Dan sat upon his stone throne, his mind immersed in every part of the Inner World that he had spent tens of thousands of years constructing, thanks to the Casimir Effect, which accelerated the flow of time within it at an extraordinary rate.
Although this colossal project was still unfinished and only halfway complete, he had already made tremendous progress. He had finished constructing the two principal structures that formed the world's foundation: the Outer Continent and the Tower, both of which had demanded an immense amount of effort.
The Outer Continent had presented an enormous challenge in terms of both size and mass. Because of the tremendous amount of matter gathered from thousands of planets, it required precise management both during its construction and afterward without interruption. The fundamental problem was that the continent's current form .a flat landmass with defined edges was, in reality, scientifically unnatural. A rocky body possessing such immense mass would inevitably be forced by gravity to assume a spherical shape, because that is simply what gravity does to any sufficiently massive celestial body when left to the laws of physics without interference.
However, this Inner World was governed by Dan's own laws rather than the independent laws of physics. The stone throne upon which he sat functioned as an enormous computer, translating his will and calculations into natural laws that operated automatically and continuously throughout every corner of this world. Through it, he was able to continuously counteract that immense gravitational force using the Casimir Effect, allowing the continent to maintain its current flat form instead of collapsing into a gigantic sphere as natural physics demanded.
At the same time, however, he did not apply this reversal uniformly across the entire continent. He deliberately left exceptions in specific regions along the continent's outer edges which were intended to become forbidden lands for the living creatures that would eventually inhabit this world. In those regions, he reversed the Casimir Effect in the opposite direction, making them extremely abnormal. Most of these areas would remain frozen and possess almost no ordinary gravity.
Instead, he increased their gravitational pull to at least one hundred times that of the continent's inner regions, making them among the most dangerous places in the entire world, far beyond what any ordinary living creature could possibly imagine. This design would suppress the curiosity of the beings that would inhabit this world for countless ages, discouraging them from approaching the continent's edges, where they would eventually encounter things utterly beyond their ability to confront.
Every one of these adjustments, exceptions, and delicate balances required an immense number of precise mathematical calculations operating simultaneously to maintain them correctly and continuously. They could not pause or even lag for a single second, or the entire balance keeping the continent in its intended form would collapse. That was why the stone throne which Dan had transformed into an enormous computer that functioned according to his will, converting his commands into natural laws applied automatically was an indispensable tool for managing a project of such staggering scale and complexity.
As for the Tower, its construction proved even more complicated than that of the Outer Continent in entirely different ways, requiring far longer to design before actual construction could begin. With its four thousand completely independent paths, each containing two hundred and fifty floors, every floor itself the size of the two American continents combined, it demanded an incredibly intricate internal architecture to ensure that every path and every floor functioned as an independent world with its own environmental laws, gravity, and climate, entirely separate from the neighboring paths without any interference or destabilization of the Tower's overall structure. Achieving such complete independence among thousands of simultaneous paths within a single structure required layers of control even more sophisticated than those demanded by the massive Outer Continent.
Yet despite completing both of these monumental structures and finishing the world's basic framework exactly as intended, Dan knew that everything he had accomplished so far amounted to nothing more than the construction of a completely lifeless shell. The Outer Continent, despite its colossal mass, and the Tower, despite its countless branching paths, were, in their current state, nothing more than enormous masses of rock arranged into carefully engineered forms. This world possessed no sun to drive natural cycles, no biological, climatic, or hydrological systems capable of sustaining life in any form. It was simply stone, soil, and raw materials organized into vast, silent structures, frozen in their present state.
It was precisely here that the second phase of this immense project would begin . the phase Dan knew would be more difficult and more complex than every stage that had come before it. His task was no longer merely arranging matter and constructing structures, but something far deeper: transforming this dead framework into a living world governed by genuine natural cycles, one capable of nurturing life and allowing it to evolve over the long term according to the blueprint he had envisioned.
It would be a task requiring no less time and effort than the original construction itself perhaps even more.
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