It took me a bit longer than I thought it would, but I was finally finished. About time, really. I was not at all looking forward to doing even more, so it's good that it's done now.

  I didn't get much of a reward or anything beyond the one level pushing me from level 29 to level 30. I wasn't bothered by that, though. After all, I didn't do more than close one single rift of potentially thousands out there. The system hadn't given an estimation of danger or extent, so I was pretty much just guessing at this point. However, if the danger was low or easily averted by closing just a single rift, it wouldn't have had to resort to a global warning message.

  One good thing about having completely explored the surrounding area already was that I at least had a general idea of where I wanted to go off to next. One of the passages I saw while cleansing them of the purple moss steadily went upwards, which was exactly what I needed now. I didn't know whether it would actually noticeably bring me closer to the surface or not, but it didn't really matter.

  Any passage was as good as the next one, but at least this one already generally went in the direction I wanted to go in. Making my way back through the now clean stone tunnels, I soon reached the place where the edge of the moss had been. It was a bit harder to tell with the moss gone, but my cleansing wash of fire had given the stone some kind of smooth shine that the area beyond my area of action lacked.

  Stepping back into unexplored territory, I didn't particularly know how to feel about all of this. Back to my own thoughts now, I quickly fell back into old rhythms. Leave marks at junctions and follow the algorithm, or pick new passages at random if it didn't dictate anything.

  It was still mentally tiring and all, but I think I've already somewhat gotten used to it by now. Like my mind had detached from the actual process of navigating my body through the maze of stone, I was basically running entirely on autopilot while my mind mostly did something else.

  Occasionally, I would be reminiscing about my time on the surface. The sky, clouds, rain, and sun, it all almost seemed more like a nice dream than reality. There was more to life than stone, but the way its permanent presence crushed the mind quickly made you forget most of that.

  Sometimes I would also keep myself occupied by practicing with [Celestial Fire] again. I went through everything I could do and practiced until I ran out of mana. It soon got incredibly boring as well, but I had nothing else to spend my mana on. If I could at least make some form of permanent progress through that, it would be well worth it.

  The walking felt like it went on forever, but it probably seemed like a lot more time than it actually was. The reason I was currently stopping here was because that feeling that I had felt when approaching that first rift was back. It was a lot weaker than back then and almost unnoticeable, but without any other sensations to feel, it stood out like a sore thumb to me.

  About time, really, a nice distraction in the face of the ever-present dreariness of stone. Actually, was it really good that I found another invasion-related thing so close to the last one? If the density of them was really that high, I didn't have much of a chance to defend against the invasion on my own. Even if I ran at a pace of a single rift per day, it would take me years to close all of them if there were truly thousands out there.

  And that was still speaking optimistically. Realistically, I would never make the pace of a rift per day. Judging by my own approximation of my mana regeneration, it took me almost an entire week to get from the first one to this one.

  On top of all that also came the fact that I was still underground. And it wasn't just me that was underground, the rifts I had found now both were as well. It would maybe be fine if they were entirely constrained to the surface world, but that was wishful thinking. As I saw it right now, we didn't stand a chance. I didn't know what our resident [Hero] Blake was doing right now, but he better somehow also be helping to clean up this mess.

  Well, even if the remaining humans up there could somehow mitigate the entire invasion up there, we would still lose due to a lot of the rifts being positioned below the surface, in the incredible complexity of the Great Labyrinth.

  I didn't have much more left to do except to let it all play out and hope for the best. If we couldn't stop the rifts from letting invaders into our world, maybe they were all incredibly weak and couldn't compete with the power the Will of the World of this realm provided to its natives? I thought the chance of that to be rather low in the face of the rifts even appearing here in the first place, but one could at least hope, right?

  It took me a bit to make sense of the position of this second rift I was probably sensing, but triangulating it through the strength of the feeling wasn't easy when one couldn't move in any direction and instead had to stick to the natural layout of the surrounding caves.

  After running in circles for what felt like hours, I finally got noticeably closer. The feeling was now strong enough to be very apparent, even if it was still weaker than that of the first rift. After a few more minutes, I finally found what I was looking for. Nestled in the corner of a slightly large chamber in the cave system was a weird distortion in the air.

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  Unlike the first one, though, this one was a lot smaller in total and also lacked the prominent actual black rift that made up the moss-emitting rift I had closed. Instead, this one looked like it was just a light-bending distortion.

  There was also no moss quilling out of it, which was a major plus in my books. Now that I calmly looked at it, the way the blue light from my trusty fire bent as I tried illuminating the anomaly for inspection was kind of mesmerizing.

