As I floated in the Place between Places, I set my visual interface to my personal setting instead of the default and looked out into the vastness that spread out in all directions. This Dimension, Universe, Realm? The realm, I liked that word for this location. This realm was filled with colors that moved and swirled. I released some nanites and found that this medium was more like the Astral Planes I’d encountered. It was gaseous and dispersed as opposed to the vacuum of space. I had thought it was similar to the dimension of chaos but now realized I was wrong. My nanites detected all types of magic. Unlike Chaos, the medium wasn’t morphing or changing, for the most part. I could identify those areas that were made up of chaos because they did change but then I’d find areas of earth magic, air magic Fire magic as well as small areas that contained multiple different kinds of magic. I also found physical particles of every element that I knew of and a couple of variations I had not seen before. They were dispersed, but they were present.

First things first, I thought about making a place to call my own here but realized in this vast nothingness, it would stand out. Instead, I looked into my soul space. Was it visible from the outside? I released some of my nanites and willed myself into my soul space. I connected with the nanites hovering around my entry point and they detected nothing in any spectrum they could see in. There was probably a way to detect another’s soul space, but I currently didn’t have that ability, or did I? I willed myself back into the Place between Places and tried to will myself to see soul spaces. Yeah, that didn’t work because I didn’t have a frame of reference. Without someone out here with me, I might not be able to. Maybe it was as simple as casting a detect soul spell, so I did. It was successful but not helpful. I detected my soul and couldn’t detect anything else. I dispelled Detect Soul and willed a detect soul spell that detected all other souls except for mine. I watched as a green snaking line of light led off into the distance. I followed the line of energy until it stopped. I didn’t see anything that stood out.

I cycled through my vision, trying every single spectrum but saw nothing. I moved right to where the green line of energy ended and noted that it seemed to go into something. I magnified my vision and noted that particles were avoiding a very small area, no larger than the size of a quarter that the green line of energy came up against. I brought up my finger to touch the dead zone and my mind was attacked by a consciousness that tried to enter me. It failed. I tried to send a question into the soul, but my mind hit a wall and I was locked out. I started to strengthen my will to force my way through the barrier when I received a warning.

WARNING: You are trying to access another’s Soul Space without their permission. This will lead to a contest of wills. Soul damage to you or your target may result if you continue.

Do You wish to invade the Soul of Camaxtli?

That name was Aztec, or sounded like Aztec in nature. Was this the soul of an Aztec that had become lost in this place? There was only one way to find out, I chose “Yes” and heard an audible pop as a release of energy, equivalent to a small stick of dynamite went off and I was flung away from where the soul space of Camaxtli had been.

The soul space of Camaxtli has been ruptured.

You have taken 1,234 points of force damage

I brought myself to a stop and willed myself back through the wave of force to the point where the soul’s space had been. I waved my hand through the now empty area and looked around. The soul space was gone. I tried to summon Camaxtli, with no success. I tried to teleport to Camaxtli, again with no success. I checked my Combat Log which only consisted of one line, which is why it hadn’t even been flagged for my attention.

The Soul of Camaxtli has been completely disincorporated

Disincorporated? I’d have to find another Soul and figure out what had happened. I cast the spell to find another soul again. This time I received a system message.

No Targets within Range

There could be other souls out there, but it looked like they were pretty rare out here. So, either the souls were disincorporated, on their own, or they were destroyed by individuals that didn’t know what they were doing. The ones still floating around must be extremely rare then. My high luck had let me find one, but not even my luck could prevent a lightbulb from exploding when you put way too much power through it. That’s probably what happened when I tried to break inside. I was making a lot of assumptions though and this was no longer something I could explore so I decided to redirect my attention to the real reason I came out into the Place between Places.

I willed myself into my soul space and set up a copy of my Place of Power back from when this all started. I like the aesthetic of the setup and it just felt right. I also redirected the quantum links for my nanites so that I could call them up on the monitors in this place of power as I desired. That way I watch them like a program instead of in my head. I’d still be watching in my head, but it would give me something to do with the projection of myself I had in here. I wanted to be able separate those two in my mind just in case I needed to have my projection do something or entertain someone. I also wanted to check something. I willed a portal into existence from my living room on the 1st floor to Ne’lix’s office and was pleasantly surprised when that worked.

Ne’lix looked through the portal, saw that it was me, and asked, “Adam? Can I help you?”

“Hey Ne’lix, just testing something out, don’t need any help, keep up the good work,” I said as I closed the portal.

So, I could open a portal from within my soul space into a Cosmos. Was it just one cosmos, or others? Over the next couple of minutes, I opened portals to locations in every cosmos that I’d ever visited where I had nanites that had no one around. I did not try to step through at this point, I just wanted to see if I could open the portals. Next, I tried opening portals to two different Cosmos at the same time. Even with my mana sitting at 1.61E+36 and my mana regeneration sitting at 1.08E+34 mana per second each time I opened a portal into a cosmos my mana bar take a serious hit.

