Seven days into his grinding session, while emptying his energy every ten seconds in the most efficient way he found while still trying to automatize his energy pool emptying, an announcement was made in the global system for a new progress bar that would track in real-time the progress of ether density in the Universe Dimension.

But while some thought that once the bar attained +100% the situation would once again change and something would happen, like a new dimension would become available, the true meaning behind this progress bar was revealed in the wiki.

It was actually a pretty meaningless bar, the percentage increase was linked to the last ether density that caused a “major event” to happen, and the next change could therefore occur as much at +5% as it could at +425%.

Universe Dimension Ether Density (Void Dimension Opening basis): +0%

Useless, wasn’t it?

Concerning the grinding session in itself, Rune didn’t find it to be difficult. With no biological needs annoying him from his original body side, his mind was always clear of any distractions and he could fully focus on keeping his energy pool empty.

As for boredom, after getting the gist of emptying his energy pool efficiently, the wiki and the board were much better entertainment than he could have asked for.

With nothing to worry about except repeatedly doing the same thing, he could passionately visit every new form of entertainment born from the fusion between already existing written entertainment culture and the forums of the information board.

Be they books, unusual and funny news, fake news, or even conspiracy theories, everything was a form of entertainment if you wanted it to be, and Rune wasn’t a picky user in his situation, he could laugh creepily at a lot of things if he wanted too.

The only notable downside was the lack of music or any sound for that matter. The absolute silence of the Void Dimension was something heavy, worse than even an isolation room in making you feel isolated.

Rune, like everyone else, couldn’t split his awareness, activating only the sense of hearing of his original body was possible according to the wiki, but he couldn’t do it.

He of course tried, who wouldn’t? But he stopped when he successfully got to see his own ether soul, surrounded by a cloud of something, this cloud was his awareness, and he couldn’t get it to move.

At all.

If someone actually succeeded at manipulating theirs, even only in one body, that person didn’t announce it, and if some did, then it was either treated as fake or straight-up ignored due to it not being conceivable for the majority.

Rune wasn’t left behind with all the news concerning the dangerous grounds circulating around, and after his planned ten days and a half, that became more than eleven days of grinding, were over, he opened the global system.

Dimensions

Information Board

Ether Wiki

Event (1 reward pending)

Avatar

He knew he had just completed the key head-start goal he had set for himself.

Throughout those eleven days, he had already claimed 3 objectives, but he didn’t invest in anything. He just continued to use his energy and it took nearly all his attention.

It took so much of it that he wasn’t able to gather resources while using his energy. He had tried. And he failed. And he wasted time as a result.

‘Finally.’

Having completed the chore phase of his plan, he could now move onto the much more interesting part which consisted in first investing in perception and momentum, starting another type of grinding journey.

But first, he had to claim his reward, so he opened the event window.

Event

Void Initiation

Gather a total of 100 ether-rich resources from the Void Dimension: 10 000 EP

Gather a total of 1 000 ether-rich resources from the Void Dimension: 100 000 EP

Gather a total of 10 000 ether-rich resources from the Void Dimension: 1 000 000 EP

Travel more than 100 kilometers in the Void Dimension: 10 000 EP

Travel more than 1 000 kilometers in the Void Dimension: 100 000 EP

Travel more than 10 000 kilometers in the Void Dimension: 1 000 000 EP

Survey the Void Dimension for 100 hours: 10 000 EP (COMPLETE)

Survey the Void Dimension for 1 000 hours: 100 000 EP

Survey the Void Dimension for 10 000 hours: 1 000 000 EP

Discover a special resource: 10 000 EP

Discover 10 different special resources: 100 000 EP

Discover 100 different special resources: 1 000 000 EP

Use 10 000 total energy in any way: 10 000 EP (COMPLETE)

Use 100 000 total energy in any way: 100 000 EP (COMPLETE)

Use 1 000 000 total energy in any way: 1 000 000 EP (COMPLETE) (Claim?)

