For the time being, while the others were still on their way back, Lucien turned his attention to the next unavoidable problem.

Lootwell was almost ready to open to the world.

That meant its people could no longer remain merely "the people inside." They needed order, access, and authority. A structure that made sense once outsiders started looking in.

Before assigning roles, however, Lucien settled something more fundamental.

Identity.

He called for the Crafting Division.

When everyone had gathered, Lucien spoke plainly.

"We need seals. Proof that a person belonged to Lootwell."

The room quieted at once.

Lucien explained the principle carefully.

Each seal would be bound to its owner’s mana signature. Once paired, it could not be properly used by another. The seal would serve as lawful identity, access-key, territory reference, and internal recognition node.

Restricted places inside Lootwell would respond to it. Certain arrays would only acknowledge those carrying valid seals. And because the seals would be integrated into the Origin Core’s greater network, they would remain tethered to home no matter how far their owners traveled.

Eirene leaned forward and asked the real question before anyone else could.

"You want one for everyone?"

Lucien nodded.

She went silent and slowly sat back.

Because everyone in this case meant everyone.

Tens of billions of people.

The Crafting Division understood the scale immediately.

There would be no handmaking this. Not even with tens of thousands of skilled workers.

And so the whole sector lurched into motion again.

Fresh design lines were drawn. Machine requirements were rewritten. Production logic split into phases. A seal this important could not merely be stamped and passed onward. It needed lawful pairing, owner-binding, access tier setting, and Origin-Core registration.

Which meant, once again, they needed mass-production machinery.

Lucien watched the first wave of that realization pass through the hall and nearly laughed.

Lootwell had reached the point where even proofs of belonging required industrial architecture.

Good.

That meant they were thinking correctly.

He left them to the work after approving the first batch of seal-machine concepts and moved on.

•••

Later that day, Lucien entered the Origin Core Shrine.

The place had changed almost as much as the fragment itself.

It no longer felt like a room built around a powerful thing. It felt like a nerve center.

The twenty merged fragments rested in their sanctified cradle. Now it felt like a central authority trying not to reveal how much else it might already be capable of.

The recorders were at work as usual.

The chamber beside the core had become a world of patient scrutiny. Scribes copied flagged communications. Analysts filtered patterns. Others maintained tagged histories of suspicious devices and notable message chains. The movement was orderly, quiet, and relentless.

Elias stood over part of the current shift with his usual composed severity, and no one under him seemed foolish enough to mistake the work for anything less than important.

Lucien reviewed the latest reports.

Nothing truly alarming had surfaced yet.

Sareth remained noisy, ambitious, and mildly embarrassing in all the familiar ways of organized civilization, but not yet dangerous in the way Lucien most cared about.

Not yet.

Kael and the others had not yet expanded the sale properly into the lower reaches of Sareth. Supply still constrained the spread too heavily. The Nephralis and the Varkhaals remained unconnected.

Those factions had been too quiet for too long.

Lucien stood before the merged fragment after that and let his senses brush against it more directly.

It had too many uses now to keep thinking of it merely as signal infrastructure.

The fragment held conversion authority, of course. But now, with twenty fragments merged, there were subtler things surfacing.

Lucien stood there for a long while, feeling the lawful pressure of the core as if trying to listen to something speaking just beneath audibility.

He did not force a conclusion.

But he left the shrine more certain of one thing:

The Origin Core would become one of the central pillars of everything he built next.

•••

The next day, Seran contacted him.

The message was short.

[I need you here.]

Lucien went to the main Liberator Headquarters himself using the Void Disc.

Seran was already waiting when he arrived, looking entirely too satisfied with himself.

Lucien took one glance at his expression and was confused.

Seran finally talked.

"I brought you dungeon batteries."

Lucien’s eyes glowed.

Then Seran handed him a black cube. He gave one to him earlier when he asked for dungeon batteries.

Then Lucien saw them.

Five void entities.

They were sealed and bound under multiple layers of suppression.

Lucien’s eyes narrowed.

These were not lesser things.

"These are Void Sovereigns."

Seran nodded.

"Equivalent to the Eternal Realm, more or less."

Lucien stared at him.

