Nothingness.
That was the word that best described my current state. Thankfully, this nothingness only referred to the plentifulness of life in the universe that I created, not the universe itself. With so many copies of me that I continued to produce, I was capable of experiencing the most extreme and beautiful sights that one could ever cast his eyes on.
The birth of a star.
Something that even the earthy scientists never considered to something they could ever find out, as the process was simply too much stretched in time for them to show it in any marketable way. But with the endless amounts of time on my hands and an unlimited amount of my copies, nothing stopped me from experiencing this beautiful process in its entire glory.
From nothing more but an enormous cloud of simple gas, through the first moments during which some space rocks would form from heavier elements, all the way to the point when they started to come together under the force of both magic and gravity.
Or rather, that's what I expected to see from the mix of my earthy knowledge and the insights I had on magic. But the reality slowly proved me wrong. Because of a simple element I forgot and failed to realise over millennia worth of time.
In the first round of star formation, no heavy elements existed in the entire universe.
Compared to how slowly I continued to amass my knowledge about the world that surrounded me, once I came to this realisation, everything changed. Instead of wasting years on figuring out the meanings of the images my clones provided me with, it seemed as if I managed to recall a simple, but crucial information about where literally any element heavier than the few most basic atomic structures would appear.
In order for the world to obtain any amounts of those more precious materials that were more than necessary to create any complex substances, those starts whose formation I continued to observe with how there was absolutely nothing better for me to do, not only had to die. They had to die twice.
But as great and interesting topic as it was, given how I could differentiate different elements only from insanely intricate details of the magical aura that they had, I couldn't really prove something, even if I would be doing it just for my own sake. In my current position, I could only believe those videos I watched instead of sleeping back on earth while focusing my attention on the one thing that reached levels of knowledge that no one on earth was ever privy to.
Back in that world where I first learned about the existence of true magic, my perspective was simply too small to let me notice this. Only when my mind wrapped around entire galaxies instead of small areas of a small celestial body hidden somewhere amongst the infinite number of the stars could I notice something that completely broke all my understanding of magic.
Because magic was somehow correlated with gravity.
This was something I noticed when the topic of the gravitational disasters came to my attention. While using magical aura to differentiate between different elements was something that I took for granted, I had to see one of the most violent events that could ever happen in the entire universe to learn where this change could potentially come from.
A clash of two neutron stars.
According to the video, I could vaguely remember, all the heavy elements in the universe were created from the subatomic mass that the cores of the neutron stars contained. But given how said stars were the most condensed objects that could exist outside of the black holes, how could one ever get access to the stuff created in their insides?
That actually was pretty simple. From what my clones saw, the absolute majority of the neutron stars that those copies of me could find across the entire universe existed in pairs. Some of the said pairs had relatively stable orbits, making the moment of their inevitable crash an event so far into the future that I would surely lose my sanity before getting a chance to observe it.
Thankfully, some others had their mutual orbit insatiable, inching ever closer to each other with each passing moment. But the most interesting stuff would happen right in the moment of those two insane objects collapsing against each other.
In a normal, magicless world, some of their insides would be released. Without the extreme gravity forcing that subatomic soup together, the particles would once again reassemble themselves into proper structures, forming the heavy elements that were still quite lacking in the universe. But it wasn't the physical part of that mindboggling event that was the most interesting.
So far, I noticed that the heavier the elements, the denser their magical aura was. While I had no way of proving this guess of mine, the experiences of my copies seemed to always prove this point. I had to watch the memories of a clone that saw the dual neutron star system collapsing into a single entity to finally understand where did this rule come from.
When this disastrous event would happen, outside of both of the stars that crashed against each other spewing their guts, a gravitational wave of an insane power would be released. Under such an overwhelming force, the balance of the void would be disturbed, resulting in a wave of magic appearing on a scale that even I found hard to believe in.
And little to say, in the emptiness of the universe, the one and only matter that could absorb this enormous amount of magic, was the matter formed out of the reassembling quark soup spewed out by the collapsed neutron stars!
With all that knowledge steeming from my sudden enlightenment, I should normally take several millenniums to properly digest it, but I just couldn't hold myself back from testing a single theory that appeared when I noticed it all.
What if using big amounts of magic would allow me to recreate the process? If magic could appear out of a gravitational wave, would a strong enough wave of magic force the appearance of gravitational energy? And if yes, would that allow me to at least momentarily, recreate the physical conditions of the insides of neutron stars just by releasing a powerful enough wave of magic?
Wouldn't that mean that with good enough precision, I would be capable of freely creating any form of the matter I would like? And if that were to be the truth, then how would that make me any different from a literal god?