Chapter 757 - Liberators

Chapter 757: Chapter 757 - Liberators

Time continued to pass.

The danger Vorren sensed did not disappear.

It did not suddenly become worse either.

That uncertainty was almost more frustrating.

There was no enemy for Lucien to strike and no clear disaster he could prevent. Tidewatch remained active. The conquered worlds continued strengthening their Voidwatch networks. Lootwell’s preparations deepened across the five continents.

So Lucien used the time for something else.

He returned his attention to the small worlds.

•••

The incarnation plan had never stopped running.

Even while Lucien dealt with the attacks in the void, the Grace System continued monitoring the volunteers who had successfully incarnated into compatible small worlds.

Most of the time, there was nothing for Lucien to do.

He simply waited.

Then, occasionally, a connection matured enough for the system to alert him.

Whenever that happened, Lucien left personally.

He did not delegate this part.

The small worlds were too important, and the connection created through the incarnated individual was too valuable to risk mishandling.

The process had become familiar by now.

The system gave him the approximate trace.

Lucien used the Obsidian Tower to force his way into the appropriate layer beyond the normal reach of the Big World.

The incarnation connection gave him the path.

Then he found the world.

Once everything had been confirmed, Lucien transferred the entire small world into his Divine Energy Core.

For most of them, nothing appeared to change.

They simply continued living without realizing that the entire world had quietly moved somewhere safer.

•••

After each recovery, Seran handled what came next.

He established contact with the Liberator inside.

That part remained easier for him than for anyone else.

The Origin Core fragments were surrendered to Lootwell permanently.

They joined the merged fragment Lucien already possessed.

Then the newly recovered world was allowed to settle inside the Divine Energy Core.

And Lucien waited for the next signal.

•••

Fortunately, they had sent many volunteers.

More than Lucien strictly needed, as it turned out.

Some incarnation paths overlapped.

Lucien did not complain.

The excess had become insurance.

For every group that overlapped, others had incarnated somewhere completely different.

Those additional paths kept producing new worlds.

One after another, the missing points disappeared.

The Divine Energy Core grew increasingly crowded with entire realities that had once been scattered beyond reach.

From the outside, nothing about Lucien changed.

Inside him, worlds accumulated, lives continued, civilizations moved forward, and with every successful recovery, there was one less place the Black Mass could reach first.

That was the part Lucien cared about most.

Aurelia had already confirmed the existence of small worlds that had fallen completely.

There was no rescuing those in the same way.

Whatever had once existed inside them had been consumed or corrupted beyond anything Lucien could safely recover.

The possibility bothered him for another reason as well.

Liberators were not ordinary people.

The Black Mass had already demonstrated what it could do with suitable shells.

Lucien had no intention of discovering what would happen if it gained control of more Liberators.

If those people could influence the fate of their worlds while alive, then their corrupted bodies could become equally dangerous tools in the wrong hands.

That possibility alone was enough to make Lucien treat every new signal as urgent.

Whatever else demanded his attention, he went.

•••

Months of that work gradually produced another problem.

Lucien now had Liberators.

Many of them.

These were the individuals the Primordial Slime had prepared long ago.

People born inside those small worlds carrying strange advantages that made normal standards increasingly useless.

Some possessed unusual systems. Others had inheritances, artifacts, talents, bloodlines, or abilities that should not have appeared naturally in such limited worlds.

Their methods differed.

The absurdity did not.

Lucien eventually stopped pretending they could be treated like ordinary talents.

He established a dedicated division for them.

He did not uproot them from their worlds.

The recovered worlds were still their homes.

Their families lived there.

Their histories belonged there.

Lucien had no intention of descending into each civilization and announcing that all unusually fortunate people now belonged to him.

Instead, Seran contacted the Liberators privately and gathered those who agreed to cooperate in designated regions outside their native worlds but still within the Divine Energy Core.

The first gathering was unexpectedly strange for Lucien.

He had never met most of them.

Yet when he entered the area, the atmosphere felt familiar.

Their clothing differed.

Their languages had once differed before translation methods were provided.

Their appearances, fighting styles, and even assumptions about how power worked could be completely different.

Still, Lucien felt comfortable around them.

Pleasantly so, almost nostalgically.

That bothered him.

The Liberators reacted strangely as well.