Then looked back at Seran as if checking whether madness had finally completed its work.

"You went into the Echo Zone for these?"

Seran shrugged.

"I passed through it."

Lucien blinked slowly.

The void monsters there were not like Aerolith or Morveth.

These were closer to the Devourer.

That made them excellent batteries.

Lucien exhaled then he asked, "Why were you in the void?"

Seran’s expression sharpened slightly.

"The goblin worlds."

That pulled Lucien’s full attention back at once.

Seran explained that the goblins had proven extremely good at obscuring the conquered worlds under their control. The route signatures were layered, veiled, and in some cases false enough that finding the correct worlds would take time.

He was tracing them.

Piece by piece.

Even with the coordinates Lucien had provided, the cosmos was vast and treacherously irregular, and the goblins’ technology had proven its worth.

He had no confirmed world yet, but he promised Lucien he would send word the moment he found one.

Lucien felt genuine excitement move through him.

If the goblin worlds also possessed barks of the Tree of Creation, as the gargoyle-conquered world had, then the benefits could become enormous.

For him.

Those worlds had to be taken.

Lucien looked at Seran and said, "The moment you find one, tell me."

Seran nodded. "Of course."

Lucien then accepted the five void sovereigns and returned to Lootwell.

•••

Lucien went directly to the Ascension Spire.

The new fuel was integrated with great care. The upper chambers of the Spire had already become a place of hidden horror in their own right.

This time, the work took days.

Lucien did not rush it.

Celestial-level monsters were not something he intended to mimic sloppily.

Their identities required cleaner reconstruction. Their environmental needs were harsher. Their scaling logic had to remain stable or the dungeon would become either a pathetic parody or a catastrophe in the wrong direction.

He worked floor by floor.

When he finally finished and stepped back to look over the expanded logic of the Spire, the result was satisfying enough that even his exhaustion felt useful.

He had done it.

Celestial-level monsters could now be mimicked successfully.

The bad news came immediately after.

The five new batteries were only enough to sustain dungeon entities up to around the Second Level of the Celestial Realm.

That was not nothing.

It was already absurd progress.

But it was not enough for the highest floors he eventually wanted.

Still, progress was progress.

He sealed the new layers into the public-access logic afterward.

Once Lootwell opened to the outside world, its citizens (those carrying valid seals) would be able to enter under the normal internal rules.

Outsiders, however, would pay. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝚠𝚎𝚋𝗻𝗼𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝚘𝐦

Heavily.

That part pleased Lucien greatly.

If fools from the wider world wished to use his dungeon for growth, then they could do so while funding the very civilization that would one day stand over them more comfortably than they liked.

Spirit crystals would flow well enough from that.

•••

Little by little, people returned.

Kael and the merchant caravan returned first.

Lucien met them personally.

And finally, he saw the child.

Maxim and Ellen’s son.

Allen.

A new life, small and unreasonably calm for someone born in the middle of a traveling commercial operation guarded by monsters and interrupted by violence.

Lucien looked at the child and then at the utterly transformed expressions on the faces of his parents and could not help smiling.

Clara took charge of the baptism.

That part no longer required Lucien’s hand each time.

He had already connected the church to the Origin Core through a sanctioned divine-access network and granted Clara the proper permissions. With that, the church could draw on the fragment’s power for baptisms.

It was one of the clearest examples yet of what twenty merged fragments truly changed.

The Origin Core no longer needed to be touched directly for every miracle.

It could now serve remotely.

Clara had taken to this responsibility with almost frightening competence.

At this point, nearly everyone in the church used divine energy.

More than that, Clara had become utterly committed to ensuring that everyone under her spiritual jurisdiction became strong enough to matter in war.

Lucien let her continue.

It saved him time. And if the Black Mass came again, a territory saturated with divine energy users would become a direct nightmare for miasma and corruption-based forces.

That alone made the decision worthwhile.

•••

Days passed.

Then more.

The returns continued until, by the end of the second week, everyone who mattered most had come back.

Lootwell gathered itself.

The energy of the territory changed with that.

Lucien stood beneath the evening sky and felt it settle.

Now it was time for proper restructuring.

Lootwell was done becoming.

Now it had to decide how it would exist.