Attain 100 in any individual stat: 100 000 EP

Attain 1 000 total stats: 1 000 000 EP

Completion Bonus: 10 000 000 EP

The 100 hours was the only objective other than the energy use ones he had completed, it represented only 4 days after all, not like 10 000 hours which equaled more than a year.

After claiming his relatively hard-earned Ether Points, he opened his avatar window and the equivalent of a status window appeared.

Avatar (Basic Rank) (Tier 1)

EP: 1 161 410

Stats Total: 96

Health: 5

Health Regeneration: 1

Strength: 1

Cohesion: 1

Energy: 10

Energy Regeneration: 65

Purity: 10

Affinity: 1

Momentum: 1

Perception: 1

‘And now I can claim the 100 individual stat reward.’

Everything was logical and natural, step by step, his plan was coming to life.

He invested 990 000 EP into his perception.

And not having closed his event window, he could see one of the objective changes.

Attain 100 in any individual stat: 100 000 EP (COMPLETE) (Claim?)

However, it wasn’t the most shocking, because, in just a moment, he went from blind to becoming able to truly… See.

Everything in a 100 meters radius from his avatar body, a 200 meters wide sphere in total, was now part of his perception. And for the first time since he entered the Void Dimension, he saw floating rocks in the absolute nothingness and silence he had nearly become used to.

But the perception stat alone didn’t allow for his farming ether resources plan to come to life, the momentum part was still missing.

So he invested every remaining EP except 10 000 EP, which he kept as a security amount in case of death, into his momentum stat.

Avatar (Basic Rank) (Tier 1)

EP: 11410

Stats Total: 221

Health: 5

Health regeneration: 1

Strength: 1

Cohesion: 1

Energy: 10

Energy regeneration: 65

Purity: 10

Affinity: 1

Momentum: 27

Perception: 100

‘With this, I should be ahead by at least several weeks at worst, months at best.’

Smiling without realizing it, Rune innerly felt very proud of what he had achieved.

Following his train of thoughts, he remembered the rest of his plan, the farming plan. This part consisted in just gathering ether resources, he could effortlessly remember it as it was the primary reason why he did everything else to begin with.

Executing it was, however, a different thing.

With his previous 1 momentum, he just wasn’t able to move, even when he reached his maximum speed, it was only 1 meter per minute, a derisory distance in a derisory amount of time.

Now though, he could feel himself moving when he wanted to move.

On the information board, it was mentioned that to move at your maximum momentum speed, or your momentum stat meters per minute, you really needed to exert your mind and push for that speed.

Now that he had a momentum stat big enough, he finally understood why some people complained that moving beyond half of your maximum was too hard.

‘It’s like I’m pushing something heavy! On a slope! Of course I’m climbing!’

Was the spontaneous inner joke he made to feel better at this totally new strain he had never felt before.

Moving with the momentum stat was like doing both an intensive mental and a physical exercise at the same time, it wasn’t like the perception sphere which was only acting in the background.

Rune could perfectly, even effortlessly, continue to use his perception sphere to see all the floating rocks he passed by while going at his momentum speed.

Before starting to gather resources, however, he withdrew his awareness from his avatar and returned to his original body.

Upon returning, the pure silence faded and was replaced by the constant background noise of life, the background noise of the world in general.

This noise was the sound of the wind, some far-away city noises, his family listening to things too loudly… The last was more likely to be Miro and Miri playing video games with bomb noise in it.

‘Does someone who became deaf and was then healed feel like that? It’s so strange…’

Rune nearly thought cringey stuff like “re-discovering my own world”, but he contained himself and just enjoyed the feeling of hearing things again.

Becoming used to his own body again, it was pretty intuitive considering he lived more than 20 years in it, he started to inspect it.

Before departing, he had left his body on his bed in the recovery position, maybe he was a little paranoid but choking himself in case his energy loop stopped working for whatever reason wasn’t a part of his plan, not now, and not in the future.

Ascertaining everything was fine, he decided to check out the house. A total of 10 days spent in the Void Dimension was the same as having been away on a 10-day trip after all, wasn’t it? And coming back home after that long was one of the most pleasurable moments from his own experience.

