[Broken Sky] was both very powerful and also incredibly hard to use at the same time. Still, after my recent successes with it, I had set my mind on experimenting more with it. I had made progress by not being transported to a random location upon making contact with a string, but that was certainly not everything the skill was capable of. Apart from the observer component to it, the skill had to have something active to it.

  Since it was classified as active under my skills, I somehow felt like it wouldn't make much sense for the only active part of the skill to be its activation. It did technically make sense, at least it did for other skills like e.g., [Fireball] or something like that, but even they could be altered and influenced more than [Broken Sky].

  Not willing to waste more time on idle thoughts, I just cast the skill. Like it had two times before, the broken, inception-like world rapidly enveloped me as I sank into the world of the skill.

  Now that I was in here, I wondered how I looked to someone who stood next to me but was not inside this world. Did I stand there motionlessly like in some sort of dream, did my 'outside body' copy every movement I make inside of here, or was my body entirely gone from the real world?

  I personally thought the second option to be the most likely one, though that basically implied that [Broken Sky] was more a perception skill than anything else. And technically, while true to some extent, it did more than that.

  Well, I supposed that it didn't really matter for me when I was still completely alone in some damned cave system that lay who-knows-where. The possibilities all had some sort of usable implication, but that couldn't be the main point of the skill.

  Actually, maybe the third option had some merit to it. While I was bound by the walls of the cave in real life, I didn't see any walls when in here. A whole lot of strings and a whole lot of weirdness, but not a cave wall in sight.

  I was standing in the middle of a corridor when I cast the skill, so I should be maybe two meters from a wall to the sides at most. Turning to face one of the supposed walls, I hesitatingly took a step forward. And then another one.

  I had maybe expected it just make a wall appear in front of me all of a sudden just before I would have collided if I was walking in the real world, but nothing ever happened. I walked and walked, slowly at first, but I soon accelerated a bit after slightly getting used to navigating through the convoluted maze of string.

  If I was being honest, I was a bit scared to find out what would happen if I canceled the skill now. For all I knew, I could be inside of a wall in the equivalent of my position in the real world. I chose not to think about that possibility any further, though, even if it did actively remain at the back of my mind.

  For now, I just continued walking. It wasn't entirely aimless, but it might as well have been. I had no sense of orientation in this place apart from up or down, as gravity seemed to function as normal. Every other direction looked unique and yet completely identical through the fact that it's all just strings upon strings.

  After continuing for what felt like a few hours, I noticed something very subtle in the way the strings behaved. Every now and then, an almost imperceptible shockwave would pass through the world, shaking the strings around me like trees in a mild breeze.

  I couldn't tell where they came from or what caused them, but I did have a hypothesis. What if it's caused by anomalies first appearing or by anomalies growing and opening as full rifts? I could imagine both of these events having enough impact for it to be detectable via the fabric of reality.

  Having nothing else to do, I went to investigate the source of the tremors. If following these traces could lead me straight to unclosed rifts, I'd not only have a big advantage when it comes to fighting the invasion, but I'd also have a way to orient myself in here and also a relatively safe way of exiting this world without appearing straight in a wall. After all, rifts should only be found in a place with air or at least a vacuum, right? If not, we were pretty fucked anyways.

  I didn't know if it was even possible for the skill to exit me straight into something solid, but I wasn't planning on finding out. Maybe it would even put me straight where I had entered this place, and I'd find out that it's more like an astral projection than an actual world? Though if that was the case, how did my first cast from the leviathans inside catapult me so far away?

  The way things usually go for me, I was almost certain that the skill would turn out to be some 4-dimensional fuckery I'll never even hope to be able to understand and use effectively. No matter what, I'll hopefully find out soon enough when I find another rift to exit at.

  Actually, I wondered how an open rift looked to me in the twisted world of [Broken Sky]. While the rifts were just masses of solid black in the real world, maybe I'd be able to look through from here? The system said that they are one-way connections, though, so the chance that it will just be a black mass was rather high in my opinion.

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  Well, I'd as soon as I found the source of the shockwaves as long as my hypothesis wasn't entirely incorrect.

  It didn't take much longer until I finally saw what I was looking for. Just like the anomaly I had observed when I first entered, the strings were converging towards a single point in space. This time, though, there was something very different from before. While the strings actually met and seemed to vanish in the singularity, they curled around it, forming a not entirely ring-shaped ring around that imaginary point.

