The Discarded, Half-Eaten Apple Core New Life

Epilogue II: Astral Ignition — Spreading the Love

Time: 1,200 years after the fusion of the Nine Reals and the official end of the planet once known as Earth.

Location: Milky Way, Lyra Constellation, Kepler-138 System, 219 Light Years from the Sun.

All of this was a huge gamble. But we arrived at our destination after a long time.

The worst part of traveling at 0.3C is slowing down. We had to plan a century in advance to enter this System's orbit, else we would only speed past it. Kepler-138 was a red dwarf with four planets, one of them a potential candidate for Astral Ignition.

No, we weren't going to re-enact the Superman cinematic intro. Astral Ignition was the technical term to the awakening of a planetary Core, punching a hole in reality and making it a magical world. The Human Empire would be even more pissed at us but at this point, we didn't care.

A fruit can only take so many antimatter torpedoes in the face before we become desensitized.

This wasn't the first candidate system we visited but it was the first without those stupid No-Magic spacefaring weirdos. At least they left magical planets alone; in 99.5% of the cases, nothing came out of these planets and survived and genocide was still a huge public relations problem for the government and the military.

If this project worked, they would leave this world alone. Heck, even the whole star system. It had no stargate and nobody had access to superluminal (AKA FTL) travel methods. The planets in this System, though of the right size and in the habitable zone, weren't interesting enough to warrant sending not only a generation ship but a terraforming fleet this way. They had much lower-hanging fruit, I mean, planets, to waste colonists on.

I asked through telepathy.

"Ready and eager, boss!" The Cyborg-Dryad replied.

The advantage of using Lily was that she was deranged enough to have no sense of self. Most people, when meeting a doppelganger (not the monster, just a copy) had a very strong (of the murderous inclination) rejection of the copy. Think of the uncanny valley of early XXI century robots but squared. There is a whole new field of psychology dedicated just to that. One of the new facets of sociopathy the scholars of this field revealed was the ability to suppress this rejection.

Normal people would just go berserk and try to kill the clone, Highlander style. There can be only one. It was a soul thing hence why it didn't happen with genetic clones (of which identical twins are the natural-occurring examples).

Lily didn't have it at all. Period. That's how she was the only person in dozens of billions that became a digital sapient software without going completely (more) insane or degenerating into a useless chunk of wavelengths wasting a quantum computer brain.

But she also registered way low on all the other sociopath indicators. Low, not zero. When her original meaty self was alive, she had enough self-control to hide these impulses well beneath her psyche and live like a productive member of society. When she created the AI model that copied her brain patterns and memories, creating the only self-replicating digital consciousness ever known to humans both mundane and magical, the original Lily didn't immediately destroy it. She embraced the copy as though it was the original all along.

But I digress.

The thing was, so long you had a supply of fiber optic cable and spare quantum brains, you could have as many Lily clones as possible. And so long you were cooperating with her goal of bringing her brother back to life, they would work with and for you. Lily was patient enough to put Zen-Buddhist immortal cultivator monks to shame. She's been with us for 1,000 years and still was as hopeful of one day achieving that as when we first met in Mars' orbit.

She also didn't care much if her copies got destroyed. If they could transmit the delta-status of their personal experiences back to the distributed brain network, they didn't even consider that copy to be dead. As far as Lily was concerned, all of them were her.

Seriously, her joke about the Borg assimilation still haunts me. But I digress.

I shifted to the comms, "Marshall, start the countdown."

Einherjar-Marshall counted down from ten and we launched a hundred rockets from our space station. Each of them had a massive Mana crystal worth ten trillion DM and an enchantment we hopefully believed would achieve critical mass and trigger the Astral Ignition. They also had a qDCSC, a Lily riding on the main computer, and was part of my Dungeon. We could fire that much Mana into space outside my Domain. Doing so would cause the Mana Crystal to explode with force enough to knock a moon out of orbit and pulverize it too.

The downside was that I had to make a line of spacecraft with one qDCSC every 200 miles to keep connectivity between here and the planet's orbit. I had five hundred thousand of the small craft (smaller than a Star-Wars A-wing starfighter) keeping vector and velocity along the trajectory of the rockets. They would still lose connectivity on the final approach but that was a much smaller concern.

The worst that could happen was to blow up the planet and give Kepler-138 a new asteroid belt. It had no life except for some extremophile alien microorganisms.

