Aye, Chonky had grown up to become a bigger chonker.
Sylvester grabbed the cat by the fluffy belly and checked him thoroughly. The size had doubled, and there were two more wings on the back. His fangs had also grown bigger, but other than that, there was no change. He still looked as cute as ever with the same round, greedy eyes, always hungry for a banana.
"Do you feel anything different?"
"Aye, aye, I'm a bigger boy now."
Sylvester hummed and rubbed his chin, thinking deeply about the next steps. He didn't feel comfortable placing Miraj away from his body since anything could happen at any moment, so he strapped him against his chest again. But now, due to his increased size, his fluffy head also brushed against Sylvester's lower chin.
"Let's continue the experiment, Chonky. I'll continue to make that beam of light. You need to keep gobbling it down and try to control where it comes out. Try to observe the portal that brings the beam back into this space." He instructed Miraj and used creation magic to form the beam of light in thin air, hurling towards them and entering the cat's jaws.
Sylvester kept instructing him into his ears the whole time, trying to tell him where to focus.
Woosh!
In no time, he saw a new portal forming in the distance and a beam appearing from it. With the space magic he had learned, he noticed the minuscule spatial distortion. "Chonky, focus on that portal around the beam."
"Fo-hus?"
"Try to look where the beam is entering your mouth and how it appears outside in front of us. I know it's confusing, but there has to be an entry and exit."
Miraj used his paw and pointed at his wide-open jaws.
Sylvester interpreted the meaning and started speaking to him mentally. "You mean the jaw is the only entry?"
"I think so. I'm not doing anything but keeping my mouth open, Maxy. I tried to make the beam appear nearby only, and it did." It wasn't clear to Miraj either.
Over time, Sylvester watched Miraj change the position of the teleported beam of light, sometimes going away and at times getting closer. It seemed tough as Miraj's brows twitched, but eventually, it seemed his control got better.
"Maxy, what do I do next?" Miraj asked. "I don't know how to feel space magic, and I don't know how to feel magic either."
Sylvester felt helpless. "Try to bring that beam as close as possible. Make it a point away from us. I will try to get a read on the portal."
In utter darkness, with Sylvester's body and the beam of light making all the light near them, the two carefully worked on the mystery of finding a way out. Miraj, getting better at his control, made the beam appear close to them after his fifth try.
Sylvester observed it and hoped to make sense of the spatial distortion inside what he considered to be a spatial anomaly. If the void wasn't inside Miraj's belly, then it had to be somewhere. There had to be a container for all that darkness.
"O-oh!"
Sylvester's ears perked up, "What do you mea—"
Pop!
And once again, there was darkness everywhere. Sylvester thanked himself for keeping Miraj's body strapped to his body. But, as he looked around this time, he noticed flickering distant stars everywhere in all directions. There was also some coldness in the air and a strange mass.
"What did you do this time?" He questioned Miraj.
"I didn't do anything! I promise, Maxy! I just felt that portal getting angry and unstable," Miraj answered, trying to save himself from adding one more punishment. "And I think we're out of my belly now."
"That we sure are." Sylvester agreed as he was now sure the stars sparkling in the distance were real. He couldn't see any eels either, but the space felt similar to what he expected from normal space outside the atmosphere of his home planet.
"Oooh! Again!"
Woosh!
Just as they had appeared in that space, they vanished again. Sylvester kept his senses sharp and looked left and right. There were no stars in the distance anymore, but he could see the eels once again, tangled in themselves all around him.
"What's going on? Are you doing this, Chonky?"
Miraj was more scared than Sylvester as he hugged his chest. "I don't know, Maxy. But I'm not doing it knowingly."
Sylvester sighed and tried to listen to the same voice that was guiding him towards itself. 'I hope Dalgan and Zenith didn't move anywhere.'
"Ah! Again!" Miraj quickly warned.
Woosh!
Sylvester almost cursed when, once again, he found himself disappearing and reappearing somewhere else. But, this time, instead of darkness, he noticed an abundance of light all around him.
However, when he turned around, he almost lost his mind.
"Fuck, fuck, fuck! Chonky, do whatever the hell you were doing! Get us out of here!"
"What?" Miraj looked too, and his eyes sparkled. "So prett—"
"No!" Sylvester roared, feeling his body getting shoved in a direction by forces he couldn't fight against. Feeling so tiny before the majestic, massive force of nature, he felt helpless. "We're stuck on a damn Accretion Disk of a black hole! I don't think I'm strong enough to fight against a singularity yet!"
