บท 12: Unveiled
Almost immediately, Lokus recognized the futility of continuing.
Extending his Domain outward from himself sounded simple on paper, but in practice, it was every bit as impossible as he remembered it to be. He might as well have been willing his body to sprout another hand or a tail.
But in this dark place, he had no other option if he wanted to see where he was going, and so he persisted.
'What was it she had said?' Lokus thought. 'Think of my Domain as the eye, and my body as the eyelid.'
He shook his head with an exasperated sigh. It sounded like complete nonsense to him, but it was all he had to work off of.
'Eyes, eyelid… Eyes, eyelid… Eyes… Eyelid…'
He chanted those words again and again in his mind, scouring every inch of himself for a sign of gaps, curtains, or anything resembling a seam, but he found nothing. Realizing he needed to shift his approach, he hummed thoughtfully.
'Maybe I'm looking at this all wrong. I doubt she meant it in the literal sense.' That had been obvious to him from the get-go, but for a moment he had hoped that he had simply misunderstood. As it turned out, he had been right the first time.
'If only this damned system would say something. So much for guiding me.'
He snorted when he didn't hear a notification. Of course it wouldn't help him out here.
'All right, then. My body can't 'open' like my eyelids can, so how else would something leak out? My breathing? No, that doesn't sound right.'
He shuddered just then, goosebumps forming and the hair on his arms raising as he recalled almost drowning mere minutes ago.
It was that very pool of liquid that made him hesitant to move from his current spot. Without being able to see his way forward, he could unknowingly walk right into it and go through that all over again.
He rubbed a hand on his arm absentmindedly as he tried to banish those thoughts. '…Wait a minute.'
These goosebumps. His pores!
If he wasn't sitting down, he might have kicked himself for not realizing it sooner. In his search for a "gap" in himself for his Domain to escape through, he had cast his net far too narrow, only looking for something like the slit of a closed eyelid.
Only now did it occur to Lokus that the "eyelid" he was looking for was much more inconspicuous, and existed all over him.
He had figured out part of the puzzle, but he didn't congratulate himself. There was still the other, likely harder task of coaxing his Domain through these pores of his.
'Will the goosebumps affect it?' he wondered. 'Surely not, right?'
Soon, he learned there was little to worry about. Although the goosebumps did seem to block off the pores on his arms and legs, they didn't extend to the rest of his body.
He pressed his Domain up against the bounds of his flesh, feeling it rebound and falter against his skin just as it had the last couple of times he tried this. But now that he knew how to do it, at least in theory, the rest of it came easy.
He pushed his Domain through the hundreds of thousands of small holes still open across his body like he was shoving meat through a grinder, his body subconsciously relaxing as the unnerving experience of being blind to the world began to fade.
An invisible sphere began to expand with him as the center, and piece by piece, Lokus' surroundings were revealed to him.
The rocky ground under his legs, the edges of the lake he had fallen in, and dozens of small rocks, all were projected within his mind in stark relief.
While things like smell, taste, and even color weren't detectable with this new ability of his, he had essentially extended his range of touch to everywhere in a radius a little under four meters from him.
Lokus' Domain, while filling him with a sense of confidence, was not infinite. As it was, it only painted the surroundings in this radius, leaving him largely lost within what he knew to be a massive underground cavern.
So when he spied the corner of his sled within his Domain, it wasn't until he walked over that he discovered what happened when a pile of bones fell for several kilometers.
[Quest "Expanded Domain" complete!
Reward: Opening of the Celestial Gateways (Noble Throne, Prince)]
[Your Perception has improved!]
The influx of information distracted him from what he found, but only temporarily.
His sled, what he had been hoping would buy him a few nights with a comfortable bed and some warm food, hadn't been as lucky as Lokus was during its descent.
The bones were smashed to bits, the hide had been ripped to shreds, and its contents had almost all broken on impact. The cloaked woman's fire poker was a mess of warped steel, and the claws he had been carrying inside the sled were nothing but useless chunks of keratin.
Only the leather bag the woman had given him remained intact, a shocking fact considering even the bones of the demon he had slain hadn't survived the fall.
He accepted this loss with only mild agitation. After all, without a city to sell all of it off to, it was little more than junk.
'But my weapon – err, my fire poker is gone,' he thought sadly. It hadn't been with him long, but it had already saved his life once, and he had no idea what he would encounter in this chasm.
As if on cue, a soft growl interrupted the impromptu funeral, and he turned his head on instinct toward the sound, a pointless endeavor considering it was as dark as it always had been down here.
A figure stalked into the short range of his Domain. It was a tiger-like beast, with rippling muscles and thick legs matched only by its sharp claws. Although it lacked eyes, it seemed to have no trouble seeing Lokus in the dark, its tail swishing back and forth behind it and its front half lowered as it readied to pounce.
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