Resil ruled Petrah like no one before him. As Balor skipped decades ahead, he watched the edges of the empire grow slowly at first and then explode all over the small continent.

  Each of the four surrounding continents received a Petrah-like city to centralize their governance, and Resil used four Kings to take care of local matters. He distributed Petranovan monarchs on all four continents, using their will-bending eyes to great effect.

  By the time Balor slowed time down for himself, Petrah was connected to the other four continents with large portals, making trade and resource exchange near instant. In six decades, Veilthorn was globalized enough to establish a lot of elements needed for Balor’s ascension.

  Magics and sciences were fused together, creating two classes of Petrahn scholars that completed myriad research projects. Arcanists looked to the past to recover knowledge that was lost. Analysts looked to the future to uncover new knowledge.

  Resil had an entirely different sector in Petrah dedicated to portals and other traversal methods. Their current methods were crude and rudimentary in Balor’s eyes, but they were enough to boost the Veilthornian civilization a hundredfold.

  Resil also made many enemies with such rapid globalization. They arose from a few populations that were resistant to will-bending. Most of them were swiftly dealt with and brought to kneel before the emperor, but small pockets of tension festered at the edges, sometimes infiltrating Petrah to cause trouble and chaos.

  Balor fully focused his attention on portal traversal. It was the fastest way to become a Dragon, and he personally struck down several attempts to sabotage it, bolstering Resil’s reputation as a terrifying, undefeated emperor.

  Around this time, another mode of traversal came to fruition. It used the Source as the fuel in a crude way. The analysts had found a way to release a massive amount of Source from a Sky Stone with various controls over how much.

  They managed to propel a square beam of stone to the upper atmosphere. It was Veilthorn’s first step towards a space. Something that took Balor’s own species four Dominion centuries to figure out. It fulfilled a prerequisite for the world seed to determine the species viability as part of the Dominion.

  Their intentions weren’t grand enough yet, and they only seemed to be using them for demonstration purposes.

  Seeing how close he was, Balor risked skipping another decade. There were no major problems that he could see Resil, now a sixty-year-old man, couldn’t handle on his own.

  Balor’s soul matter awakened him after eight years. He feared Resil’s death, but it wasn’t that. He’d been awakened because one of his thresholds for portal traversal had been reached.

  He descended upon Petrah on a special day full of celebration. The city was crowded to the brim with all sorts of people from all corners of the world to witness a great event.

  The unveiling of the first interstellar portal.

  Balor didn’t bother assimilating with anyone this time. He had enough information to craft a new identity now, and he was well concealed in a crowd that numbered hundreds of thousands, filling every gap in Petrah.

  He saw Resil for the first time since he last saw him. The boy was an old man now with greying hair. He sat atop a golden throne on a floating platform above the crowd with his closest Petranovan relatives.

  Their golden eyes scanned the crowd, and for a moment, Balor’s own eyes crossed with the Emperor's. Resil had somehow spotted him in a crowd this large.

  A female child, presumably his daughter, also looked at him, more shocked and wide-eyed than Resil. Farrador’s bloodline program still seemed to be running very strongly.

  A group of Analysts and Arcanists revealed a construction project that had been going on for the last two decades on the highest peak of Petrah. A gigantic hollow square that dwarfed the Emperor’s own castle.

  Balor had seen it being constructed, but from his high vantage point, he’d not been able to tell if it was just a monument or not.

  It was the portal.

  Suspended in the middle of the stone frame was a gigantic Sky Stone shard the size of a small mountain.

  There were long speeches by the inventors about what they expected, and at the end of it all, they handed the Emperor a golden scroll, essentially giving him the first rights to open the portal by himself.

  Resil stood from his throne, extending his outstretched hand at the Sky Stone looming in the distance. He let out a burst of Source in a straight line, hitting a designated point in the crystal. It shattered in a series of chained explosions, dispersing a thick cloud of soul matter which quickly thinned out into a membrane held together with the frame of the portal.

  The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  They had figured out how to manipulate such large amounts of soul matter. Balor was impressed with his creations for getting this far on their own.

  Spacetime collapsed at the middle of the membrane, electric arcs and winds twisting around it as the portal reached a stable equilibrium.

  The first interstellar portal of Veilthorn was thus unveiled and stood proudly looming in the highest mountain of Petrah.

  The inventors then described what they had left to do. Currently, the portal is only linked to an unknown point in what they call the middle-space. To connect two points, they needed to construct another portal.

  The nearest target was the moon, and Balor could barely contain his excitement. Petrahns haven’t figured out the surprise he left for them there. More Sky Stone than they’d ever seen so far.

  Resil was given a silver scroll to unveil the next solution to create the endpoint of this portal. A vertical stone pillar as tall as the gigantic portal itself. It looked impossible to propel with just a Sky Stone.

  There was a strict weight-to-thrust limit that determined the escape velocity of anything flying out of Veilthorn. This stone pillar exceeded that by at least twenty times.

