"The Council has decided. We need to find out if we can include the old fort in our territory." A person entered the office of The Purple Flash without knocking, his rude actions fully justified by his status. The room was small, situated in the temporary headquarters of The Purple Lotus Sect, but it was large enough to serve its purpose.
"What do you mean? It should naturally be ours and even if not, who can counter our military might now?!" Yen was talking casually to The Immortal as the tension between them lessened after the crisis had been resolved. It was unusual for him to be less aggressive than her and she knew right away that he had to possess some knowledge about the problem that she lacked.
She looked up from her desk and awaited his reaction.
"I would agree with you immediately, if not for the situation up there." He nodded his chin up towards the sky and Yen knew what he had in mind. The Heavens worked in mysterious ways nowadays, as if there had been some power struggle up above their heads. "In addition, we have detected multiple instances of second stage Void monsters over there."
"Void? That makes little sense." She pushed away all the paperwork in front of her and propped her chin with a hand, her elbow resting on the polished wood of the table.
"That is exactly the reason why The Conclave decided to skip the place for a while, focusing more on the former territory of the Purple Lotus Sect."
"Ah, I see. You have called me to investigate." Yen knew that Immortals were quite the cowards concerning raids outside their territory and rightly so. The strength of their stage was not much higher than hers against strong opponents and they were invaluable assets for the city, painting a huge target on their foreheads. Yen had participated in the broader meeting of the Conclave, but had no clue what the inner circle of the three Immortals had decided to do.
"Precisely, the activity seems to come from the underground and we fear that somewhere deep, there could be a tear in reality with creatures of much higher level than just the second stage." The Immortal continued to gauge her reaction, looking for a hint of panic in her behavior, but saw none.
"Let's hope that is not the case, I see no reason for anything similar to appear at that place."
"One never knows, the ambitions and dreams of rural Lords are sometimes too big for their own good and you would be surprised what they are able to hoard and hide in their false hopes of gaining power." The Immortal sneered as if he remembered some particular incident.
"I will look into it shortly." She replied right away, knowing that it was not up for a discussion.
"Be careful, you are not a good match for Void." He said, but Yen just laughed in return.
"Who is?" Void was a nuisance that could not be countered easily. The best counters were people with Mojos like Melancholy, Fear or other types that negatively influenced mental states, because Void tended to corrupt the mental state of its user, its emptiness being stressful to cope with. She had seen a fight between a fighter who cultivated Despair and a wolf evolved using Void and the beast simply committed suicide midway through the fight.
After she parted with The Immortal, a map of the wilderness appeared in her head, she needed to choose the safest route based on the latest reports.
* * * *
"What are your orders, Lord Evil Eye?" A trembling youth asked a giant black knight covered in markings in strange language that glowed purple, the same purple flame burning in its eyes. It was much higher than Tyrn. He had already tried to escape from the haunted place that turned out to be the cellar of his ancestral Fort Orlov, but it was like the place itself wanted to prevent his escape. He knew that the evil entity that resided in the black gem on the knight's forehead was to blame. The demon without a material form who enslaved many terrifying servants and the earth itself headed his call.
"Why run? Were you hungry or something?" Karl hastily wrote on the tunnel wall using a finger of his servant that glowed purple with Void. He had long given up persuading Tyrn Riven to call him differently, Lord Evil Eye was the least pompous title he had been able to get out of him yet. The teenager tried to escape with every slightest opportunity and agreed to anything he wanted without thinking.
"I am perfectly satisfied with everything, Lord Evil Eye! You need not to bother yourself with my wretched presence." Karl felt an urge to slam into the stone wall with something. There was no way he could think of to connect with the boy. He had tried to talk to him, persuade him, listen to him, reason with him, but everything had failed. In Tyrn's eyes, he was simply some sort of an evil reincarnation of a demonic Immortal that wanted to twist and corrupt his soul before drinking his blood mixed with marrow from his bones and tear his soul apart before savoring it bit by bit. Playing with his feelings was obviously a part of his feeding ritual.
What a disaster.
He briefly thought about his newly renovated dungeon to improve his mode and it really helped. He had successfully managed to connect all his three important structures together and heavily fortified his domain with a network of traps and tunnels that had been constructed under his new safety standard. The trap areas were accessible only after breaking a door or getting through a row of thick bars. He had even prepared a flood gate to submerge the whole network underwater in case he had been attacked by an Earth Mojo cultivator. The construction had really filled him with hopes for the future, even though he had not found any more interesting buildings than those he had already discovered. His only problem left was Tyrn.
