CHAPTER 86: TESTING STRENGTH (BONUS CHAPTER)

Liam stood at the edge of the valley, staring down into its yawning depth, different ideas ran through his mind.

The barren cliffs stretched like jagged scars, plunging into a gloom that the twilight sky above couldn’t fully reach.

Even though this valley — like the rest of the Dimensional Space — was lifeless, Liam couldn’t help but see its potential.

It reminded him of an empty canvas, raw and unpainted. But one day, he would change that.

The task of turning this wasteland into something habitable fell squarely on him. And unlike anyone else in history, he had the tools to do it: the molecular assembler, capable of building matter atom by atom; his omni-science knowledge foundation; the staggering advantage of time dilation in this space (sixty hours here for every single hour on Earth); and Lucy, his AGI-in-training.

And if he ever lacked raw materials? Daniel and the shell companies could bring him anything the assembler required.

Piece by piece, Liam could engineer this pocket realm into a living world — almost like terraforming a planet. It wouldn’t be easy, and it wouldn’t be quick, but he knew it was possible.

He dragged his eyes from the horizon and looked down into the shadowy valley again. Curiosity prickled at him. He wanted to know what lay inside — not just for exploration’s sake, but for another reason.

A test.

He had grown stronger, faster, tougher. His stats were climbing at a ridiculous rate. But numbers on a screen weren’t enough. He needed something real — something he could strike, break, measure.

And the walls of the valley were perfect.

"Yeah," he muttered under his breath, a faint grin tugging at his lips. "Let’s see what I can really do."

But testing his strength wasn’t the only reason. The valley also gave him the perfect chance to check for minerals.

The Dimensional Space was barren, yes. No water cycle. No vegetation. No microbes recycling matter. But barren didn’t mean empty. If this was truly an Earth-sized world, geology had to exist. Which meant the cliffs around him might be more than just stone.

Iron, copper, bauxite... quartz veins, crystalline deposits, maybe even diamonds buried deep below. Rare earths like neodymium and palladium. Maybe uranium or thorium, locked inside dense ore.

After all, the Moon was barren too, but it was rich in titanium and helium-3. Mars was sterile desert, yet filled with iron oxides and silicates. Even Earth’s Sahara, which looked lifeless on the surface, hid oil, salt, uranium, and phosphate beneath its sands.

So why not here?

The thought stirred excitement, but also a dose of realism. He couldn’t just "see" minerals with the naked eye.

Omni-science had given him the theory — crystal lattices, spectroscopy, classifications, extraction principles. But in practice, field geology needed tools. Spectrometers, X-ray diffraction, chemical assays. To his eyes, most rocks would look the same.

Yes, his vision was enhanced, and once he acquired eagle vision the precision of his sight would sharpen further. But even then, raw identification at a glance would be difficult.

Especially here, where the geology might not even follow Earth’s familiar weathering or oxidation patterns. Minerals could appear in strange crystalline clusters, alien colors, or raw lumps untouched by time.

He smiled to himself, as he knew that he now has another project for later.

"I’ll need a lab here soon," he muttered. "No way around it."

With that thought, he decided he had lingered long enough. Curiosity outweighed hesitation. He stepped forward, his shoes crunching against loose stone as he began to descend into the valley.

The cliffs loomed higher as he moved down, the ochre walls streaked with darker veins that glinted faintly under the dim orange glow of the sky.

The silence deepened the further he went, until even the sound of his own footsteps seemed intrusive.

Liam exhaled slowly, steadying himself, as he eased into the descent, letting the slope choose his pace.

Loose chips skittered from beneath his shoes and rattled away, pattering down the grade until the valley gulped their sound and sent it back as a faint, delayed whisper.

The air here was thinner, drier—so dry it felt almost powder-clean in his lungs. No scent of soil, no tang of plants or moisture. Just sterile coolness and silence.

The walls rose on either side as he went down, their ochre faces banded with darker seams that caught the gray-orange sky and returned it in dull, metallic glints.

