The Gamma-level clearance was a tsunami of information. Astra's mind, already a fortress of calculated thought, was now the central processing unit for a planetary war. Live battle data, resource allocations, the complete scientific and historical archives of the Saiyan race—it was all his to command. He saw everything, from the grunt in the trench to the King on his throne.
And he saw the rot.
Beneath the bluster of conquest, the Saiyan empire was a fragile thing. Their technology was largely stolen or reverse-engineered, maintained by a slave class of conquered engineers who sabotaged it when they could. Their supply lines were stretched thin across a dozen minor conflicts. Their culture of "might makes right" created constant, petty internal power struggles that drained resources. They were a magnificent, brutal hammer, but one with a cracked handle, swinging at an increasingly complex universe.
Astra became a ghost in the machine. By day, he was the King's Analyst, the Architect of Ruin. He delivered flawlessly. He identified three more Tuffle command centers, providing vulnerabilities that led to swift, devastating victories. He optimized Saiyan supply routes, shaving precious days off logistics. He became the unseen hand guiding the war, and with each victory, his value—and his leash—grew shorter.
But by night, he was a gardener, tending a secret plot in the shadows of the vast Saiyan data network.
His first project was Project: Exodus. Using his access to the planetary defense grid schematics, he began designing a flaw. Not a weakness that could be exploited by an invader, but a backdoor. A hidden command sequence that, when activated with the right authorization code—a code only he would possess—would create a localized, stable shield bubble around a predetermined location for exactly 47 seconds. Long enough to evacuate a small, chosen number. It was a digital lifeboat hidden in the code of a sinking ship.
He worked on it in encrypted fragments, burying the code within mundane system updates and redundant diagnostics. It was a slow, painstaking process, a masterpiece of digital steganography.
His second project was born from a different alert. A routine scan of deep-space sensor logs, part of his duty to watch for external threats, flagged an anomaly. A tiny, high-energy spatial ripple, unlike any natural phenomenon or known Frieza Force engine signature. It was fleeting, gone in a microsecond, and the system's automated filters had almost discarded it as background noise.
But Astra's [Appraisal] and [Stellar Forge] saw the pattern. It wasn't random. It was artificial. And the energy signature, though faint, resonated with something he'd felt before: the inter-dimensional shift of the Multiverse Mandate System.
Something, or someone, else was out there. Something that could travel between worlds.
The discovery sent a jolt of ice through his veins. He was not the only player on this cosmic board. Was it a scout for Frieza? A servant of another multiversal power? Or something else entirely?
This changed everything. It meant his countdown to Frieza's arrival was not the only deadline. There were other variables, unknown and unpredictable.
He created a dedicated, hidden subroutine within his access, a silent sentinel program he dubbed Watchtower. Its sole purpose was to continuously scan all sensor data, no matter how insignificant, for any trace of that anomalous energy signature. He needed data. He needed to know what he was facing.
These secret projects were a constant drain on his focus, a second war fought in the silent spaces between his official duties. The strain was immense. Maintaining the 15x personal gravity field, performing his analytical duties for the King, and conducting his shadow war within the system pushed his [Energy Harmonization] to its absolute limit.
It was during a late-night session, as he was meticulously planting another piece of the Exodus code, that the System chimed with a new, unexpected alert. It wasn't for a Multiverse Jump. It was a direct response to his accumulated efforts and his skyrocketing Power Level, which had now quietly reached 520.
[User has reached a significant milestone in power and influence.]
[Accessing latent potential...]
[Unique Skill: Stellar Forge is evolving.]
[New Function Unlocked: Cognitive Partition.]
Astra felt a shift within his mind. It was as if a new chamber had been constructed in the fortress of his consciousness. He could now wall off a section of his mental processing power, allowing it to run a single, complex task autonomously in the background.
It was the tool he desperately needed.
He immediately applied it. He created a Partition and assigned it the task of maintaining his personal gravity field. The constant, draining effort vanished from his primary awareness, becoming a background process. The relief was instantaneous. He felt… lighter, freer, his mind unshackled.
He created a second Partition and assigned it to run the Watchtower subroutine, a dedicated watchman forever scanning the stars for the unknown.
He was no longer a single mind trying to do the work of three. He was becoming a collective. A council of one.
He looked at the black wristband, the symbol of his bondage and his power. He was deep inside the beast now, so deep he could feel the beat of its heart. He was feeding it victories with one hand while preparing its grave with the other. And now, he knew he was not alone in the dark. There were other hunters in the cosmic forest, and he needed to be ready for them all.
The Garden of Shadows was flourishing, and from it would grow the seeds of either salvation or a ruin far greater than the one he was helping to create.