"I am tired of this, follow my servant to your cell." He wrote and Tyrn began to tremble even more.
"Yes, Lord Evil Eye. I will follow your servant!" There was an immediate response.
Karl decided that Tyrn's perception of him being his jailer was impossible to root out of his mind and he would have to play with the cards he had. After all, it was not Karl's objective to make Tyrn feel like he was on a vacation. His objective was to make a more decent man out of him, being nice was not absolutely necessary.
"What happened to this old place anyway?" The Void Knight wrote with shining letters in the air while they were walking.
"My family lived here, but they had been killed in the attacks." Tyrn said quickly, wanting to have the coming interrogation behind him as soon as possible.
"What exactly happened?" Karl made his knight write slowly in the air, his end of the conversation was considerably slower, making Tyrn nervous.
"This became a border, but we had trouble with supplies. Something with weapons. Men were inexperienced and weak. In the end, the fort was overrun by the wilderness." Karl thought that there might be more to it, but Tyrn had to be very young when that happened and could hardly know any details.
"You alone survived?" Karl wanted to make sure that his friend was really dead, yet he knew the answer already. Riven family would never have allowed Tyrn to become like he was if they were still alive.
"I fought until the last second, but the monsters struck me unconscious. Everyone died, but somehow beasts thought that I was dead and left me alone. I could not do anything. I was out." He responded quickly with his eyes wandering along the nearby wall. Karl left his obvious lie be, as it was clear that Tyrn would have not been walking behind him, if he had not run away that day. Beasts not being able to tell a dead body from a living person was ridiculous. He decided not to call him out on his false story.
"You will be trained in combat, I am in need of more forces. Better behave, if you displease me, you will become a sacrifice." Karl wrote and halted next to an entrance to the room that was suitable to become Tyrn's cell. Karl decided to act as his prisoner expected him to in order to get somewhere.
"Of course, Lord Evil Eye." Tyrn hurried inside the room Karl had originally designated as a storage room and bars quickly slammed behind him, trapping him inside.
"This might be the only model that works, I am simply at my wit's end." Karl thought when finally alone, wandering off through his network of tunnels. His old plan had not worked and he had to improvise.
He intended to force routine on Tyrn with straight and fair system of rewards and punishments, the intention being to ingrain in him that systematic hard work could pay out. At the same time, he intended to become the evil lord the boy imagined him to be and planned to threw in a few prison mates in his cell. He would then push the group to work against him until they managed to escape.
The more he thought about it, the more he liked the plan. It would force Tyrn to honestly cooperate with others, as he planned to let them escape only if they worked together like a team.
"It seems like a solid plan, but I will need some team mates. It might be the time for the evil dungeon to go hunt innocent teenagers." Karl's steps changed direction, closing to the surface entrance situated at the basement of Fort Orlov.
He ordered another two Void Knights to go alongside him and also took a group of ten goblins that would serve him as disposable scouts. He set off and began snooping around the city, not daring to venture too close to the high intimidating walls that still stood strong despite the battering they had received during the last decade.
* * * *
Meanwhile, Tyrn sat on the cold floor on his cell while tapping into the bars with a piece of stone he had found. It produce loud sound that spread through the dark tunnels. He hoped that someone would hear the sound and come to his rescue, but it was obviously wishful thinking. He was inside a secured area that had traps all over, there was no way anyone got too far.
The greater was his surprise when he saw a person veiled in a purple cloud levitating in front of his cell. The robed figure had without doubt used the fact that while flying, it was not touching any walls and had not triggered a single trap. A sign of both ingenuity and luck, as all the traps had their triggers linked to the surface of the tunnels.
"The Purple Flash! You have to get me out of here!" Tyrn almost shouted when he recognized the person levitating in front of his cell.
"The monster has finally left, tell me more about it." Yen considered other priorities without even trying to free Tyrn.
"I can tell you everything, just get me out!" He pleaded desperately, but the women was not moved at all.
"You have more value inside than outside. Tell me something I do not know and I will let you live and leave." She stated and Tyrn was shocked by her unconcealed pragmatism.
"Wait, you have to rescue me! Lord Evil Eye will sacrifice me in a ritual!" His mind automatically slipped into the worst possible outcome.
"Thirty seconds." The Purple Flash said coldly while paying attention to the tunnel she had came through.
