Now that 500 of the 200 Dragon Teams returned, I could begin a new grand undertaking in order to begin a true conquest. Yes, that maths is correct, out of the original 200 Dragon teams sent out, some of them gathered more prisoners than they could carry, even after putting some of them in bone prisons beneath them, so they simply created more Bone Dragons. They had more than enough Liches to do so.

Each of the returning Dragon Teams had about 5 Death Lords, 10 Liches and 25 Prisoners.

I would deal with the prisoners later, I had bigger fish to fry first.

I gathered up all the nearby Liches under my command onto the shore in preparation for the sacrificial ceremony. Over five thousand Liches gathered around me and still there were at least a thousand Liches scattered throughout China, overseeing my massive army on it’s march northwards. I directed them into a loose circle over half a mile wide, this would require a lot of space and mana.

With so many Liches under my control, I could destroy the world or remake it in my image. Or if things went terribly wrong I would simply be overthrown by the ambitious Liches beneath me (wouldn’t be the first time). So many entertaining possibilities.

I called forth a small selection of Skeletal Sorcerors, Skeleton Knights, Skeletal Mages and Skeletal Liches into the centre of the large circle of Liches. They were followed by forty Bone Dragons, including Orochi to join the others in the centre. Thankfully the area near the airport was empty other than long stretches of brown sand, plenty of space for grand rites to be performed.

Upon the shores of China we performed a great sacrifice. A thousand Skeletal Sorcerors, a thousand Skeleton Knights, a thousand Skeleton Mages, forty Skeletal Liches and forty Bone Dragons had their bones broken, twisted, reshaped and empowered into the shape of a massive Bone Dragon. A massive monster of the ‘western’ design, standing ten feet tall, 100 feet long, 30 feet wide, with a wingspan of 90 meters, made entirely of bones.

The next step involved gathering their disembodied souls (such as they were), stripping out the important, useful parts of each and adding into the empty headed Giant Bone Dragon and devouring the unnecessary left overs. Then we shared our knowledge of bone magic, of animating the dead and necromancy with the Giant Bone Dragon; teaching it the basics of being a Lich.

The last step was to combine and condense the forty ‘discarded’ Mana Hearts from the now destroyed Bone Dragons into one Greater Mana Heart. It required the focused actions of thousands of Liches to channel the necessary mana into it’s creation. The Greater Mana Heart was the purified and enhanced version of a Mana Heart and was the very last thing necessary to form a Dracolich.

A DracoLich was considered a SSS class threat, back home. It was the combination of three powerful things, a Dragon, a Necromancer and an Undead that made it so dangerous.

Normal Dragons have naturally higher mana supplies than a normal Mage and faster mana regen rates given their magical nature and their mana hearts. Necromancers could summon, communicate and control the dead giving them practically endless supply of troops on a battlefield. Undead have already died once and are immune to things like old age, sickness and most mortal wounds, making them quite hard to destroy.

I named him Cucumber for no real reason other than my own amusement.

I claimed it as my mount as was my right as Supreme Lich. It was also the best place to oversee it’s development and make sure it didn’t go rogue and try and kill everything. Given that it was a Lich made in the image of a dragon it would be impossible for a normal Lich to command. I took on the onerous task.

Thankfully since it wasn’t made with a single dragon bone, it wasn’t as dangerous or unpredictable as a undead dragon. Or at least I hoped not, it’s hard to tell, sometimes shapes have greater influences on things than one can imagine.

Time to take it out for a test drive. Kick the tyres, rain down endless destruction, see how it turns in tight spaces. The usual.

I jumped on it’s back and flew it the short distance to the East China Sea, flying far above the Reagan and the birds. Reminds me, I should kill some and use them as mini kamikaze pilots to destroy some planes and jets. That’d be good for a laugh.

First test, flying.

First test result; excellent speed, passable turning, B Grade flying, inferior in speed and quick turns compared to spirits but above average for normal Bone Dragons.

Second test, basic bone magic.

“FIRE BONE SPEARS.”

It unleashed a wave of bone spears into the waters at my command, raining down an apparently endless waves of bones into the ocean, that enough bones bobbed up to the surface as to form a small mountain of bones.

“ENOUGH”

Judging by the test fire, Cucumber’s bone magic is overpowered enough compared to a normal Bone dragon that it could replace lost bones, practically instantaneously, allowing for near constant use of [Bone fusillade].

Second Test result: perfect score, still basic stuff, it can spam a basic bone spell with it’s high mana and bone regeneration.

Now comes the hard test, the one that matters.

Third Test: Necromancy Skills.

Return to shore, a mile off from where the Reagan and the rest of the Liches are waiting.

This is the test that decides the value of Cucumber in my grand ambitions.

