I made an excuse and put the whole Palace on lockdown. Claiming that the Imperial Mage Tower would seek revenge for the wizard I killed, I forbade anyone from either entering or leaving the palace. I also said I would lock myself for a few days to study Blood magic, as the [Emperor] had gifted me a mighty grimoire.
That freed me to leave the Palace and skulk around the Imperial capital, trying to find a lead on the [Fleshcrafter]’s storage ring. It wasn’t an ordinary ring and I was sure it would’ve left a trail. In a society so obsessed with keeping track of everything that even a prince’s poop was weighed, such an artifact would not just vanish. It would’ve been accounted for, cataloged, inventoried, and would leave a paper trail a mile long.
At least I hoped. In a society so corrupt that even a prince’s physician could be bought, such an artifact might have just vanished. Perhaps someone stole it and never created any paper trail, or replaced it with an imitation and absconded with the original.
The empire was infuriating like that, full of dichotomies and contradictions. Only one thing reigned absolute, the Emperor’s words.
I could remember the faces of the people who entered the room along with my father that day. And I was sure it had a report of it somewhere. It looked like a good place to start. I shut my fake status completely as I went outside. Prince Percival remained inside his chambers. This was me, the “Old Soul” as the Fulgen bards sang, going on a mission. After thinking for a while, I went with Apricot’s form. The nimble and wiry [Assassin] was perfect for such an outing.
----------------------------------------
Much had changed in the Empire since I last lived here as Silverstreak, the silkie [Spiritualist]. The buildings were all demolished and rebuilt in this or that century, but one constant remained. This land was chock full of ghosts. People died in the Empire for any and all reasons, and most died holding grudges. As I traveled over the city toward the Imperial Palace, I got the attention of dozens of specters and lost souls.
At first, I didn’t want to interact with them for fear of losing time, but one maudlin ghost, in particular, held my attention. She was a noblewoman who wore a very similar signet ring to the one my mother had.
> Level 58 Female wraith [Concubine-Queen].
That sealed the deal. She was one of the concubines who died for one reason or another.
“Greetings, Your Majesty,” I bowed.
She appeared hostile but she couldn’t act against the effects of {Soul Shepherd} combined with {Spectral Diplomacy}. She just didn’t have the numbers to resist my influence.
“Who are you?” She asked, wary. “You… I can’t read you. You are an unknown. But I see the interest of my spectral brethren in you. A mortal who can see and talk to us. A gateway to elsewhere.”
“I am that and much more, Your Majesty,” I was about to ask her something but she raised a hand.
“I’m no longer Royalty. You can leave the groveling aside.”
I didn’t think I would grovel, but I didn’t want to antagonize her. “Fair enough. How and when did you die?”
“Thirty years ago. I committed the crime of bearing a daughter to the [Emperor]. For that transgression, my people paid with their lives.”
I finally recognized her. “You’re [Queen]...”
That angered her. “Don’t say my name! That name belonged to the living. You’ll call me Prohibidado.”
What an odd name. It sounded like something that would come up on a drunk dare. That word meant something like “forbidden information.”
“What can I do for you, Prohibidado?”
“I can’t see your Status, spirit-talker. What can you do for me?”
“Anything. What’s your heart desire?”
“The death of the [Emperor]!” She clamored, and the ghosts around us riled up.
“It won’t be today, but the [Emperor] will die.”
“I don’t want him dead, I want him killed!” She kept getting more and more excited. “Kill the [Emperor]!”
“Death to the tyrant!”
“Kill the [Emperor]!”
“Vengeance!”
And so on. This city would see the second ghost uprising if I went along with their wishes.
“What do you offer me if I take on your job? What could a bunch of wraiths possibly offer me.”
That made the more rational ones pause to think. Prohibidado was one of them. She replied with a question of her own.
“What is your desire? What do you want from us?”
“Enter a contract with me. Only then I’ll reveal my motives.”
We negotiated the fine details. Prohibidado and a few selected wraiths would work for me to further my goals, and in exchange, I would grant them better conditions in the next life. I had offered her to come back to life but she didn’t want to return to what she once was. After the contract was in place, I vacuumed the rest of the specters into Pandora, processing them for much-needed Divinity.
“I’m looking for works on Flesh magic. Grimoires, treatises, scrolls, the likes. I also need to find the whereabouts of a particular ring.”
“Raswaria had one such mage of great renown,” Prohibidado remarked.
“It is his ring and knowledge that I seek. He was last seen during the birth of Prince Percival, killed by the mages escorting the [Emperor]. Of his body and worldly possessions, I know nothing. This is your task. Find that ring for me.”
