Explaining everything that had happened to him took several hours. Luckily, Lily was an excellent listener, and she kept up with the insane story without any difficulty. Caeden was, once again, grateful that he had a girlfriend who was smarter than him. It made dealing with his increasingly unhinged abilities a lot easier.

“You know, you’re lucky you’re cute because this is a lot to deal with.” Lily smiled, patting his arm. “I leave you alone for one day, and you go have an entire civilization’s worth of kids. I don’t appreciate you stepping out on me with an extradimensional space like that.”

Caeden snorted, which turned into a full-on laugh. “I’ll keep that in mind the next time I see another extradimensional space, but we’re keeping the kids.”

“Hmph, you bet.” Her eyes shone with deep curiosity. “So, you were planning on taking us there, right? Why didn’t you tell Erik, Cat, and Asherta? We could have grabbed them, and you only would have had to explain this once. Now we have to get them up to speed as well.”

Caeden waved his hand. “No thanks. I figured we’d just give them the abbreviated version. It’s not like the specifics will matter to them, and I know for a fact that Erik won’t give a shit.”

“So, you were just going to take them to another dimension without explaining it?”

“Yup.”

“Honestly, great plan.”

Caeden laughed at the faux-serious expression on Lily’s face. He’d missed her so much.

“So, when do we leave?” Her expression shifted into a more serious set.

“Honestly, I want to sleep through the night without thinking about any of this. I know we’ve dealt with ridiculous stuff ever since we joined the Academy, but this was way too much. I feel exhausted. Plus, with the time manipulation, one night is basically meaningless.”

“It’s also a huge amount of wasted time.” Lily countered.

Caeden shook his head. “If I learned anything from talking to the researcher, it's that taking time too seriously is a dark road to walk. He warned me when he was teaching. Gaining control over time leads to the temptation to take every second seriously since you can stretch it into weeks. But you have to remember, Lil. It’s just a second. Thinking of it any other way will drive you crazy worrying about wasted moments.”

“That seems like a very cavalier attitude.” She frowned, biting her lip. Caeden could see the mounting nervousness in her.

“It’s not,” Caeden refuted. “It’s literally necessary. I felt what you were feeling as soon as I realized that I had essentially infinite time when I was in the Forge. It forced me to spend another few centuries working on projects that could have just as easily waited. I got lucky. What would have happened if I was pursuing a truly impossible goal? How long in there before my mind broke? It did, for a while. I was unbelievably lucky that I managed to piece myself back together. I don’t think I could do it again.”

“And that’s the problem. I can feel it, even now. The temptation. Once you can control time, it’s so tempting to think you can control everything. But Lily, I can’t determine the future. I can’t see what is going to happen. We could die in a second, and none of the time I spent in the Forge would have mattered. That’s outside my control.”

“Constantly stressing over using my time optimally now that I can somewhat determine how much time I have is nonsense. The researcher said it. When you have an infinite amount of time, one second is a million years or a million billion years. But it’s still just a second. You don’t know how many you get before the end, the same as before. Just because I can change a second doesn’t mean we should treat them any different than we already did.”

Lily huffed. “Still feels wasteful.”

“It’s going to.” Caeden shrugged. “But that’s life. We’re facing a desperate situation with so many unknowns, with the Revolution hiding in the background. Maybe spending time with you, or you spending time with me, is a waste that would be better spent training. After all, it wouldn’t help us survive. But if the end came an hour from now, or right this second, I would have regretted not spending this time with you more than all the training in the universe. So relax. We don’t know if we’ll be fine or if not using the Forge tonight was a mistake. But that’s the same as before I had this power.”

“I…” She looked conflicted. “It’s just, the possibilities…”

“Will be there tomorrow, just the same. We can’t live in fear of time disappearing now that we can change it just a little.” Caeden coaxed softly.

“This feels very counter-intuitive.” Lily laughed, her tension fading somewhat. “Having more power shouldn't make you feel less in control.”

“We’ve stepped into a whole new territory; that’s the real problem. It’s easy to dismiss the limited amount of time we have when there’s no way to control it. But as soon as we have the strength to influence time, it’s easy to become keenly aware of how much we could be wasting it. But that’s an illusion. We just have to live assuming that we’ll see tomorrow.”

“Ugh, now I kinda wish you hadn’t gotten this new ability.” Lily groaned, leaning into Caeden, “It feels like too much responsibility just got dropped on us. We could do so much with this; it's hard to even imagine. Especially the Entrance and Exit Blades. If they work how you described, wouldn’t they be able to teleport people just like the portal the researcher opened to the CMS?”

“Yes,” Caeden nodded. He’d thought of the same thing as well. It was impressive that Lily had caught on in only a few minutes when she had so much else to think about. He’d had literal decades to contemplate the implications of his abilities. “The Forge exists outside this space and time, so the distance between Traversal Blades doesn’t matter. They can be anywhere in time and space, and I could still access them from the Forge. And before you ask, no, we can’t travel back in time. Technically, we can, but the researcher explicitly told me not to. It’s possible, but the likelihood of destroying our universe is untenably high. It would be way too easy to end our own existences and create a paradox that would swallow this universe whole.”

