When the pain stopped my consciousness was mostly back to working in my brain again. The way my consciousness worked, having a single consciousness running over two different platforms, was that I had a single core focus. A single personality that was thinking at a time. My digital side dominated in calculations and logic, my biological side dominated in emotion and feeling.

My biological side was mostly back to working in the sense that my consciousness was there, but the chemical systems that gave rise to emotion was still frozen. As well as large sections of my brain that my consciousness was used to accessing. I'd only recovered about five percent of my brain to get it to this stage.

Looking back within my Pocket Dimension, the programs that I had set to expand my processing and memory chips had made great progress. I had roughly ten times the memory and processing that I did when I blacked out to the pain, and the chips themselves were stacked around the Mind Link surrounding it in a matte black cube fifty centimeters wide, long, and high. The Mind Link couldn't be seen at all anymore. I sent a signal to all of the programs that were working on expanding it even further to neatly finish their current tasks.

Essy and Greta were talking to each other in my fortress just outside my doorway.

"Hello." I said.

"My Lord." Greta said. "We weren't sure what happened. Essy's eyes were fixed an hour ago but you wouldn't respond. We stayed nearby in case there was anything further you needed to do."

An hour. My consciousness kicked in much earlier than I had estimated, or whatever governed the pain received from modifying living things had started before my consciousness was there. It was a good thing I had set a cutout for the repairing threads or it could have taken twenty hours before I came back to awareness.

"I blacked out from the pain of reviving my body." I said.

"You were in that pain state for a whole hour?" Essy asked. She looked shocked.

"There isn't much difference between three minutes and an hour." I said.

"I don't think that would be true for me." Essy said. "I could feel myself losing my grip on sanity the longer it went on. It was worth it, but I don't think I would do it again. Being able to see again is a great gift, but I wouldn't trade it for my sanity."

I hadn't noticed anything like losing my sanity, I didn't think. The pain was either all consuming or it was past. Perhaps my power that allowed me to perfectly recall my memories stopped my mind from being able to be corrupted. I could perfectly recall the pain from each time I'd had it, but there wasn't a time component associated with the pain. Each instance was much the same as any other.

"I don't think I'm insane." I said. "Though I'm not entirely sure how I would be able to tell."

"My estimation is that you are not." Greta said. "Although you are a difficult case to assess, I am talking with your ghost after all. But you are able to perceive reality, and interact with people normally."

Reality was just a simulation ran by beings more powerful than gods... And I thought I was occasionally influenced by one of those beings... I took some comfort in the fact that my powers had definite effects in the world. It was unlikely that I could manipulate matter if I was insane, right?..

"My Lord, is there anything else you need of us?" Greta said after a few minutes had passed.

"No." I said. "I should get back to reviving myself."

"Thank you, my Lord." Greta and Essy said, bowing and leaving.

I tried to soak my power into my surroundings, initiating it from my brain. My range had shrunk to the point that I wasn't even able to push my power outside of my skull. I pushed harder and noticed the temperature of the heated parts of my brain drop. I was using my body heat automatically as a source to push my passive power out from myself, and at the moment I didn't have any.

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The heat that I did have access to was being entirely supplied from the micro-portals. I didn't even have any blood flowing through my brain as the constant low level of pain I was in showed as I refreshed the energy and oxygen in my brain cells. I would prefer not to use any of the matter that made up my body as an energy source, so I focused my power into a narrow beam and pushed it as far as I could.

Just outside of my skull was ice. And it was unenchanted, so I could use it. I broke apart one of its atoms and used the energy to take over keeping my brain warm and I was finally able to push my power out to soak through my surroundings.

My power soaked into my body and the ice around me, which was a few meters wide, long, and tall. My power bounced off of whatever was below the ice, and the sides and top was striped with something that was also rejecting my power. The gaps in the sides and top were air, which my power didn't travel through very well at all. It seems that I was surrounded by ice in a cage that was enchanted.

My sense of Chantelle was working properly again, she was six hundred meters away and slowly getting further. Either she or I was moving. Focusing back on my body, there were chips in both of my shoulders as though someone had tried to shatter me with a sword. They'd tried quite a few times before giving up, too, but the divine cold that it had taken to freeze me had fused my body into a strong whole that would need to be warmed up before it could separate.

Comparing it to the model I had of my functioning body, the entire thing was broken, the cells that made up all parts had burst from the cold. The only exception was my brain, and that was likely because they'd stopped after I'd died. I could use the matter that was there, but I would need to rebuild from the cells up.

A wave came through the ice, throwing my power back from the top down. I slowed my perception of time and watched it happen. My power was forced from the ice, but not from my body. It took a few seconds to pass through the entire block of ice, and the cold increased, fighting against the warmth that I was pushing into my brain.

I started converting the ice to energy as soon as the wave had passed, warming my brain again. I soaked my power back into the ice and turned my attention to the functioning model of my body. I was going to have to rebuild from scratch anyway, so I kept my perception of time slowed and spent some time incorporating the heat vision from Essy's model into my own.

I ended up creating my own system entirely based upon the heat sensing cells. Most of the complexity in Essy's heat vision came from requiring the cells to be kept at an ideal temperature even as they heated up from sensing heat, otherwise there would be ghost images left behind. I could cheat with my Matter Manipulation power and keep them cool by pulling heat from them directly. I placed the cells in a circle around the iris of each of my eyes.

Hooking the cells up to my brain through the nerves running in my eyes was complicated and I had it mostly set up when I realised that I would need a dedicated adapted part of my brain to deal with the new sense. It would be simpler to make micro-portals and have my digital side deal with it, feeding the heat vision back as an overlay on top of my normal vision. Which would also eliminate the need to overload the nerves going to the eyes.

I was just finishing designing that when another wave of power went through the ice. I had been working for hours, subjectively, but it had only been thirty seconds in objective time.

There were two possibilities I could see for what they were doing. One was that they were keeping the ice cold and making sure that I remained frozen, as there was definitely an extra chill after the power went through. The other was that they were monitoring me, making sure that I was still frozen. If it was the second reason then it would complicate my repair strategy as I would have to break it up into twenty five second chunks.

I ran up a simulation of how I would do it and saw immediately that I could just keep the outer layers of my body frozen to bypass the scans, if that was what they were. The waves focused entirely on the ice around me, so long as I didn't warm it at all there would be nothing for their scans to detect.

With that as a parameter I implemented a program that would keep the entirety of my skin at the same temperature of the ice. Estimated time to complete repair, thirty minutes. I was still using the old implementation I'd written forever ago to handle modifying myself. It did things in a linear way, prioritising the most important changes first. But I'd written a massively parallel version out of necessity to work on my brain through the micro-portals.

I spent some time reworking the programs, combining the two implementations together. Now it should work on everything at once in parallel tens of thousands of times in a coordinated hierarchy. Estimated time to complete repair, twenty seven seconds. A decrease of over one hundred times. I could even make it between waves, now. I waited for the next one to pass and then triggered the program.