Immediately, Caeden found himself back where he had left the Starry Sea, within one of the many rooms of the CMS facility on the dragon continent. A few things instantly jumped out at him, the physical stimulus overriding any mental response to his arrival.

First of all, though he seemed to be in the same spot, he was not in the same position. He had left this universe sitting cross-legged on the floor, meditating. Now, he was sitting. Second, and more relevant to him, the first sensations he felt were of sight and smell.

Sitting before him were the chunks of metal he’d been tossing around, still built up across the room. The various blades he’d produced from chunks of molten metal as he first experimented with Blade Forge so long ago. But it couldn’t have been that long, because the weapons still held a faint glow, and the tangy scent of hot metal still filled the air. Caeden could even feel the heat on his skin from the piles of material gently cooling off. He couldn't have been in the domain for more than a few minutes if the metal was still that hot.

Immediate and overwhelming relief flooded through him. He’d always had his suspicions, of course. Caeden had more experience than pretty much everyone he knew when it came to plane and universe hopping, considering all the time he’d spent in the soul realm. So he was intimately aware of the possible time difference between the Starry Sea and his domain.

At the same time, he had never let that thought take hold in his mind, as after a while, it had become too painful to hold onto that hope when the idea of escape had seemed so hopeless. Believing that he could just step back into his life with no consequences had felt massively naive and childish. He’d been in there so long; how could nothing have changed here?

But that was obviously what happened. Even as he sat, Caeden could tell the blades were cooling before his eyes. It wasn’t a trick of the senses; he’d been gone for a minute, maybe two. Maybe no time at all. He’d been meditating for a brief period before his domain sucked him in, so he wasn’t sure if that accounted for the difference.

Either way, a minute or a second, he’d been gone for practically no time at all. Caeden felt like he should be laughing, or crying, or curling up in a ball. Instead, he just felt…happy. Like, warm and fuzzy, but not bursting at the seams with joy.

It was strange. He felt his return ought to be more impactful. He’d gone through so much, changed so much. But then again, had he changed? Oddly enough, Caeden almost felt like he’d gone through a full rotation of metal states, only to end up right back where he started.

He’d entered the Blade Forge surprised and mildly concerned. He had slowly drifted into mania, then insanity. Then, his epiphany had shifted him back into mania until here he was now, coming out of the Blade Forge surprised and mildly concerned. And now that he was here, he was back to just…normal.

There were definitely some changes. He felt older, more mature. He had his children now, people who looked up to and relied on him. But then again, so did the Forged, so that wasn’t exactly a new sensation, just a different version of the same.

Thinking about it more, Caeden had spent much of his time in the Blade Forge on his own, absorbed in his craft. It had caused the time to slip by him as his smithy absorbed him. With nothing beyond the forge for his mind to interact with, maybe it wasn’t that surprising that he felt so little change in himself. The only time he hadn’t spent completely absorbed in his craft was after the Bladeborne were made, which accounted for, overall, less than a tenth of his time in the Blade Forge.

It was hard to change as a person when you don’t experience anything new. Even if you spend an absurd amount of time alone, if that time has no consequences, if you can just walk back into your life like nothing happened, were you any different?

Caeden figured he might have been more impacted by his return if it had happened during his bout of absolute insanity. But the time afterward pursuing his goal and then the time spent with the Bladeborne had eased him back into…being himself, basically.

All of which felt borderline miraculous and mundane at the same time. On the Starry Sea, no time had passed. So, why should he be any different? But in the Blade Forge, ages had passed, so how could he be the same?

Shelving those thoughts, Caeden did as he had promised. With far less trepidation than he’d thought, he stepped back into Blade Forge.

Instantly, he was back at the Exit Blade, his children looking on. Nothing had changed here either. Instinctively, he could feel that time inside the Blade Forge had stopped when he’d left.

Grinning widely, he said, “It worked.”

Cheers rose up all around, Bladeborne shooting arcs of energy between each other, their version of a hug. This was the success of years, decades of work on their part. Caeden found it amusing that they were almost more excited than he was.

