The various surfaces were indistinguishable from actual woods and leathers, courtesy of the materials he had shovelled into the flask as reference. Along with quintessence, different kinds of magical and mundane woods, stone, metal, and fabric had been consumed by the cloud flask. It could dissolve and consume whole blocks of stone, sucking it into the flask.
More than once, Jason had used the flask to remove obstructions as his team explored the astral space. It was a win-win, since generally the obstacle was something sturdy enough that other methodologies would be slower or ineffective. Clive had posited that Emir’s cloud flask had consumed ludicrous quantities of materials and was always encouraging Jason to throw things in.
While he missed the plush comfort of cloud furniture, Jason maintained the houseboat internals in a camouflaged state, with the exception of his own bed. He would continue that at least until his family were up to speed on magic. While his sister might feel like he was stonewalling, he was even more anxious than her to get everything into the open.
The goal was to resolve everything, if not neatly, then with as little mess as he could manage. Throwing explanations in between meetings with vampires and crime bosses the way he had with Hiro, or getting bystanders caught up like with Taika, was precisely what he sought to avoid.
Ideally, that issue would be settled by the time the weekend was over. He was unsure how much his powerful but inexpert healing would help his nanna, but it had the potential to cause, as Nanna herself would say, a kerfuffle.
Jason could sense Hiro and Taika watching more of his recording crystals in the media room. Leaving them be, he made his way to the upper deck where he opened a portal arch and entered his spirit vault, the enhanced version of his old inventory ability.
The personal space was apparently different from an ordinary dimensional boundary, like that sealing off an astral space. Unlike that sort of boundary, Jason could maintain his familiars on one side, while he was on the other. This allowed Shade to keep watching his family and the houseboat while Jason was safe inside the vault. His familiars were a reassuring presence each time he retreated into the spirit vault for meditation.
Since his soul underwent changes after overcoming the star seed, Jason’s meditation had taken him to an internal world—a garden of the soul where his abilities were represented by beds of flowers. At bronze rank, that garden had expanded, giving them room to grow. Trellises created tunnels of flowers in bold colours of red, white and black, allowing him to walk through the living pathways of his own power.
The boundary of the garden was still the wall surrounding it, a stone facade covering a darker and stranger substance underneath. The facade was increasingly crumbling away, exposing more of the eerie material beneath. It was like darkness itself made substantive. A black hole, frozen and harnessed to build an unassailable boundary, then hidden behind an acceptable face. Compared to the cracked and battered stone, the dark walls beneath promised invulnerability to those within and annihilation to those who attempted to breach it.
In the time since he acquired the spirit vault, he found that it had gone through a change. The vault took the form of a gazebo of marbled black and white obsidian. It floated in the sky, which reflected the world outside. The first time he had used the vault, it had been dark and raining. During the day, the sky was bright with sunlight, but Jason’s favourite times were clear sky nights. With no town to cause light pollution, the sky was a sea of stars. There might be a wisp of cloud, lit up by the light of the moon, and he would sit beneath it, meditating in absolute, uninterruptible peace.
Over several meditation sessions, the gazebo had started descending. At first, there seemed to be nothing but endless sky below, but slowly, the garden appeared. He sensed it before he saw it, then he went out to look over the edge and down.
The garden itself was different from his experiences in the past. Instead of dark earth, it rested on dark clouds, heavy with the promise of storms. Slowly, the gazebo had descended until it settled in the middle of the garden, in a space that fit it perfectly. Henceforth, every time Jason stepped into the spirit vault, it was already in what was now a sky garden. The line between his internal and external worlds was becoming hard to tell apart.
It was a scary yet exhilarating feeling, like falling, but there was still a sense of disconnect. It made him think of the power the World-Phoenix had offered, uniting body and soul into a merged gestalt. The connection between that feeling and the offered power made him wonder if the World-Phoenix had a hand in evolving his inventory power into the spirit vault. Clive had told him that a great astral being shouldn’t be able to impact his gift evolutions without his knowledge, but even Clive couldn’t be right all the time.
Jason arrived through one of the four arches holding up the gazebo roof. There was an arch for each of his familiars and one for Jason himself. The contents of his inventory still floated in the air, orbiting the space just above the gazebo. He could see them clearly as he left the gazebo to walk around the garden.
Just strolling through the garden was a meditative experience now. He could even direct the power he was consolidating in specific directions by where he chose to go in the garden, although the powers he had been using were easier to promote. He had consolidated the gains of his recent challenges and now all his abilities were at least past the third of what Clive called the minor thresholds. His most-used abilities, his vision and cloak, had passed the halfway mark of the fifth threshold.
Until he found a new challenge, his abilities would not advance further. He hoped to find that challenge working with the Network, but if the Network decided to become that challenge instead, then so be it.
Jason spent the night in meditation rather than sleep. The more powerful he became, the less he needed to rely on sleep, although it was never wholly inescapable. Slumber was an intrinsic part of the mortal existence, even for those imbued with mystical power.
Sleep was part of the magical cycles of an essence user, even when their superhuman recovery attribute kept them awake and alert. Going too long without it would increasingly impair their ability to regulate the magic stored in their bodies. With a cloud bed to come home to, though, Jason did not begrudge the need for sleep.
Emerging through the archway from his spirit vault the next morning, his phone immediately started beeping. He went through the voice messages: an audio mosaic of his sister narrating events surrounding their nanna through a series of increasingly angry and erratic messages.