When the Core began to have it harder with creating the line, having a harder time reaching the edge, it should have noticed something being wrong. But it didn't, instead of moving on without a care, not realising its process wasn't working exactly as intended. The Entity did luckily notice the flaws a while after, though the damage had already been done.

Small leaks. Ones were noting but a particle or two got through without being stopped. A simple like that mattered little to anybody, the actual amount of energy being lost so low that it wasn't even worth trying to calculate. But, the reasoning for this loss was a whole other thing entirely. And it all revolved back to how the Panels worked, to begin with, their densities being the true decider of everything.

A Panel, at the minimum, had to be five percent denser than the Mana within. This was not an entire unbending rule, the Core just knowing that from experience. Without a five percent overshoot of the normal density, nothing really happened when the Mana within tried to push back against the escaping Energy. Without that level, the quantity of Mana being stopped from escaping out and dissipating was so low that the Core couldn't match it against anything else as a comparison. And even at those five percent, time would still allow for some level of Mana to get out, forcing the Entity to go ever higher than those meagre amounts.

There was a reason that it had put so much energy and time into creating the Panels, the Core needing to make sure that no smaller losses came about. Having the Density of the walls be close to a thousand percent denser than the Mana inside the domain helped to stop the process of escaped energies completely. It was so small that more Energy came in than out, making any losses worthless.

But that didn't matter at the lower levels. The Mana from the outside able to break through was still outweighed drastically when the Core only increased the walls by a factor of one hundred percent. Mana could still be contained within those walls, and they most certainly stayed in place, but small amounts would still come out at regular intervals. Again, it wasn't that bad, the actual quantity being so low that a single meter of travel amounted to no loss at all.

Yet when it was a hundred meters or more, the amounts began to grow into quantifiable ones. By a hundred and fifty meters, the loss was close to one full Mana-Point. That may not have sounded like a lot but it was nearly a quarter of everything sent through. To make it worse than before, the amounts lost were based around the Mana sitting just by the walls. With the Core having made the line as thin as possible, everything was constantly grinding against them, allowing for virtually everything to have a chance at escaping into the abyss.

How would that be fixed? Well, it just meant that a certain extension would have to be made early on, the Core forced to increase densities evermore, lest it would have to deal with more and more Mana being lost. With a quarter being removed every hundred meters or so, it would take four turns of that before the actual remaining count was so low that the Core would have trouble using it. Sending a lot of Energy through was already hard. Losing most of that energy before it could even be used was inefficient.

And the Core was against that more than anything, ruthless around the concept of wasted resources. Everything had a place to be and the Entity would be damned if everything was there precisely. If it had anything to say, it would be a long speech about the need for everything to be right the first time.

Yet the road to perfection was not quick and there were times where a whole operation had to be reworked if it wanted to function properly. The Core could have technically continued another three hundred meters and still have it working semi-decently, but it would have brought too many bad ideas along with it. And the waiting period for sending out Mana would have been utterly atrocious, just to make it all worse.

Which was why an entire thirty minutes was spent making sure everything worked, With an additional ten minutes on top of that to make sure that the Core could still make sense of the time. Previously, it had been using the original variant of the [Moss] for that, yet this process had been cut short when the Core had removed every single piece of the plant from its domain. And that had somewhat forced it to shift over to an alternative source of information about time through growth, this being the growth of a Moss Variant. [Blood-Moss] could still grow without a constant source of energy, just like the original one, though the variant was quite slower at that. And that meant that the Core would have to adjust its sense of time-scaling, else it would constantly mismanage when what was. An hour could be a half and just the opposite. Also, it was somewhat forced to make sure no creatures accidentally stepped on it, lest a few skips would be made in the counting.

ANyway. That was an entire ten minutes spent to make sure everything in that regard worked perfectly. While the Core would have loved for it to have done so instantly, finer adjustments were everywhere and an origin point had to be established to evaluate the rate of growth consistently. The Core wanted to be able to count the seconds, after all, and brought guesses did not leave itself able to make such claims.

But now the Entity was beyond such things, able to move on with its work of finding the Queen’s Colony while also knowing exactly how long each step took. And with the fixes done, each piece of Panel getting a reinforcement to make sure no minor leaks were culminating into a massive disaster, the Core made headway once again. Though… since the increase was only up to four hundred percent of the normal density inside, there was still an expectation of some energy being lost. However, it was expected to be minor enough to only truly matter once the kilometres were reached. If it would oven reach that level.

