Gourmet World – The Gravity Basin, Day 187 of the Gourmet Year
The air in the basin didn't just press down—it felt like the entire weight of the sky had been condensed into a liquid atmosphere that sought to infiltrate and crush every cell. This was the "Gravity Basin," a depression fifty kilometers wide where the planet's natural gravitational fields intersected in a catastrophic knot. At its edges, gravity was a mere 100x Earth standard. At its center, where they now trained, it fluctuated between 350x and 500x.
Indra stood naked to the waist, his feet planted on ground that had been compressed into a substance harder than diamond. Every breath was a conscious effort, requiring his intercostal muscles to work with the force of hydraulic presses. Sweat didn't drip; it was squeezed from his pores in fine mists that immediately flattened against his skin. His body, already transformed by months of Gourmet evolution, was a compact engine of super-dense muscle and bone—250 pounds of hyper-compressed biology that could have bench-pressed a mountain in their home world.
But here, he struggled to lift his own arms.
Rias: (Her voice, transmitted through bone-conduction via their updated comms, sounded strained) "Readings show a gravity spike incoming. 480x and climbing. You sure about this?"
She was positioned at the edge of the basin, monitoring from the *Raijin-1*, which hovered uneasily even with its upgraded gravity compensation. Her Banshee Bat demon was a silent, watchful presence in her shadow, sensitive to the warping of space-time that such intense gravity caused.
Indra: (The words came out as controlled grunts, each syllable a victory) "Positive. My spatial sense... it's stretching. I can feel the fabric of this place warping. This pressure... it's exactly what I need."
For weeks, he'd felt a plateau. His physical transformation had slowed. His hybrid energy reserves were vast, but their quality felt static. His Eternal Mangekyō, while granting him incredible spatial and temporal insights, operated within set parameters. He could manipulate space and time in discrete "packets"—a fold here, a moment reversed there. But he felt the deeper currents, the continuum, just out of reach. The Gravity Basin, with its twisted, heavy reality, was the anvil upon which he hoped to forge a breakthrough.
He began the kata again. A simple Uchiha spear-hand form, designed to pierce armor. In normal gravity, it would have created a sonic boom. Here, his hand moved through the dense air like through molten lead. Every muscle fiber screamed, not in pain, but in profound exertion. His chakra—no, his hybrid energy—flowed through pathways that felt like they were being forged anew with each cycle.
His eyes, the intricate geometric Mangekyō, were active. They didn't just see the physical world; they saw the stress lines in space itself. In the basin, gravity wasn't just a force; it was a distortion of dimensional geometry. He could see the weight bending the very grid of reality.
He pushed harder. The gravity ticked up: 490x.
A blood vessel burst in his sclera, the blood immediately crushed into a bruise-like spot. His bones, reinforced a hundred times over, groaned. He wasn't just training his body; he was training his perception. To see space as malleable, time as fluid, even when they were being crushed into a singular, oppressive point.
See it, he commanded himself. Not as separate. Space and time are the same fabric. Gravity is the warp in that fabric. To control one is to understand the other.
His left eye, attuned to time (Dialga), saw the gravity's effect on temporal flow. Time moved slower here, stretched thin by the immense weight. His right eye (Palkia) saw the spatial compression, the way distances were shortened, the way the basin was essentially a fold in planetary topology.
He tried to link the perceptions. To see the unified field. The strain was immense. A headache, deep and fundamental, began behind his eyes.
Rias: "Indra, your vital signs are spiking into the red zone. Brain activity is... I've never seen patterns like this. You need to pull back."
Indra: "Not... yet."
He forced the two viewpoints to merge in his mind's eye. Space-time. Not space and time. A single entity. The gravity was a depression in it. His eyes burned. The geometric tomoe in his Mangekyō began to spin, then smear, as if the patterns themselves were melting under the conceptual pressure.
Then, the earth moved.
Not an earthquake. A gravitational tide. The readings on Rias's monitor went haywire. 520x. 550x. 600x.
Rias: "IT'S NOT A SPIKE! IT'S A PULSE! SOMETHING'S COMING FROM THE CENTER!"
The ground at the basin's epicenter, two kilometers away, erupted. Not with rock and soil, but with inverted gravity. A column of earth and stone was vomited upward, defying the crushing weight, only to hang suspended in a chaotic orb. And from beneath it, something rose.