Up close, the cliff wasn’t uniform. It was a mosaic of geologies: columnar plates shouldered against layered sheets, with veins—black, bronze, gunmetal—threading the gaps like frozen lightning.

Some strata looked sedimentary, stacked in tidy laminations the way pages stack in a book. Others jutted like cooled basalt, squared off into rough columns with hairline seams between them.

Every so often, a seam flashed with a glassy sheen, as if obsidian had bled through and solidified mid-flow.

By the time he reached the floor, the valley swallowed him whole.

It was broader down here than it had looked from above, a bowl pinched into a long, jagged funnel.

The ground underfoot had no sand—no grit that shifted and gave way. Instead it was hardpan, compacted to a ceramic-like toughness that rang faintly when the heel of his shoe struck it, as if he were walking on fired clay.

Pale fractures spidered across its surface in geometric plates that reminded him of dried lakebeds—except there had never been a lake here.

He turned slowly, taking it in.

The valley floor wasn’t flat. It rolled in subtle swells and dips, as if something enormous had once pressed a hand into it and then let go. Boulders lay where gravity had abandoned them: angular, freshly cleaved faces exposed to the dim.

In the dips, finer dust had gathered into shallow fans, the powder so fine it clung to itself and formed delicate ridges that shattered like sugar when he stepped through them.

He stepped toward the nearest wall and he put his palm to the cliff.

The feeling was cool. Not cold or hot, but cool. The surface had a dry chill that stole the heat from his skin without giving anything back.

He let his hand fall and rolled his shoulders once, exhaling.

Enough sightseeing.

Liam stepped back two paces, drew a breath, and let the [Formless Combat Doctrine] do it work, as he reflexively took a boxing stance.

He threw the first punch making sure to hold back.

His fist met the wall and a deep, compact boom rolled away like thunder caught indoors.

A faint spiderweb crack had bloomed where his knuckles had landed, a handspan wide and very shallow, delicate as frost on glass.

Dust rained down in slow, velvety waves, sifting into the still air and falling so lazily he could track individual motes.

The sound of the impact struck the opposite wall, and came back as softened booms, echo stacked on echo, until the valley sounded like a distant storm.

He flexed his fingers, felt nothing but warmth, and he smiled. He had expected to feel even some pain from the punch but he felt nothing.

"Not bad," he murmured.

He shifted again, ready to continue his test. He took a long, deep breath and exhaled slowly.

He looked at the spiderweb as if it were a target ring, found the center point, and decided not to hold back.

The second punch arrived like a verdict.

The sound leapt past boom and into something that cracked the valley open: a cannon-report that hit the cliffs, ricocheted, and made the entire floor under him vibrate slightly.

Where his fist had landed, the spiderweb exploded outward. The shallow frost pattern deepened, thickened, and shot farther than the span of his outstretched arms.

A central crater had been punched into the wall the size of a dinner plate with its edges scalloped. And the stone around it shed dust in sheets.

A slab the size of a suitcase detached above the crater, hesitated, then sloughed off and split when it hit the floor with a heavy, ear-satisfying thud.

Liam lowered his hand and stood still, chest rising and falling with the simple rhythm of his regular breathing.

It was calm and easy, as if he’d done nothing more strenuous than knock on a door. He looked from his injury-free dust- stained knuckles free, and then to the wound in the wall and back again, then exhaled through his nose, almost letting out a laugh.

"Okay," he said softly. "That answers a few questions."

Though it was only two punches but it was enough to tell Liam what he wanted to know. There was no doubt that he was strong.

Being able to punch a cliff at his full strength and create a small crater in it, and also not sustain injury was insane.

A punch like that would’ve shattered reinforced concrete, maybe even tank armor.

"I’ve done achieved what I wanted. I should be heading back to Lucy now. She should be done with her training. It already been hours already. If not almost a day," he said to himself.

While he still wanted to explore more of the space, he would have more enough time to do that in the future.

Liam picked up a half of the split slab that fell and ran out of the valley, turned to the direction of his little base and ran towards it.