The Runic Alchemist

96 kilometers of strange white substance. That was a lot.

They had spent 57 days digging a hole big enough for just one man to stand—Damian had to use a wormhole spell to use their erosion spells by throwing it inside. When they finally broke out—for a full hour, they didn’t even realize that they had done so. It was pitch black outside. When Damian finally stopped their bombardment and went down to check their progress—only then did he realize they had broken through the floor.

Damian alone went outside first. From where he came out—there didn’t seem to be any gravity. He could fly with his black fire being generated from his hands and feet, but for any traditional transcendent flying based on pulling themselves against gravity, it would not work out here.

There was nothing above—just dark abyssal sky, but there were distant stars in it. That was confusing.

Damian stood atop the white thing inside which they had been captured for so long—there was no gravity, so he could stand there without any problem. When he left the white thing and flew above—finally, he had a broader view of where exactly he was. After only flying a few meters, Damian had already noticed hundreds, no—thousands of long rectangular white boxes below the one he came out of—they were moving at a fixed speed around a giant grey planet. The white boxes were like satellites circling around the planet constantly—if only the satellites were in thousands upon thousands and all looked identical. He couldn’t even see the end of it all—it was spread all around him as far as his eyes could reach.

They were not as big as they should be though—there was no way any of them crossed even 5 km on their long side. And they had dug 96 km in just one direction, and that was thickness, not height. Maybe the dimensions from inside and outside were different somehow.

So.. they were in space?

No, that can’t be. He could breathe easily here. And the planet was not moving at all—it was still, fixed in one place.

Damian had seen such a thing before only once. When he transcended.

‘Is this the Demon Lord’s Astral Plain?’

That explained why the waygates did not work here. The white boxes allowed people to come here, temporarily shielding them, but not leave—once someone came here, the rules of the Astral Plain started applying to them. There was no exit because this place did not exist. A waygate can’t calculate the path and the needed time difference because Astral Plains are not physical places. It was outside of time.

Before the white box he came out of could go out of his sight, Damian used a waygate connecting to Sam—it worked. Confirming his hypothesis; he was together with him in this Astral Plain, so it worked. Maelor, Lucian, and Sam himself walked out of it. Sam could use his lightning energy to propel himself and keep stable in this empty space, but the two second-rankers had no way of staying still. Damian conjured two mana arms and held them with it—keeping them beside him.

“What is this place?”

Maelor asked, seeing the grey, lifeless planet below, which only had one giant black structure on it that looked like a giant palace and the thousands of rotating white rectangular boxes around it.

“Forget that. You used a waygate, right? We can use it—then let’s get out of here..” Sam interrupted him. Lucian looked towards Damian. She could read his face and knew it wasn’t good news even before he said anything.

“It’s not that simple..” said Damian, looking at Sam. “What does this place look like to you?”

Sam was a transcendent now, just like him. He needed to know if all third-rankers had their Astral Plains converted into a small planet when they started becoming transcendent.

“A dark place full of stars and a big round piece of land..” Sam muttered, looking around. A second later, his eyes widened, and Damian had his answer. Sam confirmed it with,

“It looks like my changed Astral Plain! It’s much bigger than mine..”

“Mine too..” Damian nodded. “The Demon Lord is a fourth-ranker, so that should be given.”

“Are you saying we are in an Astral Plain of that damned Demon Lord?!” Maelor asked, his face filled with utter shock.

“How do we get out?” Lucian asked the important question.

How does one get out of their Astral Plain? Only a success or failure in the ascension trial would give a way out to them. But will the thing that gives ascending choices to the Demon Lord work for them too? There was only one way to find out.

“Listen now..” Damian explained to the others his thought process as best as he could.

“What if it didn’t work?” Maelor asked.

“We will find some other way,” Lucian said with a straight face—if that was just acting or she truly had that much faith, Damian and the others could not tell. And something told him it was a good thing not knowing.

“Let’s go,” Damian said, and everyone nodded.

Damian released the dark fire from his palms and pushed towards the giant grey lifeless planet. Sam kept up beside him, releasing his lightning energy in low but constant intensity. It was a good thing the planet had no other structure than just one—it was very clear where they needed to go. The whole half of the giant grey planet that Damian could see was just filled with grey dirt and nothing else. The light was very dim, like it was late evening right after sunset. What a weird Astral Plain this was.

There was no source of light anywhere—there was no sun after all. But Damian’s own Astral Plain was a sunny forest and there was no sun anywhere. These places were not real—they did not obey the rules of physics. Their breathing alone here was unexplained by any means. Damian kept going for some 40 minutes only then did they reach near 3-4 km range of the surface.

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