"So, uh, what is this?" Beth asked with a slight frown as she looked at the portal.

"I made it make a spatial rift that can only move inanimate objects. Why?" he said.

"I guess for training?" Beth replied, still frowning.

"No, you dolt; why can it only move inanimate objects?" Zane replied in exasperation.

"Oh, well, why didn't you just ask that?" Beth said with a another sigh.

"This is why I stay in my space station," Zane said, rubbing the bridge of his nose with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand.

"The station that also has the insanely powerful, and probably a little insane, griffon that can control time? The one that argues with you constantly? That station?" Beth said, staring at him with a no nonsense look.

"Yes, that station. That's the one," he replied, frowning at her and pointing at the makeshift portal.

"Yeah, yeah. I get it," Beth muttered, looking at the portal.

She started to use her Spatial Mana Detection to try to figure out what was going on. The more she studied the portal, however, the more confused and shocked she became. The rift was doing things that it shouldn't be, or rather, the device that was creating the portal was doing some very strange things that Beth couldn't really explain. It was fascinating to study, and she got lost in tracing the swirls of mana and lines of power that the device generated. There was a certain way the mana was being used to create a curtain or barrier in front of the portal, which must be what Zane was talking about. Upon further examination, she realized that the barrier was a clever piece of mana manipulation that bounced anything with a living mana signature off before it could pierce the plane of the gateway.

That led her down a second rabbit hole as she tried to figure out, first of all, how she knew that weave of mana was going to stop a living thing from passing it and, second of all, how it did what it did based on the mana pattern alone. She examined it from several angles, walking around the portal to try to get a better feel for the mana distribution and how it was applied across the plane of the portal. She even, with great hesitance, touched the barrier that was preventing living objects from passing through. Fortunately, it wasn't a destructive barrier, as it just stopped her fingers from going any further without injuring her.

Beth frowned at the thing and tapped the barrier again, feeling like she was tapping a stone wall, or maybe even a metal plate. She was using her detection skill for all it was worth, examining the portal in as minute detail as she could currently do. She frowned at the barrier, not quite sure if what she was going to do was right, but she extended her finger and used it to cast Spatial Slice, creating a thin line of severed space from the very tip of her finger. She used the skill to cut apart the barrier that covered the portal, but she wasn't quite as precise as she had intended, slicing the portal itself. She reacted quickly, but not as quick as Zane, who literally grabbed the portal, which was collapsing, with his bare hand and crushed it, causing a small explosion in his palm. Well, small because he had smothered it with his incredibly powerful body.

"That wasn't great," he said calmly.

"Could've lost my eyebrows. Again," Beth said a bit sheepishly.

"Could've lost more than that," he grumbled, resetting the device. "If you're going to cut a portal apart, best you know what you're doing first."

"Well, I wasn't trying to cut it apart," Beth retorted before returning to examining the portal.

This time, she forewent the skill use, not trusting herself to have the kind of surgical precision necessary to do what she had been attempting. It wasn't a question of power, either, as her skill was far and away powerful enough to do anything she would need with the portal. It was, as always, a question of finesse and fine control, something that she really struggled with, having the kind of finesse one would expect of a raging bull in a glassworks.

But this was a raging bull that could learn new and exciting tricks, and the portal blowing up in Zane's hand-which was also another question, considering just how had he stopped it like that?-had also given her some valuable insights. Everything that was related to space gave her some insights, and she attempted some new things now. She reached out to the barrier, first of all, and prodded with a finger that she covered in a thin film of spatial mana. Doing that was a bit tedious, as she had to draw mana into her finger, which was easier now thanks to her possession of a Mana Physique, and then convert it from neutral mana to spatial mana. That was a whole process, and the end result was that the barrier in front of the portal flexed just a bit, which was new, but still easily recognized her coated finger as a living object and wouldn't let it pass.

That was no big deal and Beth just gave a little shrug before changing the mana on her finger, creating a pattern in the mana similar to the barrier. She attempted to copy it exactly but in reverse, where the barrier looked like two threads of spatial mana woven together, one thread going left and right and one thread going up and down, overlapping in a simple weave, she made the mana over her finger do the same but the…type, or flavor, or sub-type of spatial mana was reversed. She then pressed her coated finger against the barrier, gently at first, but then with a little more force. As she applied force, the barrier made a fizzing sound, a bit like a drop of water hitting a pan that had been heating for a time, before there was a slight popping noise. The barrier, and the weave of mana over her finger, both burst with much the same intensity and look of a soap bubble popping, and then Beth's finger just barely passed through the portal.

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Fortunately, the portal was in no way destructive itself, and she was able to pull her finger back out without losing part of the digit. She breathed a sigh of relief, glancing over to see Zane eyeing her with a searching look, one eyebrow cocked and a slight frown on his face. He waved his hand over the device generating the portal, causing the portal to shut off before a new flux of spatial mana appeared. This time, he had the machine create something that didn't look or act like a portal, but was instead a pinpoint of spatial mana gathering ambient mana from the room into it. The process was slow, very slow, but Beth could clearly see that the object was pulling mana in, drawing just a few little motes in at a time. Beyond that, she also quickly determined that the new spatial feature was converting that mana into spatial mana, changing its nature as it reached the center of the little point.

