A sudden flash of the arcane web before my eyes triggered the evolution, releasing the excessive pressure I felt earlier and condensing it in a cylindrical space below my spiritual heart, where it boiled like a volcano waiting to blow.
[Prestige Cleric: The Eternal Path - Step One. Complete.]
[Evolution: [Divine Well] - The Divine Well compiles the faith generated from your followers inside your spiritual body and molds that faith into pure divine mana.]
I could hardly read the words, as the immensely overbearing feeling soon exploded outwards in a conical shape while simultaneously bursting upwards to bury itself deep in my skull. One forced my back to arch in pain while the other compelled me to reel forward in the air, clutching my head as the pain only intensified, and the words continued.
[Evolution: [Divine Pool] - This is the pool that leaks out into your Clerics, Paladins, Warlocks, or most devoted Clergy, granting them powers far beyond their station in exchange for their faith.]
I forced myself to read on as the feeling bloomed, spreading out towards my eyes while the proverbial sun in the center of my brain burned ever-hotter.
[Evolution: [Divine Sight] - The Eyes of the Divine enables you to see true, and grants you the means to see the faith of your followers as a visible aura hugging their flesh.]
The pain grew almost intolerable just before it faded in a blinding flash not unlike the one that began this unpleasant process. Tentatively, I took a deep breath and felt hardly any difference in my body, yet there were still words lingering before my hungry eyes.
[Evolution: [Credence Cortex] - This spiritual cortex gives you the means to interact with the cerebral cortex of your faithful and communicate with them by manipulating their emotions, senses, and memories. Thus enabling you to convey your word or guide your flock from afar.]
[Level 2: [The Holy and Unholy Word] - Your path to perpetuity continues first by creating your divine realm, and second, by having your existing Clerics mold one of your faithful into a priest or priestess. They must then build a temple or church erected in your name and staff your clergies before holding the first service in your honor.]
A seemingly arduous task for them, but I got what I wanted nonetheless. Divine mana was now in my arsenal and my two Clerics were made official. More so, they were to pray for the spells they wished to use, unlike Hogaz, who was the mercy of my choosing for not only his tasks but the perks he gained as well, which was a huge plus in my eye, as that would come to translate to every Legionary that would come to be.
Speaking of Hogaz, I didn't need to study him to see he was both Seeker of Mani and a Noctis Legionary. First, a sorcery of Lunacy and then one of my warlocks, a Prime Noctis Legionary. Thus he had two responsibilities merged into one. He was still to be an investigator of the arcane, obscure, and verboten. He was still the Seeker of the strange monoliths scattered across the southern lands by the ever-watching moon and a soon-to-be explorer of the World Seas. Now, for my Legions, he would command the greatest fleet of privateers, pirates, sailors, or whatever else could exist on the open waters. As such, there was little I had to do regarding his progress. Unlike the others.
That wasn’t to say it was all bad, however. On the contrary, the founding members being Prestige Warlocks was infinitely more auspicious than I could have imagined. There were 10 ranks in the Legions as of now, so it was all too easy to split the 20 steps of the warlock path among the ranks and have the tasks fall into line with the orders I’d already planned to give them. Conversely, the same would apply to all the Master Class Legionaries who would come in the future.
As for the rewards, the class made it all the easier to truly make the founders the deities of my pantheon. It allowed me to grant them ritual necromancy. It would allow for buffs and auras that would affect their civilian, military, scientific, or industrial roles. It would allow their followers to gain resistance or immunity to their magic, allow them to manipulate their magic, or even cast it as a warlock. Everyone in Toril’s Legion, for example, could come to be immune or resistant to, be able to manipulate, and eventually possess analogs of his magic, allowing him to use his magic freely. On top of that, it would also align with my ambitions to turn them into the deities of my pantheon. Complete with domains that would affect everyone beneath them.
The exceptions were, of course, Urshure and Bazzric. However, that wasn’t to say they weren’t my warlocks as well. On the contrary, their respective patrons, Tiamat and Sutark, essentially agreed to share so long as my ambitions continued to fall in line with theirs. Tiamat, it turned out, was quite happy about my deal with Cononthoth. Thus she changed Urshure’s path to revolve around creating a clan of shadow dragonborne and, of course, finding more venerable dragons for me to corrupt with shadow. Sutark, on the other hand, altered Bazzric’s path to have him learn how to create from me, in turn bringing his destructive potential to new heights.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
With all that said, I took as much time as was needed to fill out the prestige and master variants of the class, ensuring the founders and future Imperators would forever remain the pinnacle of this organization. Even then, however, I was still a bit chagrined about it. There was still much research and development to do before we obtained technological superiority, thus I wanted to wait. Not to mention, our final training regiment hadn’t been established. However, their subordinates going through such a regiment in just six months was the cutoff for their rapid rise through the ranks. After that, the Legions would be fully realized.
