Chapter 771 - Big Change
Lucien spent the next several days doing exactly what Alanthuriel had told him to do.
He looked inward.
At first, that accomplished very little.
Nothing unexpected appeared beyond the changes caused by the newest Bark.
Everything had changed, but nothing seemed significant enough to explain why Alanthuriel had specifically warned him to examine what was inside.
That irritated Lucien.
Mostly because he was beginning to suspect Alanthuriel had known exactly how long this would bother him.
Lucien continued anyway.
He stopped looking for something obviously new.
Instead, he began comparing how his inner realm behaved now against how it had behaved months ago.
That was when he noticed it.
At first, he thought he had made a mistake.
Then he checked again.
His expression changed.
A third examination produced the same result.
Lucien went completely still.
"This can’t be right."
Unfortunately or fortunately, it was.
•••
Lucien entered his inner realm directly.
His figure appeared in the void between its worlds.
From the darkness, he could sense almost everything.
Nothing looked wrong.
That was precisely why Lucien had overlooked the change.
It had happened naturally.
His inner realm had always grown alongside him.
Whenever Lucien’s Laws deepened, their expressions inside the realm became clearer.
Whenever the Divine Energy Core expanded, the space available within it grew.
Whenever Lucien developed another aspect of his authority, the worlds inside benefited indirectly.
He had become accustomed to that.
The problem was that the process had quietly crossed a line.
Lucien raised one hand.
His attention settled on Time.
And then he changed it.
•••
Actually, he had tried manipulating time inside the Divine Energy Core before.
That was nothing new.
He could alter the length of days.
He could modify how quickly celestial bodies moved across artificial skies.
He had even created areas where perception, training, or environmental processes operated faster than they did elsewhere.
But those effects had still remained anchored to the outside universe.
If one year passed in the Big World, one year of actual existence had still passed for someone inside his Core.
He could make their days feel longer.
He could accelerate processes.
He could alter local reference.
But he had not truly created more time.
That distinction had always remained.
But now... it did not.
Lucien isolated a barren region, then he accelerated it.
He watched carefully.
One second passed outside the region.
Ten seconds passed within.
Lucien waited.
The effect remained stable.
He pushed farther.
A minute became ten.
Then an hour.
The environment inside did not merely behave more quickly.
Time itself passed, matter aged, and energy cycles progressed.
Even the plants Lucien created for the experiment grew according to the accelerated interval rather than the external one.
A small creature he formed matured correspondingly.
Lucien immediately returned the region to normal.
Then he stared at it.
His expression became strange.
He repeated the experiment.
The same thing happened.
This was not simulated time.
His inner realm had developed its own temporal reference.
Time inside no longer needed to remain synchronized with the Big World.
Lucien stood in the void for several seconds.
Then he began laughing.
He tried to stop, but that made it worse.
For years, he had complained that he never had enough time.
Now there was a universe inside him that had apparently decided to solve the problem literally.
•••
Lucien calmed down eventually.
Then the practical implications arrived.
That nearly made him start laughing again.
If the realm remained stable at a ratio of ten to one, a single year outside could provide ten years inside.
Ten years of training.
Ten years of research.
Ten years of craftsmanship.
Ten years of young talents gaining actual experience.
Ten years for formations, medicines, ecosystems, settlements, and institutions to mature.
It was not an illusion.
People living through those years would actually experience them.
They would learn. They would change. They would age.
That last part immediately stopped Lucien from becoming too excited.
Accelerating time had consequences.
A person living ten years inside while only one year passed outside still lost ten years of their life.
That could be useful for someone with an extremely long lifespan who desperately needed training time.
It could be disastrous if used carelessly on ordinary people.
Resources would also be consumed according to internal time.
Medicinal plants would absorb nutrients.
Artifacts would degrade.
Energy would be spent.
A decade of progress still required a decade’s worth of inputs from the perspective of everyone inside.
The ability gave Lucien more time.
It did not create ten years of resources from nothing.
Lucien actually appreciated that limitation.
Anything this ridiculous deserved at least one inconvenience.
•••
He began testing the boundaries carefully.
Accelerating the entire inner realm was possible.
