Orykson, despite the losses he’d taken recently, was still feeling positive.

Oh, sure, the heir project had failed. But it had done that a lot: dozens of clones, flesh constructs, modified mimicfruit, Vivian, and Malachi… He was beginning to think the project may just be an abject failure, utterly impossible.

But despite the loss and embarrassment of his loss to Meadow, his overall plans were still going well. Once he had this complete, he should have another weapon to add to his vaults.

He finished using the bone carving tool to complete the enchantment that he and Aerde had designed, socketing in one of the purge-jewels that he’d stolen from Vivian’s primary skeleton body.

The powerful desolation energy began to hum through the lines carved into the bone, connecting to the glass orb full of dozens of hand-selected shades, then to the greater necrotic core.

That core had taken an absurd amount of effort for him to build, requiring an absurd amount of his personal mana, resources that were rare – even for him – and such complex carvings and mana manipulations that he’d actually considered outsourcing the core’s construction to the Craftsman.

He wouldn’t blab to other powers. If he did, nobody would ever trust him to work on anything ever again.

But even still, the slightest chance that he might have let one word slip…

Orykson couldn’t take that risk.

He leaned down to add another desolation channeling line, and nearly dropped the bone carving tool when Aerde began to ring an alarm bell inside of his mind.

“An Occultist has just formed a Title,” Aerde said.

Orykson frowned and snapped, conjuring a quick simulacrum. He already had his truly well crafted ones out and about, working in the world. This one was just a rough sketch of him, and he handed it the tools.

“Finish the last channeling line, then add a bit of gate solidified death mana dust into the lines as a conductor.”

The copy of him nodded, and then Orykson tapped into Aerde and cast a True Teleport.

He appeared in the unclaimed territory and frowned. Aerde flicked a scanning spell over the area, and noted that while the mana density in this region was a little bit above average – high fourth gate – it wasn’t high enough for a magical beast to have likely formed a title.

Then again, it was possible that some beast had wandered to a weaker region to relax, and had inadvertently formed a title.

A moment later, the Knowledge King appeared next to him. Their ability to move around the world was much more limited than his, but he wasn’t exactly surprised to see them. They likely had noticed it, same as him.

“What is it?” he asked her.

“I’m not sure,” she said. “Whatever it is, it’s definitely human magic, but it also feels almost like an elemental.”

Then fire filled the air, and Orykson sighed. He wrapped himself in a demiplane until Aerde’s sensory spells indicated that it was safe on the other side, and he stepped out.

The Knowledge King, who’s combat power was far lower than most Magi, had engaged an enchanted shield made from the cast off scale of a mountain dragon to block the fire, so he had Aerde file away information about the shield, just in case.

A man in a burning crimson aura rose into the sky.

“Analyst,” he called. “Knowledge King. I’m glad to see that I’ve got such a prestigious audience to kill.”

“You really think you can kill us?” Orkyson said, barking out a laugh.

“I serve as a Cardinal of the Church of the Primes!” the man called. “Though, given my ascension, I think the Pope title suits me far better… We will purify the unnatural taint of the Magi and return the world to a natural state.”

“Magi are perfectly natural,” the Knowledge King said, sounding exasperated. “But also, natural doesn’t inherently mean good. The natural world has plenty of terrible things in it. The Slumbering Bear, for example?”

“I will not listen to the lies of the magi!” the man declared. “You have the honor of being in the presence of The Purifier!”

As he spoke his title aloud, reality hesitated for a moment, the trembling of a freshly congealed title that had yet to fully take effect.

“Do you have this one, Orykson?” the Knowledge King asked, “I’ve work to attend to.”

“I do,” Orykson said. “Mopping up a baby occultist who’s using power he doesn’t understand doesn’t even require my real body. I could do it just fine with a rough simulacra.”

“Don’t ignore me!” the man spluttered, the red aura around him flaring even brighter.

“Good,” the Knowledge King said. “Have fun.”

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Then they used another artifact, teleporting away. Aerde noted that they’d teleported to Kijani, then Orykson turned to focus on the cultist.

“I admit, I’m impressed that you’ve gotten this far,” Orykson said. “Tell me, does your cult still forcibly fuse you with elementals?”

“It is no forcible fusion, monster,” the cultist said. “It is a holy union in the honor of the Primes. To be conjoined with the power of raw magic is an honor.”

A dozen retorts swam to Orykson’s mind – that Elementals weren’t the only type of being that was made of pure magic. Any creature that was a result of magical manifestation was – from a lowly paperbeetle to the grandest of elemental.

That humans were half pure magic, given their souls were completely magical.

There was even an argument to be made that since all matter had magic, everyone was completely magical.

But instead, Orykson just nodded.

“Good.”

Then he pulled a weapon out from one of his many spatial pockets.

Beast magic was wild, bound heavily to the physical form and nature, and a chaotic blend of the environment and evolution. They were a blend of energy and mana, and the difference between the two was all but nonexistent.

Human magic was more pure, distilled essences, but their physical form was still inherently physical. Energy ran through them, but it wasn’t actively mana yet.

