Even if I still felt a bit apprehensive about using any 'fabric of reality'-related skills after my fiasco with [Broken Sky], I still had to deal with this rift that was just as silently floating in front of me as before.

  Well, at least the ability of my [Regalia: Starfire Corona] shouldn't go as poorly as [Broken Sky] had. Unlike the cryptic poetry in the description of that, my halo-like crown was a bit more explicit in its description and hint.

  I wasn't going to waste enough time to let anything else apart from the moss crawl through this rift, so I acted immediately once I gathered enough resolve to invoke [Unstable Space].

  The moment I did, the world began to tremble. Imperceptibly at first, but stronger the longer it held. It wasn't literally shaking like an earthquake, but everything kind of fluctuated and behaved weirdly as if something very wrong was happening. Unlike the even shine of the flame I held in the air to provide some much-needed light, the now visible light reflecting from the cave walls was a lot brighter in some areas and almost entirely dark in others, like something had distorted it on its way there and back.

  The cast itself wasn't invisible either. It was a bit hard to see my own halo, but I could see that it was now spinning at quite a notable speed. It was also a lot brighter and maybe even a touch bigger than before. That might just as well have been an illusion generated by its higher rotational speed, though.

  As the cast progressed, everything got weirder and weirder. Distortions grew stronger, and they weren't just affecting visible light. Instead, basically everything was a bit wrong. I tried speaking a bit to see how my voice sounded, but I heard a sound so horribly wrong come out of my mouth that I almost burst into laughter.

  I was glad that I didn't, though. If my own voice already sounded so agonizingly terrible, I did not want to know how laughter would sound here. I didn't notice it at first, but even gravity might have gotten significantly weaker. There weren't random stones floating up from the floor or anything, but walking felt very wrong, and just a tiny jump easily catapulted me over one meter into the air.

  Maybe I was having a lot more fun than I should right now, but there wasn't much danger here in my opinion. I know, famous last words with a potentially extremely dangerous extraterrestrial rift right next to oneself, but I really needed this right now. I still couldn't say how long it had been, but by past months or years were so drearily bleak and filled with just mindlessly numb survival that it sucked any fun right out of it.

  I made myself a bit of fun when experimenting with surfing the pools of magma with a self-created surfboard made through solid fire, but that already felt like ages ago too. Navigating a nearly endless maze of stone by foot was the most anti-fun anything could possibly be. Following the algorithm of some random, long-dead French guy really wasn't fun either. The method had figuratively integrated itself so deeply into my DNA that I didn't even notice myself doing it anymore.

  I was unceremoniously ripped out of my thoughts when a piercing, wail-like sound ripped straight through my mind. I didn't know where it was coming from, but I couldn't think straight enough to find out either. Why does everything I try always somehow end up in me getting a goddamned headache!?

  The sound got even more piercing, and I could soon feel blood dripping out of my ears as my eardrums finally gave up. Extremely uncomfortable, but not the end of the world, it will heal soon enough. Good thing, though, the sound was a lot quieter now, though I still heard it even through my new deafness. That noise couldn't possibly be only physical in nature, there was something more to it that affected me at the very core of my being. I didn't think it was doing much harm there, but it was still far from being comfortable.

  Just as suddenly as it had started, it stopped as everything plopped back into place. As if it had never even been there, the rift was simply gone, unraveled and back to the nothingness it belonged in. My ability [Unstable Space] also fizzled out, and the distortions slowly dissipated, returning me to the previously known normalcy.

  Damn, what a fever dream all that was. There was no way I could have ever been prepared enough for something like that to happen. In total, it was very successful, even if it had cost me my eardrums, a bit of my remaining sanity, and probably a shit ton of mana. A peek at my status confirmed my guess.

  [Name: Hanah Mayflower (Sentinel of the Realm)

  Race: Human

  Level: 30 (Tier II)

  Mana: 102/1385 | 5560/10000

  ...]

  This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  Okay, somewhere around 5000 mana in total. A lot more than my actual reserves can hold, but not a problem with my extraneous battery joining in. The only reason I still had mana in my real reserves was because spending mana down to zero was extremely exhausting. Pulling mana from the corona instead when nearing the low 100s was a very good idea, if I could say so myself.

  Actually, now that I thought about it, why didn't I just pull out of there straight away? Whether my actual reserves are full or not doesn't matter, all mana I regenerate on top of my maximum would go there automatically anyways. If I do that, I won't ever run the risk of running out of mana in my own mana pool.

