Years passed as Dan kept working to expand his organization. After a decade or so, the cult and the Explorers Guild stopped needing his direct input. Mainly because the cult was running the Explorer's Guild, making it all one big organization.
Dan still needed to make up sightings of aberrations and plan attacks for possible future members, but the bigger the cult grew, the less he needed to do. Something that helped that along was that the stone folks were a long-lived species, so each member of the cult could live for centuries and maintain their positions without issue. It's not like they needed to control everything since having the majority in something like the Explorer Guilds was good enough. Even better was the fact that Dan also pushed them to integrate themselves into other important roles in society, which would then help them in the long run.
At some point, the cult and the guild grew enough and were stabilized enough that Dan finally moved to expand outside their current kingdom. That took some time, but it wasn't too long, as he could send members of the cult ahead and have them start new branches of the Explorer's Guild. Of course, by then, people had already heard about the Explorer's Guild, and it didn’t take as long to gain members.
Meanwhile, the one area that Dan didn't have much success with was magic research. Looking into the issue, it turned out that it was mainly because the researchers didn't know much about the wider magical world. Dan had pushed them to learn as much about space magic as possible, but that aspect of magic seemed relatively advanced. As such, he pulled back on his need for space research and began letting the scholars and other magic users he had hired over the years look into the other aspects of magic. He would let them build a foundation over some time before switching their focus back to spatial magic.
With the expansion of the Explorer Guild, and by far, one of the things Dan appreciated about the entire endeavor was that they did find more aberrations. Not only did that make Dan's work of faking aberration attacks fall off since there were actual attacks, but it also meant that he started hunting them down at a much greater rate. Sadly, a much greater rate meant about one aberration a month at best. The worst part was that the aberrations were usually D rank or lower, which didn't really offer Dan much power. In fact, if it wasn't for him bringing attention to these aberrations by creating the cult, Dan doubted anyone would investigate their appearance.
Either way, the finding of more aberrations meant that his duties were stabilized since the threat was much realer now. Thus, he decided that it was time for him to finally visit the green areas at the center of the continents. These green areas turned out to be the greatest disappointment since they were just normal forests like the ones he had seen many times back on Earth. Obviously, they were amazing sights to the locals since most of the planet was just rock and stone.
With nothing else to do, Dan traveled around the planet hoping to find more aberrations while also setting the seeds to help the guild and cult expand.
After about a decade of traveling throughout the planet's barren lands and visiting many underground places in which he did indeed find normal plants, Dan felt it was time to check back on his magical research team. He was glad to find that the research team had made some good progress at cataloging information. The progress was breaking down the different types of magic and finding how mana interacted with reality.
It explored what Dan had already learned plenty of by simply traveling around, such as how chants worked and why will was such an important aspect of magic. None of it mattered to him since aberrations couldn't use magic like regular folks.
Aberrations could harness ambient mana but only to unleash their telepathic and telekinetic magics. Usually, the higher the aberration was in rank, the more ambient mana they could control and unleash. It was an annoying but balanced approach, well, unless you followed an Eldritch God, because then the rules of magic for aberrations changed. Either way, Dan felt it was some good give and take because most people couldn’t travel in the Astral as free as aberrations.
With the new magic research on its way, Dan began steering the researchers back to spatial magic and the study of the Astral. He really needed to get off the planet, as he felt that he was falling behind based on the amount of time he had spent on the stupid rock. There were just not enough aberrations for him to progress quickly, and even if he did slowly power up, it wasn’t at a good enough rate. Things were even getting a bit worse as the guild expanded. Sure, they were finding more aberrations, but usually, by the time he made his way across an entire kingdom, the thing had already been killed. And the locals took the Heart Crystals, crushed them, and used them for enchantment purposes. He had bought a few here and there, but their rarity and usefulness caused a real shortage.
If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
The hope was that the research team would unlock teleportation via ritual circles, and he could teleport quickly between places. This would then allow him to reach the aberrations sightings sooner. Even then, Dan didn’t think it was enough to get him to a high rank fast enough.
