The Runic Alchemist

"Out of our world? You mean the limit of the sky where even air doesn't exist?" Land-breaker asked.

"Yes, outer space. Have you been there?" Damian asked back.

"I have tried. It's too cold and quiet. My body felt like it would be crushed any moment as my ears were ringing constantly," the Land-breaker shared his outer space experience.

"That's after you became a fourth ranker?" Voidshaper asked from the side, surprised that even a fourth ranker could be so vulnerable.

"You don't breathe, do you?" Damian asked. It was a rare chance to question a fourth ranker.

"No, air is not needed. But there is no mana out there too. Even if one can create something to survive the physical pain—without the body replenishing mana constantly, that's not very useful," the Land-breaker said, looking at the sky in wonder. But when none of them said anything for a while in reply, he looked down and saw Voidshaper looking at Damian, who was also looking high up in the sky.

Land-breaker's eyes widened in realization. "Oh right! Runebreaker has liquid mana. He can survive in any manaless place."

Damian did not like how the topic had shifted from Land-breaker to him at all. "It's not that simple," he replied, still trying to see past the atmosphere—he could rarely do that when the weather was clear.

"I will have to take liquid mana from here. Every time I need to refill, I will have to create a closed place and fill it with a little air before opening my liquid mana containers, unless I make them one-time use only. But then I can't store them in spatial storage, so I will have to take all the containers with me. And there is no way I can carry enough to reach another world.."

Damian realized he had started rambling on his own. He stopped midway and looked apologetically at the two men staring at him as if he had started speaking Persian suddenly.

Space was one of the topics he thought about a lot in his day-to-day life. Damian had seen many planets in the night sky of this Earth-07. It felt like they were so close yet so out of reach. One day he would make it possible though—with his waygates, he just had to reach a planet once, and all the resources and wonders of that new world would be forever within his reach.

Voidshaper fake-coughed a little. "Should we get back to the task at hand?"

Damian nodded. "I can put enough shields under the rock island that the liquid chaos won't be an issue. We should lift it and bring it as close to outer space as we can—from there I can use a spell to throw it away from our world."

"Place the shields, I can lift it alone. You should focus on your spells," the Land-breaker said.

Damian nodded, then pulled out four ingots of Sacrium and some twenty ingots of steel—quickly using his flames, mana hands, and air shield shapes to make a large megaphone-shaped runic device. The two Highswords exchanged glances as Damian inscribed the giant megaphone with three spells. The Sacrium coating under the megaphone had an attraction spell, the large Sacrium-steel mixed solid box-like shape in the middle had a spatial storage spell in it. And in the end, behind the megaphone, Damian created places to hold the whole thing—a spell there was a custom mana box spell, but it was open from the end so air could circulate.

Once finished, Damian handed it to Voidshaper, saying,

"It will store everything in front of it in a spatial storage while protecting you from the liquid chaos. Use it to get as much poisonous seawater around this place as possible. Fly fast after activating it, and don't dive in the water."

Voidshaper looked at the weird runic device with skepticism but nodded anyway. Looking towards the Land-breaker, Damian asked, "Ready?"

"I will make a clean cut from deep, you ready the spells," the Land-breaker replied, and Damian nodded.

Damian activated his three Sacrium mana cubes, creating a wave of golden liquid mana circling all around him as he ascended, staying in the middle of his liquid mana wave, creating three runic spells for a giant golden shield one after another and connecting the mana threads to the liquid mana to keep them continuously powered. Then he made a giant attraction rune, keeping it horizontal above the whole island. Connecting that too with his golden circling wave of liquid mana.

He pushed the three runic circles underwater, keeping them near the center of the rocky island. The Land-breaker dived in the sea and summoned his soul-bound giant double-handed sword. Damian could see the red glow of aura coating the big sword as the Land-breaker charged it—then he swept it from full right to full left.