“Skeleton Knights.”

Cucumber rained down a hundred bones which in under a minute formed into a hundred Skeleton Knights.

“Excellent. Skeleton Mages.”

Another hundred bones fired down, another minute, another Hundred skeleton Mages.

Same thing for Skeleton Sorcerors.

It was only when I asked for Skeletal Liches that things changed as Cucumber produced only ten Skeleton Liches.

I was a little disappointed, Cucumber couldn’t pump out more Skeletal Liches than that at a time but it could be managed.

Before I could finish the test I noticed something odd, all of Cucumber’s newly spawned minions were just standing there doing nothing.

I reached out through Cucumber and tested the connection. I sighed, new necromancers are so much work.

Used [Telepathy] to lecture Cucumber as to the value of properly ensouling and encoding minions with the information necessary to do their job.

Another ten minutes went by as I guided Cucumber through his first mass ensouling. “Give that minion information on bone magic, give that one knowledge on how to fight close quarters combat, give that one knowledge as to how to craft fireballs and so on”.

Cucumber as a newborn, didn't have much of a personality, just a roiling mass of instincts, with a smattering of education but he'd develop into a truly devastating individual given enough time.

More time passed within our thoughts than it did in the outside world, time is relative after all and to some extent telepathy could manipulate one’s perception of it.

That done, moved onto the last step, BONE DRAGON creation.

“Bone Dragon time”

Cucumber jolted as it disgorged a stream of bones and mana onto the sand.

A jumbled pile of bones, surrounded a greenish black blob of mana. Over the next ten minutes, I watched and waited as Cucumber shaped it into a Bone Dragon and shaped the tangible Corrupted Mana into a Mana Heart. I cheated somewhat by reminding Cucumber to encode it with [Levitation] so that it would fly and told him to encode some knowledge of bone magic into it.

A new Bone Dragon awaited along with ten Skeletal Liches and a hundred Skeleton Knights, Mages and Sorcerors.

Third test results: Passed barely, B plus performance at creating new undead, D for failing to encode them without prompting and a C grade for taking direction well. It’ll do for now, it’ll be better once it eats some more souls, maybe get it some extra bones so it can mass produce more troops. Where are the seagulls?

Enough testing, time for preparations for the sea journey, need more seacraft. I could take over a port but that could take more time than I have right now.

Directed Cucumber back to the Reagan and had him rain down bone spears into the waters. It didn’t take long for piles of bones to amass, floating on the surface of the water.

With the abundance of bones floating around, my other Liches went to work on creating some unique sea craft to take us to our destination.

Zedong, the Bloody Dragon, helped to bind the bones together with his caustic blood, melting the edges of the bones, making them like putty, helping to lock bones together into unusual shapes.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

Some of the bones were turned into simple rafts made with bones, rather than wood and tied together by strips of Ghoul Flesh, with large bones formed into the centre to create a mast of bone, with a sail of stripped human flesh. The Bone Rafts were then populated by thousand of undead.

There were still too many to travel across the seas on the bone rafts and they’d be far too slow and cumbersome even if towed by our few metal ships.

We had to upgrade the Bone Rafts, into something bigger, better and most importantly bonier. A thousand Liches gathered together to resonate souls to form a gestalt consciousness to shape and reshape bone on a larger scale. I simply monitored their efforts, while directing Cucumber to rain down more building materials, along with the other Bone Dragons, for the first time in Earth's history, the skies rained down countless bones into the ocean waters.

The Gestalt Lichdom, reached out to these bones, gathering them together, growing them, shaping them into a crude outline of a 'ship', a very very large ship, 300 feet long, 60 feet wide and 18 feet high in the style of the ancient galley. They directed a small army of a thousand Skeleton Knights inside, who performed the requisite amount of alterations inside the Bone Galley to form oarlocks and bone oars, along with benches made of bone to sit upon.

Following their example my other Liches formed into 4 Gestalts to create more Bone Galleys, each of the collectives, favoring different designs, some favoring the Trireme design, while others went for biremes and others tried creating new designs using bone as replacement for wood, strips of generated muscles for cabling and flesh to serve as cloth for sails and so forth.

Hundreds of Bone Galleys were made, with thousands of troops crammed in like sardines, most of whom were conscripted into rowing. The undead needed little space and little comfort and they wouldn’t get much of either. Speed was far more important to my goals than the comfort of minions.

The Skeletal Steeds were dismantled to ensure every undead had a weapon. The Skeletal Steed could simply be remade later when we reached Japan. I should find some horses for Cucumber to eat so it can regurgitate Skeletal Steeds on command, that would be quite helpful.