It didn't walk. It displaced.
The Gravity Rhino was a creature of pure, condensed mass. It stood thirty meters at the shoulder, but its true size was deceptive—its body warped space around it, making it appear both near and far, huge and dense as a neutron star. Its hide wasn't skin; it was a lattice of crystallized gravitational force, shimmering with a sickening purple-black light. A single horn, spiraling like a galaxy's arm, tore the very light around it. Its eyes were singularities of dark intent.
[System Alert: 'Gravity Rhino' detected. Capture Level: 500. Entity is a walking gravitational anomaly. Capable of localized gravity manipulation up to 1000x standard. Generates spatial shear fields as a defensive mechanism. Extreme threat.]
CL 500. The number was academic. The presence was apocalyptic. The air around it screamed as it was torn apart by conflicting gravitational pulls. The suspended debris orbited it like a miniature asteroid belt.
It turned its head. It didn't see with light. It sensed mass, energy, and the disturbance they caused in the gravitational field. Two tiny, dense anomalies—Indra—had been poking at the fabric of its domain. It was displeased.
It took a "step." Space between it and Indra compressed. One second it was two kilometers away, the next it was five hundred meters, having crossed the distance not by moving, but by bending the spatial metric.
A low, subsonic bellow rolled out. It wasn't sound; it was a gravity wave. The wave hit Indra.
700x gravity.
It was like being struck by a planet. Indra's knees buckled. The diamond-hard ground beneath his feet cracked radially for meters. Every organ in his body felt like it was being pulled into his spine. His enhanced physiology, which could regenerate from a bisection, was on the verge of being compacted into a meaty paste.
He couldn't breathe. He couldn't think. Only one instinct screamed through the crushing pressure: ADAPT OR DIE.
His Mangekyō whirled madly, the patterns disintegrating, reforming, disintegrating again. The conceptual wall he'd been pushing against shattered.
Space and time are one. Gravity is the curvature. To control the curvature... is to command the foundation.
In that moment of absolute physical and perceptual crisis, something within him aligned. The separate insights from his right and left eyes didn't just merge; they fused into a deeper, more fundamental understanding. The geometric patterns in his irises dissolved completely, washed away in a surge of purplish light.
When the light cleared, his eyes were no longer the crimson and black of the Uchiha.
They were a ripple of concentric circles, lavender and violet, with the faint, ghostly afterimage of his old Mangekyō pattern etched within them like a memory.
The Rinnegan. But not the Rinnegan of the Sage. This was something else—a Rinnegan born not of chakra inheritance, but of transcendent understanding under duress. The Space-Time Rinnegan. The Palkia and Dialga aspects weren't templates to be completed; they were fundamental forces he had now internalized as the core of his visual prowess.
The crushing 700x gravity didn't vanish. But it ceased to be an overwhelming force. It became data. He could see the gravitational field lines around the Rhino, could see how the creature manipulated them. He could see the stress points in space-time around his own body.
With a thought that was more will than technique, he recalibrated his local space-time metric.
The gravity around his personal vicinity dropped to 1x standard. The relief was so sudden he almost launched into the air. He stood straight, the cracks in the ground ceasing their spread.
The Gravity Rhino paused, its singular intelligence puzzled. The tiny mass should have been pancaked. Instead, it stood, and its energy signature had changed dramatically. It had become... coherent. Ordered.
Indra: (His voice, when he spoke, had a new resonance, as if echoing from a higher dimension) "Thank you. For the pressure. It was the final ingredient."
The Rhino responded with fury. It stamped a foot. From the point of impact, a Gravity Fissure tore through the ground towards Indra—a crack in reality where gravity became infinite, a one-dimensional string that would cut through anything.
Indra didn't dodge. He raised a hand, his Rinnegan glowing softly.
"Space-Time Decree: Metric Smoothing."
The tearing fissure didn't hit a barrier. It hit a region of space that had been rendered geodesically flat. The infinite gravity gradient simply... dissipated, smoothed out into harmless background curvature. The ground stopped cracking.
The Rhino charged, this time using its spatial compression in rapid bursts, becoming a blur of distorted reality, its galaxy-horn aimed to impale.
Indra didn't retreat. He reached into the core of his new understanding. He needed a weapon, a manifestation of this new sovereignty. The answer came not as a technique, but as an expression.
"Manifest. Susanoo."