Distances and extra things to watch over was getting quite peculiar. The Core was somewhat omnipresent inside its domain, after all. It could focus on specific areas and get somewhat distracted because of it, but everything could still be seen perfectly. There was not a single shadow hidden inside its domain, every piece of Mana constantly observed and noted down. Or the rough movements, at the very least, since the Entity had no real gain from looking at a bunch of individual pieces of Mana. The Coreo instead just made sure to observe the clusters and even them out to make sure that the entire domain had a semi-equal amount. Nothing needed to be deprived of energy, after all.

However. In the context of the extra space, the Core was having a harder and harder time just focusing on a small area. It was hard to truly say why, though. The first thought upon realising it was that the distance had become too great. A hundred and fifty meters was quite the stretch, after all, and it would make sense for the minuscule amounts of Mana in that location to make it hard to truly see what was happening. Yet… then the Core tried to focus on the group of ants just beside it and felt the same difficulty as before. While there certainly wasn't hardship felt in actually looking, the amount of concentration needed for it had increased.

That couldn't have been a good sign of anything. While the side-effects were limited to a longer reaction time and nothing else, the Core wasn't sure what the exact reasons were. The amount of space being added to its domain was an easy concept to point at, yet that didn't seem too applicable. It should still have been able to focus, right? The amount of available space to focus on shouldn't have mattered.

Except… the Core still, couldn't unfocus on anything. Everything that its Mana was around would be detected no matter what. While only a small bit of mental capacity was added to every piece of area, enough areas would make the criteria expand rapidly. With enough length, the line could make the Core lose the ability to focus on anything at all. Such a thing was way out of reality at the current moment, there still being more than enough space to work with.

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But the chance was still there in the future. Enough area would make the requirements too large to handle for the limited mental capacity. The Core would either have to lessen the density of Mana in its Domain or lessen the space inside. Either would be looked too kindly on, the Core liking the current state very much. The idea of having to down-scale wasn't… something it wanted to do. More space left more opportunity for defences, creatures, and everything else. Without those, it wouldn't be able to function for much longer.

What needed to be upgraded to make it work? There had to be some factor that counted in the speed at which the Core was able to process the input of information. It had to be a stat, now that it thought about it. The limiting factor for creatures had been [Willpower] so why wouldn't it work with maximum space? It was an easily quantifiable number, after all, and it could be used for many things. While the instant thought was that [Willpower] would be the determining factor once again, the next few moments had the Entity reconsidering that opinion.

What made it the stat that controlled the maximum amount of creatures? Well… that’s because control was the most important thing. Without the Will to hold down each of their minds, they would run rampant and try to destroy the Core. Each creature needed to be focused on in some manner for the Core to make sure that everything worked. If not, the creatures would start to disobey and create chaos, the Core unable to stop them easily.

The effects from too large an area were different. It didn't stop the Entity from controlling the creatures or anything. The focus needed to do it might just have increased the Core’s abilities, the determined mind more efficient than anything else. No, it was the speed that was limited. With so much to constantly have inside its mind, there wasn't much space left inside to handle unrelated computations. The speed of thought wasn't quick enough, forcing more to be used than it should. This left the Core with a lacking reaction and inability to work as quickly as before.

So that was the problem. A lack of quickness made the Entity have trouble doing anything at regular speeds due to the ever-increasing amount of work needing to be done in the same amount of time, which currently forced it to let the larger task take up more space. One would think that the answer was to just increase the Core’s mental capacity, yet that wasn't exactly useable for anything. The process of that wasn't tied down to any of the different stats. The [Wisdom] didn't do much with the mental tasks at all, only making the Entity better at integration and distribution of Memories. Anything else was out of its class. [Wisdom] was also not on the table for increasing the day-to-day task of processing, being more of a multi-functioning thing. It helped make sure that the different sub-tasks could be split up instead of increasing the speed overall.

Which left… [Intelligence] to be the only remaining state. It hadn't been worked on a lot over the time that the Core had been alive. No points had been given to the stat at all since the start, the Entity not having cared for it. That was slowly starting to have looked like a bad idea, the stat seemingly more important than what had been previously let on. By letting it stagger on, the Core had seen what the consequence would be, the stat meant to increase the speed of thoughts.

It should have been obvious, now that it thought about it. It increased Mana-Regeneration, after all. Letting it increase even more than that in speed-factors only made sense, though it had never thought about it until now. What else would increase the pace of thoughts be, the Core wondered? Would it be able to truly think faster and more decisively, rapidly putting down its reaction speed? It was supposed that would be the case since there was no physical body to improve as well, making the whole thing much more sustainable.

At what rate did the improvements grow, though? How many cubic meters were allowed with each point of intelligence? The Core wasn't truly good enough to count out how much space there was inside of itself at the current moment, such a thing never truly measured before. It supposed it could do it when given the time.

