Chapter 758 - Accelerate

Chapter 758: Chapter 758 - Accelerate

Eventually, another incarnation signal reached Lucien.

He recognized it immediately and departed without delay.

This search proved more difficult than most of the previous ones. The connection was faint, stretched across layers that were harder to reach, and for a time even the Obsidian Tower struggled to maintain a stable path.

Still, the link created by the incarnated individual never disappeared completely.

Lucien followed it until the surrounding space finally opened around a distant small world.

The moment he confirmed the connection, the tension in his expression eased slightly.

He had found another one.

As with the others, Lucien transferred the entire world into his Divine Energy Core without disturbing its inhabitants. Afterward, Seran helped establish contact with the Liberator living inside and guided the process that followed until the Origin Core fragment was finally surrendered and merged with the rest.

Then Lucien waited.

He expected another signal to arrive eventually.

None did.

Days passed without another alert.

Eventually, even Lucien began wondering whether there was simply nothing left to find.

Seran reviewed everything.

At last, he gave Lucien the answer he had been waiting for.

As far as everything they possessed could confirm, the surviving small worlds connected to the Primordial Slime had already been recovered.

Lucien remained silent for several moments.

Only then did he release a slow breath.

He had known the search was nearing its end.

He had not realized how much tension he had been carrying until there was finally nothing left for him to chase.

•••

It did not mean every small world had survived.

Aurelia had already confirmed otherwise.

Several had fallen.

Those losses remained.

But the surviving worlds were now inside the Divine Energy Core.

The Black Mass could no longer casually find them scattered through inaccessible layers.

The Liberators within them were accounted for.

The Origin Core fragments they carried had returned.

Another vulnerability had been closed.

More importantly, Lootwell had gained people who might eventually become extraordinary forces in the war ahead.

For once, the news was simply good.

Lucien allowed himself to enjoy that for almost an entire minute.

Then he went back to work.

•••

The Liberators were not the only ones changing.

The native populations of the recovered worlds had begun progressing as well.

Lucien had expected some improvement.

The scale surprised him.

Their old worlds had developed under incomplete Laws and limited environments.

That did not make their accomplishments meaningless.

If anything, surviving and advancing under those restrictions made some of their strongest people remarkably resilient.

But there had always been ceilings they could not cross.

Inside the Divine Energy Core, those ceilings were no longer absolute.

The worlds themselves remained intact, but the environment surrounding them was different.

The Laws available beyond their original boundaries were more complete.

Ambient energy was richer.

Paths that had once ended simply continued.

At first, only the strongest natives noticed.

Then breakthroughs began occurring.

They happened quietly.

A peak expert entered a stage his world had considered mythical.

Another followed months later.

Younger generations progressed more smoothly because their foundations were being built beneath broader Laws from the beginning.

Techniques evolved.

Old theories were revised.

Scholars began arguing about why principles that had failed for thousands of years suddenly worked.

Lucien did not answer them.

He preferred that.

The civilizations inside the small worlds were still their own.

He had promised himself that recovering them would not become an excuse to rule every detail of their existence.

They deserved to develop naturally.

Unfortunately, nature was taking too long.

And Lucien was increasingly short on patience.

•••

That was how the Grace System entered the small worlds.

Lucien had considered several approaches before deciding that the existing method was still the safest.

He would not descend from the sky and tell entire civilizations that an approaching cosmic disaster required them to train harder.

That would create several problems, most of which involved being worshipped more aggressively than he already was.

Instead, approved Grace locations were established gradually.

The system became available to those who willingly approached them.

People received guidance appropriate to their situations.

Nothing about their civilizations was forcibly rewritten.

They simply gained another path forward.

Lucien felt slightly guilty anyway.

He knew exactly what he was doing.

He was accelerating worlds that had no idea why acceleration had suddenly become so important.

But the alternative was leaving millions of people weaker simply because telling them the entire truth would create chaos they were not prepared to understand.

Lucien chose the lesser problem.

Then Clara discovered the small worlds.

Lucien would later consider that one of his more questionable decisions.

He allowed her inside.

Clara entered a civilization that had never heard of Lootwell, Grace, or Lucien and somehow treated this as an administrative inconvenience rather than an obstacle.

She did not force anyone.

She did not need to.

She established chapels. She explained Grace. She organized volunteers. She trained local attendants. She adapted the doctrine enough that it could be understood without revealing knowledge the population was not ready to receive.

Then she moved to the next world.

Lucien received the first progress report and stared at it for an uncomfortable amount of time.

Seran looked amused.

Lucien ignored him.

Somewhere along the way, Clara had become terrifyingly efficient at spreading a voluntary religion.

He decided not to examine that sentence too closely.

Still, the results were undeniable.

Grace spread.