  Now, I should probably just cast a quick [Unstable Space] through my halo and call it a day, but I actually planned on doing something different here. While it might be a very stupid idea, I didn't have much of a choice here. If I wanted to find any way to actually survive and beat this invasion, I needed to experiment more.

  Simply running around aimlessly and setting all my cards on randomly encountering rifts on my path just wouldn't cut it. I needed power and knowledge, and both very quickly if possible. Power was somewhat easy, killing stronger and higher-level monsters with my relatively high experience multipliers should level me up rather quickly. Knowledge was a bit trickier, though.

  There were so many things I didn't know about all of this. I was just doing what the system told me to do for now, but why was I doing all of this? My skillset suited this task extremely well, which directly explained me being chosen as the [Sentinel], or whatever, but did it actually happen this way? What if, instead of me being tasked due to my skillset, I only ever got the skills I ended up with due to the system prepping me for this very task?

  It was just a conspiracy theory at this point, but I thought I had a few points to support my claim. One major aspect here was a minor clue one of the flavor texts dropped on me. After all, the last verse of the description of [Regalia: Starfire Corona] said, 'The heavens do not crown you yet, but they prepare for the moment they must'. If this was not suspicious, I didn't know what else possibly could be.

  Of course, I had no idea how trustworthy those texts were, but they had to mean something, right? On the other hand, if it didn't want me to know of it doing that, why would it ever even include this in the text? Questions upon questions with no solution in sight.

  On top of system-related questions, I was also wondering about this so-called 'invasion'. Who the hell was invading us, and why? It should be safe to assume that we were originally transported into this world to fight this very invasion, but that only shifted the question back in the hierarchy.

  For now, I guess I'd have to do with just doing what I could, even if it wasn't a lot just yet. Still, I had a plan to execute now. Well, maybe it was more of a vague idea than an actual plan, but it could work. And if it actually does end up working, it will easily have been worth it.

  My grand plan was strongly related to the elusive fabric of reality that had been repeatedly mentioned by now. I even had two skills that were directly related to that, even if my halo did so only marginally. In the end, I was sitting on a treasure trove of untapped potential for both power and knowledge with [Broken Sky]. The skill was as mysterious as it was dangerous, unpredictable, and probably powerful.

  I had tried the skill once before, even if that went extremely poorly. The skill had kicked me into unconsciousness and transported me to an unknown location, which, justifiably, made me very hesitant to try again.

  Still, I had tried it once already, so I already knew a bit about it. Not a lot if I was being honest, but some things were guessable from context. Even if I didn't know what exactly I was looking at when using that skill, it had to be at least closely related to the fabric of reality. While that information alone was rather useless, it should basically give me a way to view the fabric itself if I interpreted it correctly.

  And what better way to find out than to use the skill to look at something like those rifts, which were very clearly deforming the fabric somehow? I only had to be careful enough to avoid stepping on anything while casting the skill, lest I risk getting teleported to some random location somewhere else again.

  While I knew what I had to do now, actually doing it was easier said than done. The moment I tried casting the skill, all the confidence I had accumulated with my monologue instantly washed away in the face of hesitation. Did I really need to do this? What if something went horribly wrong again?

  No, I couldn't hesitate and just walk away right now, it wouldn't be right. I had to see through what I started, there was no place for any worry here. Finding a last spark of intention, I invoked the dreaded skill [Broken Sky].

  Just like it had before, an unseen world unfolded itself in front of me. I was prepared this time, though. Looking around, I could once again see an uncountable number of strings twisting and turning through space in ways that entirely defied logic.

  This time, there was more to see, though. In the place where there previously was the distortion floating, the strings looked like they were converging into a single point. It almost looked like they were actively being sucked in by something in that location, even if they showed no signs of active movement.

  Carefully watching my steps, I slowly crept closer to the point of convergence. It was just in arm's reach now, but I still couldn't see anything I hadn't already seen from my original vantage point. It was honestly a bit underwhelming. Seeing the infinite convergence up close was definitely a bit mind-bending, but it wasn't pretty or mesmerizing in the slightest.

  ... I was about to do something extremely stupid. I knew it was stupid, but I had to try. Well, I didn't actually have to, but I wanted to. While the sane part of my mind screamed at me to not do it, I ignored it. Carefully placing my hand close to a string that was converging in the anomaly while strongly focusing on not being thrown to some random location, I grabbed it.

  Skills were extremely intent-based. While they would do things unprompted after their activation, many things could still be controlled to a certain degree.

  All in all, a genius idea, if I could say so myself. I mean, what could possibly go wrong here? Seeing myself not immediately falling into unconsciousness upon wrapping my hand around a string of reality, I then pulled on it.