Chapter 772 - Testing
Lucien continued testing.
Living Creation was everywhere.
The worlds did not wait for Lucien to decide how every species adapted or how every ecosystem responded to change.
They adjusted naturally.
Plants introduced into unfamiliar climates developed variations across generations.
Beasts exposed to different energies slowly produced new traits.
Civilizations altered their environments, and those environments influenced the generations that followed.
Lucien could still intervene.
He simply did not need to.
His inner realm had acquired its own capacity for development.
That was the part that unsettled him.
In the past, everything inside the Divine Energy Core had existed because Lucien sustained it.
That remained true at the deepest level.
But increasingly, the things inside were sustaining one another.
Worlds produced resources.
Living beings altered worlds.
Death fed future life.
The Tree of Creation interacted with the Core.
The Cycle Merit Web handled reincarnation.
Laws maintained structures that once required Lucien’s direct attention.
The whole thing had begun behaving less like an ability.
It behaved like a universe.
•••
Lucien tested energy circulation next.
That produced another surprise.
His worlds had developed increasingly complete internal cycles.
Energy released through death, natural decay, Law interactions, weather, geological processes, and ordinary activity no longer simply dissipated into the Divine Energy Core before Lucien redistributed it.
More of it remained within local systems.
A forest could absorb what its ecosystem produced.
A world could recycle a portion of its own ambient energy.
Some regions had even begun forming natural concentrations where local conditions repeatedly pushed the same Laws together.
They were primitive compared with the ancient sacred lands of the Big World.
But they were forming naturally.
That meant his inner realm was slowly learning how to create its own special environments.
Lucien immediately imagined what several hundred years of accelerated internal time might produce.
Then he deliberately stopped imagining.
He had already learned that giving the universe ideas was dangerous.
Unfortunately, this universe was inside him.
•••
The changes to Light, Darkness, elemental forces, and environmental Laws were less dramatic individually but equally important collectively.
Day and night no longer required Lucien to consciously maintain every relationship behind them.
Worlds could sustain climates according to their own structures.
Seasons developed where appropriate.
Oceans circulated.
Atmospheres stabilized themselves.
Storms formed according to environmental conditions rather than because Lucien happened to possess enough authority to permit weather.
Fire behaved like fire.
Water carried the properties expected of water.
Earth supported structures according to its local composition.
Air moved according to pressure and heat.
That sounded ordinary.
Lucien understood how extraordinary ordinary had become.
A real universe did not require someone to remember that rain should fall.
It simply possessed enough internal Laws for rain to happen.
His worlds were approaching that condition.
•••
Lucien traveled farther.
The recovered small worlds were particularly interesting.
They had once developed beneath incomplete Laws.
After being transferred into the Divine Energy Core, their old limitations had gradually weakened because they were surrounded by a broader environment.
Now that process accelerated.
Not because Lucien poured power into them.
He did not.
The surrounding universal framework itself had become more complete.
Their inhabitants could encounter expressions of Laws their original worlds had never supported properly.
Older experts found paths beyond ceilings they once believed absolute.
Young people grew up without inheriting quite the same restrictions.
Scholars who had spent generations constructing theories around incomplete natural laws would probably spend the next few centuries discovering how much of their academic confidence had been misplaced.
Lucien wished them luck.
•••
Then he considered the most dangerous application of all.
Training.
Lucien could place compatible versions of training facilities inside accelerated regions.
A group could spend five years training while only months passed outside.
Command structures could run repeated campaigns.
Healers could gain years of controlled emergency experience.
Formation masters could test designs through development cycles that had previously taken decades.
Researchers could fail a hundred times without consuming a century of external preparation.
Even young talents could gain more time to mature before being expected to stand beside monsters who had existed for thousands of years.
Lucien’s excitement returned.
Then his expression became serious.
There would have to be restrictions.
Accelerated time could become addictive.
A faction might decide that if ten times acceleration was useful, one hundred times must be better.
Someone desperate enough might willingly burn centuries of lifespan for strength.
Others might pressure younger people into doing the same.
Lucien would not allow that.
Training inside accelerated regions would need consent, lifespan evaluation, medical oversight, psychological rest periods, and limits appropriate to the individual.
Long-lived Eternals could tolerate decades differently from young practitioners who had barely begun their lives.
Time was a resource.
It was also life.
Lucien would not confuse the two.
•••
There was another limitation.
Knowledge gained under acceleration still required a mind capable of absorbing it.
Ten years of bad training did not become valuable simply because it happened quickly from the outside perspective.
A poor teacher could waste a decade just as efficiently as a good teacher could use it.
Resources also remained real.
Training for ten internal years consumed ten years of pills, equipment maintenance, food, energy, and materials.
The Grace System could help match people with appropriate programs.
It could not turn wasted time into useful experience automatically.
Lucien actually found those restrictions reassuring.
His newest advantage was overwhelming.
It was not effortless.
That meant it could be managed.
•••
Then another thought occurred to him.
Lucien became very still.
The Prime Continuum would open soon.
Parallel Timelines would return.
Causality would weaken.
Alanthuriel had told him that his connection to the universe had become too important for the Abyss to erase casually.
And now Lucien had discovered that there was an increasingly independent universe inside him.
He did not know whether those facts were connected.
He had no intention of pretending he understood enough to decide.
But Alanthuriel clearly had noticed something.
Perhaps this was what he meant.
Perhaps it was only part of it.
Lucien looked toward the countless distant lights of his inner realm.
For the first time, he wondered whether the Divine Energy Core was still the correct name for what existed inside him.
It had begun as a Core.
Then it became an inner world.
Then an inner realm.
Now it possessed independent Time, self-sustaining Laws, natural reincarnation, stable internal energy cycles, evolving ecosystems, autonomous civilizations, and worlds capable of developing without his constant intervention.
Lucien rubbed his forehead.
Apparently, he had spent so long worrying about the outside universe that he had failed to notice another one quietly forming inside his body.
That felt embarrassingly on brand.