I contracted more ghosts of nobles, knights, and bureaucrats that could find me a lead to what I needed. While they worked in secret, I went around the metropolis and scoured the place of phantoms and lost souls.
The contract was important because it allowed the ghosts to use magic by consuming my MP, or its substitute, Energy. Normally, ghosts were harmless because they can’t use either magic or perform physical attacks. They are in another phase related to the material world and very few could manifest to spook people on their own. The flip side of their inability to act against the material world was that very few attacks and spells did damage to them. A contracted ghost that got defeated would simply return to me to be healed. Since they were basically souls and thus indestructible.
Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.
It all changed when they were contracted. Though each of them leeched 5% of my Experience, they were considered my agents. I earned the Exp from their deeds (which was again split) and had limited ability to check on their whereabouts.
----------------------------------------
Prohibidado and her ghost squad delivered news two days later. We met at night on the roofs of the noble district’s mansions.
“We went through the official records and found the people who escorted the [Emperor] that day. None of them had the ring. The mage’s body was disposed of in a common grave. His ghost did not remain behind,” she said with a hint of envy. “And his buried remains did not bear the ring.
I wasn’t surprised his specter wasn’t around anymore. Buscalpaun fulfilled his goals. Though he died in a most violent way, his spirit was at peace.
“In your opinion, who has this ring? Was it accounted for when they stripped the mage of his gear?”
“Your father has it. The ring is in the [Emperor]’s vaults.”
“Did you confirm it?”
“That’s impossible. Nobody but the Emperor may enter the vaults. It’s one of his ridiculous exclusive Perks.”
I had to see it for myself. Incorporeal and invisible, I went with the ghosts to the Imperial Palace as they knew exactly where the vault was.
We went through a wall and… bounced on something impassable. It was a flat surface going along the inside of the wall. I tried to use {Force Phasing} but it did absolutely nothing. The surface had no friction and was completely smooth. Going around this barrier, I found it was a perfect cube around the Imperial Vault. I couldn’t coax any information from the barrier. It wasn’t a magical effect, it couldn’t be eaten, it was impassable. On spots where it intersected a door, I could see it was a pitch-black barrier that extended into the Ethereal world. I had fuck all ways to cross it.
After two hours of fruitless floundering inside the stone wall around the vault, I gave up. I had a theory. That barrier wasn’t anything physical or magical. It was a spatial boundary. The same kind of magic the Gods didn’t allow people to have, the [Emperor] could use, even if in a limited way.
Teleportation didn’t work either because I couldn’t target anything inside. I had no knowledge of what was in there and I couldn’t perceive anything. I could probably teleport out from there, but the problem consisted in getting in.
“I give up,” I said to a very smug ghostly queen. “How does someone enter this?”
“Only when the [Emperor] enters, and even then, only he and whatever he’s carrying.”
That gave me an idea. I just needed to make the Emperor take me inside.
----------------------------------------
“I’m an antique merchant from southern Pekothas,” the merchant woman said to the Imperial guards. “Why are you rummaging through my things?”
“It’s an inspection, woman. And stay quiet, unless you want to be arrested,” the guard barked. “Here, just as our informants said!”
The guard removed a long wooden case from the back of the wagon pulled by two horses. They broke the locks and opened the case. Inside, a pure white spear, with a horn for a blade. A spiral horn. It radiated power.
“The legendary [Unicorn King’s Spear]!” The guards cheered. “The [Emperor] will be pleased with us.”
The merchant tried to fight back, to keep her merchandise, but the guards forced her to flee the border checkpoint away from the Empire by scaring her horses. She claimed she’d intended to sell the spear in an auction at the empire, but the empire decided it wanted the weapon for free.
----------------------------------------
Prohibidado ran away from the empire, scott-free in her new body and life of freedom. Meanwhile, I lurked inside the spearhead, incorporeal in my favorite hog-nosed bat form. The tiny mammal was three centimeters in length from head to tail and the ability to fly couldn’t be beaten. I could extend all my senses from my heirloom weapon so I didn’t even need to stay close to the surface.
The [Emperor] wanted a weapon for his son, a [Lancer]. I just needed to spread some rumors with the ghosts’ help and supply the weapon. I knew the greedy bureaucrats would rush one another to get it before the others, so they could win the [Emperor]’s favor.
After a while, the case opened and I found my weapon in the throne room. The [Emperor] was ecstatic at the sight of the magnificent item.
“You’ve done well,” he declared. “Now hand it over.”