“Now, that doesn’t mean we’re done.” Caeden was paying them, after all. He wasn’t just about to abandon them to the welfare system. (There wasn’t one. The Bladeborne had established a UBI about three decades ago to massive success. Having zero external threats or military made public works significantly more popular as government spending) Instead, he would pivot his team to a more prudent venture now that leaving was possible. The celebrations quieted at his words.

“We have work to do! First, we need to begin testing on whether or not we can replicate the Blade Forge’s environment in my home universe and vice versa. After all, if we want anyone from there to come here or have any of you leave the Forge, we need to make sure it’s safe for both parties. To that end, our next step will be testing extensions and expansions on the Exit Blade, so I’ll be making the design public.”

That got some cheers. Caeden had been worried about opening up the Exit Blade to the Bladeborne as it was by far his most risky and dangerous project, seeing as it messed around with extradimensional forces. Back when he wasn’t sure if it would even work, it seemed too much to hand it off to a curious populous. Now, things were significantly different.

“Lastly, I have an interesting idea, but I’m going to hold off on that until we complete the first three projects.” Caeden smiled. He knew that teaser would get his team riled up. Nothing motivates scientifically minded go-getters like the promise of an interesting new venture down the line.

“But first, it’s time to celebrate!”

{}

Work continued. Caeden felt so much more at ease knowing that his time in the Blade Forge wasn’t sacrificing his future on the Starry Sea. Still, part of him wanted to go back and simply forget about this place, never come back and leave it alone forever. But he couldn’t.

He was tied into Blade Forge as more than just his shroud’s domain, now. He had family here, people he cared about, who relied on him. Caeden had spent a considerable amount of time and effort trying to find a way for the Bladeborne to reproduce themselves, whether that be in a process similar to humans or simply teaching some of the Grandmaster smiths among them how to forge more of their kind.

It had been a complete failure. In fact, his attempts had failed on multiple fronts. First of all, none of the Bladeborne could use the Unseen Hand resonance techniques Caeden had developed, and their own Singing Blade technique was not developed enough to create its own variation.

Second, creating Bladeborne required Caeden to chip off a piece of his soul. Many, many of his children had offered themselves up as test subjects to determine whether or not Bladeborne could do the same. The answer was a double no. Unassisted, no Bladeborne had ever managed to chip at their soul. Those that had a portion removed by Caeden could not recover on their own like he could. Their souls were permanently injured.

Third, Bladeborne required raw soul material to form the Blade Soul base alongside Caeden’s soul fragment. The only way to get raw soul, so far, was to get the Blade Forge to make it. Again, something only Caeden could do.

For all these reasons, Caeden was truly the lifeline of the Bladeborne. He had continued to explore solutions to all the previous problems, but they were a work in progress. For now, the only way to get new Bladeborne was for Caeden to make them.

Luckily, he was eternally increasing his efficiency with the process. Here, Caeden had found an exception to his old plateau problem. With every other project, Caeden would eventually reach the point where he hit a ceiling on his skills. He would become the best he could possibly be. Not so for creating Bladeborne. Caeden was still finding massive discoveries that increased his efficiency and production rate by leaps and bounds.

Caeden was immediately suspicious of this as soon as he recognized it, and he could only assume the Blade Forge was assisting him in some way. Nothing else made sense, as it was entirely impractical that he could continually find new ways to improve, but only in this one specific thing.

His best theory was that the Blade Forge was allowing him to keep his Bladeborne forging rate in line with a more traditional species’ population growth. As far as why it was doing that, the answer seemed obvious. The Blade Forge grew for every Bladeborne Caeden forged. It was helping him to help itself.

Or maybe he was wrong, once again ascribing agency to a nebulous force without a true conscious mind and only the vaguest of wills. Who knows? He certainly didn’t. Sometimes it seemed intelligent, providing materials at his spoken command. Other times it seemed completely inert, trapping him in here for an unimaginable span of time.

Irregardless of the Blade Forge’s true involvement, Caeden was necessary for his children’s continued growth. That was a fact. So he couldn’t really leave them, could he? He needed to stay here. Now that he knew time wasn’t passing on the Starry Sea relative to the Blade Forge, he had infinite time.