  Looking through the ring revealed something I actually hadn't expected to see. While I'd hoped to see the other realm and thought the idea of it just being a ring that didn't do anything when looking through to be realistic, it actually showed me the corresponding real world location through the rift.

  The other side of where I stood looked like a normal cave, just like the one I had been tunneling through for so long, except for the fact that there seemed to be something illuminating it in a dim glow.

  There was also a whole lot of the already familiar purple moss, though I didn't see any actual invaders from my point of view. Well, I didn't even know what they looked like. For all I knew, the purple moss might already be the so-called invader. Not everything had to be some sort of graspable monster, especially when coming from another realm with potentially very different laws of physics.

  Since I could already see the normal world through the string ring, would stepping through it cancel [Broken Sky]? Only one way to find out, I guess. Not hesitating this time, I carefully stepped through the portal made of string.

  Just like I had expected, [Broken Sky] deactivated and kicked me back to the real world. In the spur of a moment, I tried jumping back through the rift I had just exited, but nothing happened. I'd have found it a bit funny if it had taken me back into [Broken Sky], but it didn't make sense from a logical perspective.

  Just because the world of the skill created a way for me to deactivate it out of the very world it had created did very much not implicate the existence of a condition in the real world that could forcibly activate that skill against my will. The thought of something like that existing was scary enough already. If anything outside of your control was capable of activating and deactivating your skills at will, how would you ever even attempt to defeat such a thing?

  Back to the present, though. The portal I had stepped out of this time was extremely similar to the very first one I had closed. No invaders in sight, just a whole bunch of moss or whatever the hell that stuff actually was.

  Not wanting to waste any more time than necessary, I jumped back into [Broken Sky] and immediately cast a controlled [Unstable Space] through the off-center halo that was still floating and slowly spinning silently over my head. This time I wanted to observe the collapse from inside the other world, just like I had done for the anomaly.

  The first time I closed a rift like this, it just vanished in the blink of an eye from the real-world perspective. Methodically in my approach, I wanted to find out if an open rift would close the same way an anomaly did.

  ...It pretty much did. There was just nothing much special to observe, except for maybe the collapse of the view to the real world. It didn't look interesting either, though. One second I could look through normally, the next second it was just a melting ring of string floating in a world of many more strings.

  The tension in the strings slowly returned as the effect of my skill sputtered out, and soon it looked no different than it had just a minute ago, except for the now missing portal, of course.

  I had enough of this world for now, though, so I canceled the skill again to bring me back to the real world I had just been in shortly. I also still needed to clean the moss up that was left behind. I didn't know if it was entirely necessary to do so with its connection to the portal gone and everything, but I didn't want to take any easily avoidable risks.

  Wait a minute, that doesn't look anything like where I just was! Unlike the dimly lit cave covered in purple moss I had expected to see, I was in an exceedingly normal-looking cave. While I could maybe justify the moss as having been annihilated along with the rift, this cave was not lit in the slightest, and I needed my fire to see again.

  No matter what, this couldn't possibly be the same location I had just entered from just a minute ago. Unlike my first cast from the insides of the Leviathan, where I got transported someplace else as well, I hadn't even moved in the short time I was in there!

  So... what happened? How did I get here? Why am I here now? Questions upon questions whirled through my mind as I grasped at straws to come with any theories.

  Actually, could the world of [Broken Sky] be less spatially related to the real world than I previously thought? I had thought it to be strange that the entire place was entirely flat without any walls, but I hadn't given it much more thought than that.

  Then in extension, maybe the only reason I could reliably enter and leave the world of the skill in fixed places was because of the very rifts I was seeking out to destroy. As was evident from how they showed the real world when viewed from inside of [Broken Sky], they were connecting the fabric of reality to the spatial locations within the real world in a certain way, effectively stapling the fabric to a specific location like an anchor.

  With the anchoring effect of the rifts and anomalies gone, the fabric is once again free to fluctuate from place to place. Well, all that was more of a theory than anything else, but I thought it made quite a lot of sense.

  Problematic in all of that, however, was that I had left all of that moss behind in that gloomily lit cave. I really hope that doesn't develop into a more serious problem. Well, it couldn't be worse than all the still-open rifts where the moss was not disconnected from its origin realm, so it couldn't possibly be anywhere close to problematic until every other open rift on this planet is closed. In the light of that thought, it should be fine overall.