Chapter 775 - Recognized

Chapter 775: Chapter 775 - Recognized

A month passed in the Big World.

Inside Lucien, considerably more time had gone by.

The recovered small worlds had experienced three months.

The special training region had experienced five.

From the outside, it was barely enough time for the five continents to settle into another stretch of uneasy routine.

Most people carried on without realizing that somewhere beyond their perception, entire groups had already lived through a season of training.

Five months was not a long time by the standards of ancient experts.

But for people who had already been standing near the edge of another realm, five uninterrupted months under Lootwell’s best facilities made an enormous difference.

Lucien saw that difference almost immediately.

•••

Midas was among the first to reach the point where further ordinary training stopped helping.

Lucien noticed it before Midas said anything.

For weeks, Midas had been thrown into simulations designed specifically to attack the weaknesses in his fighting style. Whenever he relied too heavily on strength, the training grounds produced opponents he could not overpower. Whenever he became too cautious, the scenarios punished hesitation.

Gradually, those weaknesses disappeared.

His understanding had reached the point where another round of ordinary training would no longer make the difference.

He was ready.

Lucien had already prepared several isolated regions in the void of his inner universe for exactly this situation.

They were far from the inhabited worlds and separated from one another by enormous distances, giving anyone attempting a major breakthrough enough space without disturbing the rest of the realm.

Midas entered one of them.

Then he began.

•••

The breakthrough took weeks.

Lucien watched without interfering.

At first, everything appeared normal.

Then the surrounding void began responding.

That was when Lucien’s attention sharpened.

He had expected his inner universe to provide enough energy and Laws for someone to prepare for Eternal.

What he had not been certain about was whether the actual recognition would happen there.

It did.

The void around Midas changed gradually as the process continued, and his Law became increasingly defined within the surrounding universe.

Lucien remained completely still.

His inner universe was recognizing him.

That discovery was much larger than Midas’s breakthrough itself.

Weeks later, the process finally settled.

Midas opened his eyes as an Eternal.

Lucien examined him carefully before bringing him back to the Big World.

Nothing changed.

His authority remained stable.

The outside universe did not reject what had happened inside Lucien, nor did it force Midas to undergo the process again.

That was enough for Lucien.

Whatever differences might exist between being recognized inside his universe and being recognized outside, the result was real.

Midas was Eternal.

•••

Augustus followed later.

Lucien sent him to another isolated region of the inner void and watched the same process happen again.

His breakthrough took a month this time.

The manifestation differed because his Law was different, but the result did not.

The inner universe recognized him.

...

Leo took longer before attempting his own breakthrough.

Lucien preferred that.

He had been correcting something he had forced for years, and the accelerated training finally gave him enough time to fix it properly instead of rushing toward the next realm.

Only after his foundation settled did Lucien allow him to enter one of the breakthrough regions.

His advancement also took a month.

When he finally emerged, he was Eternal as well.

By the end of the first external month, all three had crossed the threshold.

They were not the only ones approaching it.

•••

Among Lucien’s special forces, several of those who had consumed the Mythical Law Cores had also reached the point where Eternal was no longer far away.

The Law Cores had given them an enormous advantage, but they still needed time to turn that advantage into something they truly understood.

The accelerated training finally gave them that time.

Months of combat, meditation, refinement, and repeated use gradually settled what had once been rapid advancement.

A few became ready.

Lucien sent them into the isolated regions of the inner void one by one.

He did not rush the process.

Anyone whose condition remained questionable was told to wait.

Fivefold time made patience easy.

Those who were ready eventually began their breakthroughs.

And once again, Lucien’s inner universe responded.

One after another, new Eternals appeared.

By then, Lucien could no longer dismiss what he was seeing as an accident.

His inner realm was no longer merely capable of containing Eternals.

His inner universe could now support their breakthroughs and recognize them naturally.

Lucien looked across the vast darkness of his inner universe.

That realization pleased him almost as much as the new Eternals themselves.

The universe inside him was becoming more complete than he had understood.

•••

The commanders changed in a different way.

