Chương 267: Barbecues and Administration

I returned from the Council at Nexus Delta-00 with the smug satisfaction of a man who just showed up late to work, scowled at the broken coffee machine, and got promoted to CEO for his "Visionary Silence." Lucas handled the actual diplomacy, shaking hands and smoothing ruffled feathers. I just stood there, radiated impending doom, and let everyone assume I was plotting their existential erasure if they didn't sign the treaty. It worked beautifully.

From what Jeeves tells me, they were passing legislation and trade agreements before I even stepped back into the portal.

"Efficient," I said, strolling into the Sanctum lounge, grabbing a bottle of purified water from the dispenser.

"I should intimidate more government bodies. Saves time on speeches."

"Indeed," Jeeves replied, his shadow-form projecting a massive, terrifyingly organized schedule onto the air.

"Now that the ink is dry, we have four months of relative peace until the Coronation concludes. How would you like to spend your sabbatical from apocalypse prevention?"

"Administration," I groaned, dropping onto a reinforced couch that creaked under the weight of my density-enhanced body as I lessened my control over my Domain's gravity a little bit.

"Then adventure. But let's make the boring stuff fast." The next few months were going to be less about punching monsters and more about kingdom building. And honestly? It was definitely going to be harder. Fighting a Tier 8 Angel is stressful, but trying to standardize the curriculum for mana-theory across five different species with varying biological affinities is a bureaucratic nightmare. I spent weeks drafting the blueprint for the "Void Star Academy System."

It sounds fancy, but really it was just me copying homework from the stolen Kyorian databases and adapting it for people who wanted to learn and adapt to our integrated reality. I visited the newly built lecture hall of Bastion's Tower one Tuesday morning. It was tiered, made of white marble, and filled with eager students ranging from eight-year-olds with glowing eyes to eighty-year-olds clutching basic mana-primers.

"Look," I projected my voice, pacing the stage without a microphone.

"We are going to learn about Core cycling efficiency. The manual you are holding is stolen from the Kyorian galaxies-spanning empire that views you as cattle. Prove them wrong. Don't memorize the chants. Understand the flow. Mana isn't just magic; it's a universal code. Learn to read it, to sense its existence. It's hard to imagine but it's like trying to smell without a nose, you must first develop a way to perceive — which will of course be assisted by the System." A hand went up.

A young S'skarr boy in the front row, his scales shivering with nervous energy.

"Sir? Does that mean I can rewrite the fireball spell? The manual says I must invoke the 'Sol-Heritage'."

"If you rewrite the 'math' correctly," I nodded, conjuring a small, non-burning flame in my palm to demonstrate.

"The 'Sol-Heritage' is just Kyorian branding. They have good ideas and techniques but don't focus too much on their methods and only use them as vague guidelines. For your example, focus on the combustion ratio. But be careful, if you fail, you… might explode. I suggest starting small. Use a candle for inspiration." The departments flourished under my Anima's supervision. Eliza took Alchemy. She turned the lower labs of the tower into a bubbling cauldron of productivity.

She was mass-producing health potions that mostly didn't taste awful anymore, and mana-draughts synthesized from local herbs mixed with trace amounts of tower-crystal dust. I visited one afternoon to find her arguing with a glass alembic that was vibrating aggressively.

"No!" Eliza shouted at the bubbling purple liquid.

"You are supposed to emulsify! Listen or I will boil you with the potion!"

"Everything okay?" I asked, leaning in the doorway, ducking as a cork flew past my head.

"Fine!" Eliza pushed up her goggles, which were smudged with soot.

"We're synthesizing a mana-accelerant for the non-combat classes. It boosts cognitive speed. Great for the craftspeople! Strange side effects though... makes your sweat glow bioluminescent blue."

"Blue sweat," I mused.

"We could market that. Night-club wear. Put it in the 'experimental' bin." Leoric ran Engineering. His class looked less like a school and more like a high-stakes demolition crew. They were experimenting with "Mana-capacitors" — devices that stored spell-energy for later use by non-mages. I saw a kid welding a lightning-rune onto a shovel with intense concentration.

