Chapter 421: The Beginning Of The End [LXXXIII]

Creaack…

“Aestrea, you’re back!”

As soon as Aestrea opened the door of his dormitory, a figure instantly jumped into his arms, wrapping her arms around his waist tightly.

The force almost pushed him back a step, but he smiled instead.

“I’m back.”

He gently slipped a hand under her chin, tilting her face upward. Christina barely had time to blink before his lips met hers.

Her eyes widened in surprise for half a second, then softened.

“Mhm~!”

She melted into him, arms sliding up around his neck as she kissed him back without hesitation.

When they finally parted a minute later, her cheeks were faintly pink, her breath warm against his.

“I have some news for you,” he said quietly, brushing his thumb through her golden hair.

Her head tilted in curiosity, a familiar sparkle lighting her eyes. Before she could ask, Aestrea lifted his hand and twisted his wrist slightly.

Crack…!

The dormitory vanished in a soft distortion, and the next instant, the air changed.

Christina’s eyes widened as her feet touched smooth metal flooring.

Vast white lights illuminated rows of machines, glass chambers, suspended instruments, and neatly aligned consoles.

The laboratory stretched far beyond what should have been possible, pristine and orderly, humming softly with latent energy.

Her breath caught.

“…Is this a laboratory?”

Aestrea exhaled slowly, rubbing the back of his neck.

“Yeah. I took it from an enemy base. It was a mess before… I reversed its time to the last stable state.”

His eyebrows knit together for just a moment.

’Using the Authority of Time is really damn hard.’

Christina slowly turned in place, taking everything in. Her earlier excitement gave way to awe, then understanding, and then excitement came rushing back tenfold.

“Aestrea… this is incredible.”

She spun back toward him, her eyes shining with excitement.

“Do you have any idea what this means?” she said, her voice rising with every word.

“Our technical gods, our alchemists, even the artificers… we’ve been forcing them to work with scraps! Half-finished equipment, improvised tools, borrowed materials!”

She gestured broadly at the lab.

“This place has dedicated fabrication arrays. Precision distillers. Mana-stabilized reactors! We can finally make real artifacts, complex potions, long-term projects, things we literally couldn’t attempt before because we lacked the environment!”

“I figured you’d like it.”

“Like it?” She laughed, stepping closer and grabbing his hands.

“This is exactly what we needed. More than that, it’s simply perfect! I can already see the production routes, the research divisions…!”

She stopped herself, taking a breath, then looked at him again, softer this time.

“You really went through hell to get this, didn’t you?”

“Worth it,” he shrugged lightly.

’…It wasn’t that difficult.’

Christina smiled, squeezing his hands.

“We’ll connect it to our base, right?”

“I’ll open a spatial portal,” he nodded.

“Great!” Christina’s smile brightened immediately.

“Then I’ll contact the research team and start preparing the transfer. We’ll move everything useful here and reorganize what’s left.”

And just like that, everything began to move.

…

The following days passed in an instant.

Aestrea and Christina worked side by side, turning the seized laboratory into their second core base, one dedicated entirely to research, development, and long-term projects that could not be safely conducted near the average gods.

On the first day, Aestrea personally opened a stable spatial portal, permanently linking the main base to the laboratory.

Unlike temporary war-portals, this one was layered, reinforced, and keyed exclusively to their authority signatures.

Those signatures were etched on the souls of every single member.

Unauthorized passage simply wasn’t an option.

He retrieved a massive quantity of divine crystals from storage and embedded them directly into the laboratory’s structural nodes, forming a self-sustaining energy circulation network.

Layer after layer of barriers followed, with anti-intrusion, anti-scrying, anti-spatial interference, and even conceptual suppression fields meant to prevent hostile authorities from forcing their way inside.

Once that was finished, Aestrea didn’t rest.

He returned to the Cliff of Despair, the original access point used to reach the laboratory, and directly shattered the teleportation array embedded there.

Then, with the research team’s assistance, he reconstructed the exact coordinates of the laboratory in the higher planes.

Instead of stopping there, Aestrea flew directly above its position, stopping in the empty sky where nothing existed but drifting divine currents.

And looking at the deserted place, he had an idea…

Rather than letting the ambient divinity go to waste, he purchased the surrounding ground and aerial territory outright and contracted the God of Construction.

Under Aestrea’s specifications, a massive Natural Beacon of Divinity was created.