The rockets raced down the string of relay spacecraft.

"Larry, telemetry?" I asked.

"All green," the platypus answered with his best impression of a thumbs up. We both knew I could access the data with my techno telepathy but he loved to be of use. "Rockets will enter the planet's atmosphere in four days."

Four days. Fuck space. Everything was a thousand to a million times further apart. But we had no choice. Our station would be damaged or destroyed if we were any closer than that.

*

*

Four days later, the rockets entered the planet's orbit. They were on Lily's hands now. The clones would gladly sacrifice themselves to either awaken or destroy the mini-Neptune water planet. They started an orbital ballet as they moved into position around the watery world. This was exactly like acupuncture. We needed to strike the dormant Ley Lines in precise points. The margin of error was in the scale of a hundred feet.

That took another week. When the rockets started their descent, it wasn't all at once. Different latitudes required different orbital heights and they started firing and going down in a synchronized way, with a few seconds of delay between ignitions.

The heat-resistant materials and the fact the noses were Dungeon Walls allowed the rockets to survive re-entry. I think it is still called re-entry even though they were going to the planet for the first time.

They pierced the thick gas clouds and vanished from visual, only the glare of their solid fuel booster engines proof they were still going but soon that too was suppressed by the massive gas layer covering that world's oceans.

Two hours later, Larry shouted in the comms. "Astral Ignition imminent. All stations, brace for impact!"

We were basically using magical nukes as a defibrillator on a dead planet (magically-speaking). The magical shockwaves would be detected thousands of parsecs away.

I felt it on my furthermost spacecraft still connected. Their psy-Pylons and qDCSC blew up from sheer resonance. Like a string of firecrackers, the linking spacecraft all blew up as the shockwave washed over them, blowing one every 0.001 seconds because the magical shockwave still obeyed Einstein's theory of relativity and traveled at the speed of light.

We might do crazy shit, but we still kept Physics-Chan if not happy then indifferent about us. She was a stern and wrathful force of nature. So long we inhabited her baryonic realm of three spatial and one temporal dimensions, we needed to pay at least some obeisance.

It still took six minutes and forty seconds to reach us. I told you space was fucking huge. All the linking spacecraft was destroyed but the ones closest to us and those would also die to the shockwave. I adapted the divine rule that allowed this whole fun trip to happen.

"Mana cannot cross the boundary of my Domain without my express permission, in either direction."

The shockwave struck the station and I felt my DM reserves plummet. Worse, I had to maintain the rule while it washed over the magical portion of the station in the center. But compared to how much DM I made these days, the cost was negligible. Yet, it took the points away from my personal DM stockpile before going for the energy stored in my inner Demiplane trees.

The mundane, non-magical decks that made up the outer shell were fine. Seconds later and more DM burned than I had the courage to count, it was over.

The planet hadn't exploded. it flashed as a massive, worldwide lightning storm rained down on it.

"It seems it worked, boss!" The techno magical dryad cheered.

I sensed the space around us with my divine powers. It seemed okay to proceed.

"You got it, boss!"

A magical world was a treasure trove of opportunities. It might give birth to an Archmage well-versed in soul and live magic that could revive her brother. Even if the odds of that happening was lower than ten to the power of minus nine (one in a billion), she would give it a shot.

*

*

Putting a moon-sized space station in orbit of a planet was a delicate matter. We were big enough to have our own microgravity on the outer hull and cause (small) tidal forces on the oceans below.

The station transited for months. Grueling months of wait to see if we pulled it off.

We placed ourselves in a degenerate orbit that would push us away from the planet even if we did nothing. We deployed a mutated Jamaican cacoon vine, a plant that was three feet thick and hundreds of kilometers long. But two of its dimensions were compressed. The vines were just 3.6 inches thick and enchanted to be resilient and nigh unbreakable. The carbon nanotube sleeve that housed them would keep the inside pressurized and the steel pipe that was reinforced as Dungeon Walls worked to give structural integrity and shield the vine from leaking Mana into space.

That was our magical space elevator. We deployed the massive spool of vine coaxial cable by spinning one of the station's outer decks. Down it went, allowing me instant communications due to Superconductive Vegetation. Which also worked at the speed of light but it would take more than 150,000 miles to cause a second of delay. Even this space elevator cable wasn't that long.

I felt it the moment the vine touched the planet's atmosphere. Mana.

"We did it, guys!" I shouted on the comms.

