CHAPTER 163: UNDERSTANDING THE UNKNOWN.

(A/N Big thanks to everyone for the Power stones and Golden tickets, they mean a lot. As usual, please don’t hesitate to comment or drop a review. ENJOY)

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Caelum tapped his bracelet, and the gentle vibration cut off. He skimmed the small glowing text with an expression that didn’t shift even a fraction. After a brief moment, he closed the interface and returned to his book.

Orion waited.

Caelum didn’t speak.

Meaning it wasn’t as important as he thought it to be.

So Orion asked with a raised brow, "Who was it?"

Caelum didn’t look up. "Seris."

Orion blinked. "Important?"

"No." Caelum flipped a page. "She wants to move the meeting to four."

Orion stared at him for a second, then let out a deep groan and stood from the chair.

Of course.

Of course Seris postponed their meeting.

She was probably going out again—"an outing with her girls." In Seris-language, that meant she was about to waste academy points on something ridiculous. But Orion couldn’t even bring himself to blame her. She’d said it herself: This is the last month she gets to act like a queen.

And she wasn’t wrong.

Being the strongest female student in the academy came with enough influence to shake an entire magnum if she felt like it. Add her beauty, her ferocity, her talent—and Seris wasn’t just respected. She was an idol. Tens of thousands of students knew her name.

If she wanted to indulge herself before graduation, Orion wasn’t going to stop her.

As long as she was spending her points, not his.

He dragged a hand across his face and walked back into his room, leaving Caelum absorbed in his novel. The moment he stepped inside, he let himself flop backward onto the bed.

More free time.

He pushed himself upright and sat cross-legged near the head of the bed. His eyes drifted half-closed, breath steadying.

If Seris moved the meeting to four, then he had hours.

Hours to dig deeper into the one thing that had been eating into his mind like a parasite.

Phasing.

Orion rested his palms on his knees and exhaled slowly.

To understand how his goal came about, you’d have to understand how overcame his last goal.

Back then, he had thought observing Thaddeus in action would give him a hint—some visible anomaly, some hint of distortion, some slight shift he could track. So he had done just that. For months. Watching. Studying. Trying to analyze something his senses refused to grasp.

Nothing.

The more he watched, the more irritated he became, until he finally decided to take the academic route.

The library.

He had combed through dozens of books, archives, scrolls—anything that might even whisper about dimensions, space-layering, or innate spatial techniques.

Nothing.

He wasn’t surprised. Spatial Veil wasn’t something every Chronos knew. It was a branch-specific innate skill—meaning only a particular lineage within the Chronos family possessed it. And if it was branch-specific, then the knowledge wouldn’t be in the general academy library.

It would be in the branch itself.

Which meant he had to find another route.

So he had gone to Landon—the instructor for Spatial Manipulation Theoretical.

Orion still remembered that conversation even now. Landon had looked at him like a puzzle box. Not annoyed, not dismissive—impressed. Very impressed. Orion had asked questions usually reserved for seasoned research mages, not an eleven-year-old.

Landon didn’t know the specifics of Thaddeus’s skill, but he knew enough to point Orion down a different line of thought.

A different way of seeing space.

Different enough that Orion spent the next months deliberating, comparing theories, building frames, breaking them, rebuilding them again.

Until finally...

It clicked.

The concept was complicated. It was messy. It was the type of thing that could cause migraines if held too long. But if he simplified it—if he stripped everything down to its bare bones—it became something understandable.

Dimensions.

Thaddeus wasn’t just in this dimension.

He was in multiple—simultaneously.

His body existed here. But it also existed there. In a second layer. And possibly a third. A constant triple-presence.

Which was why mana-based detection couldn’t track him.

Mana search, presence detection, every single technique relied on mana as the underlying medium. And if Thaddeus was cycling between dimensions at a rate that mana couldn’t stabilize on...

The detection simply broke.

Every scan flicked between layers, unable to lock onto one, unable to settle, unable to determine which version of Thaddeus it was sensing.

Physically, he was in front of you.

Magically, he was everywhere and nowhere.

That alone had taken Orion a full year to accept.

But even after he understood that, many questions emerged.

The first:

Does this mean mana itself is interdimensional?

Because if mana exists in every dimension simultaneously, then it made sense that it could "see" multiple layers—but also makes sense why it was confused by someone occupying more than one.

The second:

How does someone hide their presence when their physical body is still interacting with the environment?

Because Thaddeus still stepped on the ground.

Still disturbed the air.

Still created physical vibrations that should, in theory, be detectable.

Yet with Protocol, Thaddeus vanished.

Completely.

And Orion hated that.

He had tried to detect him with spatial sense, mana sense, pulse sense—nothing worked. Not a single technique could pinpoint him. He had been forced to rely on physical tracking—sound, sight, shadows, breath.

And even then, Thaddeus slipped past him more times than Orion liked to admit.

He leaned forward slightly, elbows on his knees.

Phasing.

Going through matter.

It was the natural extension of that concept.

If a person could exist in multiple layers at once...

Then shifting fully into one should, theoretically, allow passage through physical space.

Simple in theory.

Infuriating in practice.

His mind spiraled through the formulas he had built, the resonance patterns he had attempted yesterday, the frequency clash that nearly made his arm go numb—

—until he forced himself to stop.

His thoughts were going too fast again.

He inhaled deeply, steadying his breath, letting the silence of his room soak into him.

Outside, the faint sound of a page turning drifted in from the balcony.

Caelum was still reading.

Still calm.

Still unbothered.

Orion almost envied him.

Almost.