MASS EFFECT 2

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For starting, I gained additional body weight by absorbing the most useful and rare chemical elements. Once I get into interstellar space, I may need building material for some equipment. There was enough equipment on the gate installer that I could disassemble without risking blowing up the ship.

Mentally prepared, I used a blank Stargate to create a portal that works on magic. With sufficient energy, I prepared to depart. Such difficulties were necessary because I did not want to arrive to another world in a state of magical exhaustion. In order not to leave behind forbidden magical technologies, I built a self-destruct system into this gate, which was supposed to work half an hour after the passage was closed.

So, the portal opened, and I passed through it into another world.

When I stepped out of the portal, I immediately felt that this was indeed a different world with completely different laws of physics. First, my entire supply of naquadah transformed back into Uranium-234 and detonated immediately. Well at least I assumed such occasion, surrounding the metal inside of Fuinjutsu barrier. Strength of barrier could not hold so much, so I had to immediately 'throw' dangerous cargo. I expected that after a few seconds the barrier would collapse and the plasma would blow up in a nuclear explosion, but it did not, the matter surrounded by the barriers flew farther and farther away from me.

Calming down, I decided to find out what the hell is going on in this world with the laws of nature. The first thing to notice was the decreasing of my control over magical energy. Inside the aura, I could still cast spells, but as soon as they flew a meter away from me, all the energy in them dissipated after a second.

The second anomaly has become a chakra. It did not dissipate, but on the contrary portrayed itself as a spring steel. I could hardly change its shape. As a result, the techniques I performed before in a second now took hours or even days to create. But there were pluses. The impact of the chakra has become literally 'irresistible'. For example, the weakest fire Jutsu, able only to light up a match, now it could melt the battleship, literally evaporating it.

Biggest fiasco was waiting me when I tried to use the technology of the Ancients. The bottom line was that these technologies didn't work at all. None of the devices didn’t show any signs of working.

After spending several hours trying to figure out the reason for this failure, I came to the conclusion that the laws of physics of this world are fundamentally different from the laws of physics of the Stargate world. At the level of Newton's physics and chemistry everything worked the same way, but at the quantum level and below the whole structure of matter was based on completely different principles.

Summing up, I came to the conclusion that my situation is bad. Magic works only at arm's length. Chakra requires an unrealistic investment of time and effort. The knowledge of the Ancients can be completely thrown into the dustbin of history. And yet I'm stuck in a deep cosmos, and the nearest star is at least a few light-years away.

Calming down a little, I decided that, on the whole, it was too early to change my plans of enslaving the galaxy with replicators. Yes, I can't build a processor that runs on the quantum technologies of the Ancients. But I can still build a Photonics-based computer that I can put a fairly complex algorithm. As a result, I will get a robot capable to perform complex actions, including self-replicating and destroying everything and everyone.

I formed a ball from my body about the size of a fist, inside which I began to magically create photonic transistors and optical fibers. After going through a few dozen solutions known to the Ancients, I found one that worked enough well in this world. After that, I formed a standard photon processor of the Ancients and wrote a basic diagnostic program into its memory.

According to my plans, I had a couple of days to develop a fully Autonomous robot with a program in which at a basic level would be incorporated a Protocol of submission to me. Before I even had time to check all operation modes of the processor, suddenly in the memory of the computer began to appear literally gigabytes of incomprehensible code, which immediately began to run, overwriting or changing all my instructions.

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At the same time, on the astral level, I saw some huge creature’s tentacle connected to my computer. I couldn't even estimate the size of the creature. It literally stretched from horizon to horizon as far as my astral perception would allow me to see.

In just five seconds, the computer was completely out of my control, so I banally melted it into an amorphous mass. After that, the astral creature reached out to me, trying to subdue my Vritras body. I had to cover myself with magical shields, turn my body into a homogeneous mass, and begin to burn out the tentacles reaching after me. I could not release the parasite, because it was sitting behind the chakra barrier, which would need to me several hours to open. And it could take years to recreate another one.

After a couple of hours, the strange creature got tired of losing parts of its body, and it left me alone. Mentally wiping off sweet from forehead, I wondered what I should do next. It seemed that when the Creature said I need to destroy the Reaper, it was referring to this creature. It say 'Reaper', not 'Reapers', that changes everything. I was confident to destroy a rampaging computer, but to destroy such creature... It does make me wonder about whether it is better to work on a task is more modest - simply to survive. But we are not looking for easy ways.

For first, I need to learn about the local civilization and find out the state of affairs and the time period. After it, necessary to find the ship of Reapers or at least Collectors and study their technologies, while one, to understand how this astral creature live and what is it. Then we will think. Just sitting around and waiting a thousand years for death is not for me.

So, I need to move to a habitable planet. I don't think the Being would have thrown me into the middle of nowhere, so I'd expect that the nearest star will have a planet with a biosphere. But in space, determining the distance to a star is a difficult task. The brightness of the stars useless for this purpose. There remains only one method, triangulation, while measuring visible angles of stars in spaced.

I remembered the picture of the starry sky and wondered how I could move through space. The most working way is the Stargate. To open the portal with it I need the coordinates of the destination point, which means that there should already be a beacon. Basically, I can create a beacon based on the chakra. At least it won't go up in smoke in a couple of seconds.

Beacon device is quite a simple, so that can be created appropriate Jutsu in several hours. But I can only move it some distance by magic, because creating the same Hiraishin in local conditions is impossible task. In theory it's possible, but it's will consume several months.

That leaves only magic. However, I can open a small portal with the magic, shove in it construct of chakra, and then jump there through Stargate. The plan is ready, time to execution.

Six hours later, I sent the beacon a light-month's distance in the chosen direction. After that, I counted the coordinates from it and began to mold the Stargate out of my body. It didn't take much matter, but there were problems. To keep the magic from dissipating, I had to make a gate only half a meter in diameter. Opening the passageway, I squeezed my body into the portal and tumbled out into space on the other side.

Fortunately, chakra-construct already waiting me here, which I only slightly updated, and then sent to the next point. While I was creating a new gate, I took a survey of the starry sky at this point.

After I got to the fourth point, which together with the previous points formed a tetrahedron, I began to analyze the images. After a couple of minutes, I calculated where is the closest star. It was a yellow dwarf, so I had high chance of bumping into an earth-like planet there.

I planned my next jump with as much precision as I could muster. When I emerged from the portal, I was only a day's light from the star. From here I carefully studied the vicinity of the star, finding the planet in the habitable zone. Another jump took me into the near-space of the planet, from where I jumped into its orbit.

Each jump cost me a decent amount of my body material. Well at least, before moving to this world, I brought the weight about five hundred kilograms.

From orbit I began banally fall to the planet, accelerating under the influence of gravity. I was able to give the exit point such speed that I could not bypass the planet. I had no way of controlling my flight in a vacuum. More precisely, there was a telekinesis spell, but in this world, it could only develop an effort of a few kilos.

Given the circumstances, I was expecting a pretty hardcore landing. However, it took me several hours to reach the planet, so I managed to build a simple Jutsu on the chakra, which was supposed to allow me to slow down in the atmosphere. At an altitude of a hundred kilometers, I activated it, and by the time the planet's surface was ten kilometers away, I was no longer pretending to be a meteor, but simply falling like a stone.

Here I took the already practiced form of a quadcopter and activated the flight spell. The power consumption, of course, was several times higher than normal, but I was able to fly. From here I began to study the planet, which was a typical oxygen world with lush vegetation. There was no sign of civilization, but it was too early to start worry.