An Immortal's Retirement: To Achieve Peace [Volume One Finished]

The dragons ducked and ran in the fields outside of the valley.

Small ground critters dug and extended themselves through the small and still sandy earth. And though they were large and the world was small, it still took them time to dig it regardless.

The desert was no more, and trees were already sprouting, some bigger than men. The outline of many forests were already in view and the rush of beasts into the desert was something to be witnessed.

And ofcourse, there were the people. The people who couldn't afford to trek a thousand five hundred miles to come under the protection of the Oasis sect, could now live on its lands without repercussions.

I stood above the region and watched the former line of sand and dunes blossom with greenery.

And I had a small orb in my hand.

I floated back down, taking the time to move through the physical space, rather than just blinking and teleporting. I landed on the roof of my house, just overlooking the valley and sat down on the roof.

The orb was one of the more valuable things in my possession. It was a crystal of thought. It wasn't sentient, but rather sentience.

It was self awareness without the self, a mind without a soul, a spirit in its purest form.

It was a rare find out there in the big bad world. It wasn't as rare as primordial qi, it was nowhere near that. But it was something hard to find.

Because most thought came with a concept. In fact, people often confused the two. A thought by itself was perceived to be information only, but there was something else underneath it, a process, a holder of the idea if you will.

And that was what I had in my hands, pure calculation. It was necessary in the array master's world. It was like our very own calculator. Each array master would make their Mind's Eye over time and refined it as they grew older.

Mine was an orb, but it could take any form.

It could be used for all types of things, but mainly it was used for calculations and to simulate law and dao interactions.

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In this case, I was going to use it for other reasons.

I closed my eyes and focused.

This was the tiresom part.

I was creating an array that I had used before, but at a higher level. It was like taking a birdhouse, and scaling it up for a pterodactyl. There were just more things to worry about when building something of that size.

But it was necessary. I was trying to cultivate, and to do that I needed to pull out the whole cultivating set up.

I had reconstructed the basement into my Palacium, and while I did have some defense array set up around here, most of them were meant to keep the beasts in, not to keep things out.

It was a hovel of a home, and I had to remake it. But I had to make sure no one around this region would notice. It had to be absolutely hidden from anyone below the thirteenth rank and I had to make it hard to perceive for anyone beyond that rank as well.

It was complicated but I had ideas on how to do it, and I was happy to use my new knowledge for an actual array.

"Let's see… I have about ninety-three major nodes, each of which needs to be constructed from the ground up."

A major node was basically an array in its own right. It completed its own purpose but also functioned as a part of a whole.

A decent array master of the Immortal Rank, could create a universe. But it would be a rank four or even rank three universe, and to make it live and be capable of life, you would need to use parts of an actual universe. Souls, life, growth, that was the hardest thing to replicate.

That was why the array universes I had made in the past lacked life. They weren't designed for it.

The more things your array had to do, the more capable an array master you had to be.

I flexed my hand in an exercise and an array of the fifth rank came to be. It could do trillions of things. I upgraded it.

Sixth rank.

Seventh rank.

Eighth rank.

With each growth, its abilities whittled down, but its power grew.

At the thirteenth rank, it became capable of only one thing.

Stealth.

Now it was taking effort to keep up.

I lowered it back down to the ninth rank, and then I changed its formatting to defense and scaled it back up again.

An actively shifting array.

"Alright then, I think I have an idea," I said to myself.

And then I started working.

It was all thoughts, ideas within my Mind's Eye, but it would turn into something eventually.

The sun rose and the sun set, but I stood still in concentration.

I was dealing with so many concepts, so many ideas. I was trying to incorporate laws that I didn't have.

I couldn't limit myself to materials I had, that would be half assing it. And if I was trying to do something, if I was trying to make something that lasts, I had to give it my all.

It took three Ah-Marin days, but with my mind running at maximum power, it felt like eons had passed.

At the end of it all, I had a blueprint of a blueprint. A defensive array born of all the knowledge I had gathered. It wasn't going to be living like my other array. I didn't want to meddle with those ideas right now, but I had put almost everything I had into it.

"Looks alright," I whispered.

Then I fell into the grass and closed my eyes.

I was tired.