Waking through the giant hall of golden mana stones, Ray's body was getting closer and closer to the queen sun eater. The life signature was getting stronger and stronger yet he was only getting more confident.
"If this is the limit of this nest then I will have no issues getting them to enter the sub-space. I feel like something will change when there are enough living organisms in there."
After putting Jason to bed Ray went to see Laura's children. Unfortunately she had just put them to sleep so he just finished setting up the gardens and spreading the lower tier medicinal herbs around the continent. He also created a few more mana flowers and planted them around any important structure, whether that be the gardens or the mansion.
He knew the benefits of a high concentration of magic over long periods of time so he also placed a simple mana gathering formation around these points of interest. As long as someone was likely to be there for a substantial period of time they would always have access to the most dense mana in the subspace.
Even if others had a heart of mana like Laura, Yogan and John were going to have, that didn't mean that absorbing mana would be as easy for them as it was for Ray. A natural heart of mana, like Itroth had, is created in the womb when the mana was at a specific density and the fetus was free of any impurities.
One of these factors could be controlled, but the other was near impossible to do so. Even if the mother and father were free of impurities at the time of inception and every thing that came into contact with the mother was pure, there was no guarantee that the baby would be free of impurities. Though the parents having a heart of mana would help.
But being free of impurities doesn't only help when creating a heart of mana, having any impurities would impede the flow of mana into and around the body. With Ray's talent always keeping his body 100% free of impurities at all times he had a natural advantage over the 3 others.
The hundred flowers cultivation technique would also add to this gap, as any progress in the creation of one with one with mana would increase rates of absorption.
For those who can't keep a pure body at all times, having denser mana would increase their rate of absorption.
After setting all that up, he used his clone to practice flying. He could theoretically do it now, but the consequences of messing it up were too great. His clone was not very high quality and only had one of his 7 different thought channels placed into it so it exploding would hurt but wouldn't be fatal. It being weaker also helped as it had access to less mana, meaning that its body exploding might not be fatal.
With all that completed he shifted his focus back to the giant hall. Settling the subspace's affairs had taken a whole day. Even if he wasn't moving as fast as he possibly could, that still served to show just how large this hall was.
In the distance a giant door came into view and in a moment he appeared before it.
"The queen has been waiting for you." One of the guard ants spoke up. There were hundreds of them stationed here, and while not as human-like as Julius they were many times stronger.
They stood a foot over Ray's normal human form and their 4 arms each held a heavy looking saber.
Seeing that Ray didn't respond to him, the guard ant spoke up again. "The queen has been waiting for you." It was only now that Ray's gaze shifted away from a certain corner of the wall that the giant gate was on.
There was a door there, which wasn't strange as he had passed maybe hundreds of thousands of such doors, but this one had a powerful life signature coming from it.
There was also a powerful life signature coming from behind the giant gates, but it was nowhere as vast as this one.
'Must be an especially powerful guard, ' he thought to himself.
Seeing that the guard was going to say the same thing again, Ray responded.
"It is my honor to speak with your queen. Please open the gates so that I may speak to her." He could blow the gates open with a wave of a hand if he wanted to, but as he came here with the intentions of peace talk he refrained from doing so.
The guard stared at him empty eyed for a few seconds before its antennas twitched.
"Open the gates." It said.
'That was a little strange but these guards don't look all that smart.'
A group of the guards walked over to the door and with all four arms they pushed it as hard as they could, their exoskeletons appearing on the verge of breaking. Whatever this door was made out of was exceptionally heavy as these guards were peak strength focused grandmasters.
Now that the gates were open Ray could now sense the differences between the two life signatures even more. This one seemed inflated, large but not dense, while the other one was powerful yet hollow, like someone had dug out the insides.
"Either way I am about to meet the queen, after that I'll have to go to the next major city and get a few books. I still want to be a creation master, so I have to see the advances my chosen occupations have gone through since Itroth's days."