Purple and blue energy erupted around him—but it was different. It wasn't the chaotic, emotional outburst of the Uchiha curse. It was a deliberate, majestic unfolding of personal reality.
The energy didn't form a skeleton first. It formed a conceptual framework. A lattice of intertwined space-time coordinates solidified into a towering, humanoid shape of breathtaking complexity.
The Warrior Form: The first to fully manifest. It stood sixty meters tall, a majestic giant of amethyst and cobalt energy. It was armored in plates that seemed to refract light from multiple angles, and in its hands, it held a massive shield that shimmered with temporal dilation and a sword that hummed with spatial harmonics. This was the balanced form, the mix of both aspects, powerful but with limits.
But Indra felt the deeper reservoirs now open to him. He willed a specialization.
"Palkia Form: Susanoo of the Spatial Lord."
The Warrior Form shimmered and transformed. It became sleeker, more avian, more abstract. Its armor turned pearlescent white and silver, etched with non-Euclidean geometries. It gained wings—not for flight, but that were actually folded space, granting instantaneous short-range teleportation. In its hands, the sword became a Spatial Rend Blade, a weapon that didn't cut matter but severed spatial connections, leaving clean, unmendable dimensional cuts. This form radiated an aura of absolute positional authority.
"Dialga Form: Susanoo of the Temporal King."
Another shift. This form was bulkier, more draconic, armored in burnished gold and bronze. Its movements left after-images that lingered for seconds, showing where it had been and where it would be. Its eyes were clock faces. Its weapon was a Chronos Mace, whose touch could accelerate time in a target to dust or rewind it to a previous state. It existed slightly out of phase with the present, making it incredibly difficult to target.
He could feel the limits. The Warrior Form was his baseline, sustainable. The Palkia and Dialga Forms were overclocks—immensely powerful but draining, requiring deep taps into his newly unified space-time energy reserves. He couldn't maintain them indefinitely.
The Gravity Rhino slammed into the Palkia Form Susanoo. The horn, capable of puncturing spatial layers, met the Susanoo's shield. Space warped violently around the impact point. The shield held, but concentric rings of distorted reality rippled out, shearing the surrounding landscape.
Indra, encased within the Susanoo's core, didn't flinch. He was now operating on a level where such forces were parameters to be managed.
"Palkia Form Ability: Localized Gravity Well."
The Susanoo's free hand pointed at the ground beneath the Rhino. A point of infinite density, a microscopic black hole, manifested for a nanosecond. It didn't have the mass to be truly dangerous, but the sudden, violent gravitational spike—2000x for a fraction of a second—jerked the Rhino off its feet, disrupting its charge.
The creature bellowed, righting itself. It retaliated by generating a Spatial Shear Cage—a web of invisible lines that cut space itself into cubes, trying to dice the Susanoo.
"Palkia Form Ability: Spatial Tear."
The Susanoo's blade swept in an arc. Instead of cutting the web, it cut the space containing the web. A ragged, black tear opened in reality, swallowing the shear cage whole before snapping shut with a sound like breaking glass.
The battle became a clash of cosmic principles. The Rhino manipulated gravity, a symptom of curved space-time. Indra, through his Susanoo, manipulated the underlying geometry itself.
The Rhino, enraged, gathered all its power for a final move. Its horn glowed with a light that sucked in the surrounding illumination. It was preparing a Gravity Collapse, a point of such intense spatial curvature it would create a temporary singularity, sucking everything within a kilometer into a crushing doom.
Indra saw the buildup. He couldn't nullify that much focused distortion with his current abilities. He needed to strike at the source, at the time of its creation.
He dismissed the Palkia Form. In a flash of gold light, the Dialga Form Susanoo materialized.
"Dialga Form Ability: Temporal Stasis Field."
The Susanoo's clock-face eyes blazed. A sphere of altered time encapsulated the Rhino's horn just as the collapse reached criticality. Time stopped for the energy building in the horn. The Rhino was frozen in the moment before release.
But maintaining stasis on something of that power was like trying to hold back a tsunami with a wall of sand. Indra felt the strain immediately. The Dialga Form flickered.
Need to finish this. Not with raw power. With precision. With an unraveling.
He pushed the Dialga Form to its limit, buying himself two seconds of real-time. His Rinnegan saw the Rhino's entire history—its birth from a gravitational anomaly, its growth, the rhythmic pulses of the basin that were its heartbeat. He saw a weak point, not in its body, but in its temporal stability.