There were also the fresh batch of Mage prisoners to deal with, over twelve thousand of them gathered from throughout the country. They had been guarded by Death Lords and Death Knights on the shore while the Liches had been busy with our other tasks. Most of them had been [Life Drained] into unconsciousness either on the journey or during the wait so as to avoid dealing with legions of instinctual amateur Mages and the mess that could result.

To deal with them, we basically repeated the same process as last time, gathered the fresh meat together, assembled some Liches, resonated souls, tugged at their souls and cleansed them of the Soul Virus. Only major difference was that we had to use a thousand Liches instead of a hundred.

There was a disproportionately high amount of potential Necromancers within the group. Of the twelve thousand, three thousand of them, had the bare minimum talent to become Liches.

Admittedly you could pump enough knowledge and mana into anyone with a modicum of intellect into becoming a Lesser Lich as long as you didn’t care about their long term prospects. Still it was a little surprising, then again, considering my world’s hatred of Necromancers and the abundance of Blight, corrupt mana and death energy on Earth now, maybe this was to be expected.

Still another three thousand lucky souls got to experience the joy of being Lesser Liches, well maybe not joy as such, but the potential for power over life and death. What’s a little bit of happiness compared to being able to serve as a Priest to the God of Death?

They were of course ritually killed and stripped of some inconvenient personality traits and added to the Lich family. The more Liches I had the easier it would be to draw out the Soul Virus and clean the air and create more Bone Dragons or use them for a variety of other tasks as necessary.

I had the newest Lesser Liches and even the Skeletal Liches take part in another great sacrifice. I set them upon the Zombies and had them use [Energy Drain] to devour everything from the Zombies. Nearly two hundred thousand Zombies ceased to exist in any meaningful way, other than as piles of dust and in the minds of my Liches as the unhealthy urge to consume the flesh of their prey.

One cannot achieve greatness without sacrifice. The zombies offer up their all to their superiors, their nascent second souls, their body, their blood, their very bones and all the power that keeps their molecules together.

It’s a little sad but I don’t need zombie cannon fodder, ghouls are superior to basic zombies and can breed new generations of ghouls given time. There’s a 9 to 1 ratio, males to female in ghouls, compared to a 6 to 4 ratio of females to males in Skeletons. Women on average don’t make for good runners, which means they tend to make good zombie snacks, on the upside, they tend to make better Skeleton Mages and Liches.

Thanks to this sacrifice, my Liches advance to the next respective level, perhaps a little less sane than preferable, but sometimes when you’re in a hurry, you just have to cut a few corners. So what if some of my Liches want to devour flesh, as long as they harvest souls as ordered I don’t really care.

After clearing out the bottom tier for the three major classes of undead, it was time to provide benefits to upper management and to the high performers.

“You get a Bone Dragon and you get a Bone Dragon. Everyone gets a bone dragon.”

The minions were looking at me weirdly.

Someone in my head laughed. Damn Luthor, I think he’s messing with me. Damn voice in my head, feeding me random pointless information.

I yell back at him “You’re supposed to be sorting through their memories for useful information not muddying up my thoughts with useless pop culture references.”

Luthor “It’s my god given duty to fuck with my boss through the communication system. It’s like a divine right or a national past time or something.”

“I’m your bloody God, you irreverent mad man, get back to work.”

“Says the man yelling at the voice at his head.”

I sighed. Even my own creations mock me. I laughed maniacally. “Unreliable and disrespectful minion, I’m going to make you suffer, time for a nice national cleansing.”

I had the legions of Liches, stop their work on ship building and get to work on mass producing Bone Dragons, with a hundred teams of 50, we could get a hundred Bone Dragons produced every half hour. Might even be able to get out more if they push themselves to their very limits.

I even had Cucumber create a small army of Bone Dragons to pad our numbers, though every time he did create a new Bone Dragon, he was literally ripping out a piece of his Mana Heart to do so. It would grow back over time, given enough mana to reconstitute it. The loss of bones was negligible to him.

We all had to work hard on creating more Bone Dragons as the more Bone Dragons, the easier it would be to counter any aerial assault and the better the supply of mana would be.

It also had the side benefit of providing mounts to some of the higher level undead. After all I couldn’t expect the likes of Rampagers, Ravagers, Revenant Lords, Death Lords and Dead Kings to be crammed into ships when they could have flying mounts instead.

The removal of the Zombies, had provided a little more space for my legions but not a lot of it. I didn’t want the higher level undead, that did have egos and high levels of authority or power to revolt.

The remaining prisoners were spread throughout the three human ships, none of the skeleton galleys were fit for human occupation, as they had no food or water. Still probably need to get more human appropriate ships to prevent overcrowding and the possibility of disease and insurrection.

Before I could leave I still needed to do one last thing. Metaphorically salt the ground behind me.

