Eventually, my tower was finished. It felt like it went by pretty fast, but from the annoyed expression that Azrael kept giving me, I assume it was at least a few weeks.
The Antigo guardians were still present on each floor, but I was working on getting Wisps to handle setting up my defenses. Since I had 64 floors, I figured that it would be best to have a boss floor on every 8th, except that there would be a final boss on the 63rd right before myself. I’d need to figure out what to do for those, and I wanted some more unique layouts and mobs for the floors past my first boss, so in the meantime, I just had a small squadron of Transmute Wisps and Mold Terrain Wisps working on making the first 7 floors look more unique. It was quite interesting to watch them grow and develop. I’d told them to decide on a singular theme and make everything look similar, but still different, and that had originally led to some confusion. Eventually, though, I let them go outside and they’d collectively decided to make the rooms into something more… “natural.” The ground was dirt, though much more bumpy and rocky, and there were bumps and ridges to the sides of the rooms, as though they were part of the bases of hills or mountains. They’d actually started to make stone trees, which was just fascinating. The detail was impeccable, and they looked as though they’d sprouted from the ground.
When I’d been thinking of how to place loot in the area without making it look out of place, I’d noticed one of the Wisps experimenting with growing fruit on the trees, and an amazing idea popped into my head: apples. Golden apples, emerald apples, and ruby apples! They would not only fit well into the petrified nature theme of the original floors, but they would also look utterly beautiful. I’d instructed the Wisps to find a couple trees and place some of the opulent apples here and there. Most were gold, some were emerald, and a bare few were ruby, with more showing up on the later floors than the earlier ones.
With the new style of these floors, though, I had some concerns. Eventually, I would want to repopulate the dungeon with something to fit the different themes they’d end up having, which led me to the issue of what to do with the current defenses once I’d started work on that. Making all of those Antigos and then just doing nothing with them would be pretty wasteful, so I had a plan for when I was done with them. Of course, for now, I still needed the simplistic power that they provided, but at some point in the future they would become redundant and out of place. Once I no longer needed two thousand Antigo guards, I’d use Construct Consciousness on them to give them the ability to Spread my Influence, then just tell them to travel as far away from here as they could.
The Wisps I’d sent out earlier had already proved this strategy to be effective. I now controlled much of the aerospace surrounding my tower, which would prove useful if any of the creatures out there ever decided that it needed to fall. I’d even started to incorporate a bit of the nearby mountains. I didn’t do anything with them for the time being, but at a later date I might flatten them or incorporate them into my tower to make it even bigger.
Now that I’d finished building and making basic protections for myself, and had even managed to automate the construction and repopulation of my floors, it was time to work on empowering myself. Currently, the biggest holdups in my Skills were Calling and Spatium Manipulation. I decided to work on the former first, since it would be the easiest of the two.
I instructed one of the Antigos to bring up the corpses of the two undead who had entered my dungeon a while ago. Contrary to my expectations, the bodies were actually in pristine condition. Was my Domain so toxic to life that not even fungi or bacteria dared enter it? That was an interesting thought. In any case, I cranked on my Bondsight and targeted the lizard body with my Taglock Boon. My Omniscience told me that it was a Gila Hulk, an extra chonky version of the regular gila monster from Earth.
I activated Calling, and one of the bonds that I saw pulling away from the corpse with Bondsight lit up and started quivering. I sent a bit of Spatium into my fingers and tugged on the bond a bit, speeding up the process. Soon, a scaled beast landed on the floor before me. Pushing Necrosis into my hand, I grasped the lizard’s neck. It didn’t take long before the beast died in my deathly grip, its life energy having been devoured by the all-consuming Necrosis.
With that done, I considered what to do with the body. Eventually, I just decided that it was best to simply reanimate it without any bells or whistles. The thing was already quite large and had a terrifyingly strong bite, with powerful venom to boot. With that pain-inducing venom that now carried Necrosis, nothing else was truly needed to make it an incredibly powerful beast. I experimented with the mob a bit more, having it fight a Quadjack Caerbalope just to see how it fared. It did quite well.
