Palpatine's cosmic accomplishments
There seems to be this retarded misconception that the imbalance of the Force during Clone Wars and the Dark Times was the result of Darth Plagueis' and Darth Sidious' meditative rituals and thats that. This has been false for decades now.
Sidious, upon killing his Master Darth Plagueis, gained a monumental increase in power. The magnitude of this increase was such that the Force itself was tipped to the dark side more than it had ever been, all because of Darth Sidious’ personal power in the dark side. In that moment, Sidious trancended all other mortal beings that had ever existed, and achieved the status of galaxy-wide dark side nexus. As a feat it shits on all others and is the ultimate proof of the supremacy of Darth Sidious among the dark side masters that have existed throughout the ages.
A tremor took hold of the planet.Sprung from death, it unleashed itself in a powerful wave, at once burrowing deep into the world’s core and radiating through its saccharine atmosphere to shake the stars themselves. At the quake’s epicenter stood Sidious, one elegant hand vised on the burnished sill of an expansive translucency, a vessel filled suddenly to bursting, the Force so strong within him that he feared he might disappear into it, never to return. But the moment didn’t constitute an ending so much as a true beginning, long overdue; it was less a transformation than an intensification—a gravitic shift.
A welter of voices, near and far, present and from eons past, drowned his thoughts. Raised in praise, the voices proclaimed his reign and cheered the inauguration of a new order. Yellow eyes lifted to the night sky, he saw the trembling stars flare, and in the depth of his being he felt the power of the dark side anoint him.
Slowly, almost reluctantly, he came back to himself, his gaze settling on his manicured hands. Returned to the present, he took note of his rapid breathing, while behind him the room labored to restore order. Air scrubbers hummed—costly wall tapestries undulating in the summoned breeze. Prized carpets sealed their fibers against the spread of spilled fluids. The droid shuffled in obvious confliction. Sidious pivoted to take in the disarray: antique furniture overturned; framed artwork askew. As if a whirlwind had swept through. And facedown on the floor lay a statue of Yanjon, one of four law-giving sages of Dwartii.
A piece Sidious had secretly coveted.
Also sprawled there, Plagueis: his slender limbs splayed and elongated head turned to one side. Dressed in finery, as for a night on the town.
And now dead.
Or was he?
Uncertainty rippled through Sidious, rage returning to his eyes. A tremor of his own making, or one of forewarning? Was it possible that the wily Muun had deceived him? Had Plagueis unlocked the key to immortality, and survived after all? Never mind that it would constitute a petty move for one so wise—for one who had professed to place the Grand Plan above all else. Had Plagueis become ensnared in a self-spun web of jealousy and possessiveness, victim of his own engineering, his own foibles?
If he hadn’t been concerned for his own safety, Sidious might have pitied him. Wary of approaching the corpse of his former Master, he called on the Force to roll the aged Muun over onto his back. From that angle Plagueis looked almost as he had when Sidious first met him, decades earlier: smooth, hairless cranium; humped nose, with its bridge flattened as if from a shock-ball blow and its sharp tip pressed almost to his upper lip; jutting lower jaw; sunken eyes still brimming with menace—a physical characteristic rarely encountered in a Muun. But then Plagueis had never been an ordinary Muun, nor an ordinary being of any sort.
Sidious took care, still reaching out with the Force. On closer inspection, he saw that Plagueis’s already cyanotic flesh was smoothing out, his features relaxing.
Faintly aware of the whir of air scrubbers and sounds of the outside world infiltrating the luxurious suite, he continued the vigil; then, in relief, he pulled himself up to his full height and let out his breath. This was no Sith trick. Not an instance of feigning death, but one of succumbing to its cold embrace. The being who had guided him to power was gone.
Wry amusement narrowed his eyes.
The Muun might have lived another hundred years unchanged. He might have lived forever had he succeeded fully in his quest. But in the end—though he could save others from death—he had failed to save himself.
A sense of supreme accomplishment puffed Sidious’s chest, and his thoughts unreeled.
Well, then, that wasn’t nearly as bad as we thought it might be...