Elemental magic, or really, any magical manifestation, was completely mana. They had no real energy in their body, only pure mana.

When a human and an elemental completely fused, like the cult liked to do, it resulted in a human who had the bulk of their energy burned away and replaced with raw mana, only of the type that the elemental was.

In essence, this cultist’s bones weren’t telluric energy, they were solidified solar mana with a throughput of telluric energy.

That granted them a considerable amount of power, but it also created a weakness.

He tossed a spell that he’d purchased from Tom. It detonated, expanding into a sphere of blue light, and within that area, all solar mana was suppressed.

With his other hand, he cast a sixth gate spell that he rarely got use out of – Dessicate Flesh.

The cultist began to turn to ash as Orykson’s spell broke apart the remnants of energy that were left in his body.

“No!” the cultist screamed. He flexed the power of his new Title.

The Purifier reached out, and was blocked by The Analyst, who had already found a thousand flaws in The Purifier’s power. Tom’s sphere was assisting in further suppressing the Purifier – the downside of binding yourself and your title so closely to one mana type – and there was nothing The Purifier could call.

The cultist died, and Orykson made a yanking gesture with one hand, pulling the dust and spiritual components into one of his demiplanes.

“Aerde, scan the area,” Orykson said, sticking his hands in his pockets. “I suspect I have a church to desicate.”

He found it, nearly four hundred miles away. The Purifier had clearly moved far away from his cult commune in an attempt to hide them.

It wasn’t good enough.

He teleported above the camp and allowed Aerde to scan the commune.

There were one hundred and forty nine people in the cult’s commune.

Eighty-four of them were Practitioner level mages. Orykson killed them with a snap of his fingers and raw mana-pressure.

Thirty-seven of them were Spellbinder level mages, all of whom had undergone the torture that was fusing your body and soul with an elemental’s. They were killed by a hoard of conjured deer.

Two of them were Arcanists. They rose into the air to challenge Orykson, and he actually had to divert a bit of attention to them. He wrapped them in wards that cut them off from the desolation and temporal mana that they were made of, and killed them with two more casts of Dessicate Flesh.

Twenty-six of them were children. Orykson extended his mana…

And paused as the memory of him killing Meadow’s simulacra over and over again entered his mind.

Of him losing and being vulnerable to possibly taking a real injury.

For a moment, he warred within himself. Then with a sigh, he pulled them into a demiplane that he’d grown into a small mansion and closed the portal out. He’d sort that problem out when he got to it.

For now…

He floated down into the commune and, with the help of Aerde, found the secret tunnels under their church, then flew down them to their ritual chamber.

There were a few things that were actually worth looting down there – a crystalheart most notably – but the real thing Orykson was after was their communication arrays and research papers.

The Cult of the Primes were zealous idiots, as far as Orykson was concerned. He’d seen their so-called perfect world, and found it lacking.

But if there was one thing that they were good at, it was research.

Their ideas were often wildly off the mark, but that didn’t mean the research was useless.

He glanced over a pile of reports involving the integration of multiple elementals into different aspects of a person, attempting to recreate the complex balance of a human with elemental mana, rather than latent energy, and tucked those away.

That wouldn’t do what they hoped it would. Even in their own testing, all of the people who they’d tested it on – both cultists who’d signed up willingly, and people who they’d kidnapped from a nearby city in the unclaimed lands – had died within days, and the elementals had needed to be warped to and mentally broken.

But he and Aerde could see some uses for that. Before they broke, they were able to display a considerable amount of power – more magical power than anyone of their gate should be able to output, and more physical power than a mortal frame should be able to handle. On top of that, they were absurdly resistant to spells, almost as much as one of the infamous Converse or Primary Immunity legacies.

If he could integrate death, telluric, and a few other elementals into skeletons in a similar way to that, though, it could create a good temporary superweapon.

There was also a considerable amount of research into the way cult communes created fascinating warps in normal conditions, which he pocketed. The observations of its members were always unique. In some ways, it was like a more localized version of the effects of what happened in Vivian’s nation of Nightflock.

This commune didn’t have any interesting research into soul manipulation, which was disappointing. Sometimes they got really deep into unethical soul manipulation – he’d once found a commune where, on top of fusing with elementals, they had engineered the souls of everyone born inside into a hive-mind directed by its leader.

That had been long, long ago, though, when the cult was an actual world power. Now? Orykson was shocked they’d managed to create an Occultist.

Oh well.

He glanced at their communication array, a complex spell they used to communicate with the other communes.

Once upon a time, that array had been a truly mind bending piece of magic, something worthy of studying.

Now it was just a less efficient version of a standard communication mirror.

Aerde appeared and sunk into the array, gathering all of the information on the locations of other cult communes that it contained.

Orykson tucked his hands into his pockets and teleported away. He had more cultists to clean up.

~~~

The leader of the cult of the primes watched as Orykson tore apart two dozen of their communes, and she smiled. Sacrificing the lesser communes to give the magi a sense of control was well worth it.

She glanced down at the list of her truly useful recruits.

One of them needed to be handpicked to exploit the Idyll-Flume, right under Orykson's nose.