Led an expedition throughout China to draw out the poison in the air and remove the Soul Virus, it won’t stop the Devourer but it should slow them down a bit.

Over a thousand Dragon Teams spread out throughout China to perform necessary work to deprive the Devourer of potential power. The Liches drew in soul fragments throughout China while the Bone Dragons drew in Pollution and Blight to grow their Mana Hearts.

I dumped the overflow of Soul Fragments straight into Luthor’s inbox, that’d teach him for backtalking me. I’d bury him in work.

Despite the number of Liches under my command, we couldn’t undo the world wide Soul Virus so easily, we could only unravel the Soul Virus from the surviving Chinese. After all it was far easier to breaking something than to fix the damage done.

Well unless you were a Time Mage and I’ve yet to harvest one of them. They’re annoyingly hard to pin down. Always with the time dilation fields. Admittedly I don’t mind spending a hundred years in a time bubble by myself but someone else might be driven crazy or you know starve to death. Stupid Time Mages.

Anyway, sometimes a dragon team would drop down a small team of Liches to spread out and collect more Lich apprentices from those who demonstrated base level Necromancy talents.

When we reached the dead zone where the Devourer’s presence could be felt growing and progressing, we doubled back. I had no desire to attack it unless I was backed by a true military super power, our powers were too similar for me to gain an advantage in a one on one fight.

As we returned to the Reagan the Lich teams were collected along with their new Lesser Lich apprentices. We needed all the Liches we could get in order in order to sort out the billion soul fragments. We had made great progress, a billion potential hosts were cleansed and it was highly unlikely they’d be able to be reinfected.

I looked at my army and smiled, I had so many elites under my command, the Troll-like Rampagers, the Vampire- like Revenant Lords and the Skeleton Generals with their thick bone armors.

Thanks to all the murder and mayhem, I had quite a few elite undead under my direct command.

One Dracolich

A thousand Bone Dragons

Nine thousand Liches

Ten thousand Death knights

One Thousand Death Lords

Ten Dead Kings

A Wraith Emperor..

Enough gloating, time to get going before he catches up.

I made sure everyone was loaded up onto the ships and we set off.

It’d take over a day to get to Japan, along the way we should be able to produce another two thousand or so Bone Dragons.

The sailing was smooth for the first few hours, at least until we were attacked by a nuclear submarine.

The Wraiths weren’t able to finish off the crew in time to stop several of the galleys from being damaged by a volley of launched missiles. Thousands of undead fall into the waters, sinking beneath the waters. They were in no real danger, it wasn't like they'd drown and they'd make poor eating for any aquatic animals, presuming there were any alive with the Wraiths roaming about.

It did cause an obstruction to our seagoing expedition, so I had to call a stop to the flotilla.

The Wraith Lords were sent in instead to finish the job of killing the crew of the submarine and stop it from doing any more damage. I tasked the Wraith Lords to clear the way of any other underwater/aquatic threats.

I had a Revenant Lord, along with a Great Lich, Death Lord and a small army of Death Knights, take over the submarine.

Repairs were made to the damaged ships via Cucumber and Zedong and some of the necromancers. Then we took an hour long break to create another hundred Bone Galleys, to further spread out the forces, along with another two fifty dragons. The increase in mana from the Bone Dragons and the increasing expertise of the Liches, allowed for Bone Dragons to be created faster and with less mana.

I sent Wraith Lords on patrol to take out enemy ships, or any ships in our way.

Whenever that wasn’t going to be quick enough I simply had a Dragon team rain down bone spears to clear out the decks of the ships and have them kill then resurrect the crew to increase the size of our flotilla. It also helped to spread the forces out to a variety of vehicles, more in line with this current age of technology.

I had this thought hit me, while I was on Cucumber, surrounded by a growing black cloud of corrupted mana produced by all the Bone Dragons...

Out of 1.3 billion people, there should be roughly 1.3 million people with the potential for Mage craft, so there should have been far more Chinese Mages. Perhaps without the obvious benefits of being a Mage in this world, there probably wasn't as much selective breeding to create Mage dynasties as back home.

We only managed to grab twelve thousand amateur mages, with three thousand of whom had turned out to be budding Necromancers. That was a disproportionate amount of Necromancers, then again maybe not that surprising since Necromancers would be the most likely to progress in this new world I’ve created. After all there was such an abundant supply of corrupted mana available for advancement in the dark arts. This world was progressing towards a world of Death.

I’d have to recalibrate the world myself since there were no dungeons to cleanse it for other Mages. I had an idea on how to do so, but it would be a challenge of sorts. I’d have to convince the people of this world to help me. Might be a hard sell.

On the other hand, I do have some captive Mages that I can force into helping. I’m looking forward to teaching the children how to throw a good fireball, always good for a laugh that.