Based on Dan's current rate of progress, he decided to give the planet a few more decades. If nothing was accomplished by then, he wouldn’t have a choice but to set out blindly into the Astral once again.
Dan was quickly getting bored. There was only so much time he could spend on such a limited planet. He had explored all he could without it getting too dangerous since there were monsters higher in rank than him. The planet didn't have much on the side of art or games or anything, and the citizens were mostly trying to survive and expand. He had thought of bringing some games from Earth over to the planet, but he felt it might bring too much attention to him. What made everything worse was that he couldn't progress like normal creatures on the planet, so fighting didn't do much for him—making conquering or hunting monsters pointless or attracting unneeded attention.
Out of everything, the one thing he was glad about in his new form was that he no longer had any true needs. He didn’t need to eat, sleep, drink, poop, or anything, and thanks to losing much of his humanity, he had also lost his sex drive. Which, in retrospect, sucked because that would have been a good way to pass the time.
The only reason why Dan didn't go crazy as he waited for things to progress was his mental capabilities from being an aberration, giving him a much tougher mind. Additionally, he could meditate, which helped him pass the time and was something he often did when he wasn’t dealing with minor problems in the cult or the branch of the guild he controlled.
Thankfully, after a decade of waiting, Dan finally got some results from his research group. They cracked teleportation. It was expensive and required a huge setup of runes to take in and store mana for the teleportation process, but it was accomplished. The wait was worth it since he began having the guild set up the teleportation network.
It took time for the guild to set up a good teleportation network, and by that point, they were expanded across half of the globe. With the new network, the guild became the talk of the world, and much attention began raining down upon it. Dan, worried about the attention, had used the cult to twist the story to say the guild itself had created the advancement as a group project, which helped reduce the attention directed at him.
With the active teleportation network, Dan could quickly cross the globe, making his hunts much easier. Sadly, the aberrations that were found were still weaker than he was, so they didn't help him progress much, but every little bit helped.
Though the network was great, its creation brought out one of its biggest issues. It wouldn't help him move between planets since it already took so much mana to use it within the same region. Dan believed it would get better the better the runic circles got, but he didn’t feel it was worth the investment. Instead, he moved the research project to try and find a way to detect planets or World Crystals. If he could get a gadget that allowed him to do so, it would make Astral travel much more straightforward.
It did take some convincing to get the researchers to do what he wanted, but there was little issue considering he was paying them to research. He did tell them that it was to expand the Explorer's Guild out into the stars, which helped with their motivation.
This time, the research didn't take as long since there was one big difference between planets with life and those without it. Mana. As far as Dan knew, all planets with life needed mana, and mana came about via World Crystals. So, all the researchers had to do was make something that could detect mana. The problem was that the Astral was huge, and spotting quantities of mana from so far away would be challenging. Even so, he was the perfect research assistant since he could easily leave the planet and test whatever they came up with.
To Dan’s delight, it didn’t even take a year for the research group to develop a mana monocle that would let people see mana. Something Dan couldn’t do since he lacked the ability to use normal magic to enhance his vision. Sensing mana was doable, but it wasn’t very good at the distances he would need to travel in the Astral.
Either way, hoping there would be another planet with mana nearby that would act like a beacon in the emptiness of space, Dan headed out of the planet's protection. Putting on his monocle and looking around, he first saw that the planet gave out lots of mana in the form of the Ethereal Barrier. The barrier not only protected a planet from invading forces but also fended off the always-hungry Chaos Mana.
Now, what Dan didn’t expect to see was a torrent of mana traveling across the cosmos like a river. The river of mana came from one side of the planet, merging with its Ethereal Barrier before reappearing on the other side. The best part was that both sides extend outwards into the Astral.
Thinking back to Earth, Dan hadn’t felt it before since the mana given by Earth’s barrier had blocked his senses, and he had probably flown off in the wrong direction. However, now that he could properly see mana without too much issue, the river of mana was as ever-present as the stars. The best part was that it eventually flowed off into the distance where Dan’s eyesight gave out, but Dan imagined if he followed, he would find all sorts of neat things.
