After talking with Terra, and seeing how the others had created this new planet, I only had to wait for about an hour before Ashley returned to the Admin Room. When she did, I saw that she had a somewhat exhausted look on her face, prompting me to ask what she had discovered.
“Nothing.” She begrudgingly answered, shaking her head and sitting down on the couch. “At least, nothing helpful.”
“Was it all unusable?” I questioned, moving to sit next to her. There had been so much wreckage from the various ships that were destroyed, surely we could get something out of it? However, she simply shook her head again.
“If you want a sewage system that directly converts waste into void energy, sure we hit the jackpot.” She had a bitter smile on her face as she said that. “Aside from that… everything was broken to such a degree that I can’t figure out how it works. All of their manufacturing equipment should have been within the worlds they created within the void.”
“The most intact piece of technology I found was a fragment of a ship’s power supply and navigation systems. It just wasn’t enough for me to piece together a working design, and what remained didn’t seem all that advanced.” She let out a sigh as she admitted that, collapsing backwards.
I couldn’t help but look over curiously. “Out of so many ships being destroyed, there wasn’t enough to put together a single working system?”
“Not even a single display terminal.” She nodded her head. “Crystalline micro-explosives… they were embedded in every circuit with a self-contained trigger and back-up power. I found a few of them floating around some wreckage, and had James examine them.”
She snapped her finger, and a holographic display appeared in front of the two of us. It showed what appeared to be a single grain of blue sand, magnified thousands of times. The surface, which would typically be worn down in various smooth shapes over the passage of countless years, was a nearly perfect cube.
Ashley waved a finger, and a line split open the cubic structure. Inside was a hollowed out region, containing a smaller black sphere. “I only managed to find these because of how desperate I was to find something in the area, so I used the system map to scan down to the finest particles it could. My guess is that these were damaged in a blast from one of our ships, so they weren’t able to detonate properly.”
I gave a small nod at that, before speaking up again. “How strong are these micro-explosives?”
Ashley waved her hand, the grain of blue sand closing back up and shrinking down until it was barely more than a speck of dust floating in the air. “At this size… the explosive force can reach up to a million joules, equivalent to a grenade.” She told me, my mouth soon hanging open. “And I saw numerous indentations in the few chips I found. If these were meant to go in those indentations… most of the technology that the enemy brought should be disintegrated by the combined blasts.”
“So… aside from revolutionizing the sewage systems of the world… we got nothing out of this invasion?” I asked with a bitter tone. So far, every enemy invasion had offered me some form of profit. Whether this was an obscene amount of points due to the strength of the invading army, the ability to sell information on the enemy to the Gilded Branch, or items that they left behind to be salvaged. Every invasion had brought me some type of benefit, until now.
The information was already known to the Gilded Branch, so they wouldn’t pay anything for me to tell them now. Otherwise, Meatlover wouldn’t have been able to tell me in the first place. Furthermore, they sent so few troops over that I was unable to get many points from an otherwise intense battle. And finally… everything that they brought over destroyed itself before we were able to salvage it.
In other words, there was nothing valuable that could be gained here. No reward to make up for the sacrifice of troops, or even the planet that was lost in the process. I let out a sullen sigh when I realized that the closest thing I got to a benefit here was realizing that Tsubaki’s infinite power strategy was a ticking time bomb.
“We’ll need to get started on some proper research into the void, now.” I said as I leaned back into the couch. “I’m sure that’ll make James happy, at least. We’re finally stepping into his area of expertise.”
I felt a hand on my arm, and looked over to see Ashley staring at me. “Frustrated?” She asked with a knowing smile, to which I nodded my head, not trying to hide it.
“How could I not be? We’ll just have to make do. Speaking of which, how much of your energy did you guys have to use to make Sanctum?” When I asked that, I saw Ashley thinking it over.
“Aurivy spent the most energy out of all of us, since she had to use a domain that was only loosely connected with her power, and did two effects. At the normal rate we gain energy, I think she could manage doing that once every hundred years. If one of us were to get a subordinate God of Earth or something similar, we could probably reduce it to once every ten years.”
“A hundred years of divine energy, and it went into making a single planet?” I asked incredulously, knowing that it would not take even a single percent of that energy to destroy a planet of the same size.
Seeming to understand my thought process, Ashley shook her head. “Come with me, and see for yourself.” She said, standing up and holding her hand out for me. “It’ll be best if I show you.”
After thinking it over for a moment, I took her hand with a nod. It was just a simple matter of descending into my host and leaving after giving a brief explanation to Tsubaki. Outside the citadel, Ashley was already waiting for me, her wings folded over her shoulders. “I might not be Aurivy, but I’ve learned how to traverse the shadows.” She said with a small smile, causing darkness to wrap around our bodies.