Because coming back meant he would just be doing nothing for the better part of all incoming days! Lazing about had been his main life objective when he had been a student.

Going down the stairs he knew so much, he stopped in the middle. He had seen something truly amazing and his world-view changed in but a moment.

No, it wasn’t his 10 perception stat manifesting themselves.

Better than those 10 perception stat points his original body now had access to, he realized that it wasn’t his twin little brothers that were playing, it was his twin little sisters. It was not often that he saw Victoria and Floria playing video games.

‘Were they enlightened by my little brothers?’

It was only an interlude in his coming-back house inspection, but unfortunately for his excited spirit, nothing else out of place appeared to exist.

His absence had changed nothing.

Being the eldest and not a talkative one at that, he only observed for a moment before returning to his bedroom with a glass of very cold peach ice tea in hand. It was also something he had missed.

‘Eleven days… I should at least see if something interesting has been released, then I’ll deactivate my energy revitalization and see what happens.’

Rune wanted to have some serious heavy-budget entertainment before turning off the energy loop that made him either a god gamer or an ascetic.

Depends on your education.

…

After having his right dose of entertaining videos and even finding some very funny ones with the new trend of using the gained stats to make previously unrealistic events happen in real life, Rune was so addicted that he couldn’t stop watching.

His jaw muscles were hurting as he couldn’t stop smiling and laughing. Thank Ether, his room was correctly isolated.

Rushed professional productions like “IRL Blind Ninja”, “Arcade Rhythm'', “Breaking World Records With A Finger” were in top tendencies and kept getting more views for a good reason.

There was no end to innovative people publishing their own version of an eccentric use of their newly gained power, and as a spectator, he simply saw no end to the number of things he had to watch.

That only stopped when he decided to stop the loop of energy that kept him from feeling his body needs.

5 minutes after stopping the loop, tiredness started to appear and accumulated like he had pulled tens of all-nighters at once and his body was finally running out of solution to counter the escalating need for sleep.,

His body seemed to have ignored everything biology-related because of ether-bullsh*t, and now that it was over, his body started to protest and send emergency signals that it was time to sleep.

For ten days, his human body had to adapt to something completely new, and it had really tried its best.

But how could it manage energy that acted completely autonomously? Energy appeared in his blood and got where it should go, that was the extent of the revitalization technique.

Having just turned off the energy loop, he was not hungry or thirsty but his body felt light like it was floating, like it had just done a month-long fast.

As described in the wiki, energy revitalization didn’t do anything to transform the body or was a miraculous medicine.

Everyone was still a defective law life form, a flawed form of life that acted under a different law from that of the Ether Law.

What was common for everyone though was that by using energy revitalization, you couldn’t keep being awake for more than a month. After a month of time had passed, more or less, you would find yourself falling unconscious in but a moment.

The wiki explained this fact with something found in lots of other pieces of intel: It’s linked to the ether soul. The ether soul was something so detailed on the wiki now that everyone was gradually stopping to use this name.

A much more graspable name was being used in the forum: Spirit.

All the definition of the ether soul pointed towards this fact, the ether soul was the spirit, your soul was the spirit, your spirit was the soul… It was yourself, not your energy, not your body, yourself.

One month was the limit your own spirit could keep itself awake continuously before needing to recover from 1 month of high spiritual activity, or to strengthen more exactly rather than to recover.

Everything seemed to be trainable in this new era it seemed.

As he carefully experienced the change happening as much as he could, he started to wonder why he still didn’t test the application of using momentum here, in the Universe Dimension.

Shifting his focus to his still active background perception sphere, he could instantly see in a 10 meters sphere around him.

Now that he was back on the Universe side, he started to really realize what 10 meters represented.

It was huge. It was also uninterrupted.

His perception sphere wasn’t interrupted by solid matter, or maybe it wasn’t interrupted because it was not matters that could resist a power coming from the Ether Law? Or the defective law was still in majority? Who knows…

In the same way, he tried to float by willing his body to move upwards but Rune only felt himself lightening a little, he didn’t move at all.

