Time passed.

The first external branch of Lootwell proved itself worthy of the name.

Cecil had done well. Very well.

Lucien reviewed the reports more than once and found himself increasingly satisfied with what the young man had built there through discipline rather than talent alone.

He worked with purpose, listened before deciding, and never treated responsibility like a decorative privilege.

The staff chosen to work in shifts fit the structure well too. They understood that the branch was not a lesser version of Lootwell. It was an extension of it. That meant they carried the same standards outward even if the local rules were lighter than those of the main territory.

Most of the communication devices sold there were civilian-grade.

The branch existed not only to move profit, but to widen reach. It served the people who could not travel to Lootwell itself.

Higher-tier devices existed too, of course, but in controlled numbers.

Those remained limited.

The repair stations performed exactly as Lucien hoped.

Once outsiders realized that repairing a damaged device cost far less than replacing one entirely, trust deepened almost overnight. People stopped treating the devices as fragile luxuries and began treating them as durable tools tied to a wider system. That change in mentality mattered more than many merchants understood.

It meant the network was becoming habit.

...

Security held as well.

Lilith and Anvil-Horn had done good work.

Those who arrived with the foolish confidence that the branch must surely be softer than the main city learned otherwise in very short order.

One group tried tampering with the branch barrier. Another attempted to smuggle destabilizing items past entry review. A third, confident in a concealment art they had probably spent too much money on, tested whether branch surveillance might be less severe than Lootwell’s.

All three groups were expelled.

All three groups were blacklisted.

The message spread quickly.

A branch of Lootwell was still Lootwell.

After that, troublemakers became less creative.

...

With the first branch stable, talk of future branches grew naturally.

Kael had become even busier than before.

He worked closely with Shadow now, and the arrangement suited both of them. Kael knew commerce, flow, appetite, visibility, and how to sell desire before people admitted they had it. Shadow knew regions, risks, weak borders, hidden currents, local temperament, and which territories wore stability only on the surface.

Together, they started marking the next best locations.

Lucien left it to them.

That was another sign that Lootwell had changed. Not everything needed his hand first anymore. Some decisions now ripened better if competent people were simply allowed to sharpen them against reality.

He approved of that greatly.

•••

Meanwhile, the shadow information network kept expanding.

Reaper and Eldran’s people had already finished mapping the entirety of Sareth.

Lucien ordered them to mark the best positions for future instant-teleportation arrays and route anchors.

They did more than that.

They built hidden pathing models between those points and layered them with strategic notes, fallback corridors, supply viability, and threat ratings. It was not merely a map anymore.

It was a skeleton for future movement.

That pleased Lucien.

Even more satisfying was the fact that they had already begun training people into the next generation of shadows.

Robin was among them.

Lucien saw the reports and smiled.

One of the Beacons of Light had gone a very different way than most would have expected. Under Sebas, Robin’s old instincts had not been erased. They had been refined. What had once been a gifted Phantom Thief with a good heart and too much youthful edge had become something smoother, quieter, and more elegant.

Sebas had done well.

Robin was no longer a boy pretending to be clever.

He was becoming the sort of man who could enter a room, steal the answer, and leave behind enough confusion that others argued about whether the question had ever existed.

Lucien approved of him immediately.

So did Reaper.

Robin, to his credit, only smiled and bowed.

Lucien, hearing the report later, decided that the training was clearly going very well and would require no interference whatsoever.

•••

Lucien spent part of those same days testing another matter.

The mythical-rarity law cores.

He had already seen what they did for himself.

He wanted to know whether their effects could be granted to others cleanly, and whether the result would remain stable once the recipient’s own path, constitution, and realm were taken into account.

So he began testing carefully.

Rurik was among the first.

Rurik also practiced the Law of Creation in his own growing way, and his mind was sharp enough not to waste a rare law-core through stupidity.

When Rurik crushed the core Lucien gave him, the effect was immediate and deeply unsettling in the best possible way.

A new lawful structure entered his awareness, and his entire understanding of forging, material causality, and construct possibility shifted in minutes. Rurik stood there in stunned silence for long enough that Lucien almost checked whether the core had simply broken him.

Then Rurik looked up with blazing eyes and said the single most Rurik thing possible.

"I can give different law-attacks to the automatons."

Lucien laughed.

Of course that was his first thought.

Weaponized engineering.

That was exactly why Lucien liked him.

Rurik immediately sought Seren and ordered another batch of automatons refined for variable lawful integration.

That alone was a success.

But Lucien did not stop there.

He wanted a harsher test.

So he chose someone at the peak of Metamorphosis.