There was a brief sensation of my body being plunged into ice before the darkness faded, and I found myself standing within a wide meadow. Soft light poured down from above as I looked around. I could feel something distinctly different about this place as opposed to other planets I had been to.
First of all, merely standing within the meadow allowed me to feel the warmth of divine energy stimulating my body. Although it wouldn’t allow me to increase the rate that I gain this energy, it made me feel incredibly comfortable. And, if I wasn’t mistaken, my divine energy seemed to be flowing more smoothly, making it easier to use while I was here.
However, this didn’t seem like quite enough to explain why Ashley wanted to bring me here directly. When I looked at her for an explanation, she extended one hand. Relying on the raw strength of her body, she slapped out, creating a ditch tens of meters in front of her. “This is the greatest benefit to a world made of energy that Terra told us about.” She said, watching the ditch.
Soon, the stone began to shift, slowly closing up over the hole she had gouged out. Then, grass and flowers once again began to bloom, until the ground had been returned to its former state. “Unless you use divine energy, you can’t create a lasting change within the landscape. Even if the entire planet were to be destroyed by one of Silence’s ships, it would only be a matter of time before it completely reformed itself.”
I raised an eyebrow when I heard that, turning to look at a tree in the distance. Gathering ki in one of my hands, I waved a finger to launch a blade of light at the tree as an experiment. Sure enough, the tree was felled without any difficulty, crashing heavily into the ground. However, Ashley simply watched with an expectant expression.
The tree that I had severed turned into motes of golden light, which flowed back into the stump only moments later. Within moments, the tree had returned to its previous appearance, completely unharmed by the attack I had unleashed. “A closed cycle of divine energy…” I muttered while staring at the tree. This time, I used Phisher’s domain of Blades and launched a similar attack.
This attack was fueled by divine power, and similarly managed to fell the tree. However, this time there was no sign of the tree regenerating, or the fallen section vanishing. “So, it rejects the influence of any non-divine actions. Then… does that mean we need gods related to construction in order to make houses for everyone to live in?”
Ashley thought about that for a moment, before shaking her head. “For some… most domains have some way of constructing a personal residence.” After saying so, she looked in the distance. Following her gaze, I saw darkness stretching up out of the ground, forming a grand castle. “If people can’t figure out how to create their own divine home, they can definitely ask for help from other gods.”
“I suppose…” I agreed, nodding my head as I watched Ashley’s shadow castle taking shape. Part of me wanted to construct my own home within this planet as well, but I decided to wait. Aurivy had not yet created the ‘laws’ that would allow gods to easily move back and forth between here and the other planets.
“Speaking of which…” I looked around curiously. “Where exactly are we? In the universe, I mean. I can tell that this place uses Earth’s law system, and I can’t sense the presence of dimensium in the background.” Given the size of this planet, that narrowed it down to either Earth, Kione, or Sher Dien. But, I assumed that we were likely to be in Earth’s universe.
“Currently, we’re in the vast expanse between Earth’s galaxy and its neighbor.” Ashley explained, crossing her arms in front of herself. “The people here have come to call Earth’s galaxy by the name Triaxis, and the neighbor that we’re near now was named the Huntress Cloud, as its discoverer was an ardent believer in Accalia.”
I was surprised when I heard that, having not expected the planet to be so far away from everything. Of course, I could have learned its location from the Keeper map, especially having seen this area earlier. But at the time, I was more interested in watching its creation, and forgot to look at where exactly the planet had been made.
Thinking about it further, I couldn’t help but question something. “Wasn’t part of Leowynn’s wish for the star she made to guide this planet through the galaxy?” I looked up at the golden star that my daughter had created, confused how such a wish would be possible if the planet was not in any galaxy in the first place.
“That’s right.” Ashley agreed, a playful smile on her lips. “Leowynn made quite the strange star, I’d say. It doesn’t move by the normal flow of gravity, and travels along its own path. At the moment… we should be moving closer to Triaxis, and will arrive at its outer edge in two years. If we go in a straight line, it would take a little more than two months for us to cross over to the other side.”
“That… doesn’t sound right.” I may not be a genius when it came to math, but I knew that the galaxy was more than a fifth of a lightyear in diameter. Way, way more. “She didn’t create a star that moves faster than light, did she?”
Ashley laughed lightly, nodding her head. “That’s right. Actually, that star can be considered the core of this ‘closed cycle’ as you called it. Because the system we created rejects external influences, Sanctum won’t be constrained by any gravity other than that of its own star. No matter how fast the star moves, the planet will remain locked in orbit without the slightest deviation. Likewise, the sun only exerts its gravity over this planet. As long as she doesn’t plot a course that takes these two directly through another celestial body, it won’t create any disturbances.”