"He is. .. he is interested in me. I do not know why. He tried to communicate with me a lot before locking me in this cell. He also wanted to know if I am alone."
"Communicate a lot?" Yen lifted her eyebrows in surprise. It was unexpected from a demonic cultivator to speak a lot to his sacrifice.
"Yes, it was strange. It felt like he was trying to get under my skin or something. I do not know, it felt like an old creep that wants to force a candy onto a kid at times. It was strange."
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
"What?!" Yen lifted her eyebrows even higher.
"Yes, and when I resisted all his attempts, he tried to find out if I am alone and locked me in this cell." Tyrn slammed into one of the bars again, producing yet another unnecessary noise.
"I wish you good luck, continue spying on him." Yen looked at him with pity for some reason and levitated away, probably attempting to avoid confrontation with Lord Evil Eye.
"I do not like this at all, there is some very strange Mojo at play here." She uttered under her breath while swiftly passing by the destroyed entrance that she had melted with her power like hot wax.
* * * *
Karl was circling around Jinsheng in search for teammates for Tyrn. He had long sought to help out some kids and decided to score two hits with one shot, it was only logical.
"I will help some kids out as I have promised. . . still by jailing them with Tyrn. Can it still be counted as helping?" There was a tiny flaw within his logic and he needed to mend it somehow, it was beyond obvious.
"I will provide them with food and everything and I will be really nice to them. Tyrn must not figure it out though. It would become complicated." He knew that it would be though, but he was determined to make it work.
During the dungeon construction work, he had kept a few of his minions loitering near the city and hoped that there would be some disturbance that would enable him to snatch some teens. Well, save them from a terrible fate.
After the realm had become more unstable, the sources of disturbance were not just the outside sects and cults, but there were many attempts of the cultivators that lived in the city itself to break the boundaries that used to be unassailable, or protected by Heavenly Tribulations. No one knew what happened, but there were no more Heavenly Tribulations and people even began curse at the Heavens with no consequences at all, something that used to be unthinkable. Even oaths sworn on the Heavens no longer worked, it was as if The Heavens took a week off, but it seemed that it would be much longer than a week.
Many people from the city gained the courage to do what they had feared to do prior and some of their experiments caused serious trouble and chaos. During those events all kinds of disasters struck and people ran in all directions in panic, sometimes even outside of the city wall. Karl decided to wait for a similar, cornered group that sought escape beyond the wall.
It was foolish, but walking past the wall did not mean an automatic death and some still decided to try their luck when the alternative was a gruesome end.
Karl waited for half a day before an opportunity appeared, although it was not due to a disaster outside or inside of the city. The reason was much more simple.
"Get out, I do not care what gang you belong to, stealing food from the guards is really over the top!" A harsh voice barked and a second later a small group of rugged ruffians was thrown out of the city gate, motivated by tips of spears to move beyond the safety of the massive stone structure.
"Please! This is a death sentence!" Some of the group pleaded, but it had no effect and the gate quickly closed behind the group, their pleas totally ignored.
"We will not leave! This is injustice!" Another lean teenager shouted in the direction of the gate, but reconsidered when one of the soldiers took a bow off his shoulder and roared.
"Boys! Shooting practice! The snotty redhead is for double points!" The soldier reached for an arrow and the men around him laughed and began preparing their bows as well. The small group of exiled people immediately moved away from the wall and hid among the trees while not daring to make a sound that might betray their position to the beasts outside.
"Looks like we have candidates, but I have to exclude the most violent first." Karl's objective was not to kill Tyrn and he was sure that the teenager was not the sharpest knife among the thieves. He decided to observe what would happen next to the small group.
"We will try to reason with a different shift." A voice interrupted Karl's musings and he shifted his attention back to the bunch of teenagers that were still hiding behind a tree.
"No, you won't. You are mine." Karl decided to act, when he observed that swirling tendrils of a living wine were slowly creeping towards the unsuspecting victims. The living vine was one of the less dangerous monstrous inhabitants of the forest, but a dragon was not needed to eradicate a small group of teenagers with dull knives, the vine was more than enough.
It was a creature that Karl had not seen before in the forest, but was not rare after his emergence from the tomb. It reminded him of a couple of long snakes moving together, with the minor difference that it moved both above and under the ground, making it a particularly nasty surprise for those that did not pay much attention to their surroundings. It was clear that the teenagers would be ambushed and not many of them would live to tell the tale.
"Can I consider them dead now, thus saved by me or not?" Karl mulled over his moral high ground and while he did, another living wine joined the leading predatory plant.
