The individual who was the head paladin comes back, moments later with her sword and proceeds to bring in the bodies of the fallen to prevent them from rising as undead. The building blocks of reality derived from the corpses are inferior to when the person was alive. The times it takes are erratic, so I check out towards the surface and realize that she is simply working in a clockwise manner around my entrance. The corpses trigger a surge from my slimes who begin decomposing the lot of the bodies to neutralize the threat of them rising as the undead. The paladin switches up her tactics and instead spawns common slimes on the surface to clean up the numbers that way. Then the slimes just wandered off into the sunset.
The colored slimes weigh heavily on the realm and cause the regeneration rates of things to slow down. Slimes as a rule just act as a general nuisance as a rule when they are a valid monster type so having a bunch of them show up frustrates the Grandmaster to no end. The dragon’s resistance to what the slimes are up to is less than they thought. This in turn causes the war to take a break to remove all of the slimes. By the time the war resumes the Grandmaster has recovered to the point where the war didn’t happen, and with less dragons running around even with the dragons ambushing the undead lord the war ended with that doomed assault.
After that debacle the undead lord decided to occupy my entrance to block me from supporting the other divid and causing trouble. Then I feel him start looking for the head paladin, as he blocks all egress from my entrance. The elves have fermented some of the barley so they give that to her to hold onto. Her response? “I have made no oaths of abstinence, in regards to alcohol.”
“We only gave it to you as our cider was better in potions than the ale.” and with that my elves return to behind the yellow gate to frolic. Actually I have no idea what they are doing back there.
I check in on the enclave and discover that my elves have discovered science and have taken to researching the workings of biomes. My workings respond by using what they have learned to cross reference what I already have, letting me separate biomes, structures, and modifiers. It's all pretty distracting so I leave them to it and go back to focusing on the paladin.
“You know I’m not sure you have a good grasp on time; it’s been over two weeks since you last paid attention to me. So you might be facing some sort of temporal troubles, but it’s hard to be sure.”
I start looking for that and begin to actively resist the effect from the bottom up. I clean out my lower section quite quickly all things considered, and get a correspondingly minor resistance increase accordingly. The upper floors are considerably more resistant so I just degrade them, and move the boundary upward soon enough the floor count has been reduced to three floors.
“I do suppose I set up the scenario to shrink your power to force you to give up that troublemaker, but I didn’t expect this level of pushback, so either I have to deal with the now larger three remaining floors or call it quits to focus on something else. Can I recommend that you fornicate with the paladin?” Pushing out the effect also pushed out a lot of the corruption of undeath’s influence, leading to him being more limited in his tools here. It’s not absolute, but it’s enough that even he no longer wants to come down to the bottom and face me directly as he might have at the beginning of the altercation.
“I love the words related to formication, why do you ask?” Both the paladin and the grandmaster react to the word as though they were covered in insects.
“Your vocabulary is awful, stop using words I don't know and leaning on the translation skill to get the point across.” The paladin is amused at the frustration the undead creature is displaying. The paladin then has a bad idea and decides that she wants to catch one of my necrotic slimes. One bucket later and she has managed to bring it up to the first floor, which goads the most powerful undead in the entire space into a state of panic. Eventually his mages throw enough magic at it to kill it forcing the paladin to retreat to grab another. This continues for a bit until the grandmaster becomes frustrated and moves to intercept the paladin on her return for another slime.
That works great until the paladin says, “Behind you” and my elves start playing the benny hill theme.
After that bit of chaos dies down I say “Now kiss.” That lord just up and left, can you believe such an ingrate?
Then tremors shuffle through the undead’s domain, as it starts to shrink. I watch as everyone else struggles to make do with less. Then it weakens to the point where it becomes a positive feedback loop, as they seem to have forgotten that the entire realm still needs the energy you are providing it. Then my realm starts cracking. I start doing the same thing as everybody else with one exception, I draw and reduce the lower section outside the hive and the elves claim. My entrance is summarily conquered by the orcs as well, as they see it as a position the other will want to fight for. The hive agrees as they engage them for part of my territory.
