pulsed gray; the mana drain from the displacement had been enormous.

“This isn’t classical Apparition,” he muttered between breaths. “No splinching, no compression through intermediary space. This is… a remapping. A temporary breach through the fabric of space along a single vector.”

He turned his gaze upward, where he had willed himself moments ago, and let out a shaky laugh. “I suppose I should be thankful I thought of going up. A rock wall would’ve been less forgiving.”

Still, elation lit his eyes as he drifted down toward the ground, each step of descent cushioning itself on invisible air. He had folded space—and survived.

—

He returned to the sanctum after his short trip outside, exhausted but alive, and began refining the technique. He quickly noted down his observations on the technique:

Space folding was directional, his intent determined the exit point.

The distance scaled nonlinearly with mana output—twice the mana did not mean twice the range, instead it exploded until, in his experiments, he went quite a bit farther than he intended.

Folding distorted nearby matter, even stable wards rippled if he passed through them. He had tried the displacement through solid mental, and although the worst case wasn't true with his body occupying the same space as a solid rock, thus leading to his demise, the space his body occupied was simply displaced to the surroundings. Although he had to suffer through a brief moment of suffocation before he blinked back to his cave, at least he now had a perfect statue to place.

Each test carried risk, but Dhanvantri’s fascination drowned out his caution. He recorded everything. His experiments grew more complex—rings of intersecting lines labeled as he drew out his own arithmancy equations for this new branch of magic, fold vectors, anchor bias, and mana ratio decay.

Soon, he developed smaller, controlled folds—a blink-step. He would shift across the lab in bursts, skipping like a shadow between frames of reality. The displacement was instant, but the world froze and slowed down around him for several seconds, suggesting the space itself took time to “heal” from his passage.

He theorized that you could use this ability to theoretically achieve flight as a minor offshoot of this art—a limited manipulation of one’s anchor to resist the pull of gravity. He was intending to put it away for later experiments, but after getting a handle on blink-step, he was curious to test it.

—

Instead of bending the anchor through space, he biased it upward, using just enough mana to alter his body’s frame of reference. Slowly, his feet lifted off the floor. Not a graceful float as his control quivered, but a quiet, deliberate levitation different from all the spells.

“Gravity,” he whispered, “is only an agreement within the space-time plane. I can influence it the same way I can breach the space barrier holding the world together...”

He hovered there, robes brushing faintly against air, the silver tether humming like a plucked string. For the first time, he wasn’t bound to the world’s definition of direction.

He had learned to fold space—and to reject its pull.

—

The vision faded, leaving behind a soft afterglow in my mind. My heartbeat was steady, my breath calm, but a sense of awe remained as I took in what I had just seen. I had witnessed Dhanvantri defy the most fundamental rules of magic—that space was fixed, immutable.

My hand twitched unconsciously, fingers brushing the side of my head where I knew the anchor point rested. I could feel it now, humming faintly beneath my skull. A new line of code had been written into my instincts, waiting for testing.

...

[Secret Mana Art Learned: Space Folding Lv-1]

[Secret Mana Art Learned: Levitation Lv-1]

...

I stared at the glowing words until they faded.

“Space folding,” I murmured. “Not teleportation… not flight. Just redrawing the rules of where you are.”

And for the first time, the world around me didn’t feel entirely solid.

...