The undead Gila Hulk’s scales were quite tough, though it was rather slow. Its venom performed about as expected, inducing incredible pain upon the Quadjack, though the abomination’s performance was unaffected due to its undead nature. I could also tell that the Necrosis carried by the Hulk’s venom was trying to inflict damage, but the hostile energy was gobbled up by the Caerbalope’s own Necrosis.
I immediately decided that this would make for a good mob on the first 7 floors, and I might even make a boss based on it later on. That wasn’t the aim of this use of Calling, though, so I got back on task. Sadly, in my haste to kill the Gila Hulk, I’d weakened its bonds to the point where any use of my Bondsight would prove inefficient at best.
I Called another Gila Hulk, and it popped into existence before me after a few moments. Like with the original, it was confused and terrified, but this time I didn’t end its suffering quickly. Instead, I had a nearby Antigo hold it in place and focused on it with my Bondsight. Golden lines started to reach away from it, and I was able to identify some of them straight away. Some of them felt intrinsically linked with Bondsight, telling me that they were the creature’s blood relatives. There were actually many, many of those strands, but most were faint, some even nearly impossible to see.
Instinctively, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to use any of those fainter strands for any reason. Instead, I chose to latch onto one of the strands that wasn’t linked to my Taglock Boon, and followed it. I used all of my senses as best as I possibly could, and tried to see what the bond was leading me to. Spatium and Mentum drained from me rapidly, and the image was blurry and very limited, but I got what I wanted.
It turned out that this little bugger was a fighter, and I’d Called on it at just the right time to royally confuse a random farmer, who was currently writhing in pain on the sand of some desert, sporting a large bite mark on his arm. Curiously, the bond that I’d followed had actually been leading me to the Gila Hulk’s venom.
I looked at the new Gila Hulk with appreciation. He was already a warrior at heart, and those tendencies would only improve once I rescued him from the plights and toil of life. I had some experiments I wanted to try out on him, but first, I needed to work on my Calling.
I explored many of the loose strands that tied to the Gila Hulk with Bondsight, and found that many of the strongest bonds that linked to Taglock were actually just loose bits of skin. I’d never had to deal with that before, since I’d always been focused on getting creatures out of my Calling Skill, but it did seem that Taglock most effectively linked to bits of the creature itself. Outside of that, there were some older Hulks and some progeny, but I decided to leave the beast’s immediate family alone, instead choosing to extend my senses to distant relatives.
While it may have been in character for a lich to murder someone’s family in front of them, I didn’t want that to interfere with my upcoming experimentation. Yes, yes, it was silly to think that a Gila Hulk would see any difference between me murdering its family and murdering others of its species, but I didn’t have a degree in lizard psychology and didn’t want to take any risks. For all I knew, these sorts of lizards lived in tightly-knit family units and the Hulk would have fostered negative emotions towards me if I’d killed its family in front of it.
Anyways, with that in mind, I found some of the more faint strands that linked to living Hulks and started Calling them en masse. Soon, I was left with a pile of corpses, a quivering and terrified Gila Hulk, and a buzzing sensation. Looking at my Phylactery, I knew I’d accomplished my goal.
Seif Ambrose
Spatial Lich 2
Phylactery 2
* Undead Possession 1
* Reconstitution 4
* Incorporate Phylactery 2
Necrosis Manipulation 5 (Max)
* Deadsight 7
* Animate Necrosis 8
* Shape Necrosis 5
* Create Undead 9
* Necrotic Restoration 0
* Construct Consciousness 3
Domain of Undeath 5 (Max)
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* Spread Undeath 9
* Mold Terrain 10
* Transmute 4
* Omnipresence 4
* Omniscience 3
* Empowered Control 1
Spatium Manipulation 2
* Delinear Sight 4
* Stitching 2
* Folding 1
Calling 3
* Taglock 6
* Nomantic Call 2
* Bondsight 7
* Available Boon (Alter Bond, Divine Bond)
Enhancements: Willpower x2
Named Belongings: Caerbalope, Antigo, Arachnomicon
With my Calling leveled up, my only holdouts were Phylactery and Spatium Manipulation, both of which I basically just needed to practice to improve. My next specialization level was just across the horizon.