And it did have plenty of that…

Okay. So the Core supposed it could and would count up each of the spaces of the room and how much it had. The first room was easy to count, that being the Main Domain. While it was circular, the Core had spent more than enough time to split the room into lesser forms than that. And with the help of the hexagons, most of the space was counted already. In full, the Main Domain was about four hundred and seventy-five cubic meters in size, though most of it came from the massive height. It truly was something.

The next room would be the Manalock. It was quite bigger than the other one, mainly due to it being the first constructed with such a thing in mind. With final calculations, which were quite easy seeing as it was pretty much just a big rectangle, it came up to about five hundred and twenty-five cubic meters. So… one thousand cubic meters in total? That was a lot.

Which reminded the Core that it also had the tunnels to worry about. The first was the one connecting the two rooms. With it already being so long, it took up quite the space. However, with how narrow it was, it only took forty cubic meters. More could be cut down on that one if needed, however. And… there were more to count as well. Outside of the Manalock, there was another direction to come in from. That hadn't been counted. Making sure the edges were taken care of right, the Core counted that to be about a whopping hundred and ten. The larger length inside along with the relatively high width allowed for much. Three whole ants had been able to dig beside each other, after all. It would make sense for that space to have been opened up.

Lastly, there was the final line created recently. The Core hadn't expected it to take up as much space as it had since it was a line barely a quarter of a meter thick. But… it seemed that the long stretch added up in cumulative addition so once again, creating a whole seven point thirty-six cubic meters of space. Or it would be a bit above now, actually, coming closer to forty. The sphere at the end was close to being created, after all.

What did that add up to? With the Core’s meagre math skills, it took a few moments to get it to around one thousand and two hundred cubic meters. It was close to ten meters above that, though. However, it was rounded down for the sake of easy numbers. Twelve hundred cubic meters of space. Twelve points of [Intelligence].

It wasn't exactly hard to figure out where the limit was supposed to be. One hundred cubic meters for every point of [Intelligence]. It was perhaps a bit more than that or maybe there was some kind of starting bonus. The Core wasn't sure and also didn't truly care at the moment. It just knew that it was getting close to if not already above where the technically maximum was. Any further would cause it to lose out on a needed reaction speed.

Though… with how the lessened speed seemed to be progressing, it wouldn't be very extreme for a while. The Core would still be able to function, albeit with a more minor amount of speed. Doable but still not at previous levels. And that was good enough for the Entity, it decided to continue along. There wasn't too much more until it hit two hundred and fifty meters after all.

It hadn't stopped while counting the cubic meters, since that ask wasn't especially intensive or anything. And with how long it had still taken, it had allowed the Core to progress that much further in the meanwhile. However, it still did need to think of a few precautions if the space being overviewed grew too large.

The easiest way to fix the extra space was just to make sure the Core could handle it. In other words, it would need to get [Intelligence] upgraded to a point where it could go without worries about too much space being had. This equalled only adding one or two at the current moment, so it seemed quite feasible. Or, it seemed like it until the Core also had the realisation that it had promised itself to invest the next three points in [Willpower]. And while it did perhaps only make that promise itself, such a thing had been made for a reason. There was a need for it, a requirement for the stat to be there. And the new requirements for another stat did not make the previous ones invalid. It was simply another in the line of many.

One could argue that the stat could be ignored for the favour of another having higher priorities, yet the Core knew it wouldn't exactly be able to argue for that side. More [Willpower] was needed to make sure it could win the next fight with the ant queen, and more [Intelligence] was needed to make sure that locating the Ant Queen’s layer would be easier. When setting it by priorities alone, [Willpower] still looked to be the most important stat to upgrade,e therefore not losing its placement in the line but instead reaffirming where it already was.

So the Core had to think of another solution to the problem of limited space. Somehow it needed to cut off unnecessary sight. And since there wasn't any chance of it doing that to somewhere inside the Entity’s rooms, it had to think of it being somewhere else. But where could that exactly be? The tunnels? The one leading between the two rooms would be quite stupid to remove, and the line currently being dug wouldn't be a good choice to remove either since that was the exact reason that removals were being considered to begin with.

Which left one alternative. The tunnel leads into the entrance of the Manalock. The Core supposed it could cut off a portion of it or everything altogether. Those fifteen meeters didn't do incredibly much after all. Or… having recounted it, the Entity supposed it was a bit more than fifteen meters, which did nothing but just prove its point. It was used so little that the Entity hadn't known the rough dimensions of it. That said more than what was needed.

A whole hundred and ten meters was added to the remaining available space to use. While the removed part of the tunnel would leave a lacking reaction time to enemies coming that way, the Core was relatively sure it wouldn't be that large a problem.

The work continued.