“That being said, keeping the Traversal Blades as a method of teleportation by having people move through the Forge would work. The only limitation is that the Blades only function when I have my Incarnation active. So to use the Forge like that, I’d need to sacrifice the use of Blade Forge as a shroud for extended periods of time. Which means I also couldn’t use Sharp, since it’s a splinter of Blade Forge now.”

“That’s definitely a problem.” Lily frowned before noticing Caeden stifle a yawn. “But one for another time. You need to sleep. We’ll pick this up in the morning and really get to work. Come on, let's go to bed.”

Lily pulled him along, dropping Caeden off at his room and giving him a kiss goodnight before heading to her own room. It took only moments before Caeden was gone, dead to the world in a sleep only had by the mentally and physically exhausted.

{}

“Alright, go on through.” Caeden waved his hand at his friends, gesturing toward the swirling molten metal colors of the Entrance Blade. He was leaning against his Incarnation, the Forged Throne. Caeden wasn’t sure he was a fan of the name, but it wasn’t exactly his choice, and it at least got the point across.

“This is weird, dude.” Erik peered at the swirling portal suspiciously. “Makes me feel like I’m gonna melt if I go through it.”

“You won’t,” Caeden rolled his eyes. He knew Erik was just fucking with him. He would have known if the portal was dangerous from across the ship, let alone a few feet in front of it. “Hurry up. I slowed the time dilation to nothing so you all could get in.”

“Time dilation?” Cat asked, looking between Caeden and Lily, who was sitting on the Forged Throne. “What are you talking about?”

“Cat, get in the portal. We can explain after, but we’re kinda on the clock here.” Lily huffed, gesturing with both her hands to get her friend moving. “It’s fine, I promise.”

“Yeah! Well, it might be. Is that the right portal?” Caeden rubbed his chin, staring at the Entrance Blade with a faux-serious expression. “Maybe I picked the wrong one. Maybe it’ll vaporize you. Oh, well. Jump on in.”

“Ha ha. Very funny, Cae.” Cat snarked, causing a smile to break out on Caeden’s face. “Erik, you’re going in first.”

“What? Why me?” He asked.

“Because I know you won’t go in there if it could kill us.” She shrugged. “Plus, you have the best chance of surviving, what with Healing and all that.”

“It sounds like you want me to get hurt for you.”

“Got a problem with that?”

“You know, I should just throw you in. You’ll probably be fine-”

“Less talking, more going!” Asherta yelled, apparently fed up with listening to them. She grabbed both, scales running up and down her arms, before jumping, with Cat and Erik in her grip, into the portal.

“Well, that worked.” Caeden chuckled. “Should have figured Ash would just get bored at some point.”

“Otherwise, those two would have gone back and forth for who knows how long.” Lily rolled her eyes. “Well, looks like it’s my turn. Moment of truth, right?”

“Right. If this doesn’t work, all my planning was pretty pointless.” Caeden wasn’t sure he was looking forward to that answer.

“It’ll be fine.” Lily patted his hand comfortingly. “Regardless, the Blade Forge is a massive benefit. We don’t necessarily need this to work.”

“I don’t want to stand above you,” Caeden whispered. “I want us to stand together. It would be too lonely, being the only one to reach so high.”

“Then we’ll get there, no matter what.” Lily nodded resolutely, getting off the Incarnation and stepping up to the Entrance Blade. “I’ll see you on the other side.” She smiled widely. “I’m excited to see it.”

Then she stepped through.

In the next instant, Caeden willed himself to their location. Multiple Exit Blades that correspond to paired Entrance Blades had been established in the Forge, but only one of them was safe for Starry Sea natives to enter. The others were all stuck in the native environment of the Forge, which would fry the vast majority of humans, shrouded or not, to a crisp. The only way for a shrouded to survive would be to pump themselves up with a stupid amount of physical enhancement, sacrificing vast quantities of shroud every second to withstand the supernaturally high heat in the Forge.

He arrived on a platform of steel, hemmed by poles or ethertech at all four corners of the square space. These were the environmental regulators, changing the inhospitable Forge into a perfect replica of the Starry Sea, Ki density and air quality included. Everything his friends needed to survive the trip.

The poles themselves were twenty feet tall and almost five feet thick. Blue, purple, and rainbow-colored ether crystal stuck out of them in multiple places, interacting with the air, gravity, and Ki, respectively. That had been a major breakthrough in the project. Caeden had found that the Forge could create Ki ether, a type of ether that was perfectly neutral, able to affect the ambient Ki without causing an imbalance that could lead to monster formation.

It turned out that manipulating ambient Ki was hard. Disturbing the balanced environment invariably created monsters. That was how it happened on the Starry Sea. Shifting patterns of Ki swirling together into monsters. Caeden didn’t want to deal with that, so he strove to recreate the Starry Sea environment but with a perfectly stable ambient Ki. It took some doing, but he succeeded.

But none of that was his central focus. Instead, Caeden immediately looked to Lily and his friends, all of whom were staring around at the third depth arrival space, the walls created by the Fifth Blade that protected them from the volatile soup of concepts outside.

“Well?” He asked.

Lily focused on him, and, looking away from the wall, she raised her hand. Above her upturned palm, a crystal of ice formed. She smiled. “Looks like we’re in business.”