In truth, nothing in her previous existence had prepared her for the saturation she now felt:
Every vein, every micro-facet, every thought-thread was crammed with mana.
Her crystalline chassis throbbed like a living forge; each pulse rang down the pillars of her core dimension with cathedral-bell resonance. The once-decorative [Anodita] sub-core — so starved for [data] in earlier times — now shimmered like a newborn star, its conduits coated in streams of numbers and color-coded theorem webs.
I am a supercritical reactor, she mused, half in dread, half in awe,
fueled by solar caffeine and hubris.
[Administrator], who had started as a fingernail-sized helper, now boasted a 500-meter kernel of translucent facets and spun like a humming gyroscope beside her. Whenever Alex's thoughts threatened to bottleneck, the Support Shard:
- rerouted overflow to colder lattice banks,
- juggled thread priorities (blue threads for structural integrity, green for ecological forecasting, amber for emergency auto-healing),
- and kept the entire network from deadlocking under sheer informational weight.
[Corona Solar] burned bright as ever. Ribbons of gold shot from his four-kilometer mini-sun, flooding every relay node. Even so, the Shard-King could feel the strain:
[Corona Solar]: Peak draw at 91 %. If we exceed 100 % for longer than seven minutes, regions of the net will brown-out.
[Linguagens] darted about like a librarian with too many urgent scrolls, feeding technical briefings to the still-germinating [Harmony]. The Queen Shard, not yet a day old, complained in precisely-modulated tones:
[Harmony]: Insufficient ecological matrices. Extrapolations currently ±37 % accuracy. Requesting fresh biome telemetry.
To fill that appetite, [Néctar Solar] beamed in terabytes of Lepidopteran genetics, wing-microstructure images, and pollen chemical maps -- all while she squealed with delight at each new butterfly bonded.
And high above, [Lensing] — ever the watchful lens — pre-aligned his spatial grids, unable to create the main rift but determined to clamp space like guide rails once Alex tore it open.
D-00:04:00 — Alex issued a full-network [ping]. Status lights rippled from violet (idle) to green (alert).
D-00:02:30 — Simulations spat out the final estimate: two minutes, maybe three, to haul the stone. Mana leakage predicted at "nominal."
Nominal, Alex knew, meant "won't instantly kill us", not "safe."
[Harmony]: If leakage exceeds 6.3 × 101?3 motes/sec, delicate species on Remnant's surface may experience thaumic embolisms.
[Administrator]: Routing extra threads to monitor leakage.
D-00:00:10 — Alex pulled her [Anodita] core forward. Gleaming rings of living equations spun around her torso, locking into place.
D-00:00:05 — [Lensing] fired coordinate packets into her back-buffer: 2 km fragment, hidden far-side basin #7B-Dark.
D-00:00:00 — Reality tore.
The sound was not audible; it was felt — a toothache in the soul, a violin string snapping across the gut. Space folded like wet parchment, edges sizzling.
Instant data floods hit [Administrator], who forked new process sets just to index the phenomena.
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Mana did not simply leak; it erupted — an artesian well of aurora-colored water. Alex hurled [Anodita] filaments into the breach, yoking the moon-stone like a harpooned whale.
40 seconds in:
Suction inverted. Something unknown drew mana out faster than she pulled stone in. It felt like a void-tide, a cosmic thirst.
[Lensing]: Spatial coherence at 72 %. We are still within tensile tolerance.
[Administrator]: Spawning reinforcement threads.
High above, the visible Moon lit up with fractured rainbows.
Atmospheric seers on Remnant looked skyward in terror and wonder; scrolls would later call it "The Night of Shattered Dawn."
A delta surge at t+80 s severed three primary cords. Alex re-braided them on reflex, sweatless but strained.
Ping bursts closed in on her cortex: [Corona Solar] had identified the impossible composition:
"The Moon is inert Dust."
Thought paralysis lasted a single instance; [Administrator] split cognitive load, buffering fear.
Alex's roar thundered across subspace:
— "IT'S A PLANET. HOW CAN IT BE DUST?!"
[Harmony] answered with numbers no one liked:
Probability of systemic collapse: 100 % at current trajectory.
Two minutes elapsed. Waves of mana slammed outward. Broken lunar shards twitched in orbit, swirling like stirred pearls.
Alex's mental excavator analogy felt too generous; now she clung to a collapsing dam with fingernails of light.
Three-minute mark.
The portal clanged shut—space smacked flat.
A captured boulder of moonstone, luminescing like a newborn star, hovered above her dimension floor.
She could not waste a heartbeat.
With architects swarming, she began Shardification:
- Strip impurities — slag pockets melted away.
- Inscribe binding runes — fractal sigils laced the core.
- Infuse personal mana — her own essence pouring in like molten silver.
- Overwrite identity — force a name, a purpose, a song.
Throughout, wild pulses bucked, fracturing her torso. Every chip that flew off she transmuted into another [Architect]. Some looked like koi of glass, others like diamond macaques; forms were irrelevant — function first.
Outside:
- Plumes of fire-Dust spiraled from a lunar fissure.
- Jets of ice blossomed, crystallizing mid-vacuum.
- Gravity ripples sent smaller fragments tumbling like marbles.
- A spider-web corona of lightning stitched across regolith plains.
[Lensing] captured petabytes of imagery; [Corona Solar] buffered solar output to keep Alex's core stable; [Harmony] ran millions of ecosystem forecasts and flagged each one cataclysmic.
Somewhere on Remnant, a cloaked Wizard gazed up, staff trembling; in a distant coven, an old Witch hissed as every candle in her sanctum burned vertical white.
Alex tunneled deeper, down to quantum grain.
She felt the stone resist — as though the Dust-god inside still dreamed of orbit.
But her [Anodita] circuits poured determination; will beat inert will. Layer by layer, the lunar heart yielded.
Then—
A surge.
A pulse.
Light.
In one exquisite super-nova moment, the rock shattered into structured symmetry:
[Diamond Moon].
Radius: 2.5 km.
Aspect: opaline, rimmed in argent fire.
Domain: magic, Dust, space, tide.
Song: a sub-audible lullaby of harmonics and gravitational hum.
Alex hovered, stunned. Pride — fierce, unfiltered — welled inside her chest.
When [Diamond Moon] synced to the lattice, the network thrummed. The mana flood slowed, reversed, then rerouted into new rivers of organized flow. Architects danced; relay crystals rang.
Outside, the real Moon's shards drifted into slow, wobbling realignment; curtains of aurora swept Remnant's clouds, sowing wonder and dread in equal measure.
Alex let herself fall backward, buoyed by zero-gravity currents.
For the first time in centuries, she allowed the thought:
Maybe — just maybe — this was the right kind of miracle.