That is one big tree, I thought.

I was on my back, laying on the rather cool dirt under the shade of this crazy big tree. I was mostly familiar with trees from books, but I had seen a few dead specimens floating around here and there. We'd seen a live one as a family when I was young, but that was kept as a museum piece that the owner charged admission for.

He would've had to increase his prices if he'd owned the one I was looking at. That sucker was bigger around at the base than my house, and a good portion of the way to the office building that apparently doubled as energy storage. I would have a ton of questions for Celistar when she woke up, or something. I hadn't seen her since we arrived, but considering how we'd met the first time we interacted, she might have more powers now that she was back home. Tough to say.

I looked around at where we had arrived. I felt refreshed, like I had slept for ages. It was a great feeling and for a moment I just took in the scenery, enjoying the fact that I wasn't in a life-threatening situation for a change. Around me, I saw people roughly in the same arrangement as there had been in the space we'd used as a 'transport', for lack of a better way to put it.

They all seemed to be resting peacefully, which set my heart at ease — I hoped they'd wake up as refreshed as I had.

I took another deep breath and felt surprised at how much richer the air felt here as I inhaled it. It felt straight up revitalizing, like it was making me stronger with every breath. It was a feeling I hadn't noticed the first time around for some reason.

Sitting down, I took the time to circulate my Streams, looking for changes. I found them almost instantly, as the Nebula moved so freely I very nearly caused an accident as it shot down my arm like a bullet, barely able to contain it and make it complete the first circuit instead of it forcefully manifesting itself outside my body. As it was, a small burst of it leaked out from my hands as the swirling arms of Nebula exploded into existence - the tiny galaxy forming between my palms in what felt like record time.

I was much more careful with the second Stream, but something still felt off. It felt like there was more there, something I hadn't explored.

Allowing the circulation to come to a stop, I experimented with moving my Nebula around, circulating it down into my palm, but then resting that on my knee and seeing if I could make it go there next, before bringing it back up into my Core. This worked rather splendidly, but I didn't feel as though anything was gained.

Next, I ran the Nebula up the centerline of my body, into my head and then back down. I felt tingles like I was activating my special vision, but I hadn't tried to do that. Yet, anyway. Leaving that sensation be, I moved everything back down to my core and felt a feeling that was like my nose being unplugged, or sinuses clearing, but for my energies. Very difficult to describe.

Surprisingly, I had created another stream, this one running though the nodes of my core, spine and head. Enabling my vision, I was surprised to see a wall of light all around me.

Then I realized I was looking at clouds of my own Nebula, just kind of hanging there randomly. This concerned me for a bit, as I was worried that what Viktor had taken to calling my 'eye-lights' wouldn't be working for me going forward.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

I strained for a bit, and was eventually able to perceive some sort of mechanism by which I changed my 'focus' and then could look past the floating clouds of energy farther out. The big downside was now that my surroundings had a blurry golden fog in them, obscuring details. That and it took a ton of strain to maintain this focus of mine.

There had to be a better way to deal with this.

I took active control of the Nebula and pushed it away from me, trying to clear out the airspace. The it briefly worked, but then the small amount of Nebula I'd imbued with my will to clear the rest out 'fogged' up the area again, which wasn't helpful.

In my frustration, I waved my arms around, trying to clear the air the old fashioned way. In the processed, I noticed that where my arms passed, they left wisps and trails of Nebula behind. Looking even closer at the surface of my arm, I could see a thin 'veil' of it all over my skin, and staring intently as closely as I could, it was rising off the surface of my arm like heat off the fractured asphalt of the street I lived on during the summer. While this wasn't much, given time it'd kind of condense into the thicker and more opaque form I was having so many issues with.

Well, now at least I knew the problem, but how to deal with it? I wasn't really sure it was a problem for normal people.

Err, well, normal for people with abnormal powers like Viktor, István and myself. Not sure if that was still normal. Anyway.

It seemed like it would continue to be problematic for me moving forward, and with everyone down for the count, I figured that I would just keep experimenting until someone else got up.

I tried a bunch of things with manipulating it that were successful in the short term, but longer term it seemed like no matter how I moved it away, it'd just condense all the same. I got up and tried walking out of the cloud, but it'd just reform if I stood still too long.

Looking at the third such cloud I'd walked out of, I noticed that the edge of it looked funny. Not in some major way, just that it was kind of blurring there like a mirage. Okay, that's weird.

I had to bend in carefully and stare at the edge before I realized what was happening - the Nebula was dissipating there. It was like it lost the critical mass or density needed to sustain it and just evaporated into the ambient air.

Which, I mean, I had no idea why it was happening, but that didn't mean I couldn't take advantage of it to form new bad ideas based around my poor understanding of reality. While this approach had failed me in the past, that doesn't mean it wouldn't this time.

Right?

So yeah, I went to work figuring out how to reduce this cloud, which meant reducing the rate of emission from my skin.

Watching said exterior organ closely, I tried doing different things with my Streams and Nebula, figuring out which of these reduced it the most. Turned out circulating it did reduce the amount, which made the think that it was like the best approach. It had the side effect of making keeping my vision sharp easier.

But it didn't eliminate it - the issue was still there, just reduced. Which cool, at least somewhat effective. Using the newly enhanced vision to look at my Streams, I realized that as they flowed, some of the Nebula would curl into the walls and force its way out. It was similar to the rotation that happened in the Eddies, the nodes along the Stream, but in this case instead of redoubling the flow, it'd just kind of put a drag on everything and then eventually force it's way free. So not cool.

I went to try to 'harden' the banks of the Stream when suddenly everything went out like a light and I piled over onto my face, hitting it into what was luckily the soft loam of the forest floor. So could be worse. I looked around to see if anyone had been awake to see me make that mistake, when I saw the hazy outline of human figures in the edges of the glen we'd all been deposited into, in the remnants of my vision, which had shut off the second I'd ingloriously face-planted.

I quickly flipped it back on, focusing with all my might on sharpening it past this stupid cloud of Nebula I as in.

Yup. People. A lot of them. And they were armed.

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