Robert took his stuff out of the apartment and moved everything to the abandoned city in the Puffbloom Islands. He used his considerable resources to buy livestock and place them in the overgrown pens of a farm on the same island. Without predators, he let them free-range, trusting they would thrive with ample resources and no competition.
He hired trustworthy workers to make some changes to the buildings and landscape. Branch the river crossing the island to give his animals water. Change a warehouse into a conservatory. With that, he moved his Minotaurs to the island. They could play all the music they wanted without bothersome neighbors.
Maybe he could make his Minotaurs gain a love for farming. All he needed was One Moo-re Plow.
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Sitting on the rooftop of a building, he watched his island. Robert had an idea of recruiting people and having them move in to live here. But it was a bad idea in many ways. First, they would be very isolated. He would need at least ten to twenty families for it to work. Second, he couldn't find the will to force them to stay if they wanted to leave. And third, they could damage what he built. Disgruntled people acted irrational. What would stop them from burning the place down? Worse, he could either make them Archhumans or leave it to chance that they would manifest a Prime and use it in secret.
Or he could use fairies. Right...
Yeah. Both ideas were dead in the water. This island would remain his fortress of solitude. He went to the workshop to finish the remaining eighteen teleportation platforms.
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They were overdue to return to Taulusia. The canine aliens were laying low, letting the Endless Hive retake the territory they’d liberated during that week-long series of raids. It was barely a blip in the aggressive expansionist multiversal empire but the goal was met. Nobody died and all the expedition members were stronger.
Robert missed Freddy and Poochline. The two remained behind in the Resistance camp.
That’s when he had the idea of donating the stolen resources and equipment, he took from the MCP and the Shayver Group to the Taulusian cause. He couldn’t sell them on Earth without triggering alarms and he didn’t need the money. The ATA laundering trick only worked because it was seldom used.
He had half a mind to visit random people around the world and give them the Prime Vestiges he kept but that was also problematic. Some of these Prime Vestiges were kept by the factions he robbed because they were too odd, too powerful, or too strategic. He could tell that some of the Talents were so powerful whoever used them would earn a free ticket to three stars, no questions asked.
Like this one.
It was an orange ball with eight spider-like eyes and a fanged mouth. When asked about its talent, it replied, "Healing Duct Tape! Conjure Infinite duct tape, wrap them around the boo boos! Protection and perfect, instantaneous repair with no scars left!"
Yeah. The talent let the Arch conjure "infinite" duct tape (it wasn't infinite but until the Arch suffered from talent fatigue) that could work as both armor and healing aid. Once conjured, anyone could use the tape to dress a wound and the tape lasted for twenty-four hours before vanishing. He estimated the healing quality was supernatural because of the "no scars" part. It also granted three affinities, Life, Light, and Holy. The worst part? Robert was pretty sure it worked on objects too.
That's why he thought of using some of these Prime Vestiges in an experiment. But first, he needed to set up a theoretical foundation.
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iRobert penned down his observations while Robert worked.
The 1% Life's Real Prime Vestige once said, "When the Void feasts, the Emperor eats."
He dubbed this evolution the "Emperor's Banquet."
That was the only talent evolution he wasn't entirely sure about its true meaning and effects.
It had to do with those orbs he gained after taking some creature to the true void but he found a few of these orbs before gaining the evolution. It meant that the talent didn't create the orbs, it just gave them some purpose.
His current hypothesis was this: The more orbs he got from an affinity, the closer he felt he was reaching a threshold. And the closest he was to a threshold, the harder was the effect. Ice, for example, caused acute physical pain whenever he absorbed one such orb.
Except if it was an orb from an affinity he had. He conjectured that he couldn't gain more than one extra power from each affinity. Therefore, an Unholy orb would probably not affect him.
His first experiment was to find an Unholy-affinity monster. This new "Three Points of Essence on Kill" power could have originated from the missing unique spirit. He went to one of the almost five hundred passages he found linked to the maze Corridors. There, he dominated the mind of a Fire/Unholy imp, a small ugly demon with red leathery skin, bat wings, and horns. He dragged the creature to the true void and let the void devour it. He gained 3 points of essence back from the kill.
Two orbs came out of it, one red and the other dark gray. They were joined like two soap bubbles. The fire orb gave him the mother of all heartburns. But on the unholy part, he only gained essence and felt no detrimental effects. It was the same as if it was an orb from one of his affinities.
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iRobert marked one of his hypotheses as confirmed. The new 3% Essence on Kill was related to the missing spirit, the Heart of Carcinodon. Could it be that this unknown talent evolution, the Emperor's Banquet, as he called it, gave him extra powers? He had to test it with more monsters. It could also be that he could only get a power when he "ate" a unique. If so, what did the orbs do? What difference did it make if it was an Affinity, he already had versus a new one. Could he gain powers from the same affinity more than once?
While the prospect of gaining new powers was enticing, the pain each orb causes was exactly the opposite. It seemed to him it was trying to do something unnatural. But it could be just his bad impression, tainted by the pain.
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Alone in the true void, Robert took one of these Prime Vestiges he didn't care about from his ring. He took it from the case and tossed it away. The Prime Vestige screamed bloody murder and then went silent. It vanished in a cloud of mist that quickly evaporated. It didn't trigger the Emperor's Banquet. Perhaps only things with souls did.