  Resil blasted it with Source yet again. It set off a chain reaction of shattering Sky Stone and then, miraculously, the gigantic pillar burst forth with a violent purple burst of energy from the bottom, taking off into the sky.

  Balor gazed at it, completely caught by surprise. The energy signature felt different. Every hominid in Petrah felt the impact in their brain stem as the shockwave washed over them.

  The pillar disappeared in the blue sky, piercing effortlessly through the atmosphere.

  They had unlocked something Balor never thought possible. A way to create more energy than he allowed them to. This was concerning to say the least.

  The celebrations in Petrah lasted a week. It was going on and on until the pillar made landfall on the Moon, upon which it would establish a crude endpoint of the interstellar portal.

  Balor took this time to investigate the new energy source. It was impossible to understand from the outside, because it was being closely protected by the Emperor. All bets were off now, and Balor didn’t have time to worry about unnecessary assimilations.

  He started by capturing a guard. He used the man to sneak into his superior’s quarters, which was ruined in the aftermath of two days of celebration. He assimilated the war general while the man was drunkenly walking to the bathhouse.

  Using the same man, he infiltrated the basement of the Emperor’s palace and swapped with a lower elite guard member. When the man went back to his inner-city house that day, Balor assimilated into his wife.

  He visited a good friend of hers at a weird time of night, the wife of an Emperor’s personal guard. He swapped with her, went into the house, and found the man asleep naked. Swapping into him, Balor dressed up and hurried to the palace with a pass to the highest levels except the Emperor’s personal chambers.

  This wasn’t the direction that he wanted to go. He wanted to assimilate with the inventors of the pillar. They were on the third level of the palace. He walked up to their sector and swapped with the first man that he could grab. It was a scrawny aide to one of the old Analysts, an eighty-year-old Source Wielder named Arlinch.

  The man was hard at work in his personal library, paying no mind to the young ones in his sector who were recovering from a hard day of celebration.

  Arlinch was the right target.

  Balor barged in through the ornate wooden door, locking it behind him. He walked straight to the old man, grabbed him by the neck, and petrified him with the blue glow from his eyes.

  The assimilation went smoothly, and Balor recreated the young aide, but left him unconscious on the floor.

  Arlinch had a lot on his head. Way more even than Farrador, the most intelligent man Balor had assimilated thus far. This one easily quadrupled that, and it was no surprise how such great inventions were made by fostering minds like these.

  Balor quickly found what he wanted. Arlinch hadn’t been the designer of the propulsion; that credit went to a man named Lertharin, an Elf scholar who hadn’t arrived in Petrah to see his invention work.

  Arlinch still had answers in his head. A strong memory of a demonstration that he’d watched thirty years ago in a lower stratum. An explosion with the same energy signature as the propulsion that was used for the pillar. Balor’s mood shifted from appreciation to worry as he saw how that explosion was made.

  Sky Stones and Blood Stone.

  They had somehow found what he never wanted them to find. Arlinch had the specific formula required to create the chain reaction that produced more energy with less Sky Stone.

  Balor considered killing every single inventor at once. He could wipe them out and their knowledge within a few hours.

  Then again, he was closer than he ever was to becoming a Dragon. Without this propulsion method, it would’ve taken another century. Resil would’ve died, plunging Petrah into yet another struggle to fill the power vacuum. This was the most focused this civilization had ever been.

  Bloodstone was being used, and he wanted to make sure never to come into contact with it. The corrupted seedmaker would activate as soon as he did, and this experiment of Veilthorn would be over again, when it was at the cusp of success.

  He was simultaneously close to winning and losing at the same time. It was a gamble now, and he decided to take it. Veilthorn could fail after he became a dragon. He stood a much better chance against the Seedmaker if he had his stellar core of a Dragon.

  His terraforming effort had delayed the discovery of Bloodstone. It was never going to keep it fully hidden. He was sure the Seedmaker had its own plans encoded into the world seed. Plans that were measured in tens of millennia, perhaps even more. It had unlimited time to break free.

  Balor recreated Arlinch, leaving him slumped in his chair. This time, he wasn’t going to look for bloodstone. He was going to stay well away from anyone who had it till the end of this week. Connecting Veilthorn with the moon would perhaps be enough to make him a Dragon within the current year.

  They only had to start colonizing another terrestrial space, which would clearly demonstrate their will as a species to spread to other worlds. Once they see the vast reserves of Sky Stone on the moon, they’d have no choice but to find a way.

  He could nudge them afterwards. He could plant the seed to repeat the same process for other distant planets. The day that he becomes a Dragon wasn’t far from reach at all.

  Avoiding coming into contact with bloodstone wasn’t hard at all. Balor leapt off the window and turned into a formless mass of soul matter. He reached the upper atmosphere in a second, consolidating all his soul matter into a sphere.