A year passed. And then a few more months after that.
By Lucien’s count, it had now been five years since he first set foot in the Big World.
Ti had not been wasted.
Lootwell had risen. His people had grown. And Lucien himself had not stayed still for even a season.
Among the many things he had done in that span, one of the most useful was this:
He had ford Concord Pacts with more ancient beasts.
Only the ones worth taking.
The Behemoth and the Titan remained untouched.
Whenever Lucien looked at them through Divine Sense, their colors were still ugly. Their intent was muddy enough that even ti had not cleaned it.
Lucien had given them grace.
He had not forgotten them.
But he had decided sothing simple.
If they still remained that way when the ti finally ca, then he would stop treating them as future allies and start treating them as future dungeon batteries.
That would be their best use.
The others, however, had been easier.
So were persuaded through their lost storage rings. So through the promise of battle. So through the quiet terror of realizing Lucien knew far too much about them already.
He had not needed to threaten them openly.
He had only needed to let them understand what he had seen.
One ancient serpent had imdiately gone still when Lucien casually ntioned the preserved fragnts of its own shed scales hidden beneath its war trophies. Each one was polished, catalogued, and etched with dates.
The beast fell silent for a long while before finally saying, in a voice strained with ancient dignity, that certain records were never ant for others to see.
Lucien had agreed.
Then asked whether it wished to keep them private while partnering with him.
The pact had been signed within the hour.
Another, a colossal tusked beast, had been stirred by sothing quieter.
Deep within its storage ring, Lucien found small carved figurines, carefully preserved likenesses of warriors it had once admired.
Lucien picked one up. "Who is this?"
After a pause, the beast answered, "A warrior from a bygone age."
Lucien nodded and returned it with care. "There is nothing wrong with rembering strength."
The tension eased.
Then he added, "But why remain here rembering... instead of becoming soone worth rembering?"
The pact was ford not long after.
There were others.
A beast whose ring contained half-finished poetry carved into bone slips. One whose "sacred trophies" were actually collections of exotic perfus and scented woods from extinct trees. One whose hidden compartnt held carefully preserved love letters written by a mortal queen.
Lucien never mocked them directly.
That was the important part.
He simply let them see that he knew.
And then he gave them a better road than embarrassnt.
For the true battle-junkies, however, subtlety had not even been needed.
For them, Lucien used Marina’s water-projection thod.
He refined it further and turned it into a mory-screen.
Then he showed them what they wanted most.
Battle.
He showed them Condoriano.
The sky-condor, laughing while fighting an Extinction-grade existence far beyond what most beings could endure, even though he ultimately lost.
But Condoriano had not looked broken.
He had looked satisfied.
That image alone was enough.
The beasts who had spent ages rotting in silence stared at the mory-screens with eyes that brightened like old coals catching fire again.
One of them howled.
Another laughed so hard the chamber walls shook.
By the ti the projections ended, several had stepped forward on their own.
They did not wait for Lucien to ask.
They asked him.
They wanted battle.
They wanted horizons worth crossing.
They wanted pacts.
And Lucien, naturally, had prepared for that.
And so, he had ford Concord Pacts with seven more ancient beasts.
Grave (Gravemaw Colossus) — integrated with the Law of Burden.
Ashkara (Ashen Crown Serpent) — integrated with the Law of Venom.
Thal’voryn (Voidhorn Leviathan) — integrated with the Law of Depth.
Aurvang (Gilded War-Moose) — integrated with the Law of Montum.
Virex (Mireclaw Basilisk) — integrated with the Law of Stagnation.
Xianru (Embermane Qilin) — integrated with the Law of Renewal.
Noctryn (Nightglass Owlbear) — integrated with the Law of Echo.
They were all different.
All dangerous. All useful.
And once the pacts had settled, they too joined the shaping of Lootwell.
The territory had changed beyond recognition.
The Sovereign Circle had long since been completed.
What had once been asured in plans and foundations now stood in polished grandeur.
Beyond that, the major districts were nearing completion as well.
The Forge Quarter was finished.
Naturally, the Starforge occupied it.
Its great halls rang day and night with controlled hamring, law-tempering, cooling channels, formation-smoke, and moving rivers of molten materials that ordinary civilizations would have mistaken for impossible wealth. The district no longer felt like a workshop.
It felt like an industrial heart.
The Law Hall District was nearly complete.
Its towers, lecture courts, repositories, comprehension chambers, and public law library had all been built.
What remained now was not stonework, but content.
And Lucien had not neglected that.
For the past year, he had continuously produced Law Books.
He did not do it alone.
He taught the necessary skills to those close to him.
Photographic mory was first. Imprint Manifestation was next.
Marie had already possessed both.
After they had the skills, he taught them how to create Law Books.
Then the books began to multiply.
Lucien’s own interpretations filled many shelves already, but what pleased him more was how much the others contributed.
The four elental won, in particular, had beco terrifying in that regard.
Their comprehension of their own laws had beco frighteningly refined.
Lucien himself had taken to reading their books, not rely to approve them, but to learn from them. Where his own interpretation of an elent moved through sovereignty and structure, theirs often flowed through lived experience, temperant, and instinct.
He did not underestimate that difference.