It was a giant, organic structure that passively absorbed divinity from the atmosphere, refined it, and funneled it downward through hidden channels directly into the laboratory below.

An almost limitless power source!

He sealed the beacon within its own barrier system and commissioned several compact residential structures nearby, small but comfortable apartments designed specifically for the research gods who would be working in the second base.

Close enough for convenience, isolated enough for safety.

On the second day, Aestrea attended a high-tier divine auction, one that even many gods avoided due to the outrageous prices.

There, he acquired a relic known as the Omni-Lattice Genesis Core.

The bidding alone consumed an absurd amount of divine crystals, enough to fund multiple minor gods for centuries, but Aestrea paid without blinking.

Because of the few wars his organization had experienced, divine crystals were something that they weren’t missing.

The Core was a crystalline sphere suspended within a shifting geometric framework, capable of analyzing, simulating, and stabilizing divine interactions in real time.

It allowed researchers to test volatile reactions, prototype divine artifacts, and refine godly spells without risking backlash, explosions, or collapse of authority.

More importantly, it could accelerate research progress by synchronizing multiple minds through a shared analytical lattice, effectively turning weeks of experimentation into hours, almost minutes!

When the research team saw it, they were speechless.

But Aestrea still didn’t stop there, as the next thing he addressed was information security.

Aestrea personally inscribed a Concept-Severance Array across the laboratory’s deepest framework.

Unlike ordinary anti-scrying formations, this array didn’t block observation; it directly invalidated it.

Any attempt to observe the base through prophecy, fate reading, karma tracing, or authority-based foresight would simply return static.

Nothing.

Even if someone knew the base existed, the Akashic Records themselves refused to provide them with usable information about it.

To reinforce that, he embedded fragments of Authority of Silence into the array as anchors. Not enough to activate the domain, just enough to make certain concepts fail quietly.

And in the rest of the days, he decided to do something about the ecosystem building and the resource independence.

The first thing he established was a Tiered Research Framework.

Rather than letting everyone work independently and risk overlapping efforts, he reorganized the research team into interconnected divisions: Alchemy, Authority Theory, Artifact Engineering, Divine Biology, and Conceptual Mathematics.

Each division had autonomy, but every breakthrough was automatically cross-referenced and distributed to the others through a shared cognition archive.

For younger or less-experienced gods, he created mentorship cycles.

Veteran researchers weren’t just supervisors; they rotated apprentices every few weeks, ensuring that knowledge didn’t pool into stagnant elites.

This way, the skills of each individual would spread through the others and vice versa, being the most optimal option for growth and evolution.

This way, the research team got even more euphoric, and both Christina and Aestrea watched groups of gods argue animatedly over diagrams and prototypes.

This was exactly what Aestrea wanted.

No one’s hoarding was discovered because there was no incentive to. After all, if the progress belongs to everyone, the ego loses value.

And the last thing Aestrea worked on was about resource independence. They wouldn’t have infinite materials, of course, and they wouldn’t be going to war anytime soon.

So, using the beacon’s steady output, Aestrea authorized the creation of divinity-conversion gardens, areas where ambient divine energy was filtered, refined, and transformed into usable materials without harming the surrounding environment.

Rare herbs infused with authority traces grew alongside crystalline growths that could replace costly divine catalysts.

With this…

The Alchemy teams no longer feared wasting ingredients.

Engineers no longer hesitated to prototype.

Failure stopped being expensive.

To complement this, Aestrea introduced a controlled experimentation allowance, a system where researchers were actively encouraged to pursue risky ideas within defined parameters.

If an experiment failed catastrophically, the base absorbed the loss.

And the effect was immediate as the crazier yet smarter gods started doing more dangerous experimentations… and just in a few hours of many explosions, they actually created a growth-type artifact.

Something that is barely in the Divine Realm at all.

“Phew…”

Aestrea wiped the sweat from his forehead as he finished testing the last prototype of a twinblade.

The scientist wanted to carve a different authority in the weapon itself, making it so that a single god could use multiple authorities.

Aestrea thought that it was a great idea and decided to experiment with it himself, and he was surprisingly satisfied with the result.

Although it couldn’t bring the total power of a Mythical-Grade Authority or higher, it could bring more than forty percent!

That was already a big gain!

“Perfect…”

His eyes glowed intensely.

“…A few more months, and we should be able to attack the Eternal Tribunal.”

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