Zefaris provided most of the structure, glyphs, and a number of reinforcement and velocity magnification glyph circles in the rod’s flight path. Its design wasn’t a spear, but a battering ram, with a gigantic seething glyph at its flat head. It was the most discordant, disruptive Antediluvian Glyph Zefaris knew of - at least, those were the feelings it evoked. Sifting through her mental vault of these ancient symbols was entirely unlike remembering actual letters and symbols, and more like running her hands through a tub of weirdly-shaped puzzle pieces until she found one that fit the picture… And each one could give her a splitting headache or evoke hair-raising feelings of any variety. It was a small mercy that all these phantom sensations were so vividly separate from her own, easily filtered out once they had passed.
Zel felt an aetherwave ping, and another moment later she both felt and saw the wave coming. A ripple traveling across the whole dome, only to strike one of Zef’s Resonators and bounce off in a slightly different direction. The Resonator shattered at the moment of contact, but the ripple grew.
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From afar, Roderick Von Burgghusen, Core Disciple of the Order of Six Truths, held close watch over the westward road from Eberheim. It was nearest to one of the Crimson Fog Array’s weak points, so a large contingent of Outer and Inner disciples was stationed here, the outermost layer a kill-corridor of hidden weapon specialists so they could annihilate any would-be intruders through sheer volume of projectiles. Roderick himself had several flesh-puppets around, both to act as disposable bodies for his destructive combat arts and as extra eyes. His real body, meanwhile, was buried three meters underground, immobile and defenseless, but also extremely well hidden.
This, the Living Puppet Sutra, was a truly treasured manual, on which even the famous Walking Way of the Stone Soldier was based, so renowned from the Divine