The creation of entirely new patterns turned out to be every bit as hard as I had thought, but this meant I was prepared for it. The first couple of new patterns I created were simply due to a lot of guesses, and they were unusable in the end. But as I managed to make more and more correct guesses, and learned from my mistakes, I started to see some kind of logic behind it.

Every part of the pattern had meaning, everything had to work together. Every pattern started with a core that defined the base for the pattern. Out from the core sprouted different layers containing a certain complex instruction. And through many of these layers, billions or perhaps even above trillions, it formed some kind of code. I couldn't figure out exactly what these individual layers did, but I memorized certain groups of layers that I could understand the purpose of.

The patterns I created slowly became more usable, and more unique. I memorized every single one of the interesting patterns I created.

I developed methods to compact patterns, making them faster to create and memorize. Instead of simply creating the whole end product, I created a smaller pattern that then would expand and create the missing parts by itself.

It was after memorizing possibly several million of them that I unlocked the thing that had long been holding me back. It started with an idea, an idea that maybe I could create a pattern that allowed me to sense patterns more clearly to understand them better.

It didn't take much longer than any other pattern I had created, but the instant it was finished I could feel its potential. It worked much like the sensing pattern on the stone, but instead of only sensing for electrical currents and searching for a specific pattern, it searched for any kind of energy and sent accurate data of the energy it sensed back to me.

It took a while to get used to the information being sent to me, but once I managed to do it I was certainly amazed. I could specify how big the area it focused on was when I created it, and could therefore zoom in and out in a way. Using some utility patterns I had created myself, I managed to move it around while observing which allowed for greater freedom.

It had truly endless potential. I could use it to observe the room I was in without even looking, getting a perfect view of every little nook and cranny. Even inside of things, including my own body. I could go much smaller and study individual atoms. They were like extremely small balls of energy constantly changing seemingly unpredictably.

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And that's when I noticed something, I could go even deeper. And there, at the smallest scale I could reach since I just got a headache if I tried smaller, I found them—small particles, dots of energy, arranged in complex patterns. I was mesmerized as I looked at the familiar patterns that seemed to be phasing in and out of each other. The patterns weren't as complex as mine, but there were incredibly large amounts of them and interconnected into large patterns. And this kept going all the way up to the individual parts of the atom I was looking at.

I continued looking around for the incredibly small particles, and I found them everywhere. Even where there was no matter, I could observe them arranged into uniform patterns stretching everywhere, as if they were what made up space itself.

Maybe they are...

Whatever had been gathering at it whenever I released a pattern, turned out to be these particles arranging themselves into the pattern I had specified. It seemed I was creating instructions for these little particles.

Perhaps these particles... are simply energy. And everything else is just made up of this energy, just in different arrangements.

I felt truly happy, some of the largest questions I had been thinking of ever since I started experimenting with the stone were finally getting answered. Of course, there were still many left, but things were getting somewhere.

Of all the questions that were still without an answer, there was one that simply wouldn't leave my thoughts. Why did the energy particles form the patterns I created in my mind? How could signals inside my brain affect them in such a way?

It took me quite a while to figure it out. The answer had been there all along, only very well hidden. A large construct of different patterns was situated in my brain, interpreting specific signals and acting as a sort of translator between my brain and everything else. It was very fascinating, whenever I formed a pattern I could watch as it used other patterns to create a new pattern from free energy particles. I spent what could have been years studying it and memorizing the many different patterns it consisted of.

But the more I observed, the more I got confused. It felt sloppy, and crude. It appeared to be limiting me, either intentionally or unintentionally. Whoever, or whatever had created it was either bad at it, or wanted to stall my progress. The latter of those two options concerned me slightly.

As I continued perfecting my method and increasing my library of useful patterns, I improved it and fixed the many small problems it had. Whenever I changed something with it, I felt as if a large weight was lifted from my mind. Suddenly, I could form patterns much faster than before.