The confirmation of a rival transmigrator had shattered Mikhail's strategic certainty. The revelation that the very fabric of reality was a manipulable energy field had shattered his scientific understanding. For a week, he locked himself away, not in his office, but in the sterile silence of the Resonance Chamber laboratory deep beneath the Winter Palace. He had to understand the nature of this power before he could hope to counter it.
He didn't need the chamber himself. His mind, the 21st-century mind of Alistair Finch, was already a resonance instrument of unparalleled sensitivity. He had spent his entire second life imposing logical, structured order on the world around him. Now, he turned that immense, disciplined will inward, focusing on the theories his scientists had proposed—that consciousness itself was the key.
He sat alone in the quiet, reaching out with his mind, not to command, but to perceive. At first, there was nothing. Then, slowly, as he filtered out the noise of the physical world, he began to feel it: a silent, immense, foundational hum beneath reality. It was the energy field. Alistair the scientist marveled at it; Mikhail the autocrat saw it for what it was—the ultimate source of power.
Prometheus, he reasoned, sought to give everyone a key to this power. The Old Gods of myth had perhaps been born from it randomly, like lightning striking a primordial soup. His approach would be different. It would be controlled. It would be deliberate. It would be an act of engineering.
He focused his will, not on a grand scale, but on the smallest possible point: a single droplet of water suspended in a magnetic field in the center of the lab. He didn't try to move it or heat it. He tried to know it. He poured his consciousness into it, following the intricate dance of its molecules, the quantum bonds holding them together. He saw its structure not as a concept, but as a tangible, malleable thing.
Then, he pushed. He imagined a single molecule of salt. He envisioned its crystalline structure, its atomic weight, its sodium and chlorine ions. He focused the entire force of his will, his understanding of physics, and his connection to the energy field on bringing that single, simple concept into reality within the droplet.
The concentration required was immense, a mental effort that dwarfed the most complex logistical problem he had ever solved. For a long moment, the only sound in the laboratory was the low hum of the magnetic field. The air around the suspended droplet of water seemed to shimmer, as if reality itself was resisting the intrusion of his will. Then, he felt a subtle shift in the universal hum, a tiny thread of energy flowing from the background field into the droplet, guided by his will.
Inside the droplet, a single, perfect crystal of sodium chloride blinked into existence.
He opened his eyes, a wave of exhaustion and profound, terrifying elation washing over him. He had not teleported it. He had not transmuted it. He had created it. He had imposed his will upon the fabric of reality and made it manifest. This was his true divinity. Not foresight, not intellect, but Creation.
This changed everything. The Bogatyr Protocol was no longer about simply enhancing his followers. It was about forging them anew, using his own creative power to imprint a divine purpose upon them.
He knew where he had to begin. He needed a domain, a workshop for his new creative endeavors. He couldn't risk manipulating reality on Earth itself; the side effects were unknown. He needed a separate space. A pocket dimension.
He returned to the lab, his mind ablaze with a new, grander design. He began sketching equations that made his physicists weep with their elegance and impossibility. He was not designing a machine to travel through space; he was designing a machine to weave it. It would be a Genesis Forge, a device that would take the raw energy of the background field and fold spacetime into a stable, self-contained universe—a new realm, his own private world.
The project would take years. It would require more energy than his entire industrial empire currently produced. But it was the only logical next step.
While the plans for the Forge were being drawn up by a stunned but inspired Alexei, Mikhail began the preliminary work for his pantheon. He would need twenty Bogatyrs to act as the guardians and administrators of his new world order. He already had his first candidates in mind: Orlov, Denisov, Alexei, Sofia.
He summoned Captain Orlov. "Dmitri," he said, looking at his loyal guardian with new eyes. "I am about to ask more of you than I have ever asked of any man. I am not offering you a promotion. I am offering you a new state of being. I am offering you the chance to become the eternal shield of the Empire."
Orlov, who had witnessed things in the Resonance Chamber that he could not explain, simply nodded. His loyalty was absolute.