The world inside

Chapter eleven: The World Inside

Caelum pressed the back of his wrist against his forehead, wiping away the faint traces of sweat that had formed. The sheer effort of lifting the large wooden frame had left his arms sore. "Hueh~but at least the hard part is done."

The frame was massive, easily covering a significant portion of the wall in his room. It was sturdy, seemingly made of polished dark wood, giving it an old, regal look that fit perfectly with the importance of what it was about to contain.

Taking a step back, he let out a slow exhale, hands resting on his hips as he observed his handiwork.

"you know, not bad," he muttered to himself. "like Not bad at all."

Then his gaze dropped to the floor, where the painting lay, depicting a strange cosmos. It looked vast as it spread across paper, its deep blacks swallowing the light in his room, while countless stars shimmered within its depths. The sight was just as breathtaking as when he first finished it.

"Just as i thought, It has to go up inside the frame."

There was no way he was going to let something this significant sit on the floor, gathering dust or getting rolled up and shoved into some forgotten corner of his desk.

'No. This is the foundation afterall.' foundation of something that caelum was putting his hopes on.

He bent down, taking extra care as he lifted the paper. It was large, delicate despite the strength of its existence. Folding it carefully, he brought it toward the frame, ensuring that every part fit perfectly within its borders.

The moment he secured it inside, a sense of finality washed over him.

He took one step back, rolling his shoulders and stretching his arms above his head.

"It's done! Finally—ugh."

His voice carried exhaustion, but there was excitement close to craziness layered beneath it—something dangerously crazy.

His eyes traced over the newly framed artwork. Seeing it mounted like this caelum couldn't help but notice, how different it looked from the classroom painting. "It's almost as if it were a portal to another world or something."

"Well that makes it feel even more real."

The deep and endless void of space. The glimmering lights of distant stars. A canvas that couldn't be considered just art.

His fingers twitched like it usually does when he was excited.

"Time to enter, but before that." Caelum looked at the floor beneath again. The quill still lay on the floor, right where he had left it after finishing the painting. He bent down again, picking it up with practiced ease.

The weight of it was almost non-existent, but Caelum knew how absurdly Powerful that ordinary looking quill was.

"Actually now that i think about it, even in terms of looks, it doesn't look normal at all!" The quill that completely overturned his life upside down, it looked majestic in a sense he couldn't describe.

Standing directly in front of the framed cosmos, he reached out with his free hand, fingers brushing against the smooth, glassy surface.

"Huffff." Taking a long breath His palm pressed flat against the painting.

And then caelum slowly poured his willpower, half of it was already used to create the painting with only half remaining

He felt the slow pull, as if invisible threads were wrapping around his body, his willpower began to drain steadily and purposefully.

His vision narrowed. The whispering silence and the dark void wrapped around him.

He was being drawn in by the second.

Caelum didn't have the time to react before the familiar sensation of weightlessness overtook him. his mind fogged for a brief moment as reality itself bent, twisting around him as his body disappeared from his room.

"Umh..."

When his senses came back he was in a tunnel, dark and endless. Same as when he entered the classroom.

It was a corridor of nothingness, stretching infinitely in all directions.

Faint streaks of white light shot past him, brief flashes that illuminated the void for the smallest fraction of a second before vanishing again.

The usual force beyond his understanding had taken hold of him, dragging him deeper as he was pulled in.

His heartbeat pounded in his ears with unhealthy excitement, 'This feels way different, it's almost nothing like entering the classroom painting.'

As he lacked his physical body in this space, caelum could only let his thoughts run wild.

'That had been smooth compared to this, as if stepping through a doorway into another space. But this-'

The painting felt vast, Like something enormous had opened up, swallowing him whole.

Caelum could not process the sheer scale of what was happening before the tunnel around him cracked.

The darkness shattered just like glass, it was like reality itself was breaking apart.

When Caelum opened his eyes, he was already beyond the cracks.

"This is—" his eyes widened to their limits, and his mouth agape.

What lay in front of his eyes was an endless starry sky gleaming with colours of all kind.

"Ha..." with a small chuckle caelum started laughing madly, "This is insanity!" He could barely stop his laughter as he processed the view he was seeing.

"It's as if, it's as if I'm standing right at the centre of the universe." Caelum's words left his throat out without him even realising it.

He was Floting, surrounded by a vast and eatheral horizon. With brilliant lights emitting from the distant stars in the darkness.

He was inside a seemingly unreal Cosmos.

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"This stillness is quite creepy ha."

Caelum looked everywhere his eyes could reach, standing there with eyes that seemed to sparkal like a child, surrounded by an expanse so incomprehensibly vast that it made every part of him feel infinitesimally small.

Yet, despite its overwhelming size, the place carried a quiet familiarity, as if it had been waiting for him all along.

The black void stretched outward in every direction, adorned with countless stars that twinkled like frozen embers. Their soft glow illuminated the nothingness, casting faint lights that didn't seem to belong to any single source.

"Even my breath feels oddly weightless, wait....huh?" His face went pale when the realisation hit.

"There isn't anything like air here....no it's impossible for air to exist in the vacuum of outer space."

"then how am i?" As caelum hung in the empty space like a tshirt left to dry in sunlight, he tried his best to comprehend what was happening.

"Is this because i defined it as 'a place that i can use as i want' or is it because i created this space?" As He couldn't pinpoint what the reason was, he slowly gave up trying to figure it out.

"Well I'm not dead so, it's fine?" The thought of what would have happened if he didn't define this place to be useful sent chills through his whole body. 'I was way too careless, tsk.'

