Chapter 811 - Anchor

Chapter 811: Chapter 811 - Anchor

A question came to Lucien while he was adjusting another accelerated region.

If Alanthuriel called tomorrow, what exactly would happen to everyone inside him?

Lucien stopped.

He had spent so much time preparing himself to enter the past that he had almost treated his inner universe as though it would simply remain unaffected.

That assumption was dangerous.

His inner universe had become increasingly independent, but it was still part of him.

The recovered small worlds were inside it.

The Monster Small World was inside it.

Researchers, soldiers, ancient beasts, spirits, Liberators, and countless others regularly entered its accelerated regions.

Even the permanent gates connecting several secured Lootwell territories to those regions depended on Lucien.

If his entire existence crossed into another era, there was no guarantee any of those connections would survive.

Lucien decided to find out how much distance they could tolerate first.

•••

The gates had become possible because of two things.

His authority over Space had grown enormously.

And the merged Origin Core gave him a remarkably stable reference to the Big World.

Lucien had tested the connections from different places before.

As long as he remained within the Big World’s broader Origin Core resonance, the gates behaved almost perfectly.

A person could enter through a secured gate in Lootwell and emerge inside one of Lucien’s designated regions without Lucien consciously guiding the transfer.

The same remained true while he moved through the void surrounding the world.

Distance alone was not enough to break the connection.

Lucien could still feel every passage, every entrance, and every exit.

The spatial route bent through him and returned to the Big World as though both locations remained pieces of the same structure.

The problem appeared when he pushed farther.

Lucien went into a distant void region and continued extending the connection.

At first, nothing changed.

Then the spatial tension began.

The gate remained open.

Its stability did not.

Lucien felt the route stretching through his authority, requiring more effort simply to keep both ends recognizing one another.

Farther still, the strain increased sharply.

Lucien stopped before the connection broke.

That told him enough.

The gates were not limitless.

His control over Space allowed him to ignore enormous physical distance.

The Origin Core gave him a stable anchor to the Big World.

Once Lucien moved beyond the comfortable reach of that shared reference, Space had to work much harder to maintain the route.

Traveling into the past would be worse than traveling far through the void.

That was not merely distance.

It was separation by Time.

Lucien returned and stared at an active gate for a long while.

Bringing everyone with him was no longer an option he was willing to consider.

The risk was too high.

Alanthuriel himself did not know how long Lucien would remain in the past.

He did not know what the passage would do to Lucien’s connection with the present.

He did not even know whether Lucien would be able to sense the Big World once he crossed.

Taking entire civilizations into an uncertain temporal passage because he hoped his inner universe would remain stable was reckless.

The people inside him deserved better than that.

Lucien began considering alternatives.

His thoughts quickly settled on something he had built long ago.

The Makeshift Universe.

It rested within an adjacent plane connected to Lootwell.

At the time, establishing that connection had already required effort.

Doing the same thing now would have been far more difficult.

The return of the Parallel Timelines had changed more than divination.

The boundaries separating deeper planes had become increasingly resistant to intrusion.

Even the Obsidian Tower, whose original Goblin design specialized in piercing through planes, now required considerably more energy to force passage.

Lucien suspected the change was related to the same deeper stabilization that allowed multiple timelines to exist without constantly collapsing into one another.

The universe had become better at recognizing boundaries.

That made crossing them harder.

For once, the inconvenience worked in Lucien’s favor.

Lootwell’s gateway into the adjacent plane had been completed before that strengthening fully settled.

The route already existed.

It did not need to pierce the boundary from nothing every time it opened.

And the same reinforced separation that made new entry difficult also made the plane harder for outsiders to reach.

Lucien looked toward the gateway.

The recovered worlds would be safer there than almost anywhere else he could place them.

•••

That decision created another problem.

Accelerated training would stop once Lucien left.

The specialized temporal regions existed inside his universe.

He could move worlds out.

He could move people out.

He could transfer infrastructure.

He could not leave behind the temporal structure that depended upon his own inner universe.

Lucien sighed.

That hurt.

He had only recently improved those regions.

Researchers were gaining years of work.

Armies were developing faster than the enemy expected.

Ancient beasts were using harsh accelerated environments that could support their increasingly absurd strength.

Once Lucien departed, all of that would pause until he returned.

There was no clever solution.

So Lucien did the next best thing.

He increased the remaining training period.

Not recklessly.

He had already learned enough about Time to know that squeezing every region harder simply because he feared running out of it was foolish.

Instead, he raised the safe acceleration of the military and research zones he had recently stabilized.

The change bought them more subjective time.

If Alanthuriel arrived tomorrow, they would still benefit from every extra hour.

If the path took weeks or months to open, the gain would become enormous.

Lucien informed the relevant leaders that the current training cycle might be their last accelerated rotation for some time.

Nobody complained.

That announcement alone made everyone train harder.

Lucien found that slightly worrying.

He reminded several commanders that exhaustion remained real even when Time moved differently.

The warning helped.

A little.

•••

Not everything would leave his universe.

Lucien visited the Aevan world before making the final decision.

He watched the young civilization from above.

The settlements had continued spreading.

Families were growing.

Their beliefs were changing.

Their language was becoming richer with every passing time.

Most importantly, the world itself had begun developing around them.

The Aevans were no longer merely inhabitants Lucien could relocate without consequence.

Their existence had become tied to the young world.

And that world had formed entirely within Lucien’s universe.

Removing it now would introduce variables he did not understand at exactly the wrong stage of its development.

Lucien dismissed the idea.

The Aevan world would remain.

If he had to carry anything into the past beyond himself, it would be the life that had become inseparable from the universe inside him.

That decision still made him uncomfortable.

He did not know what the temporal passage would do.

But tearing the Aevans away from the structure that had created and sustained them carried a risk he understood even less.

Lucien chose the danger he could at least protect personally.

Everyone else would be moved out before he departed.

•••

The following days were spent preparing the Makeshift Universe.

Lucien crossed through the established gateway and entered the adjacent plane.

The expanse waiting beyond it had changed since his earlier work.

It felt quieter now, and more isolated.

The strengthened boundary around the plane gave the entire region a sense of distance from the greater world that had not existed before.

Lucien liked that.

He began by measuring the space available.

Then he recreated the projected positions of every recovered small world he intended to transfer.

They could not simply be dropped wherever there was room.

Their movement mattered.

Their gravitational relationships mattered.

Their Laws could interact.

Energy flows could overlap.

Some worlds possessed stronger elemental tendencies than others.

Lucien adjusted their positions until none of their natural cycles would compete dangerously.

His deeper understanding of Space made the work far easier than it would once have been.

His improved understanding of Time helped too.

Different worlds had developed under different temporal conditions.

Once removed from his accelerated regions, they needed transitions gentle enough that their inhabitants would not experience sudden temporal shock.

The Origin Core helped stabilize the greater arrangement.

Its authority spread through Lucien’s work, allowing the transferred worlds to recognize the Makeshift Universe as a coherent environment rather than a collection of isolated objects sharing empty space.

Lucien spent days refining it.

The primary gateway received additional reinforcement.

Then he added secondary routes.

Emergency teleportation paths connected the worlds to protected assembly regions.

Evacuation anchors were placed in case one world suffered instability.

Lucien created isolated fallback zones where populations could temporarily shelter if a local disaster occurred.

He also separated the most important routes so the failure of one gate would not collapse the rest.

Nothing was perfect.

It did not need to be.

It needed to keep everyone alive without Lucien standing there personally.

When he finally finished, Lucien floated above the prepared expanse and inspected everything again.

There was enough room.

Enough separation.

Enough redundancy.

The worlds could be moved quickly once Alanthuriel returned.

Lucien would not need days to improvise a solution after the temporal passage had already begun opening.

He had turned the problem into a procedure.

That was considerably more comfortable.

Lucien returned to the Big World.

For the first time since Alanthuriel’s warning, he felt that his departure would not tear apart everything he had built behind him.

That relief lasted less than a day.