I watched my mana bar as I opened a portal then maintained it and realized that the mana cost to open these portals was by percentage, not a number. After I did a couple of tests I figured out that it was 10% of my mana to open a portal and 1% per minute to maintain it. If I opened a second portal it was 20% of my mana to open the portal but still only 1% to maintain. A third portal was 40% of my mana making it a total of 70%. I didn’t try to open the fourth portal though I was pretty sure it would cost 80% of my mana to do so. If I opened one portal I’d be back to full mana in 11 seconds, two would take 22 seconds, three would take 43 seconds and four portals at the same time would take 92 seconds if I was trying to maintain all four portals at the same time. I could open three portals at the same time and would be able to open that fourth portal 66 seconds later. It looked like entities with unlimited amounts of mana still wouldn’t be able to open that fifth portal without some outside help. Also, I was betting there was a minimum amount of mana required to open a portal into or out of a Cosmos so beings couldn’t come and go as they wished. Then again that was covered, wasn’t it? I was a special case because of my exposure to primal chaos. If my assumptions were correct of course.

Of course, that wasn’t the reason I’d come to this place. I needed to see if I could still manifest or cross over from within my soul. The first thing I tried was to have my projection crossover

ERROR You may not Crossover into any Cosmos from within your Soul Space. You may cross over with your soul-space either unattached or attached to one of your projections.

Not surprised, I chose the manifestation option.

You have chosen to Manifest a portion of yourself within a Cosmos. Please choose your target Cosmos and Destination.

I visualized my place of power in the Cosmos that I had started in and a new prompt appeared.

Manifestations are limited by the laws of the target Cosmos. While all earned Soul Abilities are available when your soul space crosses over the soul abilities available to your soul shard during a manifestation must be chosen and paid for with Karmic Luck. The cost is based on the number of soul abilities taken. You may choose two for free. The third Soul Ability will cost 100 Karmic Luck, the fourth will cost 200 Karmic Luck, the fifth with cost 400 Karmic Luck, and so on.

Please chose from your following Soul Abilities. Any Soul Abilities that are grayed out are not available within the target Cosmos.

“Perfect Memory”

“Pansophical”

“Temporally Inviolate” – Permanent, Always Active

“Chaos Forged” – Permanent, Always Active

“Chaos Tempered – Permanent, Always Active

“Adaptable” -Requires Convergence

“Willed-Movement” -Requires Convergence

“Incessant”

“Resistant”

“Open to new Ideas”

“Convergence”

“Spellweaver”

“Soul Storage” – Requires Convergence

“Affluent” – Requires Convergence

“Allegiance”

I reviewed the list quickly, noted that it looked like five would be free, and chose all fifteen soul abilities.

You have chosen fifteen Soul Abilities, two are free, and three incur no cost. The Karmic Luck cost to add all 15 soul abilities to your manifestation is 102,300 Karmic Luck.

Next, you must choose the level your manifestation will appear as. Manifestations are hard-limited to the Cosmos to which they are assigned. The maximum level possible is the highest level available in the Target Cosmos. Levels are paid for by spending experience points. You may convert 1 Karmic Luck to 1 Experience point.

You may choose to manifest as a Divine following all progression rules to attain such levels. Should Divinity Points be required to progress through the different ranks of a deity Karmic Luck may be spent at a rate of 1 Karmic Luck for 1 Divinity Point.

I chose the maximum Divine Level

Karmic Luck cost is 5,500,000,000,000,000 (5,499,994,500,000,000 Divinity Points and 55,000,000,000 experience points.)

Please chose your manifestation type from the two available Projections: Adamantadine or Ahrem

I chose Adamantadine.

You have chosen to Manifest Adamantadine with 15 Soul Abilities at Maximum Deity Level for 5,500,000,000,102,300 Karmic Luck. Karmic Luck Spent in this way is tied up in your manifestation. When your manifestation ends you automatically recover the Karmic Luck spent. If the manifestation is utterly destroyed, something that can happen, All Karmic Luck spent on the manifestation is lost.

Would you Like to Create this Manifestation, Yes or No?

I chose “Yes” and then waited to see if I would feel any different. While I was waiting something about one of the messages that I received when Trix was eradicated crossed my mind. Trix hadn’t been a God Level being when I’d killed her though she’d been quite powerful. That meant that Textrix was out quite a bit of Karmic Luck. Getting worried, I wondered if I shouldn’t already be connected to my manifestation? I pulled up my links to the nanites in the Place of Power which very clearly saw a copy of myself looking around. Then a connection formed, and we synced up.

After some very quick conversations with myself at machine speed, I realized that the manifestation had indeed been created with nanites though none of the nanites in his body were quantumly linked with me or any of my previous nanites. They wouldn’t be as I had not created the manifestation, something else had. If I manifested a copy of myself somewhere there were no previously left nanites I’d have to crossover and make a link so I could keep track of the manifestation in real time or I’d have to wait until the manifestation returned. Except, that none of my manifestations were likely to return if they had nanites

The last thing I wanted my manifestation to try was to open a portal to my current location in my soul space.

“I received a message stating that only the Primary Projection may open a portal to and from locations inside ERROR.”

“That makes sense, we’ll now we’re connected so feel free to get back out there and have some fun, I’m going to set input from that Cosmos to unmonitored unless you contact me directly,” I said to him through our nanite connection

“Sounds good,” he said as the link went dead.

