Hi, it’s me again, Aether.

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  Given that you have shown little interest in my glorious life, I will get straight to the point. Remember my little discovery of a new world ready for exploring? It turns out there is no connection like the one I have with this space, that other world is just really close. While this proximity is great news, lacking a clear guiding line meant I had to waste ages on actually finding the precise coordinates I wanted to teleport too, before I could even start considering how this teleporting would happen. It took much trial and error to finally develop a way to (relatively) safely connect to this other world. Unfortunately, my current solution has two major drawbacks.

  First, this pathway is despairingly expensive in energy, to the point that despite spending thousands of years accumulating power, I barely have enough to open a five meter wide portal. Might I remind you I am a giant eyeball measuring hundreds of meters across? The obvious solution is to use magic to shrink myself, but all my experiments point towards the fact that using magic while traversing dimensions is not something you live to regret. Because you have been unalived. By some weird and seemingly random “Tides of Space and Time” or whatever. Which makes no sense as Space and Time have no tides. Basically, it is not a good idea.

  Second, this will be a one way passage. This means that when I explore the new world, either I stay stranded and make it my new home world, which is unacceptable given it might be a barren land with nothing but unicellular life, or I have to create a new passage to come back, which brings us back to the ridiculous energy requirement. If I have trouble maintaining one portal, how am I going to manage two?

  So, as neither problem seems to have a solution, I have decided to take a step back and change my way of thinking. Thinking about the issue of size, I realized I don’t actually care about going to this new world myself, I just wish to learn everything about it and compare it to my world. I therefore don’t need to send my huge body over, I can just create a smaller avatar and send it over, even if it will have negligible fighting power. This does present a problem of its own, as an avatar cannot be disconnected from the main body for too long. As such, the portal must be continuously maintained instead of it being an ‘Open the door, cross it, and then shut it’ situation. Which, once again, brings us back to the frankly fraudulent energy expenses.

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  Fortunately, it cost much more energy to tear a hole through Spacetime than to maintain it. Even better, I can guide the energy of both worlds to do the heavy lifting for me. This means that after the initial pathway is made, my role will change from giving energy to guiding the flow of natural energy. The drawback of such a method is that I have much less control, but that is the price to pay for playing with cosmic forces that are very much beyond my level.

  Going back to our second problem, the portal only goes one way. This is great to prevent a counter-invasion from natives, and, as an avatar is disposable, I do not have to worry about the return trip. I do, however, need to recover the information collected from said avatar, otherwise what is the point? Besides, if I cannot receive information from my avatar, how am I going to control it? As such, I need to be able to exchange information between my main body and my avatar.

  Just like last time, the answer was easy enough once I thought about it. If I cannot directly shuttle data from one world to another, I just need an intermediary stop that has no such restriction. Clever, right?

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  As for what is serving as an intermediary, although this sounds even more challenging than just figuring out how to make a portal work properly, I do not need to create or find it. Indeed, does this space not meet my exact requirements? So, if you have no inconveniences, I will be moving in shortly. I just have to notify some high-ranking demons so they don’t make a mess of everything, and we will be good to go.

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  Well, if you do not voice any complaints, I will assume you have none. See you very soon, next time we will have much more time to spend together.

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