The Boons were actually very different from what I’d expected. It seemed that Bondsight had taken me a bit away from the normal path that Calling might have taken. These options were less focused on directly summoning creatures or objects, and more about manipulating those bonds that seemed to tie everything together. Divine Bond was the simpler of the two, and actually just did what I’d done by spying on that random farmer from before. It would let you latch onto a bond and follow it to its destination, then look around, not only at the subject of the bond but also the area it was in. It actually would have worked quite well with Locus Call, and I wondered if the fact that these Boon paths were “branching” meant that people who took Locus Call would also be offered this Divine Bond.
Alter Bond was the more esoteric of the pair, and I could immediately tell that its uses were far more niche and that it would level slowly. That alone made me want to take Divine Bond so that I could level up more quickly, but I then recalled something Azrael had told me and took another look at Alter Bond.
Azrael had told me that the Boons I took would help determine how my Skills would upgrade once I took my second specialization. For example, if I specced further into Death by taking some sort of Spatial Archlich specialization, then my Necrosis Manipulation Skill, which was already leaning heavily towards the creation and use of minions, would most likely change into a Skill that almost only aided in those tasks. I would still have all the knowledge from the previous Skill, just not the aids or guidelines that it provided to ease its use. For example, in some cases, people upgraded their Manipulation Skills and lost the sight Boons that came with the originals. Most of those people completely lost the ability to see their magic. While that wasn’t too bad for some, since they had an innate feel and sense for that brand of energy, for some it was devastating.
It also turned out that most people’s ability to sense magic was based on their affinity to that magic. In my case, I was a lich, and my Phylactery was completely stuffed with Mentum, Necrosis, and Spatium, so I could only imagine that meant it would take on whatever energies I was personally specialized in. With those, I could form a special body that made use of all of them, effectively making my affinity to them incredibly high.
In the sight example from before, not everyone lost their ability to see their magic once they lost the Boon. It seemed that people who focused more on learning the why of their Skills, rather than just blindly throwing energy into the forms it helped you make, tended to retain the knowledge of how to use the abilities they’d been granted even after the Boons were gone.
In any case, this was why I took Alter Bond. The Boon was more complex and would be harder to level, sure, but its effect was much more unique. It would teach me to manipulate the bonds that I saw, which included things like strengthening and weakening a bond, creating new bonds, and even removing bonds that were already there.
Aside from the obvious effects that this would have against someone who had a Skill like my own Calling or some form of Soothen Skill, this would also reduce the efficacy of Ire and Heart magics, since they used bonds to tug on the mind and its vulnerable parts. In a similar vein, it could completely halt certain types of Karma magic, which focused on creating bonds with everything, and using those bonds to make the world act in tune with your will and vice versa.
The moment I gained the Boon, I targeted myself with Bondsight and started trimming away all of the random bonds I’d formed. I didn’t fully know if it was lucky or unlucky, but I didn’t have any bonds from before this life. This was good because my origins wouldn’t ever become a weakness for the aforementioned types of magic users to exploit, but it also meant that I had no connection to that world, and would never be able to return there, nor would I be able to Call anything or anyone from there.
Anyways, I had quite a few bonds that I didn’t care for anymore. I obviously kept my bonds to my current Domain, Azrael, and all of my minions, but there were quite a few that had been randomly dropped on the ground. Most of the bonds were weak, especially the ones from when Azzy and I had been traveling here, but there were also a lot from my previous attempt at a dungeon. My Domain was basically a bond-generator, and even after I’d left the area, the dungeon still held many traces that would lead back to me. The people who’d died to my Antigo back there had also left a couple bonds, and these ones felt as though they were full of vitriol and wrath. I cut them off before they could cause any trouble.
