It took next to no time at all to return back to the Dragonlands given a one hour trip originally transported him to the Tropalca ocean. The distance of a thousand kilometres hardly mattered to him after the flurry of evolutions and transformation to a Crystal Body.

Back home, things hadn’t changed in the slightest. Korridan and Darak built up their Mind palaces and enhanced their souls, meanwhile Mala tinkered with something unknown once more. Raccelline’s unconscious body in her bed raised no brows either, he expected that too. At least she left the message flipped over. His departure and return didn’t cause much in the way of problems, and as no one informed him of any visitors, he returned to his own room to train.

A few arrays could be seen in the large excavated space, all crafted from metal alloys of slightly varied colours.

One of them, placed square in the room’s centre, supplied elements for his transformation into crystal. It initially tested the feasibility of using so many different elements at once. And while he always knew the dragons’ higher quality version applied compressive forces, he never attributed it to much effect beyond an aid.

Quickly tearing out that central array, he extracted and melted down the malleable green-tinted metal first. Then some with a marbled red appearance, followed by a semi-transparent type that many mixed up with a glass variant. The multi-layered array covered about 6 metres in space with more than just a few ingots of material used in its production. Part way through a layer encased in stone, he considered what to focus on next when a reminder of his Mind palace came back, thinking out loud, “How are they coming along then?”

Not that anyone could answer, except for himself. And that’s exactly what happened when he answered that question, “Tritheus didn’t even try to send a signal, so it should be fine. How much progress can two workers possibly make?”

A lot of progress.

The answer to that came as a slight surprise to him alone.

On the mountain at the core of his mental space, a large region of snow had been cleared out in preparation for an oncoming foundation of bricks. This area completely exceeded any of his previous projects, with plans for walls at least 100 metres in length and slightly less in width. The region they selected didn’t even possess enough flat ground to fit the whole building and likely needed additional support columns built at the overhanging corners as support.

They finished all of that. Thousands of bricks put in place, fixed by Tritheus, and set into the palace. And he couldn’t just overlook the support column towards the back of this floor which held up a dangerous hanging edge… the pillar of bricks extended about 5 metres down!

“You did all of this in 40 or so days?” As he stared in shock, all ten of the golems rushed over and either knelt, bowed, or saluted. Strangely, they never bothered with a unified greeting and the sight amused him. So it stayed.

Tritheus answered immediately, “We did what we could, master. The floor was finished five days ago, we have just been waiting for your return.”

“Why didn’t you inform me?” He raised a suspicious glare towards the answer immediately, partially suspicious but also just annoyed. Also, the other nine golems turned towards Tritheus as well, clearly in the dark about this ability he possessed.

But it didn’t sweat under pressure, still on a knee as it answered faithfully, “Given the long absence, I presumed that bothering the master might interrupt some sort of focused training.” His answer was immediately met with nods from the golems who accepted the thought process in hindsight.

Certainly, a significant interruption in some forms of training damaged or even crippled the individual. Perhaps it only assumed such a thing due to the already month-long absence.

“A fair assertion, but I will mention if I undergo any such situations. Is that clear?” A snort ended his words, and with it blew a gust of icy winds which sent shivers across all ten golems. They all nodded, faces ingrained with fervour. Stiffened gaze retained, he moved on from the topic to discuss more important matters, “For now you can focus on the main walls as I prepare a floor plan. Leave space for a pair of large doors on the long side, as well as smaller doors on the sides and back where I tell you.”

Due to the layout of his mountain, Akevorax’s new mansion effectively sat with its side visible when seen from the other buildings. This was unavoidable as the 80 metre width already created an overhung down the mountain on its right side. Meanwhile, he also excavated out snow to the point where a flat wall of snow stood on the other side towards the mountain’s peak. So, the double doors he placed either went on the side with a cliff, or against a wall of fruity snow… There wasn’t even a question. Who placed the main entrance of a building over a cliff?

Golems began work on the outer walls immediately and he left the space to develop a plan for the full mansion. While he really didn’t care much when it came to architecture, Mala and the refuge of knowledge in the library offered all he ever needed for this regard. Just six hours later he built up complete plans for it all. A quick and easy procedure given that he really didn’t care for design or aesthetics over pure functionality. Chances were half the space would be used for bookshelves anyway.

The plan itself came in the form of two sets of information. One showed off the full mansion as a three dimensional model whilst the other was just images of a top-down view for every floor. The latter served as a simpler way to tell where walls were supposed to go.

Information storage wasn’t a worry either, psychic arrays with the ability to store information always existed within the heads of those golems. Without any such ability, they’d be no better than human-shaped flies.

Perhaps a bit more verbose than literal bugs, but definitely not capable of developed thought processes.

Everything immediately important with regards to his palace’s construction came to a close and he could afford to put focus elsewhere. His Soul’s growth to name it clearly. As his Body reached greater levels, and the power available to him jumped immensely with the dragonstone, a Formed Soul very quickly became a major limiting factor for this power level. In fact, anything below an Adept Mind Palace revealed countless weaknesses to Blossoming Wizards already, thankfully the Dragoncored bloodline from a while back slightly made up for this. However, if he couldn’t kill them fast enough, it was still a significant threat. An Exalted Soul pretty much kept him safe from everything up to Ruler true spells, the level which Sages learnt and used.

As far as names went, ‘Ruler’ was simply strange because nothing used it outside of spell and Mind palace tiers. Another dumb name that someone could have removed long ago, but because the eight worlds stuck to it…

Rants aside, he moved over to an array towards the side of the room which he placed down quite some time ago. This one also created jets of elements for his use, but specifically sent them towards his Soul for usage. Progress on the next step of his technique came pretty slowly after all, with every little blood vessel created from a link of elements, he took his sweet time with every single placement.