He went to the Toybox Roleplay Dungeon and kidnapped an Origami Dragon. Dragging the paper creature down to the true void, he let go of it. The dragon was devoured by the void and also didn't trigger Emperor's Banquet. They had neither a mind nor a soul. None of the creatures in that place did. They were all controlled by the Dungeon itself.
Maybe Amanda would like to play the giant destroyer scenario, now that they were sure it wouldn't cause any loss of sentient life.
But his greed was stoked. Robert wanted to know what would it take to acquire a new talent.
*
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Fairy-Robert hovered two miles over an Endless Hive outpost on the other side of the planet. Here, the not-bugs were fighting against the Octoverines, an invasive species.
They had eight furry arms, each of them five feet long and with three joints. The arms came out of a spherical body three feet in length, which was head and torso combined. The four arms above had clawed hands and could wield crude tools, while the lower four were like gorilla feet, with opposable thumbs.
Four snouts poked out of the fur evenly-spaced between arms, with powerful jaws. Their main affinity was Blood and the species talent was called by the Taulusians "Savage Bloodlust". Every time they smelled or tasted blood, even their own, they went into a berserk frenzy, increasing speed, strength, and making them ignore wounds until their bodies were too mangled to function. It came at the cost of survival instincts and rational thought but they reproduced fast enough.
The fight was brutal. Neither side showed any signs of cowardice or a lack of bloodlust. The Endless Hive threw soldiers to die at the claws and teeth of the spinning balls of doom, pinning them under their own corpses so those that came behind could take a shot at them.
Robert found the buried bus-sized pill bugs and grinned. His Void Lance had reached the end of stage one and he'd upgraded it with the concept of "Disintegration". He aimed at the pill bugs he could sense as an absence of space due to their shields and fired a beam half an inch thick. It punctured the ground, then the shield, and finally, the pill bug. The shield spell reacted and suddenly, spent it's reserves of energy entirely. It was instantaneous and the pill bug didn't have time to pump more essence into it.
The result was a catastrophic explosion deep inside the Hive tunnels. Before the blast wave reached the surface, Robert fired another beam at the second giant pill bug. One blast compounded on the other, crushing and incinerating all the monsters inside the outpost with pressure and heat. The tunnels spat a torrent of flames and noxious fumes.
The Octoverines thrashed around until their talent expired. Some died instantly. Others survived and started to eat and reproduce right on top of the smoldering outpost.
Robert used his main talent and went to inspect his next target.
*
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All over that big planet, Robert destroyed Hive outposts. Their response was getting faster and faster. Now, they had swarms of flying fish (not like the ones from Earth) patrolling their core regions. The flying fish were sixty feet long armored monsters with long and ephemeral fins who swam slowly in the air.
These floating fortresses had strange stocky aliens with round carapaces and fluffy antennae twice as long as they were tall. Robert was absolutely sure they could detect a butterfly flap its wings halfway across the world and predict where the resulting tornado would strike.
Dozens of armies like the one that forced them to retreat before sortied onto the world. Fairy-Robert flew out of their detection range and searched for a good target.
*
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Scouting the Endless Hive’s fortifications while safely hidden in the liminal void, Robert found a golden opportunity. One of those massive roaches they used as command center wasn't shielded. He spent the remaining hours before his return training archery in the intellect fortress and returned to reality with a hand already touching the roach’s carapace.
He almost gasped when he saw four stars burning in the core of the creature. How powerful was this Endless Hive to use such a strong creature as a mobile base? And it seemed to be subdued. Robert felt it didn't even notice his touch. He wasted no time bringing it straight to the true void. There, he let go and watched with rapt fascination as the Void devoured not only the roach but the hundreds of creatures living on its back.
The roach squirmed and spewed some green liquid at him. Robert avoided it by changing depths. The shadow of the liquid flew straight past him and evaporated right after.
Then the orbs struck him. They were of all colors from known affinities, dozens, hundreds of them. Robert felt the primordial energies assault him. The Emperor’s banquet was not a pleasant one. He also gained essence on each kill, even though he just abandoned the creatures to the environment. But most of it was wasted as he was topped up anyway.
Resisting with all the might of its four stars, the roach still succumbed to the void, regardless. Three orbs remained where the giant monster remained. As wide as Robert was tall, they were brown, red, and dull gunmetal. The three orbs struck Robert like massive petards.
Robert felt the cold, stiffness, and sharpness of Metal. Its unyielding nature. Timelessness, tenacity. The grit and crush of Earth. And the devouring burn of Fire. But the strongest impression was left by Metal.
Robert's vision blacked out as the feedback from the absorbed energies was too much. Even his imprint lost consciousness.
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He recovered consciousness. Even while blacked out, his Vitae Infusion tempering pumped healing energy into his body. Robert used concepts to improve the healing quality. Now at stage 2, it had almost reached Supreme quality.
It was the first time Robert had ran out of time in the true void. He always took care to pick the point of return beforehand.
He regained consciousness in the pitch black realm. He checked on his artifice timepiece, and it counted negative nine hours for his return. His body and soul seemed to be perfectly fine and his imprint registered only a handful of nonsensical dreams.
Fairy-Robert willed himself to go to the void near the Puffbloom Islands. He surfaced above the abandoned city and was promptly ejected from the liminal void. A bit dizzy, he fluttered down to land on a roof and waited a few minutes. Then he used his main talent, loitered there for a couple of hours, and got out.
Good, it wasn't broken.
It was time to give Taulusia a rest so the Endless Hive lowered their alertness level. Robert wanted to know if the giant roach's soul had given him any new powers.