Someone who had not yet integrated with any law.

If the law cores could carry a person across it directly, then the implications were not merely useful.

They were absurd.

A desert-folk practitioner was chosen. Lucien gave him a Core of Erosion that dropped from one of the goblins he and Seran fought in the void.

The man crushed it.

And then everything changed.

He fell into a coma almost immediately.

For several days, his body remained motionless while the law entered him cleanly and completely. The desert folk’s tattoo-patterns darkened, shifted, and re-formed. Sand-colored markings became sharper, harsher, more fluid along the edges, as though the very idea of gradual wearing had entered his skin.

When he woke, he had not simply learned erosion.

He had integrated it.

His realm had surged all the way to the peak of Ascendant.

Lucien was genuinely satisfied.

That result was so outrageous he had the records checked twice to make sure no one had lost their minds in the process.

But the result held.

Sixty percent comprehension.

That was the number the mythical cores grant.

And that corresponded to the peak of Ascendant Realm if the recipient’s foundation did not reject the law and if the body survived the transition.

Lucien stared at the report for a long while after that.

It was not merely impressive.

It was dangerous.

With the right people, the right filtering, and enough mythical law-cores, he could raise a terrifying army in an unreasonably short amount of time.

The desert practitioner, upon fully grasping what had happened, looked at Lucien as if he had been personally handed a second life.

He treated him like a god after that.

Lucien had no comment on this beyond the increasingly useful observation that worship, while awkward in conversation, did seem to scale very well as an energy source.

...

That part became more obvious by the week.

More and more people inside Lootwell had begun turning reverence into something active.

The deeper loyalty of the citizens, the rising devotion of the newly accepted, the faith of those who had been lifted beyond what their old lives allowed, the gratitude of those healed, strengthened, protected, or transformed under Lootwell’s systems...

All of it gathered.

And all of it flowed.

The chapel became the clearest conduit.

There, divine energy condensed and moved toward Lucien with increasingly frightening density. The more the people believed in what he had built, and in what he represented to them, the more his Divine Energy Core responded.

Its capacity continued expanding. Its inner realm widened. The young Tree of Creation stood at the center of something increasingly vast, and the whole internal world of his being continued growing in ways that were no longer easy to call metaphorical.

Lucien had stopped commenting on it.

At this point, it had become one of those truths best accepted through observation rather than philosophy.

Lootwell was changing him.

And he, in turn, was changing Lootwell.

That cycle had become too deep to ignore. 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝙚𝔀𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝒐𝒎

•••

Then came Vivian’s birthday.

Her twenty-eighth.

Lucien stood at the edge of the Stillness Palace and watched her from a distance before saying anything.

She did not know he was there at first.

She stood near an open terrace and looked out toward the horizon with a stillness that was not peace. There was sadness in her expression, old enough that she could not fully hide it anymore even from herself.

Lucien knew that look.

He had seen it before.

Not only in her, but in those who had lived too long with absence and learned to carry it quietly so as not to burden others.

Lucien sighed.

Seran had said the Celestial Race domain remained sealed.

Lucien had avoided the matter for good reasons.

He had not always had enough power for the Void Disc to make the leap safely. The world still did not remember him. He did not know how the Celestials would react if they appeared there suddenly. And deeper than all of that sat the private fear he rarely let himself speak aloud:

Were their parents truly there? Or only reflections? Or something worse, memories wearing shape?

He had hesitated for too long.

But now, seeing Vivian like this, the hesitation rotted inside him.

He could no longer bear it.

Some things mattered more than waiting until every unknown became polite.

So he made his decision.

Later that day, he found her in a quieter chamber and said simply, "I have a birthday gift for you."

Vivian looked up.

"A gift?"

Lucien nodded.

Then, because there was no graceful way to circle it, he said, "I’m taking you to the Celestial Race domain."

For one instant, she did not react.

Then her eyes widened.

Lucien stepped closer and continued before she could speak.

"I’m sorry it took so long, sis."

That was enough.

Vivian broke.

She simply stepped forward and collapsed into his arms, crying against him in a way that made Lucien’s chest tighten with guilt and relief at once.

She wanted to see their parents more than anyone.

Lucien held her carefully and let her cry.

This, he thought, was the right gift.

A road toward the part of her heart that had never truly healed.

When her breathing finally steadied a little, Lucien rested his cheek lightly against her hair and said, "We’ll go together."

Vivian gripped him tighter.

He did not promise safety.

He did not promise the answer would be kind.

He only promised the one thing he could.

She would not face it alone.

And that, for the moment, was enough.