"Is it finished?" Duke Ishiroi demanded. The Duke wasn't usually this impatient. He had schemed for centuries, stolen, killed, or bribed Sect Heads, Clan Heads, and bureaucrats alike to get to this moment.

His people were about to open a portal, one that would allow them to move from one point to another instantly. Technology that he had 'discovered' when a team of explorers stumbled across a mountain. A mountain with a tunnel system that fed into a city beneath the mountain.

A city of Dwarves.

The Empire had long believed that there might be other intelligent races. The Hindel had only added logic and proof to that belief. But the world was so large, barely explored, and the dangers so great that it was no surprise it had taken so long to discover another race.

The Dwarves were masters at stonework, blacksmithing, and runic enchantment. Almost every person had affinities that were tied to either earth, metal, or fire. They had their own methods of cultivation, but they differed in their ultimate goals.

The Dwarves were not interested in reaching past the Profound Immortal Realm. They were too tied to this world, their connection with the earth too grounded for them to consider ascending and testing what might lay beyond.

Heimm, the Lord that ruled Felforge, had not been surprised when the adventuring party of Elves had stumbled across his kingdom. The Dwarves had known of the Elves' existence for a long time. Heimm had explained that the earth spoke to them. If a person were willing to listen, the planet would whisper the secrets of other people.

Kobolds, Goblins, Dwarves, Elves, Trolls, and Dark Elves. They all existed. They all claimed the planet Shijie as their home.

There were some differences. Not all races had the ability or capacity to cultivate. For most, that meant living in secluded areas underground. Places that could be defended with tools and weapons that non-cultivators could master.

A few had evolved to use Qi in unique ways. Much like a Dharmic master, these few individuals were able to focus the ambient energy of the planet to fuel spells. Magic, they called it. A way to twist the laws of reality to fit their needs.

Duke Ishiroi didn't care about that. He might leverage that information at some point in the future, but for the past four centuries, he had been working to create a teleportation array, one that combined the technologies of Dwarves and Elves.

The array would take a vast amount of power to function. That had been the first stumbling block. Although they had been able to increase the efficiency of the runic inscriptions they had borrowed from the Dwarves, the reduction in energy requirements had been minimal.

It wasn't until the Golden Lodoicea plant had been discovered that that bottleneck had been solved. The smuggling operation he had funded on Delph Island had allowed him to accumulate enough cores to power a teleportation array for a century.

The smuggling operation being compromised and shut down might have been a setback if Ishiroi hadn't created and planted dozens of spatial fields for the plant to grow in his territory.

The last stumbling block had just been solved, only for Four Element Sect to invade and kill the Magma Krakens he had commissioned to be created. He had little information on the five individuals in charge of smuggling and experimenting. The Duke only knew them as Skull, Butterfly, Crow, Death, and Harlequin.

Harlequin had a dual affinity with fire and life, the perfect blend of Qi required to alter the Kraken eggs he had supplied. The Kraken eggs were obstinate in adapting to fire. They had been creatures of the deep ocean for too long for the process to be anything but complicated.

But they had succeeded and had managed to raise enough Kraken to a high enough tier that they were able to begin harvesting the cores. It was these cores that merged fire, earth, water, and pressure into a resource that could be used as a fulcrum, a way to stabilize the portals.

Without these cores, the portals would tear themselves apart. The reason teleportation was possible, and instant, was because with the Portal opened, the two points in space were merged. Without the Kraken core to stabilize that point in space, to calm the event horizon, the forces of destruction unleashed might be enough to level an entire city.

Ishiroi had raged for a week once his spy in Four Element Sect had informed him that those Masked idiots had been captured and the Magma Kraken all but destroyed. But at least the idiots had shipped him dozens of Magma Kraken cores and had even had the foresight to send enough eggs that Ishiroi could easily set up a place to farm the beasts.

He realized how instrumental the Magma Kraken would be in expanding a portal network, so he had his people working on a spatial world where the Kraken could be raised without the worry of them escaping or being discovered and killed.

Duke Ishiroi looked towards the Portal as the hair across his body began to stand up. The Portal had been engaged, and the swirl of the void, the tunnel between here and there, was forming. His Arrayists had constructed an arch large enough for the most sizable mount to fit through easily.

Much larger portals would need to be created, but for this first step, the Duke had decided on this size. It still took an obscene amount of cores to power, but if something did go wrong, it wasn't so large that the explosion couldn't be controlled.

The Duke had made certain protections, and redundancies had been built, including a failsafe mechanism that would allow an operator to shatter the runic pattern that would enable the Portal to open. Safety arrays had been placed that would absorb the energy and kinetic force of any explosion created by a mistake or misalignment in runic script.

Those protections hadn't been needed, and the Duke watched in delight as the first permanent Portal in the Elven nation was formed. It had taken hundreds of thousands of cores to create the portal rift, but now that it was open, the magma cores would stabilize and keep the Portal working.

The Duke finally turned to leave the observation deck he'd been standing on. The Empire might realize it, yet. But today was the beginning of a new age. One in which Clan Velize took a decisive step in claiming the Empire with Duke Ishiroi to be the newly anointed Emperor.