Solanky looked upon the dying star, no more than a hundred years left in its lifespan, and let out a cool, measured breath that quenched the last of its guttering flames. He raised a hand toward it, and in a single motion his domain of velvet cloud and flame enveloped the star whole. He began refining it into a planet.
Most saints could manage a feat like this. But Solanky went further, deliberately rewriting the laws that would govern this newborn world. A planet of such mass demanded its own sun, its own moon, its own constellations — all of it wrapped now in a soft, drifting veil of velvet mist. He drew out the blood of several entities he had slain and worked it into the planet's core, binding it with a resilience beyond what most saint emperor transcendents could ever hope to achieve in their own creations.
In the distance, roughly a thousand light-years off, his gaze fell upon another planet — one scarred and dying, caught in the crossfire of two battling saint emperors' residual energies.
Solanky reached toward it and closed his hand. The planet vanished from where it hung and reappeared before him, obedient as a stone in his palm. With a single thought, he scanned every one of the trillions of living and nonliving things upon it, down to the smallest detail, and began remaking his newly formed world in its image. Nothing was omitted. He froze the dying planet's time entirely, transferred every last piece of it onto his own creation, and only then released the pause, letting time resume around its unwitting inhabitants.
Not one of them noticed they had been moved to an entirely new world. Solanky, his spiritual sense now operating at the half step peak-turn level, picked out every leader among them and quietly wove the knowledge of this new planet into their minds, erasing all memory of the old world's place among the stars. It was a feat few beings below the peak-turns could manage — reserved, ordinarily, for alchemists skilled enough to carefully weave together such disparate energies without a single thread coming loose.
His physical body now fully at the transcendent level, Solanky could have merged the strength of both his forms into one. He chose not to. Doing so would trigger the peak summit trials — and cost him the chance to help the forsaken realm when it needed him most. He turned instead toward a distant point, hundreds of millions of light-years away, and vanished into a teleport.
The place he emerged into was unlike the rest of the beyond realm, which mostly stretched out as empty, starlit void. This region had its own clouds, its own terrain, more planetary surface than open space. Clad in a grey robe, Solanky descended from the sky. The instant he touched down, he cast out his spiritual sense — only to find it strangely suppressed, reaching no farther than ten million kilometers in any direction. He understood immediately: this was no ordinary land. A secret region, likely holding answers — or secrets — about the beyond realm itself. Rather than fly, he chose to walk, setting his feet on bare ground that felt, despite everything, disarmingly ordinary beneath him, even carrying the faint spiritual signature of a higher plane.
After several kilometers on foot, Solanky discovered the land was home to a community of special life forms — beings at the entity level, their life force a thousand times that of an ordinary being. They seemed entirely unbothered by the presence of far more powerful visitors passing through their world. Chief among them stood a venerable transcendent saint, its strength measured at 990 million times that of an ISG. Their leader sensed Solanky's presence long before he arrived and felt something close to disbelief — the aura reaching him from that distance was unlike anything he'd ever felt from a saint emperor, of any life form, ever. He resolved, then and there, to earn Solanky's friendship.
Hours into his walk, Solanky felt a presence closing the distance behind him — the leader himself. He stopped and waited. When the being finally arrived and stood before him, the sheer weight of Solanky's presence pressed down on him like gravity made physical. He dropped to one knee in greeting. Special life form or not, standing in front of Solanky made him feel like the lowliest of creatures kneeling before the noblest being he had ever laid eyes on. Solanky only smiled, told him to rise, and asked to be shown around.
The leader introduced himself as Karan. "You're likely unfamiliar with the secret regions of the beyond realm," he said. "This is just one zone among a thousand that make up the secret region — fifty billion light-years across, and unlike any of the others. It's also the most densely inhabited, being the only zone in the entire thousand capable of sustaining life. Here — take this. I carved it myself, over the course of my travels. I haven't the strength to explore the full thousand zones, but I've mapped roughly two-thirds of them." A map, fashioned from the skin of a wild beast at the mid-stage entity level, drifted through the air toward Solanky. He caught it and studied it, committing every explored zone to memory in an instant.
Solanky smiled and offered Karan a pill in return — one he had refined using the residual energies of the transcendent grasses of eternity. "This will carry your cultivation up to the saint emperor level," he said. "Consider it repayment for your kindness — and a quiet way to keep the special life forms here safe from saint emperors looking to claim them." Karan's face lit with joy at the words, though a flicker of doubt followed close behind — becoming a transcendent was no small matter. It demanded a depth of comprehension and a domain formation shaped by one's understanding of the world, measured against the vastness of the beyond realm itself. Solanky caught that hesitation and smiled again. "You're a special life form," he said. "Your comprehension doesn't need to match a saint emperor's, or exceed it. Your body alone can carry you there by force, and your comprehension can catch up in its own time. I can help with that — but you have to promise me this stays between us." Karan could hardly believe what he was hearing; he knew the limits placed on special life forms all too well, enforced by the true peak-turns who ruled the beyond realm. Still, without a moment's hesitation, he gave Solanky his word.
Delight crossed Solanky's face. He asked Karan to sit cross-legged before him and shed his humanoid guise for his true form — but first, he wanted this done properly, at Karan's own residence, behind a formation raised for the occasion. Karan, commanding this zone of the secret region as he did, wrapped the two of them in world power and carried them several billion light-years in mere seconds, without so much as disturbing the fabric of the space around them. Solanky found himself genuinely impressed — Karan's mastery over spatial and world power rivaled, and perhaps surpassed, saint emperors who outranked him by far.
They arrived at a small mountain, only a few kilometers tall, standing behind Karan's towering residence — itself tens of light-years in height. Without wasting time, they descended into a cave to begin the pill's absorption. Solanky had his own reasons for this; a theory had been forming in his mind since his last breakthrough, and Karan would make the perfect test of it.
Karan let his true form emerge — a creature several million kilometers long, the head of a baboon set atop a dragon's lower body, wings of scaled bone spreading wide, a long tail trailing behind him. The cave's interior defied its outer dimensions entirely, vast and cavernous despite the mountain's modest size from without. Solanky regarded Karan's strange, chimeric shape without surprise; he had seen far stranger among special life forms, even calamitous ones. "Swallow the pill," he said simply. "Let's begin." Karan obeyed without question.
Solanky wrapped him in the velvet world domain — though this time, an eroding, corrosive force stirred within it. Karan, feeling the full weight of that domain settle over him, understood in that instant that a single thought from Solanky could crush him, or bend him to any will Solanky chose. As the pill's energies surged to life within him, Solanky instructed him to circulate them through his body. Drawing on comprehension gleaned from the entity of the moon, Solanky carved out a refinement process capable of pushing a life form's strength to twice the limit the beyond realm normally imposed. With the source-defying flames and painstaking care, he refined Karan's life energies and very structure. Three days of unbroken refinement later, Karan's strength — once locked at 990 million times an ISG — had tripled to 2.97 billion times an ISG, placing him, in raw physical power alone, on par with a saint emperor.
Solanky emerged from the cave with Karan at his side. "With your command over space, no ordinary saint emperor could hope to match you within your own zone," he said. "Use your understanding of this place well — carve out your own domain. And remember what you promised me." With that, he took a single stride and was gone, appearing millions of light-years beyond the boundaries of Karan's zone in an instant. Karan stood there a long while after, still struggling to comprehend how Solanky had lifted him to such heights and asked for nothing at all in return.