My Ultimate Sign-in System Made Me Invincible

Chapter 736: Months Of Gruelling Work Completed

With the seed gear locked to the entropy law gear, Liam settled his mind and waited to see what would happen.

He knew it would take some time for the seed gear to fully harmonize with the galactic system it now clung to but the effect, whatever its first sign, should reach him soon.

He did not have to wait long. And the moment came as a sensation he knew intimately and yet had never felt at this scale — that familiar, strange dark energy beginning to flow into his body, drawn along the pathway he had built into the seed gear for exactly this purpose.

His twelve-circle Mana Heart drew it in alongside the mana and the spirit qi bled from the same toxic waste, refining the three impossible energies together into the Primordial Essence.

"It’s working," Liam said, and a slow smile spread across his face.

At first the trickle was small, a thin thread of dark energy seeping in as the seed gear woke and began, gear-tooth by gear-tooth, to bend the galactic mechanism toward its own flawless rhythm.

But it did not stay small. As the seed gear sank deeper into resonance with the great structure, as more and more of the failing gear was dragged into harmony and the tangled waste it had been holding began to unravel and flood down the pathway toward him, the trickle swelled into a stream, and the stream into a torrent. Before he fully registered the change, the Primordial Essence pouring out of his Mana Heart had become almost too much for even him to contain.

But three things kept him whole. The system, exactly as it had promised, was diverting the overwhelming majority of the refined essence away from his body, siphoning it off the moment it formed and pouring it into the vast, waiting emptiness of his Dimensional Space, treating the pocket realm as a reservoir for a flood that would otherwise have drowned him.

His Devouring Energy constitution — the very foundation of his cultivation, the thing that let him absorb and hold energies that would have torn any other body apart — kept him from bursting under the sheer, relentless pressure of the intake.

And his twelve-circle Mana Heart worked without pause, around the clock and beyond exhaustion, refining the ceaseless river of strange dark energy the instant it arrived, never once falling behind, never once letting the raw, toxic decay reach a single one of his meridians unprocessed.

Held safely between those three safeguards, Liam was fine.

And just as the system had warned him, his cultivation level began to climb rapidly, surging upward on the back of the impossible volume of energy now flowing through him.

He could feel the foundation of his power deepening, his reserves swelling with every passing moment. It was exactly the danger the system had cautioned him about: pushed high enough, fast enough, by raw energy alone, he risked being forced across the threshold into a hollow, lawless godhood.

But that was a problem for later, and a manageable one now that the essence was being safely stored rather than drowning his consciousness.

With the temporary solution to the universe’s heat death finally in place, the road ahead was clear. What Liam needed now was not more raw power. It was refinement, to sharpen his skill, to deepen his mastery, and to begin the long work of comprehending and defining laws so that when he did cross into godhood, he would cross it with a Path of his own and not as an empty vessel.

But that could wait. First, there was the Voidling.

He turned his mental avatar toward the immense creature still floating serenely beside him, and asked. "Did you come looking for me because of my promise?"

"No," the Voidling answered with an unhurried voice. "I came because I wished to see what had become of you, after we parted ways. Time is near infinite for me, but I have not forgotten that it is not the same for a race as young as yours. I wondered how you had fared." Its vast gaze drifted downward, over the field of gears and, beyond it, toward the distant blue world. "And I see now that you have been busy indeed."

"Yeah," Liam admitted, a wry note in his voice. "A lot has happened since then. More than I could explain in a short time." He paused. "I still intend to go to the battle ruins one day. I haven’t forgotten."

"I will take you there whenever you are ready," the creature said. "There is no hurry. I am simply glad to find you well. And I can see how much has changed on your home world."

"Thank you. We still have a great deal to do. The road is long. And a lot of it is dangerous."

"That is the way of every road worth walking," the Voidling said. "I must go. The elders of my race need to know of the seed gear — that a solution has come at last, and from where. It will mean a great deal to them."

"Of course," Liam said, and lifted his mental avatar’s hand in a small, easy wave. "Later, then."

The Voidling inclined its immense head, and then, without sound or violence, its avatar broke apart, dissolving into countless motes of pale light that drifted upward and outward and were gone, leaving Liam alone once more above the endless field of slowly grinding gears.

For a long moment he simply looked at them. The galaxy-wide entropy law gears stretched away in every direction, vast and ancient and, for the first time in an unknowable age, beginning to turn true.

At the edge of the wall, the seed gear glowed against the flank of the colossus it had claimed, and the first faint ripple of harmony was already spreading outward from it, gear reaching toward gear, the correction beginning its slow, patient march across the dying frontier.

A bright, tired smile crossed his face.

"Months of grueling work," he murmured to himself, "and it’s finally done. I can rest easy now."

The next moment, his eyes snapped open.

The infinite mental landscape of gears vanished, and the real cosmos rushed back in around him — the hard, unfiltered glare of the distant sun, the absolute silence of the vacuum, and beneath him, slow and serene, the blue-and-white marble of his home.

But it was not the same world he had left.

He saw the drones first — countless of them, threading through the sky in ceaseless, orderly streams, dropping parcels at homes across the face of the planet, lifting others away to carry elsewhere.

Among them moved shuttles, larger and heavier, ferrying bulk goods in steady arcs across the continents.

Liam’s smile turned proud when he saw this.

"Lucy has been hard at work," he said softly.

Then his gaze drifted, and caught on something else. It was a massive dark structure floating in the distance, silent and enormous against the black. He turned his spiritual sense toward it, let it sweep across the thing’s surface and through its interior, and understood in an instant exactly what he was looking at.

"She built the space station too?" A low, disbelieving laugh escaped him. "That girl..."

He vanished from the spot.

An instant later he reappeared above the Lunar Base on the far side of the moon, the silent grey landscape stretching beneath him. There, floating in dignified stillness, was the massive Emperor Class-II Starship, holding station beside the smaller Voyager.

And when he turned his gaze down to the Lunar Base itself, to the glass wall of the office area set into its structure, he saw them.

Lucy and Yanxia, standing side by side, looking up at him — two beautiful smiles turned toward the small figure returned at last from the edge of the dying universe.

"Master."

"Papa."