It took quite a bit of effort and an absolute motherload of Spatium, but I eventually managed to cut off all the bonds that I didn’t care to hold on to. Soon, there was only one that led outside the Dead Belt. I inspected the bond, but found myself entirely incapable of viewing the other side.
That was very concerning. The most likely reason for this bond was that a Soothen-user was tracking me, which was something that I could most certainly not allow. I pumped Spatium and Mentum into this rogue bond, commanding it to break. It took much more energy than the previous bonds, and far more time as well, but eventually, it was convinced, and snapped with a spiritual twang!
The next time Azrael got back from one of her walkabouts, I informed her of the experience I’d had. She looked concerned, but told me that it was probably nothing to worry about. Soothsayers were powerful tools of the Watchers, but very few of them had anything invested into Reinforcement, and they wouldn’t send one out to die in the Dead Belt, nor would they risk the lives of their people to kill something that wasn’t causing any problems.
With her permission, I also looked over a few of her more recent bonds. She didn’t want me digging into the ones she’d held before she’d died, but luckily, those ones were easily identifiable, since they seemed a bit more gray and were often weaker than the rest. Soon, she was free of all the bonds that she’d accrued by working with the Watchers and their Soothsayers. She, too, had one of those odd, unidentifiable bonds, but I managed to break it with a not-insignificant amount of effort.
Once I was confident that there weren’t any trackers on us, I asked about Azrael’s latest adventure.
“I’ve mostly been scouting out the area and looking for threats lately,” she explained, clearly happy to have someone to talk to. “For the most part, there hasn’t really been anything out there, but I think I might have found signs of some sort of Domain Skill.”
“Oh, really?” I leaned in, my curiosity roused. Domain Skills were rare, and if there were another creature with one out there, then I would either end up in conflict with it, or, hopefully, find a way to work with it.
“Yup!” She nodded rapidly, then elaborated, “It seems that their Domain is less, well, magical than yours, though. There are fleshy growths all over the place, kinda like a root system but, well, clearly undead.”
“Hmm.” I scratched my chin. “That sounds pretty dangerous. Would you mind taking some Antigos out with you next time you go out?”
“Oh.” Azrael adopted an expression that I couldn’t place. “Yeah, I can do that. Thank you.”
I waved a hand. “Don’t worry about it. If you end up getting your hands on some of its flesh, or you find the undead itself, I would greatly appreciate it if you brought it to me. I might be able to examine it and find out what it's doing or what type of undead it is.”
She nodded, smirked, then mockingly curtsied. “Yes, dark lord. Whatever you say, dark lord.”
I rolled my eyes at her. “Hey, I asked!”
Irregardless of my protestations, she continued in her exaggeratedly subservient tone, “And your wish shall be my command, oh Lord Ambrose of the Dark Spire!”
“Hey…” I was complaining, but that was actually a pretty good title. Maybe, if I ever took on human subjects, I’d force them to call me that? They’d have to recite the full title every time, of course, or they’d be lashed thrice for their insolence.
Seeing my smirk, Azzy rose from her curtsy and pouted. “I just gave you ideas, didn’t I? I swear, if you try to make me call you that, I’m gonna punch your Phylactery.” I winced, looking at the crystal. If getting punched in the genetics-storage-device hurts, what would getting punched in the soul-storage-device feel like?
“Ideas? Hah,” I chuckled anxiously, “what are those? I don’t get those. Do you get those? They sound like something that might be bad for your health, you should get that checked out.”
Azrael’s eyes narrowed further, but she relaxed and started walking up the stairs to the roof. “I’ll be going out again in three days. I’d just hate it if you didn’t come say goodbye and I had to go out without your Antigos.”
I watched her make her way upstairs with confusion. Why did I feel like I was sweating? I couldn’t sweat, right?
I turned my attention back to what I’d been doing before the distraction, presented with a choice.
Did I keep grinding my Calling Skill so that I wouldn’t need to worry about it later, or did I accept the immediate gratification of leveling up my specialization right away?