N/A - N/A : Within the Void

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My eyes widened as theories flooded my mind. In an instant, my mind had accelerated to its limit and burned through the ideas and theories that had loomed in the back of my mind for decades, like the riddles of ancient mythology.

But while my understanding and theories advanced with haste, I eventually hit a wall.

Divinity was my first peek into a realm completely different from anything I had ever been able to fathom, the realm of time and the realm of the gods, but understanding divinity was simply the first step.

The first step of a very.. very long journey...

But that was something that would take time, something that was still a precious resource, no matter how much my understanding of it deepened. -Shit, I got sidetracked...-

Quickly shifting my attention back to Father's situation, I slowly got my derailed mind back on track and eventually was met with the same roadblock. -I need to speed up time, not for me, but for the flower...- But now I had more than a few ideas.

-Divinity's aura of influence is pretty small, but as it progresses through energy states, it seems to grow or shrink.- To put it simply, the more crystalline it was, the smaller the aura, and the more energetic, liquidy, or gaseous it was, the larger the aura. Of course, the amount of divinity also affected it, -but if I can make its aura big enough, I could engulf the flower with it. In theory, that would make it flow at a pace that would seem close to normal to me.-

However, no matter how much I slowed my divinity beyond that, the flower would never flow through time faster than me. -If I did the opposite and actually slowed down my divinity, time would pass for everyone, and not just the flower...-

One other option I had thought of was if I could control the divinity in the sleep lily and speed it up from the outside, but in practice, that wasn't possible. -And if I try to move the divinity out of my reserve, it will just crystalize, so I can't just move my divinity out of my body.-

It was an annoying predicament. Every direction I turned, I was met with a different roadblock.

But there was one theory that remained to be tested. -Divinity seems to have no effect in a gate and doesn't do anything in the void either.. so that begs the question of what is required for it to work...- My draconic pupils thinned as I quickly created a dozen small cubes of uranium and, from them, recreated a small piece of the fabric of space using my own space mana. -Is it time that dictates divinity, or is it divinity that dictates time?-

*crackle* Stopping the fabric just before it reached my body, I spread it through about half the gate and placed the cubes in random locations throughout it. When isolated from my aura, the cubes of uranium remained still and unmoving even at the atomic level, keeping them from decaying. -But if time even just slightly starts moving, they'll pop...-

"Hooh..." It was the perfect environment to burn through experiments, but for once, I didn't have many to burn through. -If I, myself, am in the fabric, when I adjust my divinity, time will be dilated for me as well.. but what if I'm not in the fabric, yet my divinity's aura of influence encompasses it?-

Thanks to the web of crystallized space mana that had spread throughout my body ever since I first awakened my attribute nodes, my body had its own laws with regard to time and constants I had come to know in physics when isolated from the fabric of space, in a gate or in the void. In a way, it was a very sloppy fabric of space that gave me the privilege of moving freely within the void regardless of the absence of time even before I had divinity.

-However, now isn't the time for me to figure out why that is...- Letting out another heavy breath, I quickly formed and used a burst of space mana to create a surge of divinity on par with what I used against Freya. *vwoop-CRACKLE* Instantly grabbing the divinity, I kept it from flowing outward and crystalizing before speeding it up in order to slow time around me.

However, because I wasn't inside the fabric, it sped up time a thousand-fold. *P-Pop* As my aura of influence expanded beyond the reach of my body by about half a meter, it engulfed two of the dozen cubes and instantly caused them to decay with a pop.

But while it was good that it worked, it made my eyes go wide. -Wait it actually.. worked?- I honestly expected the experiment to fail, as I believed time was what dictated the flow of divinity. -But if that's not the case.. then what causes time to flow in reality?-

A chill instantly passed down my spine with a shiver. -Just how much divinity would something need to dictate the time of something on the scale of a solar system...-

It was a genuinely horrifying train of thought, but was also one I had no reason to dwell on. -If a creature like that really exists.. I'd be as insignificant as a mosquito larva.. so, maybe it's best to just not think about it...-

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Trying my best to look past it, I did a couple other quick experiments to try and figure out the time dilation in relation to my divinity before finally floating over toward a marker I left in the void and reappearing over Atlas. *vwoop-vwoom*

In an instant the dark yet colorful view of the void was replaced by a dark blue sky, lit by the sun, which had yet to crest over the horizon, and filled with dragons already beginning their day.

