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Sweat pooled down Silas’s back as he struggled to slide a thread through a needle from a mile away.

“I told thou it’s impossible without raising thy mind refinement. Stubborn stallion, why don’t thou listen to me.” Dotty said.

Silas narrowed his eyes at her verbal thrust. He was a great listener and knew how to pick apart sound through his spirit sense alone. It helped him stay up to date on the plotters around the farm while he extended his fence a couple miles.

Laws were established on his land, some of which had punishments that included centuries of labor as flesh puppets. It was an easy way to legitimize turning his enemies into useful human resources. He had over 1800 flesh puppets on his land designated to various tasks.

None of that helped him thread the impossible needle. It was like fighting inflation without increasing interest rates, impossible. He needed more streams of consciousness, but there was only one destination with many routes to that problem.

He could answer Dotty, his valued assistant on all things mind refinement, or drop his current task.

“Where did this hare-brained idea come from. I expected this more from the bunny girls and their flirty ways than from thou, my most humble and forward-thinking master.” Dotty said.

Ouch!

That one was a critical hit right in the ego. Silas’s zanpakuto even seemed to laugh at that one, the bastard.

Silas glanced at the unicorn with her glowing horn and sweet attempts to help him while berating him for how bad an idea it was. Dotty was awesome; she wouldn’t agree and speak vehemently against his ideas, give alternatives, and never obstruct him once he’s decided.

He grunted when the connection to the needle destabilized for a second before he put his whole cultivation behind holding it. A mouthful of blood shot out of his mouth from the backlash before he pushed the needle with the thread.

In a moment of clarity, he found the hole and pushed with all his might. The thread blasted off at the speed of thought and traveled the long mile to slide into the needle’s narrow slick hole.

When it passed through the hole without touching a side, he quickly pumped more of the thread through before tying the knot.

The second he managed it, a mighty thrum nearly shattered his mind as a second Dao Eye connected to his aura and zipped over to rotate beside his original orb like a planet rotates around the sun. Blood exploded from his nose, and Dotty tossed him a nice silk handkerchief.

It was one of the few that hadn’t been spoiled by his previous attempts. Silas stumbled into his comfortable, easy chair. Blood continued to gush out of his nose, and he felt some pool down his ears while the new connection settled in.

“I told thou I could do it,” Silas said.

Dotty stomped a hoof near some very delicate equipment and snorted. If he didn’t watch it, she would start bucking and kicking. Her nerves were fried, and he had overstepped himself big time. Also, she didn’t like the smell or sight of his blood soaking through his handkerchief and flowing down his arm.

Her hair stood on end, including her mane, sparks danced across her horn, and she looked more like a demon beast wolf than a horse spirit beast. Dotty smile with her thick, blocky teeth whiter than most humans.

“Methinks thou will desperately study mind refinement from this day onward, or I will tell thy concubines of thy deeds. They will throw thou so much lovemaking that thou will not leave thy bed chambers for months. Mayhap then thou will settle down and stop rushing to thy grave.” Dotty said.

Silas sighed and tossed the bloody handkerchief into the pile of soiled cloths. “Methinks my cousin is most kind to care about my health. A mortal mind can’t handle the linking of many eyes to see the eldritch truth of reality. A mind that can’t handle the linking of many eyes will only break. Tis good fortune that I found a solution to the problem of mind cultivation.” Silas said.

Dotty snorted. “I have reached the middle ground of prenatal mind cultivation with only a few months of steady meditation. Tis time-consuming, but diligence pays off. My telekinesis can jump stages.” Dotty said.

Silas smiled and went to a sealed door covered in complicated formations. He mixed what he learned about the Dao of Distance with standard formations to create a pressurized dimension. Its purpose was to produce and store psionically inclined spirit stones. These spirit stones were used as a seed in the pressurized space to generate psionic crystals around a tiny grain of spirit stone.

He placed his hand on the door and waited for the inner workings within the sub-dimensions to settle. Instead, the sub-dimension was cut off from the normal flow of time and sped up using space-time formations. It wasn’t quite a hyperbolic time chamber and couldn’t handle a cultivator within its delicate dimension. He could toss humans inside, but they wouldn’t live long under extreme pressure. So he decided to use bugs but wasn’t about to tell Dotty that.

The door opened, and giant monstrosities mixed between spiders, cockroaches, and mantises burst inside. Guards inside the lab immediately opened fire with auto-gauss rifles. Shields flickered to life, built from psionics blocking the barrage of hot lead.

“Dotty, make a note to change the gauss rifle’s bullets with a heavy anti-psionic metal slug for the lab,” Silas said.

He sliced through the barrier and cut into the nightmare fuel mantis covered in too many eyes before raising his hand. The temperature plummeted in the bug’s barrier until it froze solid. One of the bugs charged a beam until Silas took a step and decapitated it. They seemed to be strictly mind cultivators with no experience with spirit cultivation.

While his zanpakuto was a strictly spiritual weapon, psionic barriers wouldn’t matter much. He took a little solace in that before he turned to the spider. She had the face of a human woman, twenty yellow eyes on her head, the body of a massive black widow spider, and long blood-red hair. She threw spinneret up, ready to web them up and limit their movement until Silas pointed at her.