Most of them did not gain spectacular increases in raw power.

Lucien had never expected them to.

Instead, they became difficult to surprise.

The command facilities subjected them to campaign after campaign.

They learned to manage forces while communication failed, retreat routes disappeared, reinforcements arrived late, or intelligence turned out to be wrong.

Some simulations deliberately gave them impossible objectives.

The lesson was not to somehow achieve the impossible anyway.

It was to recognize when an objective had become worthless and preserve enough strength to accomplish something that still mattered.

That had taken longer for some of them to accept.

People raised around heroic stories often believed retreat was synonymous with failure.

Several months of simulated catastrophes cured that misunderstanding.

The best commanders learned when to press an advantage and when to abandon it before pride turned into casualties.

They also became much more comfortable following hierarchy.

Not blindly.

Lucien did not want that.

But if a battlefield contained thousands of fighters, someone had to make decisions quickly, and the people beneath them needed enough trust to execute those decisions without debating every order while an enemy was already attacking.

The exercises gradually built that trust.

By the end of five internal months, several commanders who had once required constant oversight could coordinate complex formations without Lucien saying a word.

That pleased him greatly.

If several fronts opened at once, he did not need heroes waiting for his arrival.

He needed people capable of keeping everyone alive until he got there.

Preferably without needing him at all.

•••

The researchers abused their additional time exactly as Lucien had expected.

Within reasonable limits.

Mostly.

The first month inside had been spent testing how much work could be transferred into accelerated facilities without creating problems outside.

By the second, several divisions had reorganized entire development schedules around the temporal advantage.

Voidwatch components were redesigned more quickly because researchers could test long-term stress without waiting years for materials to degrade naturally.

Law Interweaver prototypes underwent extended use cycles, revealing small failures that ordinary testing might not have exposed until much later.

Formation engineers built models, destroyed them, rebuilt them, and repeated the process enough times that several designs outside Lootwell were already becoming obsolete before anyone knew replacements existed.

Lucien occasionally entered the research districts and discovered that a project he remembered discussing a few weeks earlier had already gone through twelve revisions.

That took some adjustment.

The researchers, on the other hand, adapted disturbingly quickly.

The one he had placed under additional supervision after attempting to plan twenty years of experiments had somehow become responsible for optimizing laboratory schedules.

Lucien considered that either excellent management or proof that the problem had spread.

He decided not to investigate too deeply.

The results were useful.

•••

The younger talents recruited after the Grand Intercontinental Competition benefited enormously as well.

Most had entered Lootwell with ability.

What they lacked was control and opportunity.

Power acquired quickly often created habits that took much longer to correct.

The accelerated training grounds gave them that time.

Five months of repeated sparring against opponents who understood their weaknesses did more for them than another pile of resources would have.

They learned how not to waste Law authority simply because it was available.

They learned how to preserve strength through long engagements.

They learned how to fight beside people whose abilities interfered with their own.

More than once, Lucien deliberately placed talented individuals into teams whose styles were incompatible.

The first attempts were usually terrible.

By the twentieth, they had stopped blaming each other.

By the fiftieth, they were beginning to exploit the incompatibility.

That was the kind of progress Lucien wanted.

The strongest person on a battlefield was not always the most useful.

Sometimes the person who understood how to make five strange abilities function together mattered more.

•••

The Monster Small World changed even faster.

Lucien eventually transferred the blood pools into a region where the beasts could take advantage of the increased temporal flow without disturbing the inhabited worlds.

The response was immediate.

Young beasts that had already benefited from Lucien’s blood continued absorbing its effects across months rather than weeks.

Their bodies strengthened.

Bloodlines awakened.

More importantly, their minds developed.

Five months under ancient beasts corrected them.

When those creatures eventually appeared outside Lucien’s inner realm, they would no longer resemble the young monsters that had first entered.

They would have aged.

They would have fought hundreds of controlled engagements.

They would understand commands.

And some would have spent years learning beside creatures that had already reached Extinction Grade.

Lucien found that thought deeply reassuring.

Whoever fought them probably would not.