First the sea suddenly lost its waves around the Land-breaker, and then a giant body of water pulled back—the aura slash had already cut the whole rock formation of the island in perfect half. The cut was so clean there was barely any gap in between. Then started massive waves rising and falling, making the whole body of water go haywire, following the path of Land-breaker's aura slash still going in the distance.

Damian activated the massive attraction rune, powered by almost half of his accumulated liquid mana wave. The giant circular shape under the rune shot up in the air but barely reached some twenty meters before falling down again. That much time was enough for Damian to place his three giant golden shields beneath the cleanly cut stone island, though.

The attraction rune was too mana-consuming. Supporting three golden runic shields while accumulating more liquid mana was much easier than using that. Damian pulled the golden shields up using the mana threads and his own physical strength. Once the three golden shields were sufficiently near the surface, Land-breaker had reached the center and had supported the full weight from under it.

Damian also flew to the side, letting Land-breaker handle the island as he just kept repairing his cracking golden shields. There was a whole pool of chaos liquid under the cave—Voidshaper quickly used the megaphone-shaped runic vacuum cleaner and sucked in all the black liquid mixed with water in it.

Damian placed wormholes at the edges of the golden shield from where the dark liquid was still falling down—catching it all and using giant mana hands to put it in a spatial storage. Thankfully, the chaos runic circles were still unchanged.

Damian called for the Land-breaker, and they started ascending just like that. Voidshaper quickly got to his job of cleaning ocean water.

---

Slowly but steadily Landbreaker brought the piece of stone mountain buried in water to the very limit of the atmosphere and went even above that. Damian still had the last few oxygen filled bottles which he used with the runic suit to keep breathing while accompanying Land-breaker and repairing golden shields whenever they came too close to breaking. Also adding spells like diamond shaped air shape covering the island and golden shields for Lnad-breaker to hold it better.

The Land-breaker, supreme blade of the Highswords, needed no such breathing tools to survive so high up.

Around Damian was an enormous rotating volume of golden liquid mana. Going higher and higher along with him powering all the spells. After a while he had to catch it all in a giant air shield box and pull it with him.

After a while, the island hung suspended nearly 900 kilometers above the Earth, its massive, protective, diamond-like air shield shape casting a faint shadow across the curve of the world below. Ten kilometers wide and forged from dense stone formation, it pulsed faintly with heat and contained potential energy like a coiled serpent.

One of the duo, Damian, reached out and quietly released the multiple golden shields that had been keeping the structure afloat. Instantly, the island began to fall—not like a feather, but like judgment itself, accelerating through the thinning layers of atmosphere. Within seconds, it plunged past 2.8 kilometers per second in downward speed.

Damian quickly moved with the greatest speed of his life chaining wormholes after wormholes and finally reached at desired height and opened a waygate at 50 kilometers altitude, right before the island could touch the denser lower atmosphere, his air shields fully getting red hot, but not catching fire. The exit of the waygate opened again at 900 kilometers, behind the original location of the fall where Land-breaker was staying still, enduring the cold space.

The entrance of the waygate was angled subtly downward. As the island passed into the waygate, all its vertical momentum was redirected—converted—into a horizontal trajectory. It now moved sideways across the thin thermosphere at nearly 3 kilometers per second, the faint wisps of the upper atmosphere hissing against its still unbroken thick air shield.

But that wasn't enough. A single orbit requires over 7.7 kilometers per second of horizontal speed. So they did it again—looping waygates after waygates, each one dragging the island into a controlled fall, each fall pushing it faster and faster. They dropped the island repeatedly into Earth's grasp, and Damian's waygates turned each plunge into lateral motion, building speed like a cosmic sling. Each loop twisted the laws of inertia and geography, compounding acceleration, and by the fourth rotation, the island rocketed across the sky at full orbital velocity.

it was now destined to rotate around the planet enternally - falling towards the Earth-07 but falling sideways fast enough that the Earth-07's surface curved away beneath it forever.