Once Elder Veridian sent word back, the four of us got to work.

The Sanctuary had promised us assistance in the form of essence and mages - but to take advantage of both, we needed to have the first step of the sun-creation project completed.

In short, we needed the core of the sun to be built.

This wasn’t something that we could delegate to other people, because most alteration mages here didn’t bother dabbling in dimensional terraforming. I had spent years playing with dimensional terraforming, all in preparation for the day I made a real artificial sun core - but now I needed to put everything together and do it for real.

The first thing I confirmed, as usual, was that using pure essence wouldn’t work. I could create rays of sunlight via dimensional terraforming, but trying to create a ball of light that could sustain itself simply wasn’t an effective way to create an artificial sun if I wanted to finish sometime within the next ten thousand years.

The other problem we came to realize after Felix analyzed the items we brought back was simple. Once we put the sun together, it was going to be very hard to take it apart again. In other words, we needed to get things right the very first time, because otherwise, we might break the components we had retrieved from the hero trial with great difficulty. That would be a mistake that was impossible to recover from.

The first part of the project we focused on was the core of the sun.

The artificial sun had four components to it - the core, the distorted lens, the spatial pocket, and the wire that teleported essence around. However, the core was the only part we needed to make ourselves, and also the most important part of the sun. While constructing the core of the sun, we would also need to manually shield it from the laws of reality present in this dimension. If we didn’t, it would collapse the moment I stopped pouring essence into it. But even before figuring out that problem, we needed to solve a simpler problem.

How to actually get the core of the sun working.

My {Spatial Capsule} proved at least somewhat capable of maintaining this situation… at first. I could at least start to set up a star core inside of the spatial capsule, and since the star core was isolated from the rest of the universe, it didn’t face constant destabilization.

This didn’t last long, because I quickly encountered another problem.

“I think what we’re missing is a better understanding of how an actual star works,” said Felix, after a week of failed attempts to create a sun out of pure essence. “None of us have really focused much on astronomy in any of our previous worlds, which is really making it hard to construct a sun from scratch.”

“That makes sense, but I can’t think of a way to resolve the problem right now,” I said. “This world won’t have the knowledge we need, and by the time we leave this world it’ll be too late to help the inhabitants and get the rewards for changing this dimension’s fate.”

“So how do we solve the problem right now?” asked Anise.

Sallia thought about it for a few moments… and then grinned.

“Felix, I have an idea,” she said. “Miria and I both saved an ability slot from our rune magic system. What if Miria and I both create new abilities, specifically to manually create some kind of makeshift core for a sun? We have no way of getting the knowledge we need in this world, so we’re going to have to brute force it with magic somehow. Since that’s the case, we just need to figure out how to make it happen.”

Felix thought about it for several seconds, before he grinned. “I like that idea. Do you have anything more specific in mind?”

“Well, here’s what I’m thinking. First of all, we should take a material that is at least kind of similar to a sun in this dimension, and then use it as a baseline. I’m thinking those transparent rocks that emit or trap crazy amounts of light and heat. Miria’s parents use them all the time while they’re baking, and they’re also used as light sources around the city. Felix, you can use your dimensional factory to melt down materials and rebuild them, right? How about you start by melting down a bunch of those rocks? Then we put it all back together as a giant orb, before Miria and I use our final rune abilities to give this rock the properties it needs to function as a real sun?”

Felix nodded thoughtfully. “I think that would work. I have at least a rough understanding of what items can accept Achievement now, so I think we could take things a step further if we create a star core that the Market would recognize as an ‘item.’ After all, items from the Market work the same, no matter which world we end up in. Miria’s umbrella has always functioned the same way, even in dimensions like this one where natural fire and lightning don’t seem to exist at all. I figure that’ll double down on how well this star core can resist dimensional corrosion.”

Sallia nodded. “That’s a good idea too. We want this thing to be as durable as possible, so that any accidents or small leaks do as little damage as possible.”

After that, the four of us spent several hours trying to figure out exactly what Abilities Sallia and I should take to convert the rock core into the core of a proper star. The requirements for artificially creating a Market-item material were very strict, so we decided that Sallia would be in charge of converting the rock core into a proper item material. To do that, her final rune ability was going to be a type of ability that could slowly reshape the core, making it more and more appropriate as a material for Felix’s needs.

Of course, that wouldn’t be enough to get our artificial sun core online, so my final rune ability slot was also needed. Since my ability needed to be related to space and water, I decided upon my own third rune ability.

Felix, Sallia, Anise and I spent quite a while trying to figure out the best way to use my ability to turn the sun into a working star core. Eventually, the ability we created was simple.

If I teleported an object into a pool of water, I would be able to ‘attune’ the object to concepts more. This would make it easier to turn the star core into a material for Felix’s needs - but more importantly, it would also make the star core more capable of storing and ‘imprinting’ certain types of essence. Such as the ability to store lots of alteration essence, and ‘copy’ the aspects of sunlight that I wanted it to maintain.

After the two weeks of brainstorming, all we had left to do was execute. Anise helped get a big pool of water built using her abilities, to make sure she still had some level of participation in the core-creation process. Sallia and I formed the abilities we had worked out with Felix. Then, Sallia, Felix, and I spent nine months building the star core and turning it into what we needed it to be.

Power: Form Your Third rune (Absorption Essence)

Achievement +900

By the end, I no longer had a problem of my ‘star cores’ fizzling out the moment I stopped concentrating on them. So long as the star core had enough essence, and was shielded from the rest of the world’s dimensional laws, it would constantly absorb alteration essence and convert it into sunlight.

Item: Fake Star Core

Effects: This item can absorb alteration essence and convert it into sunlight, before emitting that sunlight into its surroundings. This item will also spend a small amount of absorbed essence attempting to repair itself when damaged..

Maintenance cost: N/A (Does not reconstruct or repair itself upon returning to the Market, and has little tolerance for travel from one dimension to another.)

After nine months, we finally had our star core built. During that time, two more small-scale raids also occurred, giving us another six hundred Influence Achievement.

Influence: Contributed to the defense of the Sanctuary by a negligible amount (X2)

Achievement + 620

This, along with the 900 Achievement from my third rune, pushed my Achievement from 60,551 to 62,071. 

By the time the next Astral tide came, we had our star core built and online. We had also sealed it in the spatial pocket, with the essence-teleporting wire set up and the distorted lens wrapped around the star core. The prototype of the artificial sun was completed. The star core needed a moderate amount of alteration essence to sustain itself, and it didn’t actually pay for its own maintenance cost yet - but the larger the star grew, the higher its essence generation would grow. While the maintenance cost would also grow, it would increase a much slower pace. The only thing we still needed to do was actually dump essence into the star core to get our artificial sun online.

It was like a match that could light a bonfire. It didn’t mean anything yet, but it was the beginning of everything. We just needed to pass through the last few steps without incident.