It was also inefficient.
The greater the region affected and the larger the difference between internal and external time, the greater the pressure on his authority and Divine Energy Core.
Ten times acceleration across one controlled training region was easy now.
Doing the same across every world, every ocean, every civilization, and every structure inside him demanded considerably more.
Higher ratios became progressively worse.
Lucien could force them.
He simply saw no reason to damage his newly stabilized Core for the sake of proving that he could.
That meant the best use was obvious.
Selective acceleration.
Training grounds could operate faster when necessary.
Research facilities could be given additional years to solve difficult problems.
Crafting divisions could work through long development cycles while only months passed outside.
Ancient beasts with long lives could spend decades refining coordination without consuming decades of external preparation time.
The Liberators could train within accelerated regions before returning to their native worlds.
Commanders could repeat campaigns until the experience became instinctive.
Even the Grace System could take advantage of it by assigning long-term developmental quests inside controlled areas without forcing the rest of civilization to move at the same pace.
Lucien’s thoughts accelerated.
Then he stopped himself.
He was doing it again.
He had discovered a universe-changing ability less than an hour ago and was already designing schedules.
Some habits survived every breakthrough.
•••
Time was only the beginning.
Once Lucien knew what to look for, the other changes became obvious.
Space had matured alongside it.
His inner realm had always been large.
Now size alone no longer described what had happened.
Distances had become more stable as independent properties.
Lucien could expand one region without forcing neighboring worlds to shift proportionally.
He could fold enormous distances into controlled corridors.
He could isolate dangerous zones so completely that their spatial disturbances barely touched surrounding regions.
Previously, those things had required active manipulation.
Now the realm itself understood separation more naturally.
It possessed geography at a level deeper than terrain.
Lucien tested it by creating a small experimental region far from any inhabited world.
Then he folded the intervening distance.
One step brought him across an absurd span.
He released the fold.
The original distance returned.
Lucien frowned thoughtfully.
Teleportation inside the realm would become far easier.
So would containment.
Dangerous facilities no longer needed merely physical distance from populated areas.
He could give them spatial distance that ordinary movement could not cross accidentally.
That would make several of Lootwell’s researchers disturbingly happy.
Lucien decided that information might require supervision.
•••
Life and Death had changed even more.
Lucien sensed it the moment he turned his attention toward the inhabited worlds.
Birth.
Growth.
Decay.
Death.
The passage from one state into another no longer felt like something his realm merely permitted.
It had become part of the realm’s structure.
That led Lucien toward something he had not examined closely in a long time.
The Cycle Merit Web.
He entered the deeper layer surrounding it.
Then he stopped.
The structure had changed enormously.
Originally, Lucien had created it as part of his attempts to organize merit, continuity, and eventual reincarnation.
The Reincarnation Disc had once been indispensable to that process.
Now the Cycle Merit Web had integrated so deeply with the inner realm that Lucien could barely determine where the system ended and the world’s natural order began.
Life and Death formed the primary cycle.
Continuance preserved what needed to pass onward.
Eternity stabilized the parts of existence that should not simply dissolve with death.
The other supporting Laws filled the spaces between those authorities.
Souls entering the cycle no longer needed to be manually directed through the Reincarnation Disc.
The realm itself knew what to do with them.
Lucien watched a naturally deceased soul enter the process.
It passed into the Cycle Merit Web.
Its accumulated connections, merit, damage, and remaining stability were assessed.
What needed to disperse dispersed.
What could continue was preserved.
Then the soul moved onward.
No Reincarnation Disc intervened.
Lucien remained silent.
The Disc had not become useless.
It could still serve as an external tool, an emergency mechanism, or a specialized artifact.
But inside his Divine Energy Core, reincarnation no longer depended on it.
The cycle had become native.
Lucien’s inner realm possessed its own functioning reincarnation.
That realization affected him more deeply than the time acceleration had.
Time could be manipulated.
Space could be folded.
Those were extraordinary abilities.
But a world where life could be born, die, pass through its own cycle, and return without outside machinery had crossed into something fundamentally different.
Lucien looked across the inner void.
"Senior Alan really could have been more specific."
The silence offered no sympathy.