I double-checked my level of Karmic Luck and wasn’t at all surprised to see that it still showed as “Positive Error” So still effectively Infinite. I closed my interface and will myself out of my soul space and then crossed over into my Pluto base in the Vrax Cosmos, as I thought of it. No issue with crossing over, however, I could no longer connect with my manifestation. As I surmised, while my soul space was inside a cosmos I would not be able to monitor events from one of my manifestations. If my manifestations that could die did die would I receive their information? Time for a test

I crossed back over into the Place between Places and then connected to my nanites in the Universe my parents resided in on one of the many airless bodies away from civilization. The moon I chose didn’t even have a designation as it was on the other side of the Milky Way over 100,000 light years from Earth. My nanites knew about it, which meant that Thor here knew about it.

Thor, this is Adam, -Adam

Adam, where are you? -Thor

Very soon, two very basic copies of myself are going to appear within your influence at these stellar coordinates Do not assist or help them in any way. I am conducting a test and I need to see if this works. I’ll contact you within the next 24 hours to update you, and everyone else, maybe even go see my parents. -Adam

Okay, well talk then. -Thor

I created two chambers that would open sequentially, one after the other 30 seconds apart. I also programmed all the nanites in the area to ignore the appearance of two humans on the planet in the next five minutes. I chose to manifest two copies of myself. Both were level 1 and had only the abilities I could not terminate; Temporally Inviolate, Chaos Forged, and Chaos Tempered. I didn’t choose any other abilities for these manifestations because I wanted to see what happened to the soul shard. With no experience and no abilities chosen it only cost me 2 Karmic Luck to manifest both copies of myself. I had one manifest in each survival tube and then waited.

After 30 seconds I received a prompt.

A manifestation has returned, would you like to incorporate it now or wait?

I chose to wait, then crossed over into the Pluto base in the Vrax Cosmos again. After 30 seconds had passed and nothing happened. I set a timer and waited another five minutes before I crossed back over into the Place between Places and entered my soul space. As I did, a second message appeared.

A manifestation has returned, would you like to incorporate it now or wait?

I chose to incorporate it and the knowledge that the manifestation had learned washed over me. There was only one minute of life to review which consisted of “me” looking around, watching the other cylinder open, and my first copy flash freezing which 30 seconds later also happened to “me”. Additionally, an information tag was added to the memories with a unique character sequence “AD…002…XXX…ADA…003”. I opened up the message and chose to incorporate the first message and that tag was the same except it ended in 001.

I queried my interface for all Manifestation codes and found; AD…001…XXX…ADA…001, AD…002…XXX…ADA…001, and AD…002…XXX…ADA…002. It looked like the codes were generated based on the Universe and the number of manifestations I’d sent there. The “…” characters must be clipped because they were extremely long placeholders. If I was a betting man, that “ADA” meant Adam and if I ever manifested as Ahrem it would change that to “AHR”. That made sense, to me at least. The manifestations were being numbered based on how many I had created, not on the Universe I was sending them to. That Universe code was probably in the areas of the tag I couldn’t read. Not to worry, in the near future, I was pretty sure I had a way to break into that section of this interface.

The last tidbits of knowledge I learned from incorporating my two manifestations were that they did not have nanites in them, so having nanites was part of another one of my abilities. Also, they had all my memories right up until the time they were manifested. I set the nanites on that moon to recover the bodies and break down the chambers then pondered what to do next, I wanted these memories fresh in my head if I did what I think I was going to do.

For the Scientific Method to work I needed to have a large data set. Normally that took time and resources. I had plenty of resources and If I wasn’t mistaken I could probably create Gods across the multiverse, which I was pretty sure would be a very bad idea. Level 1 manifestations with all my abilities? That might work. Sure, they’d be relatively weak, but they’d have nanites and their skills would still be off the chart. Besides I wasn’t trying to rule Reality, I was trying to find a way to figure out what was going on. To get the information I needed, I would need my manifestations to be able to die so that the shard of myself I had tied up in them wouldn’t be stuck. Otherwise, I’d have to visit every single Cosmos and open the link and while that was a possibility to look into, it wasn’t something I wanted to do now. My copies would not be able to connect to the local nanite network or spread themselves out. If they didn’t do that they’d be able to self-destruct if they needed to return to me to give up the information they discovered

The last question was of course, how many could I make? Only one way to find out. I opened the Manifestation window.

You have chosen to Manifest a portion of yourself within a Cosmos. Please choose your target Cosmos and Destination.

I visualized one manifestation at a random habitable civilized location for humans in every known Cosmos

Criteria accepted if Karmic Luck permits.

I chose to give each manifestation all 15 soul abilities but started each out at only level 1. Of course, I chose all the manifestations to be Adamantadine.

You have chosen to create ERROR number of Adamantadine manifestations across ERROR number of Cosmos. This action will cost ERROR Karmic Luck

Are you sure you wish to do this? Yes or No?

It was Go Big or Go Home time. I chose “Yes”. A moment later the room I was in went dark as I felt a pulling and ripping sensation from an indescribable number of directions. I dropped unconscious.