With the last of the Dialga Form's energy, he performed not an attack, but a surgical intervention.
"Dialga Form Final Ability: Cause and Effect Severance."
The Chronos Mace touched the frozen horn, not with force, but with a precise temporal vibration. It didn't break the horn. It disconnected the present moment of energy release from the past moments of energy accumulation. The causal chain was broken.
The stasis field collapsed. The Rhino's horn flashed... and then fizzled. The built-up gravitational energy didn't explode outward; it simply ceased to exist, having nowhere to go, no cause to justify its effect. The feedback through the disconnected causal link traveled backward through the Rhino's biology.
The creature shuddered. Its crystallized gravity-hide cracked, not from outside force, but from internal paradox. Its singularities-for-eyes winked out. With a final, confused rumble, the Gravity Rhino, Capture Level 500, collapsed into an inert heap of incredibly dense, but now harmless, matter.
The Dialga Form Susanoo dissipated in a shower of golden light. Indra dropped to one knee on the now-stable ground, breathing heavily. The Rinnegan faded from his eyes, reverting to his Eternal Mangekyō, though the patterns now held a subtle, lavender tint deep within.
He felt empty. Drained. But also... expanded. New pathways had been carved in his soul. He understood things about the universe that he had only theorized before.
Rias: (Her voice crackled with static from the residual spatial distortions, but he heard the awe in it) "Indra... what... what was that? Your eyes... those forms..."
Indra: (He looked at his hands. They were the same, yet everything was different) "A new perspective. I saw the weave. And learned to pull a thread."
The Aftermath and Deep Forest Exploration, Days 188-210
The following days were spent in recovery and integration. The battle had altered the Gravity Basin, smoothing out some of its extreme distortions. It was still a high-gravity zone, but now it was a stable training ground rather than a chaotic death trap.
Indra's body underwent its most dramatic change yet. The fusion of his new space-time understanding with his Gourmet-enhanced biology triggered a final, explosive growth spurt. When he stood next to Rias, he now towered at 6'5", his frame having filled out to a solid, sculpted 280 pounds of pure, hyper-dense muscle. He wasn't bulky; he was a monument of efficient power. His black hair retained the single white streak, which now seemed to shimmer with a faint spatial distortion. His presence had changed—he felt more real, more substantiated, as if he occupied more dimensions than those around him.
Rias ran every test she could devise. His density was off the charts. A single one of his cells, under a microscope modified with Gourmet crystal lenses, showed organelles that seemed to exist in micro-folded spaces, allowing for impossible energy storage and processing.
Rias: "Your cellular structure... it's like each one contains a pocket dimension. No wonder you can fuel those Susanoo forms."
Indra: "It's a reflection of the internal space. The Rinnegan... it's not just a visual power. It's an organ of perception that reshaped my entire biology to accommodate its function. My chakra, my Gourmet Cells, my life force—they're all now integrated under the paradigm of space-time geometry."
His new abilities were profound, but required immense focus:
Localized Gravity Wells: He could create points of intense gravity, from a gentle pull to a crushing 1000x field, though maintaining the latter was taxing. Spatial Tears: He could rip temporary holes in space, useful for defense (swallowing attacks) or short, unpredictable movement. Temporal Stasis: He could freeze a target in time for brief moments, longer for weaker targets. Metric Manipulation: His most subtle and powerful ability—he could alter the local rules of space-time slightly, making an area have lower gravity, faster time flow, or even weakened electromagnetic forces.
The three Susanoo forms were his ultimate expressions:
Warrior Form: The balanced, general-purpose form. Incredibly durable, strong, with a blend of spatial and temporal defenses. Palkia Form: Specialized in spatial warfare. Could teleport, cut dimensions, create spatial shields. Its attacks ignored conventional durability by targeting spatial connections. Dialga Form: Specialized in temporal warfare. Could age targets to dust, rewind injuries, create time loops, and sever causal links. Nearly untouchable due to temporal phasing.
But using the specialized forms was like holding open a gateway to a cosmic force—possible only for minutes before exhaustion set in.
With their new power baseline established, they embarked on a deep, systematic exploration of the ancient forest sectors surrounding the Azure Fang, their discovery log swelling from #151 to #230. Rias's Sonic Release allowed them to safely navigate areas filled with infrasonic hazards and communicate with sonic-based ecosystems. Indra's spatial sense let them map areas with non-Euclidean geography and retrieve ingredients from spatially-defended plants.