Rarely did events play out as imagined, in any case. The order of future events was transient. In the same way that the past was reconfigured by selective memory, future events, too, were moving targets. One could only act on instinct, grab hold of an intuited perfect moment, and spring into action. One heartbeat late and the universe would have recomposed itself, no imposition of will sufficient to forestall the currents. One could only observe and react. Surprise was the element absent from any periodic table. A keystone element; a missing ingredient. The means by which the Force amused itself. A reminder to all sentient beings that some secrets could never be unlocked.
Confident that the will of the dark side had been done, he returned to the suite’s window wall. Two beings in a galaxy of countless trillions, but what had transpired in the suite would affect the lives of all of them. Already the galaxy had been shaped by the birth of one, and henceforth would be reshaped by the death of the other. But had the change been felt and recognized elsewhere? Were his sworn enemies aware that the Force had shifted irrevocably? Would it be enough to rouse them from self-righteousness? He hoped not. For now the work of vengeance could begin in earnest.
His eyes sought and found an ascending constellation of stars, one of power and consequence new to the sky, though soon to be overwhelmed by dawn’s first light. Low in the sky over the flatlands, visible only to those who knew where and how to look, it ushered in a bold future. To some the stars and planets might seem to be moving as ever, destined to align in configurations calculated long before their fiery births. But in fact the heavens had been perturbed, tugged by dark matter into novel alignments. In his mouth, Sidious tasted the tang of blood; in his chest, he felt the monster rising, emerging from shadowy depths and contorting his aspect into something fearsome just short of revealing itself to the world.
The dark side had made him its property, and now he made the dark side his.
Breathless, not from exertion but from the sudden inspiration of power, he let go of the sill and allowed the monster to writhe through his body like an unbroken beast of range or prairie.
Had the Force ever been so strong in anyone?
Sidious had never learned how Plagueis’s own Master had met his end. Had he died at Plagueis’s hand? Had Plagueis, too, experienced a similar exultation on becoming a sole Sith Lord? Had the beast of the end time risen then to peek at the world it was to inhabit, knowing its release was imminent?
–Darth Plagueis
The quote references the present, not their ritual. It clearly mentions "what had transpired in the suite," and immediately after "the Force had shifted irrevoccably". What transpired in the suite was that Sidious gained a tremendous increase in power, the spirits of the ancient Sith returned from their dark graves to praise Sidious, and the very concept of the dark side anointed Sidious. That's what happened in the suite, and it shifted the Force just like Plagueis' and Sidious' meditation, but this time it happened instantly.
Sidious' power maintained the imbalance throughout the Clone Wars and the Dark Times, as described in other sources:
For a decade, there was no physical signs of the remaining Dark Lord, but evidence of his power began to appear.The Jedi ability to use the Force inexplicably began to diminish.
–Databank (2008): The Jedi Order
Depowered lampdisks were rings of ghostly gray floating in the gloom. The shimmering jewelscape of Coruscant haloed the knife-edged shadow of the chair.This was the office of the Chancellor.
Within the chair's shadow sat another shadow: deeper, darker, formless and impenetrable, an abyssal umbra so profound that it drained light from the room around it.
And from the city. And the planet.
And the galaxy.
[…]
The Coruscant nightfall was spreading through the galaxy. The darkness in the Force was no hindrance to the shadow in the Chancellor's office; it [color=blue]
was the darkness.[/Color] Wherever darkness dwelled, the shadow could send perception.
-Revenge of the Sith novelization
For those who have reading comprehension issues, the first quote is from an objective, third person source, and clearly mentions the Jedi's diminished ability to draw on the Force to be the result of Sidious' personal power in the Force, as in "his power" referencing the Dark Lord of the Sith mentioned a few words earlier, which is of course Sidious.
The second quote mentions that the shadow within the Chancellor's office, which is Sidious, drained light from the galaxy, and that the darkness in the Force did not hinder him because he himself was the darkness. And you'll need a better excuse than "Hyperbole!" to refute this. I swear, people literally interpret every word Matthew Stover writes as hypebole these days, and it's getting old. There's nothing hyperbolic about this and it's supported by other sources.