People cheered. Dryad-Lily gave me a thumbs up. The colonists, a faction from my inner world that was unsatisfied with being ruled by a Dungeon God, also cheered. These weirdos rejected the System and practiced their own magic. I was happy I could get rid of them without causing much unrest with the loyalist factions.

Just like the space-faring humans, I too needed to be careful around genocide. Not only because it went against my personal beliefs but also because people disliked their government committing mass murder.

The dissenters were the secondary reason we did all this. The main reason was to prove we could, of course. We gave birth to a magical world. And now we were about to colonize it too.

On the planet's surface, I started terraforming it. I had to prove I was a Kardashev Type 1 Dungeon, after all. Nostalgia struck me as I Replicated my newest Blimp design, the size of a beach ball now. Everything was miniaturized nowadays. They spread all over the world and along the way they changed the atmosphere's composition.

Then the oceans. They were rich in Sulphur, sodium, chlorine, arsenic salts, mostly. Deadly to humans. Submarine drones and boats appeared all over the water planet and changed that. The Substance became land and in a few months of dedicated work, the new continent sprung to life and broke the water's surface.

With the oceans changed, I populated it with marine life. Algae, krill, fish, dolphins, whales, crustaceans, coral near the continent, even jellyfish (despite my grudge with them), and so on. With five inner worlds the size of Earth in Matryoshka Demiplane, I was an expert in ecological reconstruction.

The population on these inner planets was reaching 45 billion. Each person still granted me 4 DM or 10 if they worshiped me.

I regretted investing so many of my early points in Willpower. Wisdom was the greatest winner in the scale of Attribute importance for one little reason. Materialization Speed was linked to it. The biggest, unsurpassed bottleneck in all my operations was how much DM and SP I could spend in a given period of time. Not to mention my personal Domain size too.

Anyway. On the surface of the massive continent, I created hills, mountains, plains, a water table deep underground, lots of mineral deposits for them to mine, rivers, lakes, forests, and animals of all kinds.

This planet had a radius 1.5 times that of the Earth. Its gravity was lower than Earth, though, because it was mostly water. Temperatures were thirty degrees colder than back on Earth on average but I was banking on a nice greenhouse effect to keep it warmer now. And they had magic to warm themselves up.

Once the world was as terraformed as I cared to make it and a detailed inspection showed no ecological imbalances and a self-sustaining circle of life, I teleported the colonists down creating a massive magical gate. Meanwhile, we started reeling back the space vine cable.

A last call rang on the internet of the five inner planets. If anyone wanted to jump ship and go live in a real planet free from any control by their Dungeon God overlord, now was the time. A few idiots did just for the novelty of the idea. They were warned they would lose all System powers once outside my Domain and a few changed their mind. The rest got a one-way ticket to a brand-new System-less world of magic.

I absorbed the submarines and the boats, then lifted all blimps over the continent to a high altitude. These people would truly be on their own. I also launched some satellites to keep connectivity from orbit. Compared to the string of ships we used to guide the rockets at the beginning, it was child's play.

*

*

The people took some time to adapt to the surface but they started erecting cities, splitting into clans, and drifting away to claim land for themselves. I watched from afar, without interfering at all. My blimps were cloaked by illusion spells and out of sight, out of mind.

We remained in orbit, slowly drifting away.

Years passed. The people on the surface had their hardships but they thrived overall. Decades went by. They bred and the first children native to that world reached maturity. They had adventures, waged wars, exploited the land I gave them. Developed great magics that didn't rely on the System. I copied them.

Then, it happened.

Portals, rifts in reality opened up. The world was about to be invaded. Our old friends, the Infernali, was the clan of demons that won the bidding war for this planet. Demon society was complex and a topic for later. But the Infernali climbed the ladder after their victory on Earth. As far as I was concerned, they were the Italian mafia of the Demon part of the multiverse (oh, so that's why... it all makes sense now!).

I smiled and assumed the Gendo Ikari pose (no mouth and no arms, though). The bastards had taken the bait. It was a gamble. And now they couldn't back off. Their pride wouldn't let them. They would either conquer this world or waste dozens of worlds' worth of resources fighting until they gave up or were thoroughly expelled.

A spinehound pack jumped out of a portal and attacked a human village. I readied my sniper railguns on the blimps. Then I let loose.

It took me a thousand years, motherfuckers. But it was payback time.