Off paper, at least.
"Alright." I looked down and immediately recoiled at the small sea of gaping mouths below me. A few of them were in tears. Doyle was even on his knees. All of them were covered in auras of golden or pale light and stared at me as if they'd never seen anything like me, giving me nothing to do but stare uncomfortably as I landed and asked. "What?
"Is there something on my face?" I spawned my Doppelganger in response to their silence and began picking at his face while he picked at mine. "I don't look different. What about this?" I lifted his shirt just as he did mine, and just like his, my eyes grew wide. "Woah!"
"Woah!"
Our marks, a leafless tree set before a semicircle drawn over my ribcage, had one drastic change. The ring of what used to be darkness behind the tree growing from my navel was now glowing with a pale vibrancy like the moon just outside. And my Doppelganger's mark glowed with the golden radiance of twilight.
Although we felt no different, the change was there and worse, everyone couldn't stop staring. So with an annoyed huff, we quickly covered our marks and went our separate ways, he into the surrounding lands and me into the air once more.
"With that done, we can move on." I looked at Toril with a sigh and gave him a nod. "To the shores."
"To the shores!" His arm raised towards the vast entryway, Toril turned to belay the words while Jaimess followed with a responding shout.
"Paddy!"
As one, the Captains shuffled into an east-facing formation after a flick of my arm spread a curtain-shaped domain in front of the arched entryway. And then came the fall of Toril's hand.
As one, the westernmost rank conjured torches, spiraled gusts of wind, and flapped wings alike to take to the air and soar above the rank in front of them, eagerly waiting for them to pass so that they too could take off. And in a cascading wave, the captains leaped, darted, skipped, or swung behind their peers while yet more took up position behind them. Forming a constant stream of bodies to pass through the purple-hued film, and with the hold of gravity released from their bodies, they coasted to the eastern shores in a conical formation until they eventually reformed into a terrace of bodies that reached from the muddy shores of the outer rings to the cloud deck overlooking the groves.
Meanwhile, I was on the 'floating' deck rimming the base of the tower. Standing at the center of an innocuous drainage hole near the edge, I looked upon the glory of the tower for the final time. "Just as we rehearsed." I grinned to myself. Then, after a deep breath to temper my thoughts, I leaped up and struck the plugged hole with a void-filled palm.
The destructive energies of the Void Whip passed through the pre-established lines of the tower's base unabated. Like a river running in reverse, it split at the base and spread to encircle the compound, eager to flow outwards to the other drainage canals as if in flight from the wall of gravitational mana chasing after it.
With its rounds around the base complete, the platform buckled and soon stilled suddenly, yet the Whip of Void had yet to cease its rampage. It passed harmlessly through pre-bored canals and tunnels on its way up the tower, disregarding the floors in favor of chewing through the grooved or otherwise marked stone layered between the floors and wings to separate those too, sending them floating lazily within the growing cloud of stone.
Only once the grove- the last piece of the dismantled tower- had been separated, did the flow reverse. As if gravity had suddenly returned, the entropic river flowed down those chasms, tunnels, and holes it bored to converge at a point on the surface of the lake to pause for a long second.
Then, its reaching continued.
Its downward spiral into the dark freed my attention from it, moving my concentration to the dancing boulders above and the still seas around me. With one hand, I agitated those still seas by spawning dozens of Artificial Wells to pull at the water and draw it towards the dancing boulders above. Simultaneously, those boulders were guided to their respective owners by my other hand. The majority of them at least. The chemical plant, workshops, library, and other industrial or social spaces were kept above with the remnants of my floor; but kept separate. Meanwhile, the waters kept being pulled and the pillar of void continued its downward spiral. The lake continued draining until the muddy basin was illuminated by the Moon's gentle light for the first time in relative decades, giving all who looked upon it a clear view of the curtain of impenetrable darkness rising from the depths of the Mortal Plane.
As if it were a representation of the closure of the tower's short life, the curtain rose a few dozen meters above the ground before allowing a silvery blanket to encompass its open ceiling. And with a flick of my finger, it was gone. In its place was a reversed waterfall of dirt, stone, bedrock, magma, and eventually, towering mushrooms, columns of highly compressed metals, and exotic materials born from the Mortal Plane’s depths, all falling upwards into a silvery mirror of arcane radiance that disappeared it from this plane of existence.
On and on it flowed into that silver mirror, disappearing uncountable tons of matter while tiny pebbles of an arcane nature were thrown and hurled at the planetoids above by the Captains, reforming their pie-shaped wings into shards and platforms and spheres before they compressed once more into bracelets and rings and buttons.
When all that remained of the once grandiose Noctis Reach was a chasm that led to the deepest bowels of the Mortal Plane, I cast one final spell before turning my gaze to the full moon above. Then I took to the northern skies with my comrades in tow, leaving the distant sounds of cascading rocks fading behind me.