One Last System

"Let's see what it is," I muttered while raising the staff up, all the way to the point where the heart at its top moved to the level of my eyes.

At first, nothing really happened.

I simply stared at a massive heart, watching how it pumped nothing but air.

'It's not exactly how a human heart looks like, so how did I never hesitate whether or not it's a heart?' I asked myself, eagerly finding a hole in my current understanding of the situation.

I was looking for some gap in my logic… because I couldn't make any sense of this situation. And no matter how long I took staring at the beating heart at the top of the staff… I couldn't feel anything.

'There are only two kinds of people,' I thought, recalling one of the quotes from my previous life that I always found both amusing but also extremely to the point. 'Those who, when in the face of the reality going against what they know, would throw the reality away in favor of their theory,' I thought, taking a deep breath and lowering the staff.

I then raised my eyes and looked towards the sky.

It was already pretty late, although it would still take some time before the night would begin. At most, it was still a late afternoon, just the right time to conclude whatever job one had on hand and head home to get some rest.

But I couldn't do that yet. I couldn't do that, because I associated myself with the other type of people that this memorable quote described.

'And then, there are those who, in face of their understanding of the reality going against the facts, accept that their understanding is wrong and look for an explanation that actually makes sense.'

I took a deep breath. I then took a moment while my lungs were full to clear my mind before raising the staff back to my eyes.

This time, however, rather than just looking at it with my normal vision, I added my mana vision to the mix.

I didn't exclusively attempt to sense mana within the staff, even though that's how I would usually go about it when switching between normal and mana visions.

No. This time, I looked at the staff with both types of vision I possessed.

Whoosh!

Something sucked my consciousness away from my body, locking it in an entirely different realm.

I could still see the things around me, the staff before me, and even the things that were hidden behind my back… but it all appeared to be behind some sort of a semi-transparted veil as if my soul ended up trapped in some sort of a conciousness prison.

'No, that's not it,' I quickly realized as I inspected the reality where my soul suddenly appeared to be.

And for the first time, I understood what was so peculiar about the staff in my hand.

My soul wasn't extracted from my body. No nefarious spell locked my consciousness away either.

No, those were both simple but also wrong explanations for the phenomena I experienced.

The reality, however, was different.

The beating heart at the top of the staff was just the physical manifestation of an extremely powerful mana condensate. And just like gravity would affect the world around it, when I peered into this mana, upon breaking some sort of arbitrary limit, I managed to actually see into it.

The thing is… It wasn't just a massive pool of mana.

No, the condensation of energy within the dragon's heart was simply so massive, it couldn't fit into the reality around me. It couldn't adhere to the laws of the universe I, so far, deemed to be absolute.

And just like mass would act when the pressure on it grew too much, the mana collapsed the reality itself, creating a pocket of subspace in which it could fully and properly manifest.

'Woah…' my consciousness released a small moan of amazement when I not only managed to figure out what actually was that I was seeing… but also understood the implications behind it.

It wasn't a soul prison. It was a pocket of reality, a subdimension, so densely packed with mana that it became practically impossible for me to interact with it at all!

Just like it was impossible to extract mass from the center of a black hole, it appeared to be impossible to extract any sort of mana from this strange subspace!

'And that doesn't bode well for my hopes of escaping this place,' I suddenly realized.

A small movement back in the real world drew my attention.

The dust and ash that covered everything in the vincity of the area that I showered with my mana bolts… suddenly moved.

And out of a pile of ash and rubble, the very same Dragon Hunter that I fought with just a moment earlier jumped out.

He had a knife in his hand and with how he held it with its blade down while reaching out with his other hand for my shoulder, the sad reality became painfully obvious.

I didn't defeat him. My guts about there being something wrong were entirely correct.

All I did, was fall right for his trap, and now I had no other choice but to watch how he would plunge the dagger in his hand right into my heart…

As if.

The soul prison of the mana subdimension was a place that no mortal of this world could escape from. It was simply too packed with mana for my tiny consciousness to free itself from the pressure inside.

And so, rather than trying to wrestle my consciousness free from the subdimension… I just mentally swiped at it away, as if I was closing an app on my smartphone.

I didn't escape this strange subdimension. I exited it with a single thought.

"DIE!!!" the dragon hunter shouted with marks of desperation mixing with determination on his face.

Right now, I couldn't launch my mana bolts. There was no time for me to create one on my own while the majority of my wardens had no angle to launch their own bolts.

And as the luck would have it, I had no weapons in my hands either… save for the dragon heart's staff!

"As…" I muttered, swiping my left hand to the side and knocking the incoming dagger away with the handle of the staff, "if," I then finished my mockery, using my free hand to reach out and grab the man by his throat.

"…"

The look of terror that appeared on the dragon hunter's face… was just too damn real.

He didn't look at me like one would at a warrior that bested them.

No.

He looked at me… as if I was the devil incarnate!

"You…" the dragon hunter struggled to utter even a single word due to my hand tightly gripping his throat.

"You…" he attempted again, only for me to push my fingers together even further, getting dangerously close to the point where I would smash his windpipe and sentence him to an extremely painful death from suffocation.

Yet, a hint of curiosity flashed in my soul.

'Just what is he going to call me now?' I asked myself before lowering my eyelids and slightly relaxing my grip on the man's throat.

"You spawn of heresy…"