"This thing isn't going to explode when it gets enough mana, right?" Beth asked, eyeing Zane dubiously.

"No, it won't," he said. "I could make it, if you like?"

"No, no, that's perfectly fine," Beth assured him, waving both her hands at him in a negative gesture.

"It will, however, turn off when it reaches saturation. If I were testing you, I would consider that a failure," he added.

"Well, then what's success?" Beth asked crossly.

"Figure out how it's constructed. Bonus points if you tell me the exact process it's using to convert the mana. Note, I stress again, the exact process," he said.

Beth re-focused on the device, though she had taken his words to heart. Just like earlier, when she had listened to him and Fallon prattle on for a few minutes and gotten an insight, what he was saying right now was more complex, and more important, than it seemed. It might appear obvious, but his point about the mana conversion was a big red flag, considering that mana conversion was something basically anybody could do, even if they were very inefficient at it. His pointing that out, however, very likely indicated that the method the little point of spatial mana was using to convert the ambient mana into spatial mana was something special or just something different than the very basic process Beth was familiar with. That set her to two puzzles, considering she had to figure out how the spatial point even existed, and then she also would have to figure out a mana conversion process she was not wholly familiar with.

The first thing she did, having especially learned from last time, was to look. Just that. Well, not just that, but using her skills and her innate senses to try to figure out what exactly it was she was looking at and how it was functioning. The little point in space was a slight warp, something that quickly put her in mind of a singularity, though it was by no means that severe. She tried to sense whether it was warping space for any appreciable distance around itself and determined that it was not really warping space, though it was slightly distorting things in a sphere around it. That sphere was not smooth but a gradient, the effect of the very slight twisting around it very strong within an inch or so of the point, but tapered off until it was barely detectable just under a foot from the little point.

She, very carefully, poked a finger in the outer edge of where the sphere was distorting, trying to see if she felt anything different. There was a clear reaction, or better yet, a clear feeling this time, as she could detect, even with just the tip of her index finger in the very weak area of the field, that things were quite different. She could sense how the point was distorting things, though she would have greatly struggled to put it into words at that point. She knew, however, on some almost instinctual level exactly what was going on. She withdrew her finger after a second and stared at the point with a frown, thinking about what she had felt and exactly what it had meant. She had a theory on how the point was made, including how it continued to exist, which had nothing to do with the mana it was converting. No, that mana was not providing fuel for it to continue, not as such, only for it to grow slightly.

She watched a moment more before holding up her right hand and forming a fist, concentrating some mana around it. The area around it began to bend and twist, though it didn't feel quite right, and that assessment was backed up when she glanced over at Zane, having seen him moving out of the corner of her eye. Luckily, he wasn't fleeing the room, just shaking his head slightly in the negative, perhaps an unconscious gesture, but clearly indicating that she wasn't quite on the right track. She frowned at that, stopping the manipulation of mana and went back over the principles in her head again, thinking over how the point worked and what it was doing. She almost smacked herself on the forehead as she did, realizing a stupid mistake she had just made, shaking her own head as she held her right hand before her, palm up.

This time, she didn't try to manipulate mana around her hand but instead manipulated some mana to flow up into a little point above her hand. She concentrated that point, made purely of spatial mana and nothing else, before imprinting four tiny runes, so small even her enhanced sight couldn't pick them up, right in the center of the little point. That didn't work out great, her skill with runes still being at a novice level, even after the earlier hours of practice, and the whole thing sort of…exploded, with a loud bang and a little thump. She glanced over to see Zane giving her another quirked eyebrow look, as if asking if she was having fun goofing off.

She re-centered herself and tried again, this time being more careful with both the formation of the point and the construction of the little runes. Not being able to even see them, she had to do much the same as when she built her Mana Physique and operate by her mana senses and a feeling, something like a sixth sense that let her feel and interpret the formation and movement of mana around her. She had noticed that her ability to sense and analyze mana had become much sharper and clearer after construction of her Mana Physique. Whereas before, without using a skill, it had been like trying to view a room full of murky water through a dirty window, now it was like trying to view a slightly hazy room through a window that had been smudged a bit.

It might not sound like a whole lot, but the impressions were orders of magnitude clearer to her now, and that was all without engaging any skills. Her eye power could provide very limited assistance, as it wasn't a type that really specialized in viewing mana or magic forms, and Spatial Mana Detection was a little aggravating to use, as she had to detect the changes in space. Trying to use the detection skill for such things was much like she thought having sonar or echolocation like a bat would feel; she had to interpret from the waves of disturbed spatial mana or just the very slight disturbance in space what was happening. It did not always make for a very clear picture.

The second attempt was marginally better than the first, as in it didn't immediately collapse with a spectacular bang, though it wasn't much more stable. After she stopped tinkering with it, it hovered over her hand for a few seconds before slowly unraveling into individual motes of mana and energy. She frowned at the space where it had just been, trying to figure out exactly what went wrong, not really understanding why the second, much more careful attempt had just sort of given up the ghost. Zane cleared his throat at that point, and she rotated her head to look at him, not moving any other part of her.

"Okay, first, a little creepy," he said, clearing his throat again. "Second, you don't have to try to do it at such a scale."

"Huh?" was her eloquent response.

"Make it bigger, you clod," he said with a sigh.

"Oh. Right," Beth said, feeling a little stupid.

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