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The war, and I do not say that lightly, escalates as more parties join in the area. It’s such a good training exercise, that having my realm surviving the chaos has strengthened it to the abuse and has in turn expanded. There is also so much death that I have to gain more resistance to that as well. Then the grandmaster picks up his entire capital region and moves it adjacent to my territory, to have direct access to all of the extra space. I start using my proximity to analyze the grandmaster’s powers and discover that his power signature is a basic purple. While this is one of the worst matchups for me, it is increasingly apparent that beyond purple is a good way to get up your powers for success once you have awakened, after a point you plateau like the undead lord has and stagnate.
With a greater appreciation I watch the undead’s essence churn, as he tries to keep his power stable in these trying times. I watch as part of it begins to fail and snag the corrupted essence as it escapes, and turn it into card form as it is not safe for my use. Once I purified the power essence I made it a permanent boost to myself to give me an advantage in the future. It’s increasingly apparent that each essence type has its own improvement skill and I do not have any of them. I pop open my forums and start looking for how much the skills are and discover that the common stuff is both expensive and limited.
I then decide that I can try to take a crack at it myself. All I have to do is generate the appropriate signature in my essence, and then let it compound. It takes me several tries to separate out my essence and then I discover that I have to separate it from its source before letting it regenerate the missing piece. I then check for a different initial signature than from my test signature and then discover that for each signature the pattern is the same for the extraction. Then I check the mechanism for placing it back in and discover that while the intent is the same the distinctions within the essence make the incorporation of the essence distinct for each type. That by the way makes cultivating each signature a unique proposition for another time.
The shrinking pattern is of course slowing down now. Which means that the space for things going on is stabilizing. It also means that I have literally become the hub of the entire realm. I check the realm for space essence and discover that it is readily available in small doses. I then use my void affinity to check for the same and discover that that is much rarer. I pause and consider my options, as I need to ascertain what I owe the others present. After settling on not making their spaces objectively worse I get to the second question, while I need the space, more space will not defend me from the grandmaster. Actually I have no idea what would slow that monster down.
Then I parse out a secondary concern, if I do not last long I will not beat the Grandmaster in the long term. Then I realized one of my father’s comments might be useful, “When you are the steward of a thing you have to determine whether you are going to exploit, neglect, or improve the thing you are a steward of.”
So I switch to my affinity for realms and get to work. I am then interrupted by the fact that I’m using a cultivation skill and everybody knows that I have it as it radiates off of the surface. All the lords converge on me as I have inadvertently stated I still have power. Shadow is the only element that I have that doesn’t trigger a reprisal, for now so I switch to that as I wait for the opportunism to quiet down. It instead sparks a renewal of the conflict and bleeds of the grandmaster even further. Then a bunch of new Pyg tyrants arrive on the periphery and exacerbate the situation even further. I check if I can muffle the expansion of my affinities by using the lower section, and discover that it is a lot less efficient, but it does work and is utterly silent.
I cultivate endurance and fortitude in response to the chaos happening above and watch as the height of the yellow gate gyrates as things shift around me. Soon the fighting cools again as I watch the grandmaster who hasn’t healed quite right engage with someone in the distance. Then I have an inspired idea; I already have the wasteland biome so if I influence its progress then I can change the entire space we collectively hold. I get to work which confuses my elves, as they recommend that I push for more forests instead. It grinds to a halt soon after I start reaching past a hundred percent. I set my sights on the desert biome next and get most of the way done before I am interrupted.
Turns out that being against both wastelands and deserts caused my above ground territory to spawn more life than I realized I was capable of. This in turn caused a new problem in that the plants started processing the miasma to make it go away. This in turn gives me the jungle biome for the first time, which causes all the plants to die back. The elves watching the entire process happen decide that they are okay with more diversity in the biomes for areas other than their own. I watch as the biomes that they have been suppressing get added to my collection including marsh, coast, lake and hills. Curiously it’s the hills that end the altercations I’m having with other parties, as their defensive alcoves stymie the advantages of a large but weak army.
I have no walls or fortifications in the territory I directly control, but now it is physically bigger than the capital territory of the grandmaster and the other groups are starting to think that I’m going to come out on top. Even the head paladin has re-equipped their armor and has started building up a defensive army in the hills. Then the void touches the upper part of my surface domain and I start cultivating my void resistance to slow the damage it might cause. In the end it’s apparent that I will soon become the primary lord of this realm and that to survive the monsters will have to eliminate me.