I spent the day focusing on refining my soul. It's amazing what you can accomplish in a single day when you have functionally unlimited resources and the might of a hivemind behind you. Even with how rapidly these soul exercises consume the shell of my soul, I have way more energy than I could possibly need on account of how many people have died in my territory recently. Having nearly everyone in the entire continent blown up in a single attack tends to kill a lot of people.

Sure, focusing on cultivation would provide a lot more immediate benefits, but I'm expecting to die in the near future. Cultivation is almost never preserved post reincarnation, while improving my soul will make it much more likely that I will be able to reincarnate myself into something good. It's not a sure thing, obviously, I would need several years worth of improvement and several attempts at reincarnating myself before I could pull it off reliably, but it gives me a fighting chance. And doing that to someone else is completely different to doing it to yourself, it's pretty hard to have control when you are nothing more than a soul.

As far as our march towards the capital, it's going about as well as we expected. They are sending pretty much everything at us now, even Willow and her party has joined the fray. She gets shut down almost immediately every time she pops up, but it pulls our most valuable fighters away from other tasks for a time. Still, we have managed to kill a couple of her companions. Hardly a perfect result, but we can't really expect one.

They don't really have a way to stop the advance of my forest, but we don't have a way to break their army. Once we reach their capital there will be a stalemate, and, were I not to use a nuclear bomb, would result in a drawn-out siege that would see our empire collapse under its own weight long before the enemy would submit. And I highly doubt the city busting techniques I have used before would be effective, as well as several I haven't thought to try.

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Their nuclear fire user has not joined the fight quite yet, but we are already preparing countermeasures for when they inevitably do. This is assuming that they didn't somehow kill themself in the attack, which is entirely possible, but I would be surprised if there wasn't more than one of them.

I'm thinking that the most effective method would be to just drown them in as much mana as possible, get enough and it will render nuclear fire useless. To that end I have set up a system of Pipeweed running through the roots of my forest in order to allow me to dump tons of mana on a spot with pinpoint accuracy. Obviously, we don't really have a way to test this, so I hope it just works, but things rarely work out like that. It's not like I can abandon the front lines right now to test some hypothetical counter to a potential future threat when I have to be able to react fast enough to keep a very real and very present threat subdued as much as possible. Willow and her party will kill a lot of my people very quickly without my interference, while a nuclear mage might kill a bunch of my people if they group up.

So staying on the front lines and refining my soul while I wait for someone important that I need to pin down for others to deal with is how I expect to spend the next few days. It feels better than just sitting arround and trying to entertain myself at least.

Anyway, Good Night Diary.