Months passed.

Lucien turned twenty four.

The world had changed almost as much as he had.

The Liberator Organization was no longer a rumor. It had rooted itself into the world.

The campaigns in the other continents had also reached their conclusion one after another.

Now everyone knew the name.

Liberators.

To the desperate, it meant hope. To the corrupt, it meant fear. To the practical, it meant that power in the world had begun rearranging itself.

A great many wanted to join them.

That was the problem.

The Liberator bases remained elusive.

People searched for them constantly and almost never found what they were looking for, because the bases were hidden in the plainest ways possible.

One might be a city clinic with unusually disciplined staff. Another might be an academy whose curriculum looked ordinary until the wrong kind of people vanished after trying to buy influence there. Some were caravan stations, quiet monasteries, or seemingly unimportant settlements along routes too many people ignored.

Shadow had taken naturally to the work of expansion.

He had been tasked with helping create more bases in the West, selecting the right candidates to lead them, and ensuring that each one could stand on its own feet without becoming so visible that enemies would begin pulling on the thread.

Seran had sent word more than once asking whether the Liberators could make use of the Covenant of Pathless Sovereignty.

Lucien had agreed.

More bases meant more speed. More speed meant fewer disasters maturing uninterrupted. And if the world was going to keep trying to produce trouble faster than reasonable people could solve it, then the only answer was to become unreasonable in response.

That part, at least, Lucien had long ago accepted.

He had also asked Seran, more than once, about the Celestial Race.

Their dominion remained sealed.

That was the answer every time.

Worse, even Seran could not communicate with those inside.

Lucien had promised Vivian that one day he would take her there. He had promised her she would meet their parents with her own eyes and never again have to build her hope on nothing but his word.

He did not like promises becoming trapped behind silence.

And the silence around the Celestial Race Dominion had become too complete.

That worried him.

Still, he could not move recklessly.

Not yet.

The wider world still remained uncertain around him. Oblivion’s distortion had not been fully undone. His enemies did not know with certainty that Lucien Lootwell was alive again, and for now that ignorance remained one of his best protections.

If he appeared too openly at the Celestial Race Dominion, he might do more than fulfill a promise.

He might light a beacon over one of the most watched powers in existence.

So he stayed patient.

That did not stop him from asking.

And Seran understood exactly why the matter mattered.

He promised Lucien that if anything major happened inside the sealed dominion, he would report it immediately. He also promised he would continue trying to establish contact whenever the opportunity presented itself.

Lucien accepted that.

It was the best answer currently available.

•••

Meanwhile, Lootwell continued building.

Midas had left long ago to carve his name into the Big World by his own strength, and Lucien had not tried to stop him. Augustus wanted to follow eventually. Leo too. Others had begun nursing the same desire. But Lucien’s rule remained in place.

Fifth Stage of the Transcendent Realm before departure.

No exceptions.

Reaper and Eldran had moved as well.

The old assassin and the former tower master had already chosen their first people. The training grounds, combined with the newly established doors, had accelerated that process more than either of them expected.

Those selected for the Shadow Information Network learned skills and spells with terrifying efficiency once the right systems were placed before them.

Lucien had given them attributes suited to their roles, strengthening the future shape of their branches before those branches fully extended.

More importantly, he had handed them something that changed their understanding of scale.

Dawnbinder’s Luminarch Routes.

When Reaper and Eldran first studied the map, silence had settled over both of them. The kind planners fell into when they realized another mind had once solved a problem so elegantly that admiration became indistinguishable from irritation.

Reaper had exhaled once.

"This is filth," he said.

Lucien raised an eyebrow.

Eldran nodded slowly.

"He means it is beautiful."

Reaper did not deny it.

Lucien had told them plainly that he did not want imitation for its own sake.

"I want something that belongs to us," he said.

Reaper’s eyes sharpened immediately.

Eldran smiled faintly.

They promised him they would make exactly that.

Lucien had also armed them properly for the work.

He gave them transport. Fast enough to matter. Quiet enough to be ignored. Layered with stealth.

Machines that looked like they belonged to competent traders, cautious patrol officers, modest surveyors, or regional messengers instead of the hidden arteries of a future intelligence state.

That had delighted Reaper more than he let show.

Eldran had been even worse. He had immediately begun making notes on how to disguise magical signatures inside the vehicle frames.

Lucien left them to it.

•••

The communication network, on the other hand, had already entered its testing phase.

And that project had become one of the more entertaining successes in the territory.

Eirene, Elk, Rurik, and Seren had made something genuinely absurd.

They had created a sleek handheld device that, to anyone from a more modern world, would have looked uncomfortably close to a stripped-down smartphone.