There was caution at first.

That was reasonable.

A man they had never met had apparently moved their entire world somewhere else without anyone noticing and now possessed a connection to the strange legacy surrounding their lives.

Suspicion would have been healthy.

Yet it rarely lasted.

Something about Lucien seemed familiar to them too.

They could not explain it.

Neither could he.

A few stared longer than politeness required.

Others became unusually relaxed after speaking with him and Seran for only a short time.

One Liberator laughed during their first conversation and then looked confused because he could not explain why talking to Lucien and Seran felt like meeting someone he had not seen in years.

Lucien did not know what to make of that.

Seran was even less helpful.

Whenever Lucien looked toward him for an explanation, he somehow managed to look innocent.

Lucien had learned not to trust that expression.

Seran took primary responsibility for the new division.

He understood the Liberators better than anyone currently available.

More importantly, they trusted him.

Together, Seran and Lucien began locating the special places connected to each Liberator.

Those locations differed from world to world.

Some had been hidden.

Others had become legends.

A few had been buried beneath ruins whose original purpose had been forgotten for generations.

Lucien did not accompany every group personally.

He provided support where necessary, but this was their inheritance.

They needed to walk through it themselves.

One after another, they returned.

And each time, something about them had changed.

Their abilities matured.

Their systems evolved.

Dormant functions opened.

Incomplete inheritances connected properly.

The exact changes were different for every Liberator.

That was almost the defining feature of the group.

There was no single path to standardize.

One might return with an evolved system that suddenly understood an entire field of techniques.

Another might come back with a system that had gained several new functions.

A third might simply possess a terrifying improvement in comprehension that made the previous version of himself look unfinished.

Lucien found the inconsistency refreshing.

Lootwell had grown so organized that encountering an entire division whose defining principle appeared to be cheating in completely different ways was almost nostalgic.

Something else changed whenever the Liberators returned from their special location too.

Their familiarity with Lucien deepened.

That made considerably less sense.

They had not spent more time with him.

Some had been gone for weeks.

Yet when they returned, the strange distance between them seemed smaller.

Their conversations became easier.

Their trust became more instinctive.

Several began speaking to Lucien with the casual ease of people who had fought beside him before.

They had not.

At least, not in any life Lucien remembered.

The sensation worked both ways.

There were moments when Lucien would see one of them return and feel a brief, inexplicable relief.

As though someone who had been gone too long had finally come home.

He never understood why.

He filed the feeling beside several other questions surrounding the Primordial Slime and the Origin Core.

There were already too many mysteries in his life.

This one could wait.

•••

What could not wait was their strength.

Lucien had no intention of leaving the Liberators at whatever level their small worlds had originally allowed them to reach.

Liberators could change the fate of worlds.

If someone was going to overturn an impossible situation, these were exactly the kinds of people Lucien wanted nearby.

So he invested in them.

Heavily.

Resources that would have transformed entire minor factions were distributed according to actual compatibility.

Training environments were prepared.

Artifacts were repaired or supplemented.

Those whose systems responded to particular resources received them.

Those whose inheritances required specific conditions were given access to suitable facilities.

Some trained with Lootwell specialists.

Others benefited more from ancient records, rare materials, controlled battles, or the specialized facilities built during the Grand Intercontinental Competition.

Lucien refused to throw resources at them blindly.

The Grace System had already taught him the weakness of doing that.

Every Liberator was assessed individually.

What helped one person could be useless to another.

What accelerated one could damage another.

Seran coordinated their development while Lucien provided what Lootwell could afford.

Fortunately, Lootwell could afford a disturbing amount.

•••

The results came quickly.

Perhaps too quickly.

Liberators who had once been restrained by the limits of their native worlds began advancing after entering environments where those limits no longer applied.

Their foundations differed, but their potential had always been there.

Now the ceiling above them had moved.

One breakthrough triggered another.

Systems adapted.

Bloodlines awakened further.

Artifacts matured alongside their owners.

Several Liberators who had once been considered untouchable legends within their small worlds discovered that the wider universe contained levels they had never imagined.

Instead of discouraging them, that revelation seemed to make most of them happier.

Lucien understood.

Someone who had spent an entire life breaking limits did not respond to a higher ceiling by sitting down.

They responded by trying to break that one too.