Checking the forum, he realized that lots of people tried to do the same, but as regular gravity was around 1g, or 10 m/s², you would need a momentum stat of 600, or 10 meters per second, to attain theoretical balance and act like gravity didn’t exist anymore, countering an acceleration of 10 m/s² with one of 10 meters per second.

This little experiment meant that to escape gravity, everyone would still have to rely on spaceships for a long time, as for the gravity in the Void Dimension…

Well, he would be dead before realizing it from what he understood if he really tried some experiment with an etherized gravity, even if there was still no explanation as to why etherized gravity killed you…

After only 15 minutes, he decided that sleeping now just meant a more effective resource gathering later, so Rune decided to sleep now, then do a 1-month continuous resource gathering session.

So he just stripped down to his underpants and 5 minutes later, he was asleep.

…

Waking up after what felt like one entire day, which in reality was just over ten hours, he felt completely refreshed and full of motivation.

Repeating his usual waking routine, the only difference this time was that he had his perception sphere showing him things across the whole house.

After having enough of seeing everything, he just cut it off, it was easy, like closing his eyes. His perception sphere wasn’t gone per say, just put aside until he focused on it again.

“Work” was awaiting him, and it wasn’t going to do itself.

Once he was ready, he started his preparations.

‘I’ll be able to browse the board and the wiki while I’m traveling, so nothing’s stopping me.’

When he decided it was time to go, he remade an energy loop in his body and felt his hazy morning mind evaporate instantly, replaced by peak clarity and capacity that should only be attainable by taking stimulants.

He couldn’t judge the quality of the energy loop he made, but it probably wasn’t of the same quality as the previous one, he had gone through 10 days of just emptying his energy pool as fast as possible after all.

It had maybe been an effective training in energy manipulation?

He then willed his awareness to go to his avatar side.

One moment he was in his bedroom, the other he was in the Void Dimension,

‘Welcomed by the sound of silence, the sound of silence! If only I could hear some music now… It would be so nice.’

Dreaming about a fantastic future that would maybe come to be or maybe not, he focused on moving through his momentum and he started to accelerate.

The more he focused, the faster he moved. And as his perception sphere covered everything in a 100 meters radius of his avatar body, he could retroactively calculate his approximate speed from the floating rocks he passed by.

By judging them to be immobile of course.

At some point, he felt his momentum speed reach its maximum. He knew he had reached his momentum’s maximum speed like he knew this lifeless piece of rock was 56 meters away, probably a newly born instinct.

Even increasing the mental effort did nothing from this point onwards, beyond was a wall he couldn’t push, a totally immovable wall that could be called “stat limit”.

And while maintaining the level of focus necessary to keep his maximum speed was difficult, it wasn’t as impossible as the information made it out to be. And even if he relaxed a little and lost a few meters per second, it wouldn’t be that relevant if a very long period of time wasn’t taken into account.

Now that he was launched, he only had to become used to going at his maximum speed of 27 meters per minute.

Opening the system to “learn” things, maintaining his maximum speed, and paying attention to what was happening in his perception sphere, those were the 3 things he had to perfect for his resource gathering activity to be optimized.

The first, while factually secondary, was still important in the long run. Every bit and piece of new knowledge had its utility, and combining a thousand pieces could potentially give him an inkling of something surprising.

Rune saw himself as a newbie dimensional explorer, a new career with a weird market and description, and as such, he had to learn everything he could while he had the possibility to.

If he had to give his opinion, he wouldn’t be surprised at all if the amount of work needed to become a true dimensional explorer was more than what he did to get his exploration engineer diploma. At least not a mediocre one.

Having just started, however, he was still very unused to doing everything at the same time, so he didn’t open anything entertaining yet and first tried to get used to his new situation, establishing a routine as fast as he could.

And he had an idea as to how to accelerate it…

‘In restless dreams, I walked alone…’

Humming a song in his own mind, he gradually started to split his attention between what would look like a dreary future for some, but was for him only an expanse of potential only asking to be unearthed.

It was impossible to talk in the Void, but at last, Rune heard a piece of sapient culture hummed by his own mind, alone in the middle of another dimension.

And the world continued on, stopping for no one.