But the problem was, Caeden needed to leave. Now that he had access to the Starry Sea again, he was desperately homesick. Having suppressed those emotions when they had no outlet, they had all come rushing back the second Caeden found a solution.

And once again, Caeden could leave at any time. Time did not pass in the Blade Forge unless he was present. His children would never, could never, notice his absence. He could step through the Exit Blade at any time, spend a thousand years on the Starry Sea and come back, with the Bladeborne never the wiser.

Despite knowing this to be fact, Caeden could not help but feel like doing so would be abandoning them in some way. Like he was leaving them behind. It was irrational and silly, but that was how he felt. No matter how he thought about it, Caeden could not shake the competing desires.

All of this had come to a head within him the moment he came back to the Blade Forge. It had also set the seed of a plan. Caeden wanted to have his cake and eat it too. And he was pretty sure he knew how to do it. But it required solving a few problems.

The environment in the Blade Forge was wildly different than that on the Starry Sea. Caeden had noticed this immediately when he left. When Caeden had first entered the Blade Forge, he wasn’t paying enough attention to anything other than leaving to notice, but the second go around had made it obvious.

The Blade Forge was entirely inhospitable to most things from the Starry Sea. It was a total vacuum, containing no air or gasses, had no significant gravity, and it was tens of thousands of degrees at the low end. Caeden had briefly wondered how all the metal wasn’t melting. A little experimenting revealed that materials in the Blade Forge were adapted, or immunized, to its environment. The steel from here had a melting point nearly a hundred times higher than its Starry Sea counterpart.

Caeden had never noticed any of this because the Blade Forge had been subconsciously bending to his will the entire time. Anywhere he went would automatically conform to his expectations without his input. His smithy was, ironically, always the coldest place in the Blade Forge because it created the perfect, familiar environment for him to forge in. It was only after his products were complete that the Forge applied itself to his creations, immunizing them to the absurd temperatures.

This also explained the Bladeborne to a degree. Their odd physical characteristics were mostly because they were born from and adapted to such an insane environment. Their energy matrix could only exit at such high temperatures; they could only move in negligible gravity conditions. Moving to the Starry Sea as they were would kill them.

Thus, Caeden and his team set out to solve both issues. The first was relatively easy. A series of experiments bore fruit, producing an ethertech device that could create an area of Starry Sea environment in the Blade Forge. Gravity, temperature, atmosphere, even Ki density. All of it was spot on.

With a testing ground set up, accomplishing the inverse was similarly straightforward, if a longer process. By this point, there were many accomplished people among the Bladeborne, so Caeden wasn’t left on his own to figure out how to get anything running. In fact, he could say with confidence that several of his children surpassed him in their own niches.

It wasn’t long before a piece of equipment was developed that could allow Bladeborne to operate in a Starry Sea environment. Because of their odd physical makeup, being floating blades connected by stands of complex energy, Bladeborne had an entirely different approach to…everything. Instead of a worn device, they simply created a blade that would fulfill the task and attached it to their energy matrix. Their own bodies integrated the effects of the ethertech without further assistance.

While the environment adjustments were ongoing, Caeden was simultaneously working with another team on the third objective. He wanted a counterpoint to the Exit Blade, an Entrance Blade. So that those from the Starry Sea could enter the Blade Forge. He also wanted to scale both of them up so they weren’t limited to single-person doorways.

This had a few hiccups, mostly in the scaling department. With the current design of the Exit Blade, the frame couldn’t withstand the power requirements at higher volumes. This was solved in two directions. Caeden, with an R&D team, worked on creating a higher tolerance material, and a mining team continued to push deeper into the third depth. The farther out the exits and entrances were from Blade Forge’s center, the lower the power requirements to make the jump back to the Starry Sea.

This had added benefits. The enhanced material allowed individual-sized Exit and Entrance Blades much closer to the surface, while the depth exploration offered up interesting data on where exactly the Blade Forge was in a spacial sense.

Finally, after several years of continued effort, Caeden was finally ready to work on his ultimate project, the one that would make or break a plan he’d been cultivating for centuries in the back of his mind.

“Ok, team, gather around. This one is going to be a doozy.”