The former Black Panther tries to attack, but even if it is stronger than me, it is a sliver of its original self which I never met. But my heartbeats keep steady and not a single tremor reaches my muscles. Even if there is danger involved, it is only a single beast and I have dozens of avatars all around me.

I pull on my Life while I try to channel the same mindset kept while the wolves were my main sparring partners.

Staff in hands, I channel Qi and Vigor into a few roots just before the panther bulldozes one of my Avatars. Lighting it all up with a spark of Life takes it by surprise. Exploding roots, thin fragile strings in their inception engulf its entire body. Several of my avatars trust the pointy end of their weapons at the beast, the White Panther, but while they limit its movement range, they are far too slow to be any real threat.

I keep a sliver of the connection that let me peer past all the useless stuff with the beast and I can see how it moves. It’s not even actual instinct, not a fully functioning brain, but preprogrammed responses. Much better tactically than the inexperienced Wolves and bunnies that we encountered around the LLZ and even the Medium level beasts in between villages, but rote patterns nonetheless. Even if all but the bunnies were prompted to attack us, there was always a choice for them.

How I could have ever missed it… I can only blame fear, the fear that I would be injured while fighting. But fear is not a solid foundation to act from. In fact, acting out of fear sounds like the simplest recipe for making things go awry.

I get my head back on the game as the Panther tries for the tenth time to bypass the layer of defenses I have around me hampered by a coat of roots in the whole of its body. But it keeps losing ground as it can neither stop and give my avatars a chance to injure it with their spears nor can it get rid of the tangling roots that I keep growing. Especially not after another pair of Life Sparks getting it square on.

The struggle is visible, even if there is nothing really living behind its eyes, I felt its Aether. It used to be alive, it may even have a spark left, but there is nothing for me to connect with. Even its mental faculties feel like pre programmed responses that the system fed into its brain.

But even if it is stronger than me, its struggle is futile. There are no reinforcements and though I use Life sparingly, after just the three well placed plant growth explosions, the tide starts to go my way and each exchange tilts a little more in my favor. The wire mesh of roots soon becomes summer clothes, then sturdy work attire, past winter gear, until I have the panther in a straight jacket.

Fire, mana disruption and a few other tricks all fail to dislodge enough of my roots to free the beast. I even feel pity for its struggle, but there is nothing to it but to limit its movements so that the miners can work safely.

I try to put it into my inner world out of curiosity, but as expected, it doesn’t work so I end up growing a large room underground and nearly encasing the beast in loose walls of dirt meters thick that provide it no way to climb.

Probably not the best possible prison, but enough to protect ourselves.

I try to dissect my solution and… I’m still not happy, but at least I didn’t kill the beast… again.

The stone on top of my heart drops. A weight that kept me from taking a full breath for ages.

The changes in the environment were disconcerting. The artificial nature of everything in here put me off. Not an excuse, I’m the one that killed the beast, but I need to know how and why I numbed myself so I won’t pull the same thing again the next week or the next month, or ever.

I don’t want to even make the same decision again.

I won’t make the same decision again. Not because I’m incapable of it or that I suddenly grew so much that mistakes were impossible, but in the clear light of day, it simply no longer makes sense.

In the end, I simply choose not to, not after seeing and feeling the consequences of my actions, not after understanding what they brought.

I will mold the world to facilitate my decision, I will sculpt my toolset into giving me the options I need to not kill or take away what I cannot give, in accomplishing my goals without causing undue harm.

It seems impossible to get a better answer than simply locking my enemies away and it may be the best I ever come up with. Even if in a much less permanent way, I’m still taking choices away from someone else’s hand. But I’m not the one who put these cascading problems in place and I can only work under the set of conditions I find in reality.

As that thought comes to my mind, it all comes back to me.

The very same argument that got me to choose to kill nigh indiscriminately is being used to justify a much smaller offense.

To lock someone in a cage because of my views. But to allow them to kill, how then could I ever forgive myself if I committed to inaction?

The arguments start to grow, to take the slowly building momentum that would eventually drive me mad. I stop and put it out of my mind happy that I at least made some progress. Better focus on the one thing that matters now: Pando.

I move to the next place and the next and the next, slowly freeing up the territory around a dozen mines. Each action has its consequences, but knowing that at least the nigh irrational beings are not being massacred gives me a bit of hope.

