The Extra's Rise - Chapter 868

868: Mastering Time, Space and Gravity 868: Mastering Time, Space and Gravity The first time I stepped onto one of Liam’s training platforms, I did not feel like a child opening a door to a new world.

I felt like an expert smith handed a sharper file, a steadier vise, and a better light.

The stone hummed under my feet.

Symbols cut into it lit one by one, not blasting me, but syncing with me.

The “rush” was not chaos.

It was alignment.

The memories that came were not foreign.

They were angles, timings, tolerances-fine details that slid into grooves I already had.

I locked my stance and let the stream run through me.

Breathing was easy.

Balance was easy.

My mind built shelves and the knowledge filed itself: edge cases, corrections at the fourth decimal place, new thresholds for stability.

I already knew how to shape space, slow time, and bend gravity.

Liam’s imprint gave me higher-resolution control.

“Arthur!” Seraphina’s voice cut across the chamber.

“Are you alright?” “I’m good,” I said.

My voice was steady.

“It’s not instruction.

It’s calibration.” The platform brightened.

My view doubled, then matched: my eyes and Liam’s eyes overlaid.

I saw the chamber the day he finished it.

There was no scaffolding, no cranes.

He set anchors in three layers-spatial, temporal, gravitational-and made them agree.

I could feel where the load went when the room flexed.

I could feel how much slack each joint could take before it sang.

Space-time, in my hands, was a toolkit.

In his, it was a single instrument.

I had always treated the three forces as parts to be balanced.

He tuned them together so they held themselves.

I spoke so Seraphina and Ren knew I wasn’t drowning.

“His refinement is exact.

It matches how I work, just… cleaner.” The platform shifted.

A training set loaded.

Not theory.

Motion.

Liam’s hands.

Liam’s footwork.

Liam’s breath.

I did not gape at any of it.

I tracked the pattern and compared it to my own.

He crossed distance without stepping because he set two places to the same footing.

He bent time to work faster inside a fixed window by pacing its flow like a tide, not a switch.

He used gravity to carry motion through joints, not to crush.

I already did these things.

He did them with no wasted force, no wasted thought.

No drift.

That was the difference: drift.

My work had micro-slips that cost heat at high output.

His didn’t.

I stepped off and on again, testing how the platform stabilized me.

Feedback came without sting.

You’ve done this.

Try this angle.

Cut this extra half-step.

I raised a hand.

The air arced like a thin pane.

I had bent space many times before.

Now I felt the seam where the pane wanted to sit.

I slid it there, not into it.

The pane held without a brace.

I watched its edges for grain, then nudged them until the grain evened out.

“Arthur,” Ren called from his platform.

His hair, white like spun glass, curved around his shoulders and up, mapping lines as he moved.

“What are you doing over there?” “Truing surfaces,” I said, and clicked the pane out of phase.

A small pocket formed inside, clean and quiet.

“Same work as always.

Less waste.” He laughed.

“Show-off.” Time next.

My old method had a safety curve.

I slowed a region, then layered a compensator to handle rebound.

It worked.

It was safe.

It cost energy.

Liam’s method came with a different lock.

He set the boundary to breathe instead of hold.

Time in the bubble ran at a fixed ratio to the outside, but the edge flexed with micro-oscillations that bled off stress.

I set a bubble over the bench: half speed inside.

The edge rippled like the surface of cool water and then went still.

No ripple lines.

No hum.

I checked the numbers by feel.

It sat at 0.5002 and drifted down to 0.5000-self-correcting.

Seraphina watched from her platform, a light haze of fire around her like a sunrise behind glass.

“That’s precise.

How much did that cost you?” “Less than my old way,” I said.

“The edge does part of the work.” Gravity last, because gravity is my favorite.

It speaks to balance, and my Grey energy knows balance best.

I spread my right hand and called a gravity well the size of a fist.

I’ve used wells to bind, to smash, to pull projectiles out of the air.

Liam’s imprint added another form: a tuning field.

It took the noise out of other forces.

You could fight inside it, and power that would normally push back against itself would run smooth.

I set a tuning field around my left forearm, then drew Grey energy into my palm with the right.

I split it into two opposing streams and pushed them at each other inside the field.

The clash should have kicked, because Grey resists imbalance by pushing both ways at once.

It didn’t.

The field rounded the edges and fed them back.

They braided.

Warm, steady.

No spike, no stall.

“Incredible,” Seraphina said.

“You’re stacking force inside the same volume without turbulence.” “It’s a buffer,” I said.

“We could stage combined work here-your heat, Ren’s hair defense, my Grey-without cross-noise.” I kept practicing.

I did not reinvent myself.

I turned screws a quarter turn at a time.

I made a pocket big enough to hold a spear without touching the walls.

I made a time window where drops of water hung long enough to examine their shape, then fell without tearing.