Miraj had no idea what a black hole was. To him, the spinning giant thing with a dark hole in the center was beautiful. It certainly was, but deadly for those cursed with knowledge.
"But I don't know how to."
Sylvester gritted his teeth, wondering how he was even alive. "Chonky, we're out of time. If we get stuck in the Event Horizon, I'd have to fly at the speed of light to escape the gravity. I don't think I can do that."
Miraj tried his best, but he had no idea how to do it. "But h—"
Woosh!
"Fuck!" Once again the lights didn't diminish and instead changed color. "Goddammit, Chonky. You picked me up from a black hole and dropped me near a fucking dying star. But we're away enough to watch safely."
"But I'm not doing anything." Miraj was already crying, feeling helpless.
Sylvester sighed and tried to find some solution to what was happening. With the beautiful sight of a supernova in the distance, he tried to keep his senses awake to notice what spatial distortion was throwing them around space, and perhaps time also.
"I know."
Woosh!
"Got it!" Sylvester barked as soon as the spatial distortion happened again, and they were hurled through a portal. Once again, they found themselves inside an empty space with stars everywhere around them. "Let's keep going until we find those eels again."
Again.
Then once more.
And many more times.
Sylvester and Miraj were thrown into space at various places. More Black Holes, Supernovas, Hypernovas, Suns, Planets, and other unexplainable entities that seemed to be Eldritch Horror than anything else.
But each time, their visit only lasted around ten seconds to one minute at maximum. Sylvester overanalyzed every single thing and felt his understanding of spatial magic was getting better. In time, he began to form a roadmap in his head, and place coordinates whenever they'd rarely stumble back in the eel-
filled space.
Miraj had gone tired by then. The space jumps likely took a toll on his body. Sylvester tried his best to help him do something about it. Eventually, they found the culprit to be his new size, which hindered his control of himself, including his mighty jaws and ability.
"Miraj, from now on, activate your mouth ability when I tell you to. I might have found a method to find our way back to that space." Sylvester instructed him, closing his eyes to focus on reaching that middle space with eels. "Now!"
Woosh!
Left and right, up and down. Sylvester closed Miraj's mouth with his own hands while looking everywhere. "Yes! We're back to where we left off."
"Really?!"
Sylvester forced Miraj's mouth shut again. "Don't, Chonky. We don't know when your ability might cause a blunder. Let's explore it after reaching the Demon World again."
But they had to find Dalgan and Zenith first. Returning without them was no different than declaring war on the Demon Realm.
'Let's try Solarium Web.'
Sylvester closed his eyes and used the energies around him, searching everywhere, in the hope of contacting the two travelers. He also hoped to hear the voice of the young girl who was guiding him beforehand.
Miraj stayed silent, and Sylvester stayed still. There was no concept of time in that place, so Sylvester had no clue for how long he stood there trying to reach out to the two. Eventually, he started to feel a sizable dent in his solarium reserves, and yet the two travelers were nowhere to be found.
'No, I can't lose them here. This is worse than death!' Sylvester cursed under his breath and tried to focus more. 'The young girl's voice isn't coming either. Why did she stop?'
A lot more time passed, and Sylvester continued to observe his surroundings. Of course, he felt the slimy-looking black-colored eels everywhere. They didn't even create an open space around him since he didn't have a path to go to.
They were all weightless and matterless, but they were so packed around him that if he was to somehow breathe there, he'd have suffocated. Curious, he forgot everything and simply observed the intertwined little long eels. They were too long, however, similar to snakes but with no eyes.
'What's this?' He noticed a strange pattern on one of the eels that passed by. That earned his curiosity, and he started to look at the bodies of every eel. To his shock, he noticed there were some differences in each of them.
"No!" He exclaimed and opened his eyes. What he just comprehended was too wild to even think about.
"What happened?" Miraj, after trying his best not to, asked.
Sylvester was still shaken, however. He stared absently at the countless, endless ocean of black eels traveling in all directions.
"T-The eels are…" he stuttered heavily, gulping even when there was nothing inside his body. "C-Chonky, the eels are c-
containers of countless… No, this feels too ridiculous."
"What is it?" Miraj pressed on.
Sylvester stared at his own palm helplessly, for the first time showing such defeated expressions.
"Chonky, each eel contains a reality across time and space—
each one holds an entire universe inside it! We just visited some of them!" He felt his lips becoming heavy. "Your belly is in one of them! Our world and the Demon World are in one of them!"
Thank you for reading the book. Gifts and GT votes are highly appreciated.