The spear was too valuable to remain anywhere a thief could access. Everyone knew that the [Emperor] would take it to his vault until the day he would grant it to his son. He didn’t let go of the weapon until the court session ended. Then he left through a back door and went to the palace stockades. There, he used the spear to execute a few death row prisoners just to test its efficiency and damage. {Unicorn King's Noble Heart} triggered the first attack and the spear fell from his hand before he could strike the prisoner.
“I will master you or destroy you,” he told the spear as he picked it up.
Good luck doing that, daddy. The spear was one of two foreign objects the System only deigned to give a description because they interacted with the world. The spear was an heirloom from a time before the System, an object of high magic that was created from the body of the most magnificent fey that ever walked the land. It was indestructible by anything, even Pandora’s {Aspect of the Void}. Speaking of which, Pandora was the other foreign object. The [Wisp of Creation] was also indestructible by any means known to either men or God.
Contrast that with Lorna’s Coin. While it says on the description it was Indestructible, it was a System-created object. It was indestructible only as long as the System held sway. Should I get trapped by someone with the same power as the Dallas Visitor, the coin could be destroyed as easily as any other metal trinket.
He wasn’t able to kill the same guy with the spear seven times. Furious, the Emperor drew his sword and killed everyone that witnessed his failure. Then he tried to break the spear. Damage it. Put a scratch, a dent, anything. He failed and got even more infuriated by it. Then he went to his vault, killing everyone in the way, regardless of who they were. People seemed to know these tantrums happened because the otherwise busy and crowded Palace suddenly became as desert as a ghost town.
How mighty and noble was the Empire’s ruling man-child.
He opened the vault doors and it was pitch black on the other side. Reaching through the barrier, his hand crossed it as if the black boundary wasn’t there. He made a motion as if he was opening another set of doors and walked through with the spear. The boundary had no width and only the [Emperor] and what he carried with him could pass. The boundary never collapsed or opened. He just went past as if it was a film of water. Inside, I found treasures that would make my item box look like a child’s piggy bank. The wealth of dozens of Kingdoms filled the walls and chambers of the [Emperor]’s vault.
He dumped the spear on a weapon rack and walked out, fuming. I could feel the connection to the outside disappear as the vault barrier around the door came back into being.
The biggest heist in recorded history was a huge success. I walked out of the spear and took Apricot’s form once again. I was grinning when I waved my hand and cleaned the room of anything and everything. Then the next room, the other beyond that, the corridors, everything. Storage items needed to be emptied. A few of them had protections against theft but I could use my ultimate {Dimensional Pilferer} to remove things from these. One such protected storage item was the [Fleshcrafter]’s ring. I cheered when I found it, with his grimoires and a big library inside. It was a top-notch artifact.
Finally, I sat on the empty and spotlessly clean floor and pondered. This vault was attached to nothing. It was merely kept in place by the spatial boundary. And if it wasn’t attached to anything…
** POOF **
I fell to the bottom of the pitch-black boundary as I stored the very structure inside the cube. I assumed my {Light Elemental} form but it did absolutely nothing. I couldn’t illuminate anything if there was nothing to illuminate. It was a sensory deprivation chamber. I should fix it.
I dropped a big chunk of dirt and let gravity take hold of it. Sighing in relief at the sight of anything, I landed on the dirt and planted an apple tree. Using my powers, I made the plant grow to its adult size. Next, I created a stone ring around the dirt and engraved a disintegration ritual aimed at affecting the ring, the tree, and the pile of dirt. After charging and timing the ritual to fire in a few minutes, I entered the tree and teleported outside.
Days later, the [Emperor] discovered he’d been stolen from. His fury raged on for months and even when he recovered, he was never the same. Thousands died in his outrage, and the Imperial Palace guard had to be rebuilt basically from scratch. The [Emperor] never explained the motive for his mood swing but in the Empire, information flowed along with the gold. People soon pieced it together and realized that the fabled impenetrable vault had been breached.
Dark shadows loomed over the empire. In the following months and years, the black market, merchant houses, and anyone with a sizeable amount of cash would have their wealth seized by the [Emperor]. Noble houses took the opportunity created by the turmoil to fight against one another, seizing the defeated’s wealth as a tribute to appease and gain favor with the [Emperor].
Our Palace was one of the least affected ones as we weren’t open to the “public”. My debutante ball was pushed back a year, delayed by the political unrest. On the brink of civil war and collapse, the youngest [Prince] was all but forgotten. Even with his magical talent, he was considered too weak to be of any help, too unimportant to be used as leverage. The [Emperor] cared little for his children, that was the truth. He had plenty to spare and was always seeking to make more.
----------------------------------------
Nothing was well in the [Empire]. The streets ran red with blood, sometimes quite literally.