This first step was supposedly the shortest as well!

While the training process required no repeated description, one could clearly see the speed at which elements congealed and set in place sped up ever so slightly.

And while he never made it explicit, whenever he trained Akevorax obviously used other titles with similar effects. Complete Awakening gave an additional 5% boost to all forms of training, and naturally meant when he focused on the task like in this case, the golems in his mental space found that bricks set in place quicker too.

He was able to do this for a few hours nonstop before boredom came onto him a bit. Normally, it was easy to just ignore that waning interest, but that came with the assumption that no one offered anything more interesting…

Like a little switch in his brain that activated the most obstinate reminder possible. One which looked, pointed, and shouted its damn head off like a child with no filter. It nagged and nagged him away from work until that moment where his willpower lapsed.

“I really, really shouldn’t… But no one’s also here to stop me,” he said with exasperation. A heavy sigh decided the matter as he turned off the array below and switched focus onto his Soul immediately. With the Elemental Heart acting as a shell to hold his yolk-like existence in place, he easily forced his sight into the wall of white, dented soul power to smash his way into the depths once more. And as no one stopped him, the sight he saw plummeted through the layer of white and past the thin region of a half-built brick wall.

Things changed to a navy blue with the stars so far away once again, that region in his Soul which once stumped him for long months. It took a moment of endearment for him to zip across the ocean of blue until the world changed to unknown colours.

Nearby he passed by the orbs of white once more, spotless as ever, he ignored their temptations as even his consciousness trembled with fear at the thought of opening any more. Not that he possessed the right to. If he touched them, nothing would happen, thankfully.

Providences were not to be trifled with.

Within the inner layer of his Soul, a place very few ever came to, he flashed forward with ease like flying through the air. Forward and forward; Deeper and deeper… Until the centre of his Soul appeared.

Ordinarily, nothing actually took this spot. The intrinsic properties of an individual like their ego and even soul memory all appeared in some of the white orbs floating about nearby. Even his activated providences just floated about freely, in fact he could see the incredibly dark green ball from here.

So then, why had that unknown black crystal rooted itself here?

The whole situation introduced countless problems, the sheer danger of it strangled him whenever the thought resurfaced. And yet he found himself drawn to this object which somehow decided, by some unknown force, to overpower the arrays in that grade 0 vault and sit at the deepest part of one’s Soul. A question with no answers.

Which meant he had to figure them out… Somehow.

Firstly, he pulled his consciousness away and quickly cast a 319 word soul spell. With its power, his only better option would be Master true spells in Draconis… And he had not the faintest clue how to cast one which scanned things like this.

After a tiresome minute of speaking, mana flared from his body and fused together to form the highly recognisable rings of Draconic spellcasting. From just hundreds, it expanded outwards to a flat plane of thousands, every single ring constrained in two dimensions, a clear limitation in their very existence. Still, as the mana built this spell, the layer of white around his Soul quickly evaporated and escaped his body as frail particles into the wall of rings in front.

The spell resolved as expected and–

“It didn’t even detect an object in my Soul? What the… It’s a supreme tier item at the least, why am I surprised?” His eyes rolled unbridled sarcasm, mocking his own childish thought process. Obviously only a scan which utilised great runes stood any hopes of even finding this crystal.

So he jumped straight to wasteful expenditures! What better than an array made of cornem tier metal?

By choice, his array’s Base and Trigger used a relatively mediocre master tier metal instead. Chosen because neither of these parts did much in the whole array, the mana and soul power costs of such Effects weren’t ridiculously high because the cost split between the two energy sources. As such, he just had to create a somewhat powerful Base array for mana, and a weaker secondary array for soul power.

These stored and transferred the energies the moment a mental link activated the array. Which left just the important part, the Effect made up of great runes.

This process always reminded him of that time where Mala created an abomination of a spell to place down great runes in such small quantities. Now it just took a casual 324 word spell to obtain a very similar ‘condensed spell’ which acted as a foundation for his great runes. Molten metal then laid on top of this glowing light to formally complete each one.

As for its effect, he chose a very simple but direct scan across his entire Soul as well as any overlapped dimensions. Except for some extremely specific and rare cases, this would at least detect that damn crystal.

From there he could modify the array to try jamming various energies into it for tests. One step at a time though…

He cast the spell, Great Rune Ink, at least a hundred times over the course of the next two hours. Every single rune and junction required a mind-splitting amount of focus to direct the floating light precisely to a desired spot, and condense it into a sharp tip much like the point of a quill to draw precisely what he required.

And it worked perfectly fine. Because the array actually worked in a very simple manner, being two layers with minimal interconnectivity, it tested successfully after a few minutes.

A sign of his improved skill as the basics no longer pained him any longer, but don’t ask him to build anything more complex than 7 layers. Especially if it made heavy use of great runes and high level materials… And for the love of his sanity, never ask for crystal.

Once more, a wave of power skipped over his Soul and rushed towards its depths once more. In his head, a fuzzy map of his Soul appeared, the layers blurred and distorted and the orbs of Providence just not found. Thankfully, something appeared at the centre of his Soul, but when he peered closer at the result, Akevorax’s face distorted to pure confusion as everything now made less sense. In complete defeat at reality, he asked, “What the hell is this? Nexus, I give up, can you just explain?”

Yes, he opted to actually research this himself when it first happened all those months ago… Kind of like how he had to more or less discover the golem creation process as well as sort out its kinks himself. But at least that gave him a lead.

When he looked at his Soul, what appeared was not a ‘thing’ but a black region showing that nothing existed.

That crystal somehow exhibited properties of void.