I set a gravity arch that held a drifting blade perfectly horizontal, then sent it end over end with a thought and caught it as if it had never moved.

The platform listened and adjusted.

Each time I smoothed a process, it showed me an edge case.

The edge cases were where most people break things.

They were where I had to be perfect.

Midway through a sequence, a fight memory moved in.

The room cooled.

The light lost color.

The air thinned.

The Heavenly Demon, unified and whole, entered the field.

I was in Liam’s body, old and strong.

I felt the weight of his gear.

I felt the thin web of seals he had set on himself so corruption could bite but not spread.

That web had a cost.

He had accepted the cost.

No drama.

Just the choice.

The demon moved like broken glass carried by wind.

It healed almost as fast as he cut it.

It twisted space around its limbs and tried to punch holes in time so its wounds never happened.

It smeared corruption along planes and tried to make the field itself its ally.

Liam answered without waste.

He made the ground and the air share a single footing and forced the demon’s step to land twice at once, pinning it without a visible bond.

He set a clock inside its chest that ticked forward at normal speed no matter what the rest of the field did.

He wrapped a tuning field around the point where his blade and the demon’s core met so the light did not scatter.

He did not outmuscle it.

He did not “think of technique.” He was already the best.

He applied the exact tool at the exact moment and paid the exact price.

In the end, the last cut demanded more than his seals had left.

He spent himself to keep the corruption from climbing back up the blade.

I let the memory finish and let the feeling pass.

I stood still and counted three breaths.

“The fight isn’t about being stronger,” I said, not for anyone else, but to mark the thought.

“It’s about paying clean and not paying twice.” Seraphina nodded.

She had watched her own fights in the flames.

She knew.

The platform opened another layer.

I saw not only techniques but the locks on the techniques.

Liam attached limits to everything.

Range limits.

Time limits.

Interlocks.

If a cast drifted outside its window, it shut down.

If two functions started to feed each other in a way that could loop, they cut.

He let power run smooth but never loose.

I took that as a rule worth keeping.

I started building a portal.

I have opened portals before.

The trick is not opening.

The trick is keeping the bridge true while it carries load.

I laid two anchors: here and the training hall across the complex.

I set the space seam first, as thin as I could hold it.

I placed the time ratio next, both sides equal but with a slack pattern at the edge so strain had somewhere to go.

I wrapped a gravity band around the throat and tuned it to the same frequency as the hall’s floor stones.

The band hummed.

The hum matched.

The seam whitened.

The circle cleared.

Ren threw me a knife.

I did not look away.

I caught it with a touch of gravity and sent it through.

We watched the other end: the knife slid out, point down, and stuck into the board on the far wall in the training hall.

Clean line.

No wobble.

“Do you want to see something useful?” I asked.

“Always,” Seraphina said.

I widened the band and shifted the portal sideways, then up.

I made two more, each to a different corner of the chamber.

I set all three to feed back to my hand.

Then I took a breath, called three small Grey orbs, and sent them through in order: left, right, high.

The portals cycled them back like a looped track.

I adjusted the timing so they returned in sequence and reentered clean.

No collision.

No echo.

“That’s a ranged casting relay,” Ren said, eyes bright.

“You can stack effects and call them back.” “On a fixed path,” I said.

“Safe, repeatable, and under a lock.” I let the portals dissolve.

The edges closed with small sighs.

Not a sound, exactly.

A feeling of things sitting right.

The hours ran.

The platform kept giving me higher problems.

I kept solving them.

The room shifted from “show me” to “match me” to “surpass this threshold if you want the next one.” I did.

I made a pocket that canceled all vibration in a teacup so perfectly the surface became a mirror and stayed a mirror while I tapped the cup.

I set a time window in front of my face and watched a spark crawl across a wire at half speed so I could study each tiny jump.

I built a gravity sleeve around Seraphina’s forearm while she threw a punch and took nothing from her speed, adding only stability at the wrist so her impact didn’t bleed outward.

Her eyes widened.

She hit the dummy again and the sound changed: deeper, cleaner, less meat, more wood.

“Keep that,” she said.

“I will,” I said.

Ren wanted to test the tuning field.

He spread his hair like a shield and asked me to send shock through it.

I set a tight field around the shell and fired Grey pulses at fixed intervals.

The field soaked the rebound and fed it forward, so his hair did not thrash.

His face relaxed.

He looked like a man on a still river, not a storm.

“Thank you,” he said quietly.

“It’s yours when you want it,” I said.

Between sets, the platform sent one more memory.

Not a fight.

A choice.

Liam looked at a planet from orbit.

He could make its seasons easier.

He could smooth a fault that carried quakes.

He could touch the keys and fix many things.

He did not.

He set a line: act only where responsibility is held with the power, not just where the power exists.

He left the planet alone and went to help where he had already taken charge.