SPAT!

After shaking the chilly sensation off by slapping his cheeks with his hands, caelum moved his fingers and legs slightly.

"Though the body feels normal enough."

He was floating in a suspended space held by some kind of force.

It wasn't like he was standing on an invisible platform, firmly placed in the middle of space itself.

He was floating like a fish in the air.

He ran a hand through his face, inhaling deeply, one breath after another.

A chuckle bubbled in his throat before he gently slapped both of his cheeks again.

"Alright. Focus, focus, focus, focus."

His voice drifted into the abyss, swallowed by the void around him. But logically that should have been impossible.

"I never could have guessed, that i will be able to hear my own voice in a vast outer-space." Because of his definition for the space to be of use to him, the painting world seemed to violate all the rules of nature.

His lips curled slightly.

"This place really is frozen, isn't it?"

It wasn't just the stillness of the cosmos around him, There was no movement at all.

The stars did flicker, but that was due to caelum defining them to flicker

The darkness was frozen, the entire space felt like a painting in itself, existing in a state of suspended existence.

He pinched his glabella as a thought struck him.

"Ah yes…. time isn't flowing here."

He brought his hand down from his glabella and rubbed his chin, turning the idea over in his head.

'If time didn't flow, no did time even exist in this place?'

It wasn't just that things were unmoving or that nothing was changing. It was as if the concept of time itself had never been established here.

That should have been way too overwhelming for a human brain But instead, the only thing Caelum could think was.

"That makes sense, actually."

This wasn't Earth nor this was reality.

This was a world he had drawn.

If he had never defined time, then of course it wouldn't exist here. He exhaled, shaking his head.

"I don't think I'd even survive if I tried to make something as abstract as time."

That thought alone was enough to make him grimace.

Even the classroom painting had been an insane effort to create. It was familiar and It was something that had once existed. He had simply reconstructed it from memory, but it was still frozen in time.

But making a liner flow of time, That was a whole other beast.

"To try and create something so fundamental when i live my life depended on medicines. Hah!" Even though it sounded crazy, the thought was still stuck in caelum's mind.

'Would that be possible if i could properly move past the limit and breakthrough?

He let out a short laugh, shaking the thought away before it could spiral into something unnecessary.

"Yeah, let's not think about something as abstract as time for now."

His fingers tightened around the quill still resting in his grip. "Last time when i tried to expand the inside of the classroom painting, it sucked me dry but.." caelum paused for a second.

"Maybe it was because i used my raw willpower instead of using the quill?"

When He glanced at it, his mind felt at ease, as if as long as he had the quill nothing could go wrong, an unspoken thrill coursed through his veins.

It was the same feeling that had kept him awake for nights.

The same feeling that made him throw every bit of caution aside when using the quill, in favor of pushing forward.

The undeniable excitement of seeing what else he could do.

"It doesn't seem like coming inside consumes much willpower."

'Creating things drains me more than entering the paintings?'

Even when he entered inside this time, he barely felt like anything at all.

He turned his gaze back toward the vast, empty space ahead of him. With a slow, deliberate motion, he raised the quill, pressing its tip into the air itself.

His voice carried with quiet determination

"Alright. Let's make this place more stable."

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Caelum could still feel a slight cold down his spine, as he pressed the quill into the void.

The moment the ink touched the air, his willpower surged forward, leaving his body in waves.

Black lines etched themselves into the empty space, forming delicate strokes that floated like glowing filaments of energy.

Each stroke devoured his strength and chipped away at his reserves.

Caelum's breath started to grow heavier, but he gritted his teeth and pressed on.

The lines connected, weaving an intricate framework into existence. They pulsed faintly, flickering like unstable neon lights before solidifying, marking the edges of something tangible in this endless empty space.

Slowly a boundary formed, separating the area from the void around him.

As the final stroke took form, the ink expanded outward, stretching and warping as if redefining the laws of the space surrounding him.

A sharp tug rattled through Caelum's chest, his body swaying slightly as his balance wavered.

"It's done. It should be the limits of what i can do with the willpower i have left."

Before him stood a pure white chamber, roughly 300 square feet in size.

With the remaining willpower, caelum manifested a simple room of pure whiteness.

Caelum hovered just above it, still suspended in the space, Taking a steady breath, he willed himself downward, allowing his feet to descend.

The moment his soles touched the newly-formed floor, an audible click was heard from within him.

The pressure inside the room felt different from the cosmos outside, it was lighter.

Like the weight of a place that existed to comfort ones mind and body. And that's how caelum has defined this place.

"I should huff..., go back for now and rest-"

But before he could even register his surrounding, a sharp pain slammed into his chest.

"what the-Ughhhh"

Caelum staggered, his hand instinctively gripping his shirt as he fell on his knees.

His vision blurred instantly. The world around him tilted, as if spinning.

His breath hitched and a burst of raw, invisible force erupted from his body.

"Ahghhh!." Caelum screamed out of his lungs, feeling a pain that was inhumanly strong, slowly eating away at his thought process.

CRACK!

The very space around him rippled, an overwhelming surge of energy exploding outward.

His scream tore through the silence as his body convulsed.

A tidal wave of pure, transparent willpower blasted into the air, swirling violently before dissipating into the Cosmos outside the white room.

His vision whitened, his nerves burned, and his consciousness teetered on the edge of collapse.

But through the chaos and uncontrollable eruption of power—One thing became abundantly clear.

He was breaking through.