Chapter 38 38: Rules of the Mental World
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"You... you've really accomplished something incredible," Bheara whispered, taking a deep breath to forcefully suppress her racing thoughts.
"So, are you interested in becoming a resident of this world?" Lucian asked, extending his hand in invitation.
"Of course I am! Do you really think I'd miss out on something this wildly entertaining!?" Bheara grinned, firmly grasping his hand.
In the next heartbeat, she felt a profound, conceptual imprint sear itself directly into her divine soul. She didn't resist. Even though her divine seals were completely unlocked in this space and she could effortlessly crush Lucian with a stray thought, she would never dream of doing so. She despised traditional, self-righteous heroic epics, but she was utterly captivated by chaotic, unpredictable anomalies like Lucian. Her affection for him had already skyrocketed. Even her previous claims of 'hating' him were merely the frustrated lashings of a cornered tsundere.
After all, Lucian was the man who had exposed her true benevolent nature to the people of Beltane. His actions were rooted in genuine kindness. Even his ruthless verbal counters, while infuriating, were never malicious. It wasn't that she disliked his pushback; she just wasn't used to anyone surviving her games.
Lucian took Bheara on a brief tour. The Divine Court was still in its infancy, so there wasn't much to see. The only truly impressive structures were the stunningly ornate residential manors. Suddenly, a familiar aura materialized nearby, instantly drawing Bheara's attention.
"Ah, your patron Goddess, Hephaestus, I presume?" Bheara mused, eyeing the Goddess of Forging.
It was her first time coming face-to-face with Hephaestus. She didn't necessarily dislike straight shooters like her, but she certainly didn't vibe with them either. If personalities possessed natural counters, Bheara's chaotic trickery perfectly countered Hephaestus's rigid honesty. Naturally, Hephaestus wasn't thrilled to see her either.
"You're Bheara?" Hephaestus sighed, instantly deducing the Goddess of Winter's identity. "Great. Another one."
"Another one?" Bheara blinked, before a wicked, highly amused smirk spread across her face. "Let me guess. Are you implying I'm another woman showing up to steal your man? Tell me, you haven't been bullying my precious little Talvi, have you?"
"Has anyone ever told you that your personality is utterly insufferable?" Hephaestus scowled, clearly unamused.
"All the time! Everyone calls me the 'wicked honest god'," Bheara replied, puffing out her chest with absolute pride.
To be fair, before meeting Lucian, she absolutely despised that title. But after spending time with him, she realized it actually fit her perfectly. Especially now that she had given up on her moral interrogation games, she was just delightfully mischievous. At her core, Bheara was a benevolent deity; she just possessed a terminal inability to be honest about her feelings.
"You're actually proud of that?" Hephaestus rubbed her temples, feeling a headache coming on. Yet another massive headache of a woman. She couldn't be bothered to argue. She tossed a thick notebook straight into Lucian's chest. "These are the structural laws for the teleportation gate. Review them and see if there are any conflicts."
Lucian flipped the notebook open. There were roughly over a thousand meticulously detailed physical and magical laws documented inside. While the concept of teleportation sounded simple, constructing an infallible set of foundational rules to safely bridge dimensions without tearing the traveler apart at the sub-spatial level was mind-numbingly complex. If Lucian had to reverse-engineer it himself, it would require a colossal amount of energy and thousands of trial-and-error tests to perfect.
Of course, without his [Rule Creation] magic, casually building a World Teleportation Gate was a complete pipe dream. A quick glance at the lore of Bleach proved that stabilizing an artificial dimension without an ironclad foundation of spiritual laws was an absolute nightmare.
"What's this?" Bheara asked, eagerly leaning in close to peek over the notebook.
She paid no mind to how close they were, pressing herself practically flush against Lucian. Hephaestus's eye twitched violently, a dangerous shadow falling over her face as she watched the display. Whether Bheara was doing it specifically to antagonize Hephaestus or if she genuinely harbored feelings for Lucian was irrelevant. The action itself screamed favoritism. If an outsider saw this, they'd assume Lucian possessed a passive 'Anti-Goddess Special Attack' trait.