"Yeah, I can definitely consider them dead without my help now. Let the spectacle begin." Karl nodded his head with satisfaction. Well, it was actually his minion's head as he had none.
He rushed out of his hiding place and the Void Knight that carried him cut along the length of the living vine on the ground, its tendrils burning away quickly with purple fire. The knight stomped on the burned ashes that fell to dust and roared with an unpleasant sound of a torn metal, forcing many of the onlooking teenagers to cover their ears.
They were stunned by the threat that had emerged suddenly out of the bushes and were staring in shock at the runed armor of the hulking figure. Karl ordered his minion to walk swiftly in their direction while he fired up the Void attribute burning in the runes of the steel giant to the maximum. His plan to scare the group had worked and they quickly began running in the direction of the fort while screaming their lungs out.
Some of the teenagers wanted to run along the wall, but Karl used the goblins he had with him to make a racket in their hiding places and managed to keep the group together, moving exactly in the direction he wanted.
"Herding sheep must be really fun, I might have been a German Shepherd in my previous life." Karl thought while chasing the group in front of him. It was not easy to force his minion to run slowly, but appear as if it was running with all its might. Some of the people were very lean and unhealthy, they had no chance to outrun anything in the forest, except maybe the plant monsters.
"The question is, when to start the selection? Should I begin now?" Karl thought and decided to speed up a little.
"It is catching up!"
"We will all die!"
"Somebody, do something!"
Karl listened to the desperate shouts of the group, his gaze lingering on the one who uttered the last line.
"Except of you, huh? I have no room for parasites." Karl snorted and marked the individual in his mind for elimination.
He quickened the Void Knight's pace and ordered him to cut down the particular individual with an arc of void light that had followed its quick sword swing. The move cut through the female like nothing and the group began to panic. A pair of a girl and a boy were pushed to the back, their bare feet being obviously one of the reason they were slower than the rest.
Karl's minion shortly caught the girl by her neck and stopped, holding the flailing, helpless teen off the ground with one hand while she struggled for air. The boy looked at the scene, terrified, his legs trembling with fear. After a while, his absentminded gaze hardened and he launched himself against the thick, armored hand that held his companion in the air.
"Let her go monster!" He attacked ferociously, but his attempts could not make any difference against the strength and armor of the Void Knight.
"I can work with that." Karl nodded and another Void Knight stepped out of the bushes. He put down the girl and ordered him to capture the pair while Karl continued to chase after the group. He was able to catch up to them in no time with his top speed.
"The monster is back!"
"It has already killed them!"
"It is quicker than before!"
Another salvo of desperate shouts greeted Karl and he was interested what would happen next. Sadly, the group seemed to practice the strategy of everyone for himself and he was unable to sift through more members of the group. When he reached them, he simply hit them with the flat of his sword wishing them good dreams with a huge bump on their heads.
"That might have gone better, but whatever. I can do the selection later." He ordered his minions to collect all his prisoners and headed back to the Fort Orlov.
Karl looked behind him and analyzed the snaking line of his forces that was following in his footsteps. Being level three his mana regeneration had jumped to a pleasant number of one thousand and he had already distributed it to summon a decent force.
He ended up mobilizing twenty Goblins, twenty units of Warped Flesh, ten Void Horrors and ten Void Knights, a force that cost him slightly above three hundred mana to sustain. He had gone overboard, but he wanted to see how his units performed in action. He had not even bothered with Zombies, as they were too slow and were more suited for defensive roles.
Observing the broad shoulders made of purplish flesh carrying comparatively tiny figures of the teenagers, he was satisfied with the performance of his units. Goblins were good at scouting at the perimeter, dying with a screech anytime there was a serious threat to the procession, alerting the other units.
With his newfound military strength he was no longer hard pressed to gain more levels, nor would that be easy as his worst fears came true and he really needed ten thousand kills of entities of the same level or higher leveled beings to reach level four. The problem was that the higher leveled beasts were less common and had usually some years of experience under their belt, meaning they were hard to catch with simple traps. No one could survive for long being stupid in a dangerous place like the vast forests of the cultivation world, not even beasts.
That was why he had chosen to solidify his position and solve his past first while exploring the world and search for opportunities later. Partially, it was also due to his reluctance to make the critical decision he would be obviously forced to make, due to the downright genocidal character of his system. If everything followed the current pattern, he would need to kill one million people to reach level six, the Immortal stage. In other words the system would one day require him to exterminate one million Immortals.
