CHAPTER 98: BREAKTHROUGH IN TECHNOLOGY

It was the sixteenth day of Kivas’ survival in Fathomi. Morning light filtered through the crystalline patterns overhead, fracturing across her desk where a scroll lay unfurled with countless sigils and diagrams—a sign to the breakthrough of her ambitions.

Quiet currents of fate stirred in the halls of Vaingall as Kivas rose to witness what her collaborators had wrought.

While she slept, the entrance to the one and only Xenorealm beneath Vaingall had birthed its long‑awaited breakthrough.

Secured and sealed on the third day of this timeline, thanks to Kivas and Samael’s premonition about its existence on the first timeline—the gate had become more than a conduit into alien geography.

It had become an active laboratory as soon as Sarkha’una was freed from her task of making a potion concoction to nourish Samael’s Genesis Core—a fortress of potential, per say, drawing from her memory of past resets and the stubborn certainty she had never forgotten.

Kivas applied distant recollections of that realm and its mercurial threats to everything she possessed.

And what more could Kivas ask when her involvement in these projects had been accelerated once Oizys entered this timeline.

Two pivotal projects at that.

The first explored assimilation power—the latent force Yoiglah carried as a living shrine, capable of binding divine essence across forms.

It was still in its testing phase but the concept and design had been created, meaning that it won’t be for long until Kivas could get her hands on this new piece of Vaingall’s original technology.

The second pivotal project was the embryonic design of a security system, engineered to differentiate friend from foe, to open for allies and deny access to hidden conquest. Alone the projects would have remained separate arcs.

However, after seeing Oizys’ involvement on these projects, Kivas developed a much more efficient mindset since she finally saw the conceptualized idea turned into physical existence.

"Let’s just conjoin these two projects together," Kivas happily declared back then.

Under Kivas’s unconscious guidance, the two threads wove into a single, immense undertaking.

Or to be exact, Kivas just noticed that the nature and source of these two ideas could be fueled by the same method of testing, and that the two projects were quite similar with one another.

So it wasn’t really anything special outside of the actual realization. Kivas just relegated the two lines of progress into a single denser line, which should be more efficient in theory.

Not only that, since the two technologies would be based on the same breakthrough, the result of each actualization would feed one another in a tight feedback loop, and could possibly lead to an entirely brand new technology altogether.

"You seem to be liking this place, Sarkha’una."

"It is much to my intrigue when it comes to all-things exotic, Benevolent One," Sarkha’una playfully replied. "Especially now that I have someone other than myself to watch my back."

Within the Xenorealm, a certain experimentation had been unfolded.

"What if I just stab your back here and now?" Samael humored with barely any change in expression, making it hard to guess if she was joking, or threatening to kill Sarkha’una out of nowhere.

"You really should smile when you’re making a joke," Kivas casually pointed out.

"Like this?" Samael said while churning the most devilish and terrifying smile that she had ever showcased to Kivas.

"I don’t think I want to be told a joke with someone with that kind of, special type of smile."

"Heh," Oizys sneered in amusement. "You have a hidden talent in smiling, Samael. Please keep it hidden."

"That wasn’t a joke though," Samael said with the same usual deadpan.

"Oh."

"Oh."

"Please don’t stab my back," Sarkha’una answered with a professional smile "In case that you didn’t get the memo."

They all eventually peered into the expanse of alien space beyond the barrier.

They stood before a vast dome, its surface tessellated by hexagonal scales of shimmer and resilience, under which Claturian-crafted devices aligned memory-runic glyphs with xenorealm constructs.

Oizys had contributed elegant lattice‑filigree conduits, combined with the artificial e crystalline resonance of Yoiglah’s essence, while Samael had woven anchoring wards and spectro‑magnetic seals centered on limit‑tuning.

Together, they built a living matrix capable of interfacing with the impossible.

Through the dome, the alien world hovered beyond—a bleak vista of gargantuan structures, drifting landmasses, gravity tearing sky from ground.

Then something immense fell toward the dome, a monolithic shard etched with alien ichor and alive with spined tentacles of void‑flesh.

It struck the barrier with fatal intent. The immense monolith should have torn through, should have smashed the projection into ruin. Instead, the barrier held.

The hexagonal scales pulsed. The barrier hummed with wound loops of energy that absorbed shock, then re‑channeled it.

The xenos’ tentacles writhed against the surface, their corrosive segments snagging runes, yet the barrier flexed and the sigils glowed.

Kivas watched with unusual gleam, a tension coiling in her chest, then released.

She chuckled, and laughter built.

She smiled with the soft madness of success.

The prototype worked. She turned toward Samael, eyes bright. Samael nodded, lips still parted in concentration. She stepped aside and summoned one of her Limbo Tier Divine Constructs.

At her silent, synchronized command, the Construct phased outward through the barrier into the alien realm beyond.

The dome trembled at the intrusion, both on the inside and outer layers. The monolith’s grip tightened, yet the Construct slipped through, then phased inside the dome again, unconcerned by the hostile environment.

Kivas and probably everyone who contributed to this project felt triumphant clarity.

