Chapter 780 - Borrowed Time

Chapter 780: Chapter 780 - Borrowed Time

Seran and Aurelia came to find Lucien not long after he left Vorren in the temporal zone.

They had been training elsewhere in the inner universe and clearly had not heard what had happened outside.

Lucien noticed Aurelia’s expression before either of them spoke.

She looked focused rather than alarmed, but there was a tension around her eyes that he recognized immediately.

"You divined something?"

Aurelia gave him a brief look.

"I did."

Lucien exhaled quietly.

Of course she had.

Before she could continue, he raised a hand.

"Then you should hear what happened first."

That got Seran’s attention as well.

Lucien brought up a projection and showed them what had occured.

The world tremor.

The retreating boundary.

The exposed portions of the corrupted supercontinent.

The Monster Emperors shifting closer to the edges without crossing.

Neither interrupted while he explained.

By the time Lucien finished, Aurelia had gone completely still.

Seran looked from the projection to her.

"That matches what you saw?"

"Part of it."

Lucien’s attention sharpened.

Aurelia stepped closer to the projection.

"While we were training, I suddenly managed to divine farther into the Black Mass than before. I didn’t understand why at first, but after seeing this, I think the receding barrier weakened whatever had been blocking my sight."

She looked at the projection.

"I still couldn’t see everything, but I saw enough to know the transformation won’t be immediate."

Some of the tension in Lucien’s chest eased.

"The barrier is really condensing, then."

Aurelia nodded.

"What you saw outside fits with it. The change has started, but the greater conflict is still some distance away."

Lucien looked back at the image of the receding darkness.

That also matched what Vorren had felt.

"What happens in between?" he asked.

Aurelia was quiet for a moment.

"The forces inside are reorganizing."

Seran’s expression changed slightly.

"Reorganizing how?"

"I couldn’t see enough to map it clearly. But it didn’t feel like chaos."

Aurelia’s gaze stayed on the projection.

"It felt more like different powers adjusting to what is happening."

Lucien understood immediately.

That made sense.

The corrupted supercontinent had never been one perfectly unified force.

There were Monster Emperors, unknown factions, things tied directly to the Black Mass, and Primordial Incarnations whose relationships Lucien still did not completely understand.

The Thousand Races had once been little different.

Before Lootwell forced greater cooperation, races, sects, and ancient factions had all protected their own interests first.

There was no reason to assume the other side had somehow escaped that problem.

Now their barrier was disappearing.

Their territory was opening.

Whatever structures had existed under the old conditions would need to change.

"They’re preparing too," Lucien said.

Aurelia nodded.

"Yes."

That answer did not bother him as much as it might have once.

He had spent years preparing.

It would have been foolish to expect the enemy to spend those same years doing nothing.

Then Aurelia’s expression tightened.

"But the delay does not mean they will leave us alone."

Lucien looked at her again.

This time, what little relief he had felt became more cautious.

"What did you see?"

"Scattered things."

Aurelia hesitated before continuing.

"Small movements toward the five continents. Hidden approaches, but not armies."

Seran folded his arms.

"Advance forces."

Aurelia shook her head.

"I couldn’t tell whether they were scouts, infiltrators, raiding groups, or something else. The visions were too fragmented."

Lucien did not need more certainty than that.

The larger war might still be distant, but the enemy had every reason to interfere before it arrived.

They could test defenses, create distractions, sabotage preparations, force factions to waste manpower, find weak points, and spread fear.

None of that required an army.

Seran gave a faint snort.

"They’d be idiots if they let us keep growing without trying something."

Lucien glanced at him.

"Exactly."

And then, for the first time since the Black Mass began receding, Lucien smiled.

Aurelia noticed.

"You seem pleased."

"Compared to an immediate invasion?"

Lucien looked back at the projection.

"Very."

He finally had something he could work with.

The transformation had begun.

The enemy was preparing.

But the real war had not arrived yet.

And if smaller forces came first, then Lootwell had more than enough ways to deal with them.

Small forces did not frighten him nearly as much as an immediate war.

The years hidden inside the temporal regions had changed too much.

Tidewatch alone was no longer the network it had been when first established.

Its detection arrays had become far more sensitive to traces carried across the seas, including lingering Black Mass miasma that once might have drifted close enough to contaminate isolated regions before anyone understood what was happening.

Now the network did more than detect those traces.

Specialized purification structures embedded throughout the system could disperse and erase weaker remnants before they reached populated waters, while anything too concentrated to handle automatically triggered immediate escalation.

The network had also become deeply integrated with civilian evacuation systems.

If a confirmed threat continued approaching inhabited territory, Tidewatch no longer merely sent warnings.

Communication devices across affected regions could receive updated Lifeline Routes calculated according to the threat’s direction, local population density, available teleportation capacity, and which safe regions remained accessible.

Those routes were not simple roads marked on a map.

They connected directly to emergency teleportation arrays distributed throughout participating territories.

A family following the route from one district might enter an evacuation hub and emerge hundreds or thousands of kilometers away in a protected region before the danger ever reached their city.

Lootwell had constructed several such destinations.

They were not luxurious.

Lucien had deliberately prioritized capacity, food, medical infrastructure, sanitation, security, and stable spatial anchors over appearance.

Nobody needed beautiful architecture while escaping a calamity.

They needed somewhere that would still be standing after they arrived.

Years of accelerated research had improved far more than those systems, but Lucien did not need to mentally inventory everything Lootwell possessed to understand the larger point.

The five continents were no longer waiting naked for whatever came next.

They had warning systems.

They had evacuation routes.

They had trained commanders.

They had reserve forces.

They had specialists who had spent internal years practicing disasters that had never actually happened.

And if small hostile forces entered before the larger war, those forces would be entering a world that had spent a very long time expecting them.

Lucien was not careless enough to call that invincibility.

But he was comfortable calling it preparation.

"Keep watching," he told Aurelia. "If anything changes, tell me immediately."

She nodded.

Lucien looked toward Seran next.

He understood without needing further explanation.

The Liberators would continue what they were already doing.

So would the researchers.

So would the commanders, ancient beasts, administrators, and everyone else inside the accelerated regions.

There would be no desperate restructuring simply because the Black Mass had begun changing.

That was precisely how enemies forced mistakes.

Lucien had spent too long building a rhythm that could survive pressure to abandon it the moment pressure finally appeared.

Outside, the five continents would remain alert.

Inside, training would continue.

The temporal regions would keep turning months into years.

Lootwell would strengthen the defensive networks where necessary without allowing fear to swallow every other project.

And Lucien would help keep the Thousand Races steady until the shape of the approaching calamity became clearer.

He looked once more at the projection.

The darkness continued drawing inward.

Somewhere beneath it, the enemy was reorganizing, preparing, and choosing what came next.

Lucien understood that better than most.

He was doing exactly the same thing.

For years, the greatest fear had been that the calamity would arrive before they were ready.

That possibility had not disappeared.

But Aurelia’s divination had given him something enormously valuable.

Time.

Lucien looked toward the inner universe around him.

Vorren was still sitting beneath the distant sky while the Fruit of Creation quietly changed him.

Far beyond this peaceful region, soldiers trained through years the outside world would never see.

The enemy would not allow them to prepare peacefully.

That was fine.

Preparation did not require peace.

It only required enough time to keep moving.

And for once, Lucien had more of that than almost anyone else.