Rimuru smacked his lips. It felt as though he had eaten something without absorbing any of it.
He had always believed that once he devoured and assimilated a power, making it part of himself, it belonged entirely to him.
Once he had devoured, assimilated, and fused with it, it was his power.
He had always thought, what did it matter whose power it had been? In the end, wasn't it all his?
He had never expected such an extraordinarily gifted ability to become the greatest shackle holding back his breakthrough to the next realm.
It left him not knowing whether to laugh or cry, and with quite a headache.
The two sat quietly, sipping tea and chatting for a while about the true meaning of cultivation. With some of the frustration in his heart relieved, Rimuru bid the Ancient One farewell, left Kamar-Taj, and returned to his private estate.
The days that followed settled into a quiet but full and busy routine.
Rimuru lived a steady life, tending to both pursuits.
In his spare time during the day, he worked in his underground laboratory, methodically fine-tuning and upgrading each Transformer to suit their individual needs. He addressed every mechanical being's racial shortcomings, power-system defects, and battle damage, steadily raising the upper limits of the Autobots' and Decepticons' combat power.
The modifications went on day after day, tedious but rewarding.
Whenever he felt a little tired in body or mind, he retreated alone into the virtual dimensional planet he had constructed.
It was a virtual testing ground he had created specifically for Cybertron's rebirth.
He watched quietly as the barren, lifeless, and ravaged abandoned planet slowly came back to life through repeated infusions of energy, terrain reconstruction, mechanical infrastructure work, and core rebuilding.
A metal crust formed anew over the cracked