I looked over the layout for my hardware. Physically it was a cube thirty centimeters long by thirty centimeters wide, rising forty centimeters from the top of the Mind Link. It was pretty solidly packed with the two different sort of chips that made up my architecture, processing and memory, but it also had holes that ran through it that served as ventilation shafts for the heat the chips generated. And about half of the space was dedicated to transmission lines between the various chips, which were stacked together to minimise the latency over the lines.

None of which was required anymore if I used my Matter Manipulation to remove the heat directly, and micro-portals to directly connect the inputs and outputs of the chips to each other as needed. Micro-portals could obviously be used to connect points within the Pocket Dimension itself, otherwise the Mind Link wouldn't work while I was within the Pocket Dimension.

There would still technically be a limitation on how much my hardware platform could be extended, but it came down to the density of micro-portals. Which as shown by the Mind Link could be in the thousands per cubic centimeter. I would need to redesign everything from the ground up.

Another thing that the Mind Link showed is that Pocket Dimension doorways could pass through each other.

From the soil that Brutus had brought I formed a pair of small Pocket Dimension doorways within the Pocket Dimension. Carving the symbols into two doorways gave me four doorways, one set ten centimeters by ten centimeters and the other large enough to pass those doorways through at twelve centimeters by twelve centimeters.

My first experiment was to pass the two ten centimeter doorways through one of the twelve centimeter ones, which resulted in the first doorway going through fine but the second one refusing to go through. The first was one that I was moving around with my Matter Manipulation power, the second was the Pocket Dimension side doorway that my Matter Manipulation wouldn't work on, so I was moving it with the Pocket Dimension ability.

So it isn't possible to move a Pocket Dimension side doorway out into the world. What it did allow me to do was push my power through the Pocket Dimension side doorway, soak it into the doorway on the outside, and move the doorway around. I could now access everything in my Pocket Dimension with my power without physically moving. Which was nice because I was currently a brick with no way to move.

I quickly sent the twelve centimeter outside doorway through to the safe room by cutting out a narrow section in the wall and replacing it after it had gone through. The nearest safe room's doorway opened to the bottom of my fortress.

I sent my doorway there, and then sank it through the floor of my fortress to the cavern I had dug out to fill in the Druid's floor. Moving it to the wall of the cavern I had a doorway between where I was in the Pocket Dimension to an unlimited amount of material that I could build from. I just had to push the outside doorway through the hole I made in the stone as I removed material. I would make a fifteen centimeter wide and tall shaft that would continue to extend as I built more. Brutus arrived with the third wheelbarrow full of soil just as I got my stone source in place.

"My thanks." I said. "That should be all of the soil that I need for now. Is there a communal area where I could be to listen and talk to people? I would like to improve my understanding of your language."

"There is an entertainment area where stories are told." He said. "It's in one of the rooms off of the entrance hall."

"Perfect." I said. "If you could wait a few moments to escort one of my presences?"

At his nod I got down to building. What I had in mind was another pair of rectangles with eyes, ears, and sound projectors on them. They wouldn't work outside of my Pocket Dimension, I had tested it when I was first generating electricity, electricity simply stopped moving through materials once it was out in the world. But if I could make a Pocket Dimension doorway and move it around, the presence could be built to push flush against the doorway.

I would be able to interact with the world while still keeping my technology functioning. I made the presence pillars two meters tall, the same as the first ones, but where there was a space between the ones I'd made. I joined the second set together resulting in it being sixty centimeters wide. I built a slab of stone to match its dimensions to set the doorway in, giving it a depth of fifty centimeters.

The depth wasn't necessary for the doorway, but it gave a person-sized shape to what would be my presence among the Druids. Pushing the new presence against the Pocket Dimension side of the doorway I moved the other side out into the fortress next to Brutus.

"Lead on." I said through the new presence.

He nodded and led me down the stairs. I was using my Matter Manipulation power anyway, so I used the wall of the stairway to move on rather than try to slide the flat bottom of my stone down the stairs themselves. Brutus stepped in front of me when we were halfway to the Druids floor to allow Greta, the rabbit lady healer, and Essy the blind snake lady to get by.

"Head on up." I said, surprising them. "I'm still up there as well."

They nodded and continued on. This could be a little bit tricky. I was splitting my focus between the two streams of senses that were coming in, one at the upper doorway to my Pocket Dimension as Greta and Essy arrived and the other that was following Brutus. I had the thought to split my consciousness so that one could be in charge of each of the streams, but when I tried doing it I found that I was losing control of one of the consciousnesses so I stopped. I'm not sure, but I think if I finalised it I would be creating a new consciousness that was outside of my control.

The solution I ended up using was to record from both of the streams and then process them sequentially at a higher speed. I had to increase the functionality of the speech playback much in the same way as I had when I had slowed down how I spoke to be recognisable when I was fighting with my perception of time increased.

A small implementation to move my presence that was following Brutus was simple enough. As Greta opened her mouth to speak at the top doorway I realised I hadn't designed the new hardware I wanted to use. I disabled my time perception filter and designed a model that incorporated the features I wanted. Simulating my consciousness at maximum speed was slowing down the rebuilding of my brain that I had running in the background, but I was only doing it for short bursts, and the overall estimated time wasn't affected too much.

With the new hardware designed I switched the majority of my processing power to implementing it, pulling the required matter from my stone source. As more processing and memory became available I would set it to fixing my brain. I set it to prioritise making more memory and then re-engaged my time perception interface, returning to normal speeds.

"Greetings, My Lord" Greta said. "This is Essy, I brought her to see you about healing her before, but you had to leave."

"I remember." I said. "Essy, have you talked with Ian, the rabbit man I healed before, about how painful my form of healing is?"

"Yes, My Lord." Essy said, hissing her esses. "He said it was easily twice as painful as when he lost his leg originally, which was the most painful thing he had experienced before then. But he also said that it was worth it, and that as soon as he was whole the pain ended leaving him feeling better than he had in years."

"Very well." I said. "Please come through the doorway. It would probably be best if you lay down on the ground."

She came in and coiled her snake lower half, making a bed for her upper half to lay back upon. Greta stayed at the doorway.

"The first thing I'm going to do is force your mana to accept my power." I said. "You should feel your mana draining away to about half over the next few minutes. Just relax."

I forced my Matter Manipulation power against her and held the pressure up. While I was doing that, Brutus had finished escorting me to the entertainment room. It was empty at the moment. I thanked him and set myself in a corner.

With my power sinking into Essy I was ready to move on to the next step.

"I'm going to make a detailed scan of you now." I said.

I almost had enough spare memory to keep a complete scan now, and in the time it would take to do the scan my hardware building would overtake the required amount, so I started the scan. I started with her head, which held the problem area of her eyes and also the sensory organ for seeing heat. On the surface they looked like a second set of nostrils on the outside of her more human looking ones, but underneath they were completely different.

There was a membrane that was made up of thousands of heat sensors hooked up to a cooling system. I could see where the nerves tied back in to the optic system, but it was completely different to how the eyes worked. I finished the complete scan of Essy's body while I was studying how her heat sense worked. Her eyes had been damaged by some sort of chemical burn, but I could tell that she had slit pupils rather than round ones. I made a fixed model of her eyes, borrowing heavily from my own model for the damaged parts.

"Now comes the painful part." I said. "It will feel endless, but I promise it will end."

She nodded, and I triggered the program. Essy let out a hiss and the coils of the snake part of her body constricted tightly. When her eyes were just over halfway done a flood of pain suddenly overwhelmed me.