Insanity! Even if he managed such a feat, he did not know if he would be proud of it. Back in his mind, he hoped that he would be able to stumble upon a better way during his journey, as the obvious path was rarely the best path.
It did not take long for them to arrive at the fort and Karl's attention shifted back to the group he had bravely saved from a certain death.
Or despicably kidnapped, but he preferred to see it through the first lens of a savior.
"I need to do another round of selection, I have just the barefooted pair yet." His eyes zoomed at the two sinewy figures carried by a figure made of flesh. They both looked ordinary with brown hair and little muscle to their bones. Judging by their similarity, he guessed they were most likely siblings. The only feature that set them aside from the others was a tattoo on their right shoulder. It was no art, just a zigzag patter reminding him of a letter w, more like a brand than anything else.
"It is time to improvise a little."
The armored boot of the minion carrying him stomped onto the stone of the fort's cellar and Karl stared in front of him in terror.
"My door!" His inconspicuous prison door no one should have realized were leading into his dungeon were destroyed, a large hole burned through their middle part and the same fate met his favorite wooden door that were positioned deeper in the entrance into his domain.
Karl silently stepped closer to one of the steel rods that had been burned off by something, angered by the intruders arrogance and skill. Whoever infiltrated his domain had burned through all his doors without springing a single trap as if he was laughing in his face.
"Burned off, or corroded." His minion kept gripping the ruined piece of the prison door while Karl stared deeper into the tunnel. It took him some time to arrive to the right conclusion, but from his perspective it was hard not to.
"They flew, dammit to hell!" He angrily bent the remains of the door, turning it into scrap metal. It was a clear oversight on his part, as he had not expected that someone could invade his home without touching any surface at all, meaning all the traps he had installed before were meaningless.
"This needs to be rectified immediately."
* * * *
"How it went? How many troops will you need to clear the area?" The Immortal immediately asked when a person veiled in a purple robe entered his office, crossing paths with a long legged woman that was leaving, clearly after she had been dismissed when the man had been notified of her visit.
"Are you in a hurry? Something had to change." Yen spared the woman she considered a whore from higher society only a quick glance before focusing back on the Immortal.
"You can say that our dear Jinsheng is becoming smaller and smaller for all our esteemed guests." He said with a fake smile, his face an enigma. Yen guessed that there had to be some pressure concerning distribution of influence in the city. It was hardly surprising considering most of the sects invited had been used to ruling a significant portion of a large city.
"Then our honorable guests might consider doing the work themselves instead of sending someone else." Yen tilted her head to the side and folded her arms on her chest.
"They have decided exactly that and that is why I need your honest opinion. How difficult is it to reconquer the Orlov region?" He asked seriously and his smile vanished instantly.
"Lay claim somewhere else, there are irregularities there, including a rogue demonic cultivator." Yen reported without much interest. Her greatest asset had always been her strength and knowledge, she pitied the people that had to play political games to keep their wealth. The wealth she held was inherently with her no matter where she went.
"You mean a single demonic cultivator? Haven't you lost your edge Yen?" He looked at her as if he wanted to peer into her head and see what she was thinking.
"I repeat, pass the region to someone else, it is not worth the trouble." Yen held her gaze, the purple eyes staring, unwavering, at the Immortal in front of her.
"Understood." The Immortal nodded. He knew that Yen would not harm the interests of her sect lightly and her judgement was only rarely off. "How many will they lose there?"
"No idea, the situation is too off to even guess. A demonic cultivator that is highly irregular and can keep his head from exploding for an extended period of time is always bad news." She shrugged and picked up an apple that was near the Immortal's desk.
"You do not want to eat that, that was for the guest." The Immortal said dryly while pointing at the fruit and Yen's jaw froze midway before taking a single bite.
"Ah, I see. The guest." She shook her head and put the apple down. It had to be laced with something. "Anything else?"
"No, that is all. Tell your Elders to scout the area around the river. I will push towards that area from now on. Dismissed." The Immortal waved her off and she walked out of the office.
She glanced at the chair nearby where the young woman sat waiting and rolled her eyes out of habit. She was well acquainted with the man's decadence that might be meticulously hidden from others, but she had known him for far too long. However, none of that concerned her, she had done her duty and it was time to return to the Purple Lotus Sect to check on the hot heads of the young members, who were surely in full swing trying to prove that they were the best in front of all the foreign cultivators.