Its current functions were limited.

Messages. Voice messages. Priority alerts. Basic routing. Emergency override.

That was enough.

It worked far better than any of them had initially dared to hope.

The construction alone had changed because of it.

Anvil-Horn no longer needed to personally stride from one end of a site to another every time a crew needed correction, instruction, or threat. He could remain where he was most useful, send his commands through the network, and trust that they would arrive in the hands of the correct workers.

The workers themselves adapted quickly.

At first they had stared at the devices as if holding one made them personally responsible for the future of civilization.

Then they started using them.

Then complaining when someone delayed answering.

That was how Lucien knew the system was beginning to become normal.

There were also special versions.

More private. More secure. Restricted by user identity. Imprinted so that only the assigned owner could open full functions or access sensitive layers.

Reaper and Eldran had those. Lucien had one. A few of the territory’s core figures had them too.

These were not just for convenience.

These were arteries for important information.

If Reaper found something dangerous, it would reach Lucien through those channels. If an intelligence branch uncovered a future threat, those devices would carry the first pulse.

Elk and the others were still expanding the systems.

And as often happened, success brought its own next problem.

Range.

Lucien discovered the limitation earlier than the others expected.

The network’s reach, while huge by any ordinary standard, was not limitless.

With the merged Origin Core fragments currently in his possession, the signal range comfortably covered the Sareth Region and its adjacent regions. Inside that span, the communication devices functioned beautifully.

Beyond it, there was no signal.

Lucien had sighed at that.

Not because the result was disappointing in itself.

It was already impressive.

Only because the vision in his head was larger than the reality in his hand.

To spread the system continent-wide, and later perhaps world-wide, he would need more Origin Core fragments.

That realization had stayed with him until Seran solved the problem in the most direct way possible.

He offered his own fragment.

Not only his.

A few others in the Liberator network, had expressed willingness to do the same.

Lucien was speechless for a long moment when the man told him.

"I have no use for it equal to yours," Seran had said simply. "And I dislike tools rotting in hands too small for them."

Lucien had hesitated.

Fragments like that were not trinkets. They were foundational powers.

Seran only smiled.

"You can do more with them than I can."

Lucien still did not answer immediately.

So Seran added, "You will have to collect them personally from the headquarters."

Lucien would need to visit the Liberator Headquarters at another time.

When he did, the communication network would grow again.

The others had also taken the matter seriously enough that they built a dedicated temple-like structure to house the Origin Core fragment while it functioned as the network’s central gate.

Lucien had stared at the building for a full half-minute before asking whether everything in his life was legally required to become a temple.

Elk had informed him that this one was not a temple.

"It is a sanctified communications authority chamber," she had said.

Lucien had looked at her.

She had looked back very seriously.

Rurik, who was standing nearby, had immediately betrayed her by laughing so hard he nearly fell sideways.

Whatever the name, the structure served its purpose.

And from that purpose, another profession had begun to emerge.

Recorders.

Recorders would monitor the message flow at authorized stations, not to read every ordinary message like bored voyeurs, but to detect flagged patterns, threat markers, emergency words, suspicious coordination structures, and other signals requiring immediate escalation.

They would be listeners in the true civic sense. 𝐟𝕣𝗲𝕖𝕨𝗲𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝗲𝚕.𝗰𝚘𝐦

Part clerk. Part sentinel. Part analyst.

For now, Lucien did not need them. The devices had not yet spread beyond Lootwell. But the planning had already begun, and Lucien approved of that.

Good institutions were built before panic made them necessary.

As for Lucien himself—

his progress had continued.

But more slowly than before.

He had reached the Third Stage of the Celestial Realm.

His current bottleneck was exactly what he feared it would be.

The Law of Creation was too broad and too total to deepen well through stillness alone.

He can passively grow thanks to the sapling.

But that was not the same as living more widely.

He needed more stimulus. More reality. More pressure. More pieces of creation itself to examine from angles he had not yet touched.

When he turned inward and looked at the sapling of the Tree of Creation within him, he understood that more clearly each time.

It was there.

But not quickly enough to satisfy him.

And that was when his thoughts turned again toward the conquered worlds of the goblins.

Those worlds might still hold what he needed.

Seran already had the coordinates, drawn from the contents Lucien had stripped from the monster storages. He had promised to look into them when the right time came.

Lucien smiled when he thought of that.

As of now, everything was stable.

Stable enough to build. Stable enough to plan. Stable enough to sharpen.

And because of that, he had begun feeling something dangerous again.

Ambition.

The kind that looked at a stable world and immediately began asking what more it could be turned into before anyone outside noticed how far it had already gone.