People who had reached bottlenecks received quests encouraging them toward missing fundamentals.

Talented young practitioners were guided toward teachers they might never have met otherwise.

Healers received opportunities to improve medical techniques.

Craftsmen encountered tasks that encouraged experimentation.

Those with unstable foundations were directed toward consolidation instead of reckless advancement.

Rewards followed the same principles Lucien had already established elsewhere.

The people inside the small worlds responded quickly.

They did not know why their era had suddenly become so generous.

Some called it divine favor.

Others thought the heavens had changed.

Scholars produced explanations so complicated that Lucien occasionally read them for entertainment.

None of them guessed that their entire world was currently inside someone’s Divine Energy Core.

Lucien considered that a victory.

•••

The incarnated volunteers changed as well.

Those still living their second lives inside the small worlds had originally been sent there for one purpose.

Find the world.

That purpose had already been fulfilled.

Lucien did not suddenly pull them out.

Their lives there were real.

Their relationships were real.

The years some would eventually spend within those worlds would still belong to them..

Lucien allowed it.

They had volunteered to risk incarnation.

They had earned the right to live the lives that followed.

And if they chose to become stronger along the way, that was useful too.

•••

Years of stagnation began loosening across the recovered worlds.

Some civilizations advanced faster than others.

Some resisted new ideas.

Some embraced Grace eagerly.

Others treated the chapels with suspicion for months before anyone approached.

Lucien did not interfere.

The system could wait.

Clara, surprisingly, could also wait when ordered firmly enough.

Eventually, progress appeared almost everywhere.

The Divine Energy Core became a strange collection of worlds moving at different speeds toward futures they had never possessed before.

•••

The Liberator division progressed fastest.

Their training intensified.

Several began working with one another despite having completely incompatible methods.

That produced results Lucien could not have predicted.

One Liberator’s system identified flaws in another’s technique.

Another possessed an artifact capable of creating environments perfect for someone else’s training.

A third had an ability that was nearly useless alone but absurdly effective when combined with the strange advantage of someone from another world.

Seran encouraged those combinations.

Lucien did too.

If every Liberator was individually unreasonable, then putting them together produced exactly the kind of nonsense Lootwell had always excelled at.

He approved immediately.

•••

Lucien also spent more time speaking with them.

Not because every conversation was strategically necessary.

Sometimes he simply wanted to.

He could sit beside one of them while discussing something completely ordinary and experience the same quiet familiarity.

A joke would sound familiar even though he had never heard it.

A mannerism would trigger the faint impression of an old memory that disappeared the moment he reached for it.

Once, one of the Liberators complained about Seran’s habit of withholding explanations until the last possible moment.

Lucien laughed before the man finished speaking.

Seran looked offended.

Lucien had no idea why the complaint felt so familiar.

The feeling passed quickly.

It always did.

He stopped chasing it.

There were enough problems in the present without interrogating emotions that belonged to nowhere he remembered.

Still, every time the Liberators returned from another breakthrough or successful mission, Lucien felt pleased in a way that went beyond strategy.

Like watching people who had once stood beside him become themselves again.

He did not know where that thought came from.

He deliberately ignored it.

•••

Months continued passing.

The five continents strengthened.

Voidwatch spread farther through the conquered territories.

Vorren’s unease remained.

The Liberators grew stronger.

The populations of the recovered small worlds continued advancing beneath broader Laws.

Grace chapels multiplied carefully.

The incarnated volunteers lived their second lives.

Lootwell’s workshops kept producing preparations for a war that still refused to announce itself properly.

Everything was going well.

Far too well.

Lucien had learned to distrust that feeling.

He stood within his Divine Energy Core and looked across the distant lights representing worlds that should once have been unreachable.

The Primordial Slime’s surviving small worlds were finally gathered.

Their Liberators were alive.

Their Origin Core fragments had returned.

Their civilizations were growing instead of stagnating.

Another piece of the enemy’s potential advantage had been taken away.

And Lootwell had gained another reserve of strength.

Lucien should have been satisfied.

He was.

But satisfaction no longer made the unease disappear.

Outside the Divine Energy Core, Vorren could still feel something approaching.

Tidewatch continued watching the seas.

Ancient beasts remained ready.

Black Mass activity had not vanished.

The Primordial Incarnations were still somewhere beyond sight.

Lucien looked at the Liberators training in the distance.

Then at the worlds behind them.

He had already learned what happened when a civilization waited until the enemy arrived before becoming strong enough to survive it.

He would not make that mistake here.

So he continued investing, continued accelerating, and continued preparing.

He did not know how much time remained.

He only knew what he intended to do with every moment they still had.

If the coming war was going to demand absurd people capable of overturning impossible situations, then Lucien intended to make sure he had as many of them as possible when it finally arrived.