"What's that for?" I asked, pointing at the shovel.

"Excavation!" the kid beamed, his face streaked with grease.

"One swing, it digs a twenty-foot hole!"

"Or electrocutes the user," Leoric added cheerfully from behind a blast shield.

"But that's part of the learning process! Resilience training!" Rexxar handled Combat Training. Specifically, the orphans and the younger refugees who had lost their families to the initial waves. I walked by the training grounds to find him surrounded by a gaggle of ten-year-olds holding wooden swords. The lion was crouching, making himself smaller, but still looked like a mountain of fur and muscle. He wasn't teaching them to hack and slash; he was teaching them spirit.

"NO!" Rexxar bellowed, pointing a massive claw at a terrified dummy.

"You do not poke it feebly! You ROAR at it! The fear of the lion breaks the spirit before the tooth breaks the bone! Intimidation is half the battle!" A little girl, maybe seven, screamed at the dummy with all the ferocity of a kitten. Rexxar nodded approvingly, his mane shaking.

"Better! Now, strike with the heart!" The girl swung. Wood cracked. A surge of mana flared around her small fists, coated in a faint golden aura borrowed from Rexxar's influence.

"They are getting stronger," I noted to myself, leaning on the fence.

"The ambient mana is affecting their development. The new generation… they will grow into Tiers we had to fight and bleed for. They'll be naturally Tier 2 by puberty." Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences. Then came the food issue.

"The pantry is low," Masha, our head cook, announced one day in the war room. She was a formidable woman who could intimidate Rexxar with a ladle.

"The refugee influx at Delta-12 means more mouths. We need meat. Good meat. Not rat-skewers. The local boars are getting scarce." Zareth cleared his throat, raising a polite hand from the corner where he was reading a book of horrors.

"I believe my… associates… may be of assistance." Which led to the surreal spectacle of a Void-Summoner opening portals to the Deep Layers just to provide groceries. We stood in the main courtyard as Zareth pulled a "Minor Void-Hog" through the rift. It looked like a boar made of tentacles and nightmares, smelling faintly of ozone and old pennies. Rexxar tackled it. Leoric stunned it with a lightning prod. Nyx dissected it with surgical precision. Then Masha cooked it. The smell… was incredible.

It wafted through the plaza, stopping conversation. It didn't smell like sulfur like I expected; instead, it smelled like savory roast beef times ten.

"It shouldn't work," I muttered, staring at a plate of seared void-meat.

"It's concept-eating nothingness. If anything, it should taste like algebra and static."

"Actually," Masha said, sprinkling rock-salt over a steak.

"Once they 'die', the Void aspect destabilizes. The flesh grounds itself in physical reality. It becomes an incredibly dense Essence-protein. The conceptual weight collapses into nutritional density." She took a bite. Her eyes widened.

"Oh my. That's… robust." I tried it. The flavor hit me like a physical punch. It was savory, rich, and hummed with energy. It tasted like blue lightning and pepper. As I swallowed, I felt a rush of warm mana flood my core. My [Void Perception] sharpened instantly, seeing the grain of the wooden table with microscopic clarity.

"Skill affinity boost," I realized, stunned.

"Eating this… it temporarily aligns your mana to be more receptive to conceptual learning. It lubricates the neural pathways for magic."

"Brain food," Leoric realized, already pulling out a notebook and drooling slightly.

"We need to feed this to the scholars! We can accelerate the learning curve! It's genius!" So, "Void-Hog Thursdays" became a mandatory staple at the Academy cafeteria. Masha was hailed as a culinary saint. Zareth was suspiciously smug about being the lunch lady, though he complained the Void Emperors might be offended to know their underlings were being grilled for food. Two Months passed. The rhythm of Bastion settled. We weren't just a fortress anymore; we were a home. People smiled.

Children played tag with mana-wisps. Merchants argued over prices in four different languages. An ambassador droid from ANON showed up, simply stood still, and began distributing optimized farming schedules to the bewildered agriculturists. It was… peaceful. Jeeves pulled up the planetary feed one evening.