-Alright... Now, how am I going to find this thing...- Exiting the void over the estate, it was the first thing I checked, but it was nowhere to be seen inside, leaving the entire city for me to search.

But as I started questioning where it could be and questioning where our family vaults were, I faintly sensed something about eighty kilometers north of me. -Huh?-

I sensed it not with my aura but with my divinity. Feeling a sensation reminiscent of a god's presence but on a completely different scale. -It's so faint...-

Quickly flying toward it, the presence I felt slowly split into multiple before I finally arrived at a very large estate with several buildings, some greenhouses, and some proper living quarters, but at its center, there was the largest building spanning about a kilometer across with six huge glass domes composing its roof.

It was the building I felt the auras coming from, with extravagantly carved and decorated walls of white stones and colorful metals built around what looked like a section of forest layered with grass, flowers, and ponds with a small ecosystem of wildlife like a huge terrarium.

But rather than a terrarium, it was a garden.

Beneath the canopy of the towering trees that filled the glass domes, there were countless herbs and flowers I failed to recognize alongside many others I knew were precious. The most precious of which being in the areas I felt the presences coming from, where I found tiny, some yet to sprout, saplings of sleep lilies lying about.

-Woah... There are so many...- They were almost all saplings, even younger than the sleep lily I bought from the auction, with some that couldn't even be called seedlings. -But is mine here?-

Continuing to look around through the dozens and dozens of tiny plants, I looked for my own, but to no avail, forcing me to try and find the presences of other sleep lilies in the city.

But as I expanded the area I was looking for presences in, I found a stronger presence in a large room off to the side lined with mana accumulation runes containing an area of soil that was essentially an oversized flower pot.

And in that oversized flower pot, I found my lily, bathing in a sea of mana. -There it is...-

Quickly descending next to the wall, I used the space mana in my aura to engulf it in a gate before shrinking it down to be smaller than the nucleus of an atom and pulling it out through the wall, weaving it between the atoms in the wall before finally releasing it in front of me and immediately jumping into a gate with it. *vwoop-vwoop*

From the way it was situated in the room, the lily seemed to be living purely off mana, similar to other ascended creatures, but as I floated back to Siratha to grab some liquid mana from the pool I created, I noticed the flower's head had a very dense white soul in it, with a small core of liquid divinity at its center. -Ah, so that is how it works...-

Essentially, the flower's head contained what looked like an accumulation of soul fragments, somehow gathered to be denser than a normal soul would allow. -I wonder if that's because of the divinity, or if the divinity can only be there because of the soul...-

But the free time for such thoughts quickly came to an end as I returned to Father, speaking about it with Grace for a moment before gathering some liquid mana and jumping into a gate to start maturing the lily.

But it was far from an easy process.

Over the span of about two weeks from my perception of time, I had to doctor the flower to an unbelievable extent. It drank mana like an elephant drinks water, and while I quickly found out that constantly going in and out of the gate to grab some liquid mana wasn't going to work, it wasn't much less tedious to create a container in the void that I could use to monitor the flower while also creating ambient mana with the space mana around us by feeding it chunks of the heavy metals and rock from reality.

While I did originally try simply making the elements with my mana, I quickly found out that I alone could not simply feed the void such a volume of energy, as a gram of exploding antimatter had a only slightly larger reaction than two grams of normal hydrogen had. -But damn, that chunk of rock gave a lot...-

*hummm* The lake of liquid mana I sat in hummed as the lily freely absorbed it all. It was so much mana that even I felt a bit suffocated, but it was beneficial for me as well.

Over the span of the two weeks, I had progressed my understanding of mana, space mana, the void, and time immensely.

It had gotten to the point that when in the void, I had the freedom to do essentially anything I wanted. -If I had enough mana and time, I could even create a small planet with an ecosystem and everything...-

But that eventually brought up a question I had to really think about.

What was the difference between me and a true god... Was I already one? Or was the bar of what constitutes a god just much.. much higher than I could imagine...

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