The most productive thing I could think of to do is to increase my processing speed by making more memory and processing chips.

I made a scan of all of the material within my twenty meter active range and came up with fifty kilograms of stuff I could work with. About half came from the defunct vacuum tubes that made up my first set of hardware, and the other half came from the bed that I had made.

The stone stockpile that I'd had was used up to make the secure rooms in my Pocket Dimension, and they were out of range of my power.

I loaded a model of what processing and memory chips I could make with the available material, and what the increased power would do to the estimate. It would triple my current processing capabilities, but would only save me half an hour in objective time. It would take half an hour on its own, and there were losses in transmission complexity and the more copies of the program I had working on my brain the more complicated the coordination between the programs needed to be.

Tripling my capabilities only sped up the process by about a quarter, but with infinite processing and memory I could repair my brain in about twenty minutes. I could convert the air into matter I could use to create more hardware, but it took ten to one hundred times longer than working with solid matter.

What I really needed was access to more matter. And to get that the simplest way would be to ask someone in my fortress to bring me some.

I already had a working design for converting sound waves into electrical signals with the improved ears I'd made for my body. I could make something similar for light by basing it upon what my eyes did.

The real trick would be making something that could create sound. Copying the way my body did that seemed an inefficient way of going about it, forcing air past vocal cords to create vibrations in the air. Reversing the way my ears worked might work. They were set up so that the highest band of frequencies of sound, or the faintest, were absorbed and converted to electrical signals by the first layer of detectors, and the next layer absorbed the next band of frequencies down. With twenty layers in each ear they captured the entirety of the complexity of the sounds that reached them.

The detectors themselves were the key if I wanted to make sound projectors. When they vibrated they generated electrical signals, but if I sent electrical signals to them would they vibrate?

I made a model of my digital eyes and ears first, and made a frame that they would be placed upon. My model for the sound projector ended up being huge, and it would take a lot of energy to drive them. It couldn't be helped, to create sound waves in air at a volume that would be able to be heard I needed a large area to push against. With the models complete I had an estimate for how long it would take to create the analog inputs and output. Twenty minutes objective time. And that was if I dedicated my full efforts to it, pausing the reconstruction of my brain as much as was possible, it still requiring heat input to stop any loss of progress.

The question was whether I would regain the time I lost... And after a few minutes of thought I concluded that I would be able to increase my building and reconstruction potential without limit as long as I had access to more materials. It was worth taking the risk that I wouldn't be able to get anyone's attention after I'd invested the time.

I stopped the majority of the programs that were working on my brain, leaving two running to keep the fixed areas warm.

Dedicating my entire processing ability to building the model I watched it get built in fast-motion. My perception of time was unregulated, so as more of my processing was dedicated to other programs than simulating my consciousness my subjective experience of time changed.

In objective time, that everyone else experienced, it took twenty minutes for the eyes, ears, and sound projector to be built, but I experienced it over about thirty seconds. I had it set up facing out of the doorway on the top floor of my fortress.

They were made up of two reflective black rectangles that were each two meters tall, thirty centimeters wide, and fifty centimeters deep. On the front at the top of each of them was a curved lens that could bend to adjust the focal depth to the fine array of light sensors within the body of the rectangle. Below that was a flat area that had the layers of sound sensors. The rest of the body was a layered sound projector, a larger version of the sound sensors. The low frequency sound projector was at the back, and it would project its sound through the sound projectors in front of it. Each of the twenty sound projectors would add their own modulation to the sound wave as it passed through their membrane until the last one at the highest frequencies produced the final sound.

There was a thick cable that ran from the digital presence rectangles to my main hardware on top of the Mind Link and then on to the batteries. The final part of building the models was creating a physical interface to link my hardware to the digital presence.

With the build done I was getting input from the new eyes and ears. I wrote a program that would learn adaptively what the eye inputs were giving me and translate that to my model of the world around me. A few minutes later I could see through the doorway out into my fortress. I already knew how my ears worked, so all I had to do now was make the sound projector work.

I reinitialised my time perception interface and set myself to normal speed. My first attempt at producing sound came out as a garbled burp. Controlling twenty membranes at once was a bit complicated, so I wrote an interface over the top of it that would let me just give it a final sound wave. Then it was just a matter of running the sounds from my memories through a learning program that would be able to create sound waves. Once it was done I absorbed it back into my consciousness simulation.

I tested it out by talking to myself for a few minutes, working out small bugs in how I sounded through my ears. When I thought that I sounded like myself I generated a sound wave that would serve as an alarm to get someone's attention. It ended up being a bass heavy sound wave that would cause the stone to vibrate as it passed through it. I projected five seconds of the sound, and then paused for five seconds. In the silence of the fourth wave of that I heard someone coming down the stairs from the guard post.

"Hello." I said as Brutus came into view.

"... Hello." He said after a pause. "Who, what, you?"

"You can speak in your language, I will understand you and it will help me get better with it." I said. "I'll stick to this language, though. I am Lord C.C., you don't recognise my voice?"

"You don't sound like you." He said in the beast people's language. "And where are you?"

"Ah... I got myself killed, a little bit." I said. "I'm working on resurrecting myself from the dead right now."

"You're immortal?" He asked.

"I guess it could be seen that way." I said. "This is my first time being dead since I got here. I need more material to decrease the time needed to revive my body, could you bring me as much soil as you can?"

"I can, I will be back." He said, leaving down the stairs.

A few minutes later Brutus came back up the stairs carrying a wooden wheelbarrow with around one hundred kilograms of soil in it.

"Just dump it through the doorway, I'll move it from there." I said.

He did that and took the wheelbarrow back down the stairs for more, passing several people on his way. Dael, the deer man leader of the druids, Maaata the goat lady enchanter, and Greta the rabbit lady healer had come to see what was happening.

Dael was looking through the doorway into my Pocket Dimension, looking around as though searching for something.

"Greetings Dael." I said.

He took a step back, frowning. "My lord." He said cautiously. "You don't sound like you."

"This is what I sound like to myself." I said. "It's possible that I don't hear myself the same way that you hear me."

His frown cleared. "Yes, we've found that with recording crystals." He said. "What is happening? Brutus said that you were dead but immortal and coming back to life?"

"My body is dead, yes." I said. "I got caught in a tunnel that the winter priests flooded, and then froze with their Divine Cold power that overwhelmed my ability to heat myself. I'm working on restoring myself to life now."

"My lord, I don't mean any offence, but is there any way you could prove that you are you?" Dael asked. "I brought Maaata and Greta as experts on magic and bodies, but you seem to currently be two pillars in a magic void space."

Proof. "I have a treaty with you to provide a safe place for your people in return for your providing food for my fortress." I said. "I also have a commitment to restoring some of your people to full health."

"Would it be possible for you to heal some people now?" Greta asked.

I thought about that for a few moments. I could probably do it in parallel to reconstructing my brain, it should only require a small percentage of my hardware to scan and fix people.

"It should be possible." I said. "But first, Maaata, did you change the wards on the fortress? I'm not able to use my power on it, and that would be the most likely cause."

"I did." Maaata said. "I changed the heating part of the physical ward as it has been getting colder. Should I not have?"

"You did the right thing." I said. "But I would like to adapt your magic to my power. Please enter the doorway."

Greta left while I was pushing my Matter Manipulation power into Maaata, and when it finally sunk in I could sink my power into the stone of my fortress again.