A week later.
Aron stood in a cavernous room in the Cube on Avalon Island, looking at the newly printed medical pods laying before him in precise columns and rows. As it turned out, actually using the first-generation atomic printers to print runic engravings into things was a much slower process than printing things without them. The process could be compared to trying to play a modern AAA video game on an old desktop computer from the 1980s.
However, the tradeoff was well worth it, as he was only one person, but he had many atomic printers.
He swept his gaze across the room and nodded in satisfaction as his runic heart spun into action. A slow breeze began flowing through the room as he greedily sucked the mana from his surroundings. The breeze soon grew to a small vortex of about ten feet wide before stabilizing.
With the stomp of a foot, a brilliant golden runic construct appeared beneath Aron’s feet and spread throughout the entire cavernous room, slipping beneath row after row of medical pods as it grew. It soon reached the walls and stopped growing, and Aron wiped the nonexistent sweat from his brow; now the difficult part would begin.
He sat cross-legged on the ground and began feeding his intent into the runic construct. Milky white ripples spread from him, lightening the golden glow of the construct as they swept over it. Unlike the construct, when they hit the walls, they rebounded like ripples hitting the side of a swimming pool.
The ripples continued emanating from him in time with his heartbeat, which gradually increased in speed and intensity, staining the runic construct around him white as they swept through it. Soon, the entire construct was glowing with a dim white light that rapidly rose in intensity and brightness until, if someone were to see it, it would blind them and leave a shadow behind their closed eyelids.
The white light climbed up the sides of the medical pods, filling the grooves printed in them by the host of atomic printers that had built the equipment atom by atom.
Nova, observing the activity through the microscale cameras installed in the room, ran billions of simulations as the process continued. [Simulations show a hundred percent success rate in imprinting the new pods, sir. It should be completed in just under three minutes,] she reported through Aron’s implant.
He grunted an acknowledgement, unable or unwilling to take his attention off the task he was performing. Though the simulations had all checked out over the past week, and he had rehearsed the imprinting hundreds, if not thousands of times in that time as well, it was the first time anything like this was being carried out in reality and he was determined to take extra care to prevent any mistakes.
Cut corners lead to bad outcomes, after all. These pods were meant to cure the unwilling victims of the unmourned megalomaniac behind so much death and destruction, and it was also the very last thing that would finally put paid to the cult of the progenitors’ legacy. The healing represented something far bigger than the act itself; it would be the end of a turbulent chapter in the empire’s existence and the beginning of another. Thus, he was determined to do it right.
A few minutes later, a bright flash of light shone, accompanied by a shockwave of mana that spread out and penetrated the walls, reaching a significant portion of the Cube and causing people to wonder what had just happened.
Aron opened his eyes and looked at his newest creation that he had dubbed “awakening pods”. They were designed to feed mana from compressed mana stones into their occupants, allowing him to tailor a person’s awakening to a specific element. In a pinch, they could also allow for unaspected awakenings, as Rina had experienced, but the amount of mana required for those was... prohibitive, to say the least.
So instead, he had spent the past week manually carving runes on a series of extractor bots that would head to areas where specific elemental mana densities were high, then gather that mana and condense it into mana stones, a term he had picked up through reading light novels in his rare downtime. His stockpile of mana stones had been growing since, and would only continue to grow exponentially.
The decision to do so had two main benefits: first, it would allow for the operation of the awakening pods to heal the final cultist victims, and second, it would slow down the increasing mana density around the world and give him time to settle the current batch of awakeners before another mass awakening began due to the ever-increasing mana density in the planet.
“Bring in the stasis pods, Nova,” Aron ordered.
[Yes, sir,] she replied, and a hidden door slid open in the side of the room.
Stasis pods began drifting through the loading door one after another, almost like a line of ants. Once they passed through the door, they began heading toward an unoccupied awakening pod, where they were met by RES-QR bots that transferred the patients from the stasis pods to the new pods for their treatment cycle.
Seeing that the procedure was well underway, Aron stood, nodded to Nova, who had appeared in his augmented reality view as soon as the imprinting process was successfully completed, then walked out of the room through a smaller door. He was met by two of his emperor’s aegis, who took up positions on either side of him and a step behind, but he paid them no mind.
A week and a half prior, he and Rina had had their first minor spat. He maintained that he needed no protection inside the Cube, or other government buildings for that matter, but Rina had insisted that he go nowhere unescorted. Her argument was well thought out and presented, as befit the scion and heir of a megafamily like the Rothschilds, so he had eventually capitulated and agreed to the escort.
But while he had agreed, he didn’t have to like it. So he had decided to simply ignore his escorts beyond what was necessary for the sake of politeness and to ensure that they felt valued. Other than that, he acted as he thought the emperor of all humanity should.
Passing through the hall, he entered another room which led to a block of apartments where the close families of the people now undergoing the final healing process would stay through the duration of the treatment. The block included an amphitheater that would serve as the perfect venue to gather the people staying in the complex and he triggered an announcement in their rooms that he would be present to explain the treatment process their loved ones were about to undergo.
He sat in a seat at the back of the stage and his escort split up. One of them stood behind him, where he would be out of view for casual glances, and the other headed to the door of the amphitheater, where people would soon be streaming in to meet the emperor in person.