Formations appeared, and she slumped to the ground. While in closed-door cultivation, Silas gained the Dao of Fractals, allowing him to set up formations around targets. A minor paralyzing formation against an enemy with no spirit defense was simple. Once he knew his foe's weakness, clean-up wasn’t a big deal.

Silas snapped his fingers and had new guards come in and drag the new resource to a nice iron cage covered in formations. He wouldn’t say his new jail could handle anything, but it was inspired by the prisons he worked in.

“What was that?” Dotty asked.

“Methinks some bugs I have been experimenting on got out and went inside the dimension, thinking it was a way to freedom. Some roaches, spiders, and mantises were missing, but I assumed the others cannibalized them. Obviously, after they entered the sub-dimension, the quantity of psionic energy mutated them rapidly. The surviving few developed natural psionic shields to protect from the growing pressure. It has been possibly tens of thousands of years in the subdimension; the door is near the greatest source of psionic energy, so when the door opened, they naturally went in. The odds art good there art tens of trillions of bugs on the other side of the gate. So instead of entering to get the crystal, we will go with plan B.” Silas said.

Dotty continued to stare, so Silas gave her a reassuring smile before opening the door to his drone collection. Most of them were made of wood and had few defenses, but he had one prepared in case he ever had a conveniently open Garganta.

He picked it up next to a pistol he built with guass rifle technology. The barrel was much larger, and the ammunition was heavier. Steel smelted from the mine he captured made magnificent rounds, and he even enchanted them along with the gun itself. He slammed home a magazine of 20 rounds. Telekinesis made smithing much easier, but he wasn’t the man who spearheaded the smithing projects on the farm. That honor belonged to the Dutchman.

The drone was a big saucer-shaped relay covered in mirror formations connected to a nearby sealed-off cave. Once it was in the other dimension, it would rapidly absorb psionic energy until the cave’s psionic energy density matched wherever the drone found itself. But, of course, since it was about to be in the densest area of psionic energy around, that would make the density in the cave incredible.

“What’s plan B?” Dotty asked.

She seemed to finally get ahold of herself as the giant spider woman was carried up the stairs. Really, he was glad she wasn’t blowing up at him. She was a great assistant, even if she didn’t read the lab report about plan B. Silas could forgive her because reading was a new thing to the nag.

Most reports went to Eugene, Aoife, or Franklin for the day-to-day. Silas would give his compatriots a break in a few decades and put one of his brats in charge. Chepi was starting to show, and Silas was desperate to come up with a good name. He couldn’t wait until they were old enough to go on horse rides, fishing, and hunting; he planned to read them stories, teach them, and so much more. Silas would only have one chance to be a good father in their formative years, and he couldn’t wait.

Their childhoods would last maybe a couple of decades then they would be out conquering territory, pillaging, and cultivating. Silas would show them the craft and teach them how to build formations like a specialist. Maybe when the boys were old enough, they could go to Japan, kick down the country’s door, and snatch up a few hundred concubines. The girls would probably be pickier with their choice, so he would have to start finding good apprentices and teach them well.

“Cousin, what’s plan B?” Dotty asked.

“Oh, I will send a drone over and lock down the dimensions until we get more information. But, since we control the way in and out, there is no sense in being hasty.” Silas said.

He tapped a few icons on the door and adjusted the time until it synchronized. There was no sense in letting the bugs develop into a hyper-technological race. The bugs that entered were cavemen as far as their technique sophistication went. Their barriers were little more than skintight bubbles. They would band together and build arms against him if he made himself their devil. While that was interesting, he wasn’t about that.

Silas opened the gate, tossed in the drone, and sealed it.

“Why didn’t the bugs rush in this time?” Dotty asked.

“The time on their side was around 100,000 to our 1. I’m surprised more didn’t rush in. This time the gate was open only long enough to throw a drone in.” Silas said.

There was always the option to ramp the time up even higher until the bug civilization destroyed itself. Unfortunately, that would take a bit more time and resources to get that right. It would take finesse if he wanted to turn them into a destroyed civilization and move in to collect their ancient relics.

Silas would need to develop some artificial lifeforms, basically robots, and slip them through the gateway with specific instructions. Then he could watch the fireworks like a civilization builder. That was one of the functions of the drone he sent through. It had mirror formations, including the equivalent of a camera.

He turned on the main formation pillar in his sub-sub immortal’s cave, and if he kept building sub immortal’s cave, he would need an elevator. Most of the dirt went into storage rings to be used elsewhere. Most of the experiments have turned the dirt around his lab into a precious treasure to the current world. So it was mostly repurposed to grow precious herbs used for body refinement. That was Eugene’s expertise.

The drone’s camera focused on a massive hive stretching around a slow-rotating purple structure with an eye at its center. All manner of insects flew through the sky and occasionally battled one another. Psionic signals were tracked in the hundreds of quintillions, and suddenly, Silas understood he had lowballed the numbers.

He heard a knock at the door; it was from a bount. “Sir, the spider woman is awake, and she wishes to speak with thee.”

Silas nodded while he stared at the world revolving around a continent-sized block of psionic crystal. Hovering above skyscraper-sized vessels floated, spewing psionic particles in the air. It seemed they were a little more advanced than cavemen.