  It would mean that I could rarely ever cast the [Celestial Reprieve] ability of my [Regalia: Starfire Corona] at full power, but I could live with that. Not like the pittance of my actual mana pool would make much of a difference in the face of the vast amount of mana held by my halo in comparison.

  Actually, all that isn't really true either. I hadn't done it before, but it worded it as being a reserve. Since I could already freely cast with the mana inside of it and also transfer my own mana into the halo, shouldn't I just as well be able to move it from the halo's reserves to my own mana pool?

  I quickly tried it out, and I was correct. The mana transferred here was always mine, whether it was in my own pool or the halo's didn't matter, so in the end, it wasn't all that unexpected. Transferring also barely took any time, and my own reservers were back to full in the blink of an eye.

  [...

  Level: 30 (Tier II)

  Mana: 1385/1385 | 4278/10000

  ...]

  A question remained, though. What do I do now? I successfully closed the rift, but the purple moss that seemingly came out of it is still here. It shouldn't be able to grow anymore if it lost connection to its main body or whatever, but could I really be sure of that? What if my attempts at interpreting its biology were completely wrong? This thing came from another dimension after all!

  No, I couldn't just ignore it and leave at will. The system mainly gave me responsibility for closing the rifts and averting the invasion, but I doubted that ignoring the presence of potential alien life in this realm was anything but a very bad idea.

  For the large hall where the rift was in, the ability [Unstable Space] had been more than enough to clean up any of the moss filling the space. As the hint for it had mentioned, weakening the fabric of reality somehow caused them to dissipate, similar to how the rift was destroyed in the end. I didn't have a lot of information to go off of here, but I guessed that it must somehow cause them to lose their grip on this realm and slip back out or something.

  Hmm, that doesn't really fit what the hint said, though. Instead it said something along the lines of being 'highly destructive for existences that aren't native to or only partially part of the currently inhabited plane of reality'. The keyword I was focusing on here was the word 'destructive'.

  Maybe it's more like they can't easily maintain their form in the now unstable foreign reality and then end up unraveling their existences or something like that? I didn't know if 'unraveling' was the best word to describe a process like this, but I couldn't think of a better one.

  In the end, it didn't really matter for my cause. The ability was highly effective, and that was more than enough for me. I really couldn't care less about how whatever I hit with it ended up.

  I still had a cleanup job waiting for me, so I shouldn't waste more time on useless thoughts. Now that the threat of the unknown rift was gone, I didn't need to hold back on mana cost anymore. It had slowed me down significantly as I carefully closed in on the rift, but there no more need for that.

  I could probably quickly scorch away large areas of purple moss, but I also had to make sure I got every last piece of it. I wasn't in the mood for any sort of complicated algorithm, so I settled for the simplest way possible.

  Depth-first exploration was basically made for a task like this. I would simply travel down a single path and mark the path I came from at every junction. I'd then pick one passage at random and continue onwards. When I've reached the edge of its expansion and cleared every bit of moss from that tunnel, I could turn back and backtrack to the last junction I encountered.

  I'd then go and explore all the other passages that weren't the marked way back until all of them were clear. After every passage of that junction was cleared, I could backtrack to another junction and repeat the same process from there with all the remaining unexplored passages it had.

  This process wasn't really the most efficient when it purely came down to distance traveled, but it was the single most simple solution that absolutely guaranteed me to get every last bit of moss. Well, if I was being honest, I didn't know and couldn't really come up with any other methods either, so I didn't have any other option to begin with.

  It sounded like a daunting task when laid out plainly, but it wasn't as bad as it sounded. The passages were relatively long, but there weren't that many junctions. On top of that, every junction I encountered split into three at the very most.

  I also held nothing back. With how I blazed down the tunnels, absolutely scorching the hell out of whatever was unfortunate enough to be in my path, it didn't take me that long to clear most of the tunnels of the persistent purple moss.

  I was even having a bit of fun sprinting down the tunnels with a ring of fire running alongside me over every surface of the cave walls. Up until now, I had completely disregarded the pure amount of physical power and endurance that my tier two body, along with my physique skill [Broken Celestial Physiology], gave me, but maybe I shouldn't have.

  I had basically already transcended past human limits with my body. Enhanced with mana, I doubted that any normal human beings could keep up with me in terms of raw speed or strength. Sprinting at full speed for hours through tunnels with no signs of exhaustion was just not something a human body should be capable of.

  Well, maybe I was cheating a bit with unnatural regeneration through [Thermal Conversion] as I was running next to a ring of immense heat, but still. I didn't know how much pure strength I could exert for something like lifting weights and also had no way to really test it, but it was probably already extremely impressive for any normal human back on Earth.