"Reports from the Kyorian Sector confirm a total escalation," he said, displaying grainy footage intercepted from a deep-space relay. House Vorr and House Lyras were throwing entire fleets at each other. Entire moons were burning.

"They are fully committed," I observed, feeling a grim satisfaction.

"Civil war consumes focus. They aren't looking at the 'primitive dirtball' in the newly integrated zone. We finally have some time off, Jeeves. Maybe until the end of the decade before they even remember to send a tax collector. They're too busy killing each other to notice us stockpiling ammunition." I stretched, my back cracking. The chronic tension in my shoulders finally relaxed. The countdown wasn't a threat anymore; it was just a timer for a party.

I walked out to the balcony, the clean air of the healed planet filling my lungs. My comms pinged.

"Anna?" I answered.

"Hey," her voice came through, sounding clearer than usual. She must be near a beacon and not in her Dungeon training with Grover.

"Just finished a lecture on 'Trajectory Manipulation 101'. Turns out, saying 'just decide it hits' is bad advice for beginners. They lack the philosophical context. They keep asking how to aim." I laughed.

"They also still don't have a Domain yet, sis. They have to do the math first. We are kinda cheating."

"Boring," she sighed.

"What are you doing? Administrative work?"

"Finished. I optimized the grain shipment schedule and approved Masha's request for a larger Void-Grill. She mentioned that she got some interesting skills offered and her levels in crafting improved a ton so we should look into giving more crafters lesser Void material to experiment with rather than giving it all to Leoric. Also had to break up a fight between the Aquatic S'skarr and the fire-mages about the pool temperature." I looked out at the horizon.

The sun was setting, painting the sky in oranges and violets that matched the mana currents.

"It's been quiet," I said.

"Too quiet. I haven't stepped through a portal in… weeks."

"Weeks?" Anna chuckled.

"An eternity for you. You sound restless."

"I was thinking," I ventured.

"The Coronation is in two months. The paperwork is done. The schools are running. The defenses are automated. Lucas has everything under control."

"And?"

"And I have this Spire network," I said, tracing the map in my mind.

"Ancient teleporters. We used one to go to the Crystal World. One to the Ossuary. But there are millions of addresses in the database I haven't even looked at. Old training grounds. Abandoned ruins of entire worlds. Maybe even a fancy magical spa." Silence on the line. Then, the distinct sound of a bowstring being tested.

"You want to go on a trip?"

"Not a mission," I clarified.

"No saving the world. No ancient evil. Just… exploration. A dungeon crawl. Looting. Finding cool stuff. Like the old days before everything got political. Just you and me. Seeing how far we've come. I haven't really seen you let loose since you got [Final Word]."

"You? A dungeon crawl without an existential crisis?" Anna laughed.

"I don't believe you. But… I'm in. Who else?"

"Just us," I decided.

"Rexxar is busy being a teacher. Nyx is guarding the perimeter. Lucas is practically mayor. Jeeves is still busy working on the plans for the Undead with grandpa and all of his clones. Let's take a break, Anna. The Void Star can handle itself for a weekend. I want to see you shoot something that isn't world ending."

"I'm ready," Anna said, excitement coloring her tone.

"I've been working on a new Arrow concept. Needs a live test subject that can tank a conceptual hit."

"We'll find you something," I promised.

"When do we leave?" she asked.

"Now," I grinned.

"Meet me at the Veiled Path."

"Sounds good," she said, her voice brightening instantly.

"I'll be there in ten." I closed the connection. Administration was important. Stability was vital. But sometimes, you just need to jump into the unknown and break some physics.

"Jeeves," I called out, walking toward the rift.

"I'm going out for some exploration while we have time until the Coronation. Let me know if anything needs my attention, and make sure to keep teaching our promising candidates so they can share it with the aspirants from the other Cities and Settlements. If Korg complains, tell him to write a letter."

"Enjoy your vacation, Master," Jeeves replied.

"Try not to rewrite reality too much. The cleaning staff would hate to have to mop up paradoxes." I stepped into my Sanctum. The map was green. The city was fed. The war was paused. It was about time we had a fun, low stakes adventure.