"Are these the foundational rules you mentioned?" Bheara skimmed the pages, her mouth twitching. "Wait... don't tell me you're literally building this world using nothing but written theories like this?"
"You guessed it," Lucian confirmed casually.
"That defies both magic and divinity!!" Bheara yelled, clutching her head as her entire understanding of reality underwent a catastrophic meltdown.
It was like a normal person watching a horde of Greenskins bang rocks together and somehow assemble a space-faring battleship. Or like a modern scientist watching someone hand-craft a picometer-scale microchip out of thin air. It fundamentally shattered her worldview.
"It's hard to believe, I know, but that truly is all the conceptual foundation he needs to manifest his magic," Hephaestus sighed, offering a deeply sympathetic look.
She had experienced the exact same mind-breaking shock. Lucian's sheer versatility continuously shattered every logical boundary she possessed. The entire Divine Court had been built precisely this way, jump-started using the raw ambient energy drained directly from Bheara's Spring of Life. For Hephaestus, drafting the spatial laws for a portal was child's play. She intimately understood the fundamental architecture of dimensions. Writing it all down only took her a morning.
The real hurdle was the energy source. Thanks to Lucian's Ether Circulation, operating the portal cost virtually zero net energy; the only requirement was the massive ignition spark needed to initially tear the dimensional fabric. Once active, the energy would seamlessly loop back into his mana pool for infinite recycling. In a way, Lucian's World Bubbles had essentially achieved perpetual motion.
This terrifying efficiency was entirely due to the miraculous nature of his mental realm. By anchoring his magic strictly to his own consciousness—and thereby removing his physical body as a structural weak point—his [Rule Creation] magic had bypassed standard thermodynamics, unlocking terrifying, world-ending potential. Lucian was fairly certain that as long as his rules were flawless and his initial energy pool was deep enough, he could genuinely replicate the Third Perpetual Motion Machine from Problem Children. Hell, given enough time, he might even be able to manifest a conceptual super-weapon like Another Cosmology.
"Start forging the replica of the spring," Lucian instructed. "If you need any raw materials, I can instantly synthesize them using my abilities."
"Understood," Hephaestus nodded, before teleporting out to Beltane.
She returned moments later. Merely laying eyes on the genuine artifact was enough for her to perfectly map its blueprint in her mind. Since Lucian could freely generate whatever materials she needed through the Divine Court's rules, and she had unrestrained access to her divine power, the forgery process would be seamless.
Meanwhile, Bheara found herself deeply invested in optimizing the Divine Court. While the baseline concept of the World Bubbles was functional, their actual structural integrity was quite flimsy. There was massive room for optimization. Since Bheara held Authority over wisdom, her logical processing and rule-designing capabilities were easily on par with Hephaestus. Assuming they wouldn't infinitely expand the Divine Court's physical size, Bheara focused entirely on fortifying the density and durability of the World Bubble's internal logic.
Beyond just physical stability, there was the conceptual depth of the Bubbles to consider. Bheara quickly realized her optimized logic didn't need to be localized solely to the Divine Court; she could weave it directly into the foundational fabric of Lucian's entire mental realm, passively upgrading every single World Bubble simultaneously.
"Using it as a baseline framework is fine, but we shouldn't force every World Bubble to strictly adhere to the exact same logic," Lucian suggested thoughtfully.
If every single World Bubble shared the exact same immutable laws, they would gain immense stability but lose their chaotic, infinite potential. It was far better to embed Bheara's rules as a generalized ambient environment. World Bubbles could choose to sync with that environment for stability, or reject it to foster entirely alien laws within their own borders, preserving absolute creative freedom.
Essentially, Bheara's hyper-optimized rules would become a universal toolbox available for any dimension to borrow from. Regardless of how the other dimensions operated, the Divine Court—his central hub—required the absolute highest tier of stability. Bheara's enthusiastic involvement was an absolute godsend.
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