Mage And Wolf
Chapter 306

Chapter 306: Chapter 306

Full enlightenment on the true nature of spacetime is not going to come so easily as a single meditation session. So, once I’m well rested and have an idea where I should be working from to advance my cultivation, I rejoin Karl and Lelou.

Instead of the direct Manipulation of water, Karl had taught Lelou how to gather hydrogen and oxygen from the nebula and burn them to create water vapor near the surface of the planet where gravity would trap it.

Of course, that’s far from the only thing that an atmosphere will need, but Lelou had chosen to work from the core out, so she knew she wasn’t missing any steps.

Everyone watched me move the star over to the planet before my nap, which sparked a great deal of innovation. The principle of bending space around an object is the fundamental theory behind an Alcubierre Warp Drive, which Elder Song is now trying to replicate with inscriptions and magical circles designed to gather and manipulate Cosmic Energy.

It’s not quite working, so he plans to repeat the experiment as many times as necessary until he can make himself a faster than light motorcycle.

He’s definitely spent too much time around Karl.

Hui’Jin and Lala look busy, so I start gathering another star. Not with direct energy usage like last time, but by Manipulation of reality around my desired point. Every day that I work at it, in a continual cycle of cultivate, build, sleep repeat, the fundamentals behind the technique, and the influence of it on the stars I’ve made becomes a little more clear.

Neither Hui’Jin or Lala is having any luck understanding what I’m trying to do, but Elder Song understood enough to create a battleship sized faster than light transport. That’s as small as he could get it with all the inscriptions and circles that were required, but honestly I’m shocked he managed it at all.

The transport itself is mostly just a toy, a high level divinity can move between Planes, Realms or worlds in an instant without any sort of device, and an Immortal can do it with an inscription and technique combined. The advantage of the ship is, that it can operate on multiple types of energy and move not just between set points, but also at a slower pace as a proper transport.

Hui’Jin has begun adding plants to Lelou’s world, but for the moment they neither grow nor wither and die. Her understanding of botany and cell structure is strong, but life has its own energy that a a Priestess of the Death god, she is unable to manipulate without extensive research.

That’s Lala’s strong suit. Her Immortal Soul has barely begun to strengthen, and neither of them had comprehended a Domain yet, but exotic energy control and botany through a modified creation spell weren’t beyond them anymore.

After much experimentation, I found that Manipulation of Spacetime came nearly natural to me, almost as innate as my own Domain. I’m reasonably certain that I fully understand that concept now, so I move back to the study of energy cycles, and how life and death energy are one energy intertwined, morphing between forms.

That’s a topic both Lala and Hui’Jin are better with. They gladly join me in my study as Lelou takes over the finishing touches of the planet she had been building. It’s a true masterpiece, each continent is unique both in climate and plant life, she has optimally placed it around the star and set the rotation with a slight tilt on the axis to give the planet seasons. All that’s left are the moons.

To Lelou, the world needs two, in balance with each other, to properly stabilize it. That’s easier said than done, Balancing three rotating masses around a fourth takes great precision, and many times she almost strips all her hard work from the surface with gravitational miscalculations.

Now that the first prototype is primed and ready, we all set to work on building the rest of the solar system. It might only have a few stars in the sky, but it at least needs neighboring planets.

The pretty blue star I created is a little bigger than Earth’s sun, giving us lots of room to add things to its orbit. We end up settling for 5 total planets though. Two little rocky oones for practice, a gas giant for orbital stability and a second habitable one.

As we’re working, a flash of inspiration comes to Lala, and she twists the energy around the first planet Lelou made in a new way, bringing the plants to life. They’re slowly starting to grow, but that can’t last long, they’re the only living thing in the ecosystem.

Seeing that, she spread the Life Energy to all the various creatures we created for our own amusement, from bugs and worms, to fish, algae and small marine animals.

We skipped over anything larger than that, or mammalian, planning to add them later once we were more confident in our skills. But the increase has only increased the imbalance. The animals are starting to suffer, so I inject death energy into the balance.

That brings things closer to right and stabilizes the energy before it does flowing and settles as everything reaches maturity. Something is still missing, that should be allowing the cycle of life and death to flow freely and I can’t quite tell what.

Instead of mediating on the Sphere, I pick a nice rock on the new planet to contemplate where we’ve gone wrong. The next morning when I’m looking down into the pond it strikes me that these animals aren’t truly alive, they’re undead. They don’t have souls, at least not complete ones, but they needed something.

There are a number of tattered and incomplete souls trapped in the underworld dimension through my Soul Shrine, damaged by spiritual attacks and unable to reconstruct and heal themselves. Normally they would be trapped for eternity in anguish and suffering, but today, I have a use for them.

So begins my next experiment. How to modify a damaged soul to let it blend back into nature. I am certain this is that portion of the understanding of the afterlife that I’ve been missing, the nature of the change between one life and another as well as between Planes, animals and beings with souls.

For now, this undead world is stable, but soon I will be able to truly bring it to life. All I need is time to learn.