Their discoveries became increasingly exotic:
#151: Void Moss. CL 110. Grew in areas of weak spatial fabric. When ingested, it granted temporary intuition about spatial layouts and hidden dimensions. #159: Temporal Berry Bush. CL 180. Berries that caused the eater to experience a few seconds of subjective time at an accelerated rate, useful for quick thinking. Overconsumption risked temporal dissociation. #167: Fold-Fern. CL 95. A fern that existed in a partially folded spatial pocket, making it appear smaller than it was. Its fronds, when processed, could be used to create storage seals of incredible capacity. #175: Gravity Blossom. CL 220. A flower that emitted a gentle, stabilizing gravity field. Its pollen could be used to create anti-gravity materials or to calm violent gravitational phenomena. #182: Causality Root. CL 290. A root that, when analyzed, always showed effects before causes in laboratory settings. Too dangerous to consume, but invaluable for studying temporal mechanics. #190: Echo-Wood Tree. CL 155. Wood that perfectly remembered and could replay any sound ever made near it. A single chip could store entire libraries of information. #198: Spatial Pepper. CL 130. A pepper that didn't burn the tongue but created a mild, localized spatial distortion in the mouth, causing flavors from different parts of a meal to "teleport" and combine in novel ways. #205: Time-Capsule Fungus. CL 170. A fungus that encased its spores in microscopic fields of slowed time, allowing them to remain viable for millennia. Studying it improved Indra's grasp on temporal stasis. #212: Harmonic Metal Deposit. CL 250. A vein of ore that resonated at a perfect frequency. When forged (using precise sonic strikes from Rias), it produced metal that was both incredibly strong and capable of channeling sonic or spatial energies. #220: Dream-Space Orchid. CL 195. An orchid whose scent induced dreams that took place in fully realized, alternate spatial geometries. A risk for sanity, but a treasure trove of spatial understanding for Indra. #228: Gravity Rhino Bone Marrow. CL 500 (derivative). Harvested from their fallen foe. A substance of incredible density and latent gravitational power. A single spoonful, when properly prepared, could permanently increase one's mass and gravity resistance. They consumed it over a week, their bodies growing even denser, more anchored to reality. #230: The First Seed of Geometry. CL 350. Found in the heart of a region where light bent in impossible angles. A seed that looked like a four-dimensional object projected into three dimensions. It contained the fundamental "idea" of spatial manipulation. Indra did not consume it; he meditated on it, using it as a focus to refine his Palkia Form Susanoo and his understanding of spatial folds.
One evening, after cataloging the #230 discovery, they sat on the roof of their base. The Gourmet World's twin moons were rising, one silver, one a faint blue.
Rias: "We're not just collecting ingredients anymore. We're collecting... concepts. Laws of physics made edible, made integratable."
Indra: (Nodding, his new height making the roof feel smaller) "This world doesn't just have a food chain. It has a knowledge chain. You eat your way up to understanding. The Gravity Rhino was a test. A living embodiment of a principle. To defeat it, I had to internalize that principle at a higher level."
He looked at her, his Mangekyō active for a moment, the lavender tint deep within the crimson. "Your Banshee Bat is a concept given form—Silence, the control of sound. My new eyes are the concept of the Framework—Space-Time itself. We're becoming less like organisms and more like... embodied laws."
Rias: "Setsuno and the IGO talked about Gourmet Cells as the particle of life and appetite. I think they're also the particle of potential. They allow life to absorb and manifest concepts. We're proof."
Indra: "We have five months left before our planned return. We need to consolidate. Master our new forms. Understand our limits. And we need to find one more thing."
Rias: "What's that?"
Indra: "A challenge that tests not just our individual concepts, but their synergy. Something that requires your sound and my space-time to work in perfect harmony. That will be the final proof of our readiness for whatever awaits back home."
He looked up at the strange stars of this universe. He had come here to build a fortress of power. He hadn't expected to become an architect of reality itself. The path was clear: master the new laws within them, and then return to the Elemental Nations not just as protectors, but as sovereigns of a new order.
The Space-Time Awakening was complete. The Gourmet World had forged him into something unprecedented. Now, he had to learn what to build with the tools he'd been given.
End of chapter – 56.