"There." Viktor pointed ahead of us, and this time I saw it. A piece of shadow that had no place, flowing around a corner, all soft corners and long tentacles of darkness.

Qīwù dashed forward, attempting to follow it. If it was anything like the others, the ones I hadn't been able to spot in time, this would also escape her.

"It's gone," she said, the disappointment clear in her voice. They would vanish the second they disappeared from sight. It was maddening. More so because I couldn't spot them using my aura vision, either. If anything, they seemed to shy away from it, being alerted the second I turned my gaze their way.

We'd only ventured past the outskirts, but this city was already weird.

"Block C, again," István said, as we rounded the corner. "That makes this a rotation."

He'd noticed early on that as we walked, we were only seeing very specific configurations of city blocks. There were tables and chairs in the cottages, but they also repeated with the configurations of the city blocks.

What was stranger still, though, was that there wasn't any other evidence of habitation. No traces of the sorts of things that you'd find in normal houses, just simplistic furniture - almost like the sort of thing you'd see in a little child's dollhouse, very square-edged and unshaped. The most basic definition of 'chair' and 'table' as it were.

"Hold up for a moment." I said, sitting down. The streets were oddly clean, for having no one to maintain them, but at the same time I didn't really give a damn if the fancy robes from the Circle got a little dirty - surely they wouldn't have sent me on a capital-A Adventure with the expectation that I'd stay perfectly clean. That was just unrealistic.

I laid my hands out on my knees, not keeping them together as was the usual for my mediation. This wasn't any form of cultivation, after all. I was instead trying to suss out the edges of this little play 'reality' that we were finding ourselves in.

Nebula cascaded from my figure, flowing around my party members, snaking its way into the alleys, nooks, and elsewhere in the block to find out how far it could go before being blocked. Rather than a solid ring of detection, this was instead a series of very directed probes, allowing me to extend the distance.

I had gotten the idea from the attack I'd used on the Iron Veil Order leader, good ol' Junior Elder. The points of light here became my tendrils of searching, with a bonus to perception, if I wasn't mistaken.

One by one, I felt them reach the edges of this block. As we'd somewhat suspected, it really was just an irregularly shaped set piece with some fixed boundaries on the side. I could easily reach the edges on all sides, which was very concerning to me.

I lofted myself off the ground with yet more Nebula, somewhat unwilling to break the connections I'd created with my little searching feelers. I wanted to see what happened when we exited the block into the next.

For the first few rotations through this pattern, we had't noticed walking across the boundary, but now that we knew what was happening we'd learned to recognize the edges where the parts mated up.

I was approaching one of those and motioned for the others to proceed ahead of me. Now that I had messed around with my power, I didn't want to find out the hard way that the rules had somehow changed.

Crossing the boundary myself, I felt the probes that had extended out behind me suddenly cut off, ending with a hard cutoff exactly where the edge of the previous block was.

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Fun times.

I extended them back out into the new area, getting roughly the same mental picture.

So I thought, as another probe vanished.

Or maybe it didn't? The feeling was soft and vague, the probe had encountered a pillow. It had a distance to it as well, the same feeling that Celistar's mental communications gave me.

"Follow me," I ordered to the others, "Stay close."

Qīwù's face tightened, but somehow she managed to say nothing. I admired her newfound restraint, even if it was a little belated at this point. We proceeded cautiously with myself in front.

Celistar was to my right, and she saw it first, being in a better position to see around the intervening building. I saw all of the blood drain out of her face.

"Why is that here?" She said, her voice shaking.

I soon saw what had her so distraught, although I didn't quite get it myself.

It was a Rift.

Kinda. It didn't look like the ones I was familiar with. The color was entirely different, for one. The ones I was familiar with had interiors so black they had no depth. This one was some sort of gray. But not. The color was 'fuzzy', if that made any sense. Tiny specks were lighter, other little bits were darker, but overall the effect was to be gray.

It had an uneven border, and instead of being a vertical tear into the world, a sideways eye shape, it seemed more like someone had punched reality so hard they shattered it and then some of the broken bits fell off as well. I gazed sideways at Viktor.

He just shrugged. "Wasn't me."

There was more. It had a distinct feeling of emptiness. I tried to recall how the ones we'd encountered in our old world had felt, and came to the conclusion it was essentially the exact opposite - those felt more 'full' than the world around them. This gaping wound in our new home was not that.

Confounding matters was that this specific bit of lost city got lost so hard it wasn't even from this world, either. So it was a hole punched in a hole-punch from somewhere else. Hole-ception, if you will.

All of these crazy thoughts were making me feel like I was still dehydrated.

So, of course, I decided to add one more crazy thought, and walked up to the Rift. I then unceremoniously jammed my whole arm right in.

This, as you might imagine, wasn't received so well by the others. Qīwù seemed quite shocked - her jaw falling open, Celistar cried out "Benefactor!", and even István seemed to have concern override his innate curiosity for a few moments before he rushed up to look and see what was going from a closer perspective.

Viktor gave me a thumbs up, although I assume that is because he thought I punched it. Close enough, anyway.

They needn't have worried though, as the not-a-Rift Rift was as not full as it was not a Rift. Which was to say I felt nearly nothing other than some light erosion of the Nebula I had coated my arm with before engaging in this little bit of lunacy.

Like I'd engage with an unknown hole without being thoroughly protected. Even Viktor had his gloves on for the Rift recoveries.

For some reason I was having trouble remembering what the name of our company was. Which was very odd. Ah well, just call it Viktor's Pugalism Emporium and Occasional Rift Recovery. VPEORR. Sounded like a noise Steeve would make.

I removed my hand, realizing I'd probably overstayed my welcome and was surprised to see that it kinda didn't want to let me go. But only a little. The surface of the Rift flexed outward towards me a few centimeters as I pulled my hand free.

It was an undirected, passive sort of restraint, and about as strong as lazy baby. It wanted to keep my arm there, but didn't actually care enough to really do anything about it. No more or less odd than the rest of… well, anything in the city, really.

"When we did recoveries back home, how did you locate the proto-Artifacts inside, Elder Mountain?"

The big man scratched at his brow a bit. His eyebrows were bushy, so between those and his huge, meaty fingers, it looked almost like he was trying to pull a fuzzy caterpillar off his face. An amusing thought for sure.

"Not entirely sure. I could tell they were present, and when I 'reached' for them, they would move towards my hand, like they wanted to be there."

Definitely nothing like that inside this thing. It was more like a pure vacuum, empty and devoid of anything, including Nebula, as near as I could tell.

Celistar still looked a bit panicky, her gaze snapping between me and the hole in reality. I don't think this indicative of an issue with this world, I thought deliberately, This seems to be related to something else. Her features relaxed a little.

But her eyes stayed locked on that misshapen hole.

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