With the nice break over and our supply lines of silver back online, the next step comes to mind.

Or rather the actual current step.

Working with the space runes, mixing them with the system interfering ones and making the time warping apparatus work not only faster but also on a larger scale and with significantly less mana. After all, I didn’t have a million mana per second to spend.

As I climb aboard the flying craft, with my seed chauffeur driving me back to the space and time research center, the break really shows itself as a good idea. The flow of each of my plans and solutions to problems I didn’t know I had started popping up and I get ready to go under for another few days before taking any other breaks longer than an hour or three for my daily activities.

Each step in understanding how time interacts with our instance and how to bypass that ever so slightly in a small area is hard fought. But even with my most hopeful predictions anything that would be able to affect an area large enough to achieve even minimum viability would require a static bubble that I could fit in a meditation position and for somewhere so small, limitations would soon come into place.

My work begins and as the days pass, something becomes clear:

Just because I was dealing with time and no longer space, the dangers hiding underneath are there in wait.

Aspen takes to driving his version of my natural perception field every time I start the formation and even without asking me, the mana flow and reflecting waves enhancing the effect are suddenly dispersed as soon as he sees the vaguest hint of the roiling mass of black that would eat his root away in moments.

I’m playing with fire, but I need this and there is no one else nearby to get injured but myself. Everyone else was either inside the inner world or a kilometer away in the ‘main’ research center.

Small tweaks increase the time expansion factor from 2 to 3 and eventually 4, but each increase while a great step forward also invites doom. The black thing trying to reach our realm seems to learn and get a better grip on where I’m experimenting, but luckily this is not like the portal. With an opening wide enough and preparation, I guess an entity like that could sustain the vortex and keep a portal open. Something like this however is an entirely different construct. The brief glimpses it gives from elsewhere into our realm are unintentional. Just a by product of my real intention. The inherent instability makes sustaining them a hard task, further complicated by how hard is to keep the conditions of time dilation in place.

The very same thing keeping me from making progress also protected us against incursion.

Though as I came closer and closer to the theoretical limit of roughly 37 times time expansion when I would be simply running at a similar rate as the real universe, the barrier to this other realm with this being anathema to existence would be at its weakest.

It felt like walking on a tightrope between two precipices one threatened my death and the other threatened Pando.

I breathe in deeply until my mind is off those long term problems. So far the thing that inhabited the void, or nether, or wherever that realm is called is barely an annoyance, but eventually it would grow.

Cracking my neck and stretching my legs, I get up some 11 hours after sitting down and take to a walk trying to free my mind from the rigid trappings of my current dilemma. Focusing on and drilling down grinding the problem was an amazing feeling and would eventually solve just about anything, but a myopic view also came with problems of its own.

Letting my brain recharge and getting ready for my daily Qi contribution to the forge, I relax.

Five minutes, ten, fifteen. Even as I keep myself walking the village's clock rings its bell, but I keep a slow trot while most of my mind and my resources reach hundreds of miles away, as I drive the forge for Blackwood to make better equipment. Equipment that we were happily selling down the line to The Necromancer. He may be the top dog over there and had a few advantages of his own, but there was no one like me with multiple resources of their own or that could push the quality of equipment so much.

With just enough attention back on my real body to not slam my head on a tree, I drive hard at the task and get out the same quality as always, +10 weapons.

And if I can sustain the effort so easily, remote work with only 90% of my attention on the task, soon I should be able to push another step. Any increase in my income would be welcome.

But as my mind comes back to my own body roughly an hour later, I look forward and another piece of the puzzle fits into place nicely.

I don’t have everything. But I don’t need to yet.

The more I think about the more excited I get until it all reaches a climax.

I can just…. use my inner world. I can fit a lot of runes inside. Although there were limitations, with a relatively static formation like the one I wanted to establish, I could greatly increase the ‘power’ density of the mana circuit in a ‘fourth’ dimension. Mana could cross from one side of the formation to the other instantly, and power that needed to be carefully handled by huge banks could all be placed inside the inner world and out of the way leaving room for more important engravings.

That opens up all kinds of possibilities.

Now that is a good idea if I ever heard one and I feverish begin working on it.