The mechanism could authenticate passage, enforce security, and channel essence across dimensions.

It might hold the defense lines within the Xenorealm singlehandedly, allowing for selective exploration, or seal threats before they breached.

It could even be used as layers of defensive infrastructure within the Vaingall itself, or even when expanding the territory outward or inward into the Xenorealm.

Not to mention, Kivas could also sell or even mass-produced a product made from this technology.

With the Karasu Association at standby, a new joint cooperation might be born somewhere in the future.

The Construct’s pulse grew faint, as it resumed station beside Sarkha’una.

Kivas stood, silent for a moment, absorbing the weight of what had been done.

"To think that one of our many projects had reached this far."

"The fact that we have more than seven projects still pending for prioritization is quite hilarious, if you ask me," Samael added.

"Hehehe," Oizys smiled as she posed with a checkmark hand-gesture on her chin. "As the new self-proclaimed NVC’s Head Chief of Research, I can assure you that all of those projects will eventually see their bright day."

"She is so prideful that she blurted the ’self-proclaimed’ part alongside her boasting," Samael amusedly pointed out.

"You heard that sentence wrong."

Kibas wryly chuckled. "I doubt that dementia exists in Fathomi, Oizys."

The barrier faced down another newly crashing monolith again, its eldritch limbs still smarting against the domed scales, and Kivas laughed again, this time softly, with satisfaction tempered by the gravity of what had been achieved.

’Let’s check the core now that it is active," Kivas told others to come along.

After the dome’s first trial by combat, still humming with residual resonance, Kivas, Samael, Oizys, and Sarkha’una advanced toward the core that powered the entire dome.

The casing before them had been sealed beneath layers of reinforced wards and crystalline shields; now it clicked open, revealing the inner apparatus.

Jagged strands of alien tentacle flesh had pierced the edge of the chamber in the heat of the test—a side effect of the security protocol—but the interior remained intact.

Oizys stepped forward and pressed her palm against a translucent conduit.

The conduit pulsed in response: veins of crystalline resonance woven from Yoiglah’s essence combined with filigreed nanorune patterns.

Each hexagonal conduit fed energy into segmented circuits carved into the casing walls. Kivas drew nearer, feeling the hum of divine assimilation beneath her fingers.

The dome’s functioning relied on two integrated mechanisms. The first was the sensory filter, powered by an assimilation—a mathematical lattice of essence signatures that bound interceptive signals to known friendly patterns.

Divine essence—specifically Yoiglah’s shrine-bound energy—was transmuted into a baseline signature.

Each ally who passed the barrier carried calibrated resonance keyed to that template.

And when a being approached, the energy field looped assimilation algorithms that compared incoming essences to the baseline.

Friendly signatures were matched and allowed to pass. Hostile anomalies—or unknown resonance—were neutralized or deflected outward.

"Looks like the second mechanism is also working just fine."

The second mechanism was the kinetic transference matrix.

When the monolith struck the barrier, the hexagonal plates—each constructed from crystalline alloy embedded with soul-ruin runes—absorbed that kinetic energy and channeled it into the assimilation grid.

The ward loop converted destructive force into stabilizing energy. Tentacles that breached gaps triggered instantaneous encapsulation by spectral coils that then compressed foreign tissue to harmless form.

Essence fragments were looped back through assimilation nodes to decode their nature: any signature recognized as hostile triggered automatic reintegration into containment cells.

All of this happened within milliseconds, using divine logic circuits that processed essence patterns rather than binary code.

Yes, it was basically an entirely new and magical programming language that took heavy inspiration with that exist on Earth with computers and all sorts of intelligent devices and super machines.

Oizys was able to speed up this entire project due to her knowledge of these Earthly things as well, which of course, Kivas still hadn’t caught up to, that Oizys was simply just herself from another timeline.

Kivas peered at the core matrix where intertwining energy conduits glowed in tessellated rhythm.

She saw faint echoes of distorted tentacle residue, suspended in stasis—caught by assimilation filters before they could corrupt.

New glyphs had self‑corrected across the lattice as Samael’s anchoring wards integrated feedback loops from the test’s impact. T

his system achieved three things at once: detection, discrimination, and energy recirculation thanks to assimilation.

Samael spoke quietly though her voice carried affirmation. "It’s more than what we designed initially. The system repurposed the threshold algorithm mid‑strike and adjusted the defensive profile in real time."

Sarkha’una nodded, her eyes reflecting gratitude as she traced a glowing glyph. "To think that this kind of thing can exist is quite baffling, to be honest.

With deliberate motion, Samael activated a planar helix inside the core. Crystal shards arranged like a spiral arch began rotating within a vacuum shell.

That helix drew in excess energy from the barrier, including fragments of essence the assimilation nodes had quarantined.

Each fragment passed through a convergence chamber where dual-purpose processes occurred: the reclamation of benign essences and the purging of those identified as hostile.

The reclaimed energy entered a reclamation reservoir—an accumulator that stored divine resonance to reinforce the dome’s wards. Hostile bits were sequestered into isolation cubes that glowed with faint eldritch shadow.

And thus, the smart defensive system of Vaingall had been born!