On the other hand, Eirene surprised him more deeply.
She delivered two complete Law Books to him without fanfare.
Stillness.
And Equivalence.
Lucien did not ask how she had managed that.
He only accepted them and read them with full attention.
There were things in them that even he would not have written the sa way.
Astraea contributed too.
By then, she had long since recovered from the embarrassnt of Lucien knowing her secret and had chosen a different path entirely.
She embraced it openly.
She made a pink Law Book of Tempest.
No one laughed.
Or rather, no one laughed openly.
By that point Astraea had beco confident enough in her own terrifying power that she no longer felt compelled to hide it. And everyone else had beco wise enough not to test whether they could survive mocking her to her face.
Even Condoriano, for all his courage, never once dared.
...
The Practice Grounds had also stretched outward into sothing worthy of the na.
Lucien took special interest in that district.
He personally recreated training grounds suitable for practitioners from tamorphosis Realm upward. Pressure chambers, law-resonance arenas, collapsing-formation gauntlets, reflex corridors, controlled elental zones, and comprehension fields all took shape one after another.
The Ascendant grounds were already active.
The Celestial grounds were still under construction.
Once completed, they would allow breakthroughs that once required coincidence and fortune to beco matters of thod and preparation.
That pleased him greatly.
•••
Lucien had also spent the year searching for small worlds.
Unfortunately—
he still had not found his own.
That truth bothered him more than he liked to admit.
The search had beco far harder than his early successes had suggested. It had been pure luck, he now understood, that Marina’s world had appeared so early in his first attempt.
This ti, there were months when the search returned absolutely nothing.
Only silence. Only layered planes and drifting absence. Only the feeling of looking across too much reality for one person to search efficiently.
And once—
Sothing noticed him.
That mory remained sharp.
Lucien had been moving through another plane entirely, his presence was thin, and his body was almost empty to detection. By all rights, beings in the real world should not have found him there.
Yet sothing did.
It locked onto him.
Even through the separation of planes, Lucien had felt the attention fix on him like a blade point finding a seam.
He had thinned himself at once, cut his trace down, reduced his existence almost to nothing.
It did not matter.
The presence still held him for several breaths.
Lucien understood then that so existences were so perceptive they could sense movent even across adjacent planes.
Void-Walkers might manage sothing similar through the Law of Anti-ridian.
But whatever had sensed him that day—
It had not felt like a Void-Walker.
It had felt worse.
Faced with the unknown, Lucien did the wise thing.
He retreated.
Still, the search had not been fruitless.
He had found three more small worlds.
All three were now within him.
And now—
More than ten billion people now lived inside his divine energy core.
The Liberators within those worlds had begun training imdiately, and the four elental won took no ti at all establishing their "seniority" over them.
Or rather, Marie and Kaia did. Sylra and Marina were dragged into it.
Lucien could only shake his head whenever he saw it.
Speaking of the four, he had long since fulfilled his promise about clothing.
He obtained the necessary recipes, modified them heavily, and forged outfits capable of enduring their transformation.
That problem, at least, was solved.
Marina’s people had also grown monstrous in their own way.
And not just in strength.
Marina herself had finally gathered the courage to appear before them in her true form.
She had feared it for years that if they saw the real girl beneath the Water Goddess, their faith might break.
It did not.
They loved her just the sa.
Perhaps more.
Sylra, anwhile, had grown more at ease around n.
Not because the old fear had vanished completely, but because her own strength had grown large enough that she no longer felt helpless before anyone.
Power had given her room to breathe.
Marie never changed.
That’s what he liked about her.
She remained loud, overfamiliar, and entirely consistent. Where others shifted around him as his status rose, Marie continued treating him the sa way she always had.
Lucien found that more comforting than he would ever say out loud.
Kaia, strangely, had grown quieter whenever he was around.
That was unlike her.
Lucien noticed it.
But he could not yet see why.
So for the mont, he let it remain unexamined.
•••
Inside him, many of the monsters had also broken through to Ascendance.
Whenever one approached the threshold, Lucien imdiately moved it into the Monsterdex and let the breakthrough occur within the exact environnt he had tailored for its species.
The success rate beca absurd.
With the proper habitat, monsters no longer had to force themselves against reality in the wrong shape. The breakthrough occurred along a path their bodies were already prepared to accept.
It was like the difference between germinating a seed in suitable soil and trying to force it to bloom in stone.
Still, the slis were the most ridiculous among the monsters.
They had beco monstrous.
So Lucien gave them work in Lootwell itself.
Their task was simple.
Waste removal. Cleaning. Transport. Support.
At first, the people were surprised by these strange creatures. Only the ancient beasts seed to recognize them.
Then the slis demonstrated just how efficient they were.
With their sli storage, absurd carrying capacity, and perfect willingness to cooperate, they beca so of the most useful labor-support entities in the entire territory.
They devoured refuse.
They moved materials.
They helped logistics.
They even supported portions of the building process.
Before long, no one in Lootwell underestimated a sli anymore.
•••
There was also one significant change that occurred during this year.
The Liberator Organization finally stepped out of the shadows and declared its presence to the world.
The hidden years were over.
And when that happened—
The entire world stirred.
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