Great beams of shadow and light blazed through a beige-black sky, tearing everything in their path. A great cage of nothingness swallowed up forms of life within the area, leaving only countless cold and lifeless worlds. Then an army too vast to be counted marched forwards and swept up all that remained.

I’ve always felt that one of the most visceral and tangible forms of being able to see one’s own growth, was coming back to steam-roll the things that once served as challenges. There’s no better way to realize that one’s grown “taller” when the mountains of yesterday are reduced to petty hills and the great ravines of yesterday are made into mere ditches.

I got those vibes now, as Jack, Kalpana, and I returned to the chaotic sea and all of us looked around to find that the chaotic and insane maelstrom that we’d all had to do our best to survive in before, was reduced to something that we could all clearly feel the limits of. The unfathomable beasts that roamed the chaotic sea were all marked as executable targets. The varied spheres and shards of the chaotic were all turned into simple numbers. Points of acquisition, instead of worlds to be conquered.

“Halt...Turn about...Weapons ready...And attack!” roared Kalpana. Giving orders to the sisters that had followed her out to the chaotic sea.

“Well, what are you waiting for folks, get out there and fuck shit up!” bellowed Jack. Giving orders to the hundreds of thousands of immortal cultivators that were here following her orders.

We weren’t alone out here. Kalpana had brought several trillion of her sisters from out of our private realm. Jack and I were accompanied by an assault force from the Forest of Life and Death. Besides the cultivators, and the Empty-Harvesters, there was also my constructs, Jack’s fadelings, and the countless drones and AI-run deconstructors of the Division of Cosmic Artifice’s first-contact fleet.

We and all our people were currently working together to dismantle and consume as much of the chaotic sea as we could. There was no chance of us swallowing it all up. The chaotic sea was close-enough to infinite that it would have been folly to try and take it all. This was especially so, because we weren’t just attacking the chaotic sea. We were also attacking the grand nebula itself, which flowed into the higher-planes of the cosmos.

We were smart enough not to bite more than we could chew. However, we could take enough to assure that materials and resources would be used in the expanded Empty-Dream. The expansion process was reaching its end. Now our Empty-Archive Society just needed to make sure there was enough data and energy prepared for the Empty-Dream’s future growth. We weren’t just thinking in the short-term either. With the Division’s backing, I was willing to get a little bolder with my designs and aim for something more self-sustaining.

My goal was to turn the Empty Dream into something closer to a proper world. Almost completely leaving behind the Empty-Dream’s roots as a high-fidelity illusion. The code overhaul we'd done recently had set in place special laws of conservation, destruction, creation, and universal expansion that would make the Empty-Dream a whole lot more self-sustaining in the future. My research into the Division’s AI programs had allowed me to create more competent, more capable, AI-administrators, and moderators, for the Empty-Dream as well.

It was probably a hope in vain, simply due to how “work” well...worked, but the hope was that all the hard work I was doing now, would save me and my people from having to work as hard in the future, since the Empty-Dream would hopefully be self-expanding from here on out.

Countless eldritch beasts cried out as they were torn apart, by golden, metal-bodied, ant soldiers. Countless shards and spheres crumbled into rubble before being vacuumed up by giant apertures in space-time. The only beings spared from our group’s onslaught were the sapients who were decent enough to simply inform us of their presence, rather than attack. In the case that we ran into sapients, if they wanted help either getting out of the chaotic sea, or at least getting to a safer area, the Empty-Harvesters would do so. If the alien sapients simply wanted to be left alone we’d do that then.

The whole resource acquisition process took two decades to complete, but we were immortals, and cultivators, so a mere twenty years was barely more than what a month's time, would be for regular people. Especially for those who were like Jack, myself, and Kalpana, who’d experienced the passage of thousands of years. Especially, in light of the fact that even while we were finishing the resource acquisition, we were busy with a lot of other stuff, such as the creation of a bunch of new content for the Empty-Dream.

For instance, we were rolling out some ultra-high leveled areas, for current users of the Empty-Dream. We were focusing especially hard on trying to make areas that would be useful for, and interesting to, our sizable number of immortal users. We could no longer be the sole source of resources and energy for them that simply wasn’t possible at the moment. However, we could create environments that could engender safe and sustainable engagement in other activities.

One example was the inclusion of areas where restrictions were slightly relaxed so that younger immortals could play with their powers and learn to use them more easily. We were also formulating a system that would further the future utility of the Empty-Dream, by creating a mechanism that would absorb, stabilize, and then integrate chunks of the grand nebula in the Empty-Dream.

An idea that had our friends in the Division very excited, because incursion by the nebula was a very common way that many worlds were lost, and anything that could lessen, or restrain, the expansion of the nebula was something to be celebrated.

Of course, there would also be expanded social features, and as the Empty-Dream expanded we were expanding the number of varied habitations and inhabitable environments that were available to our users. You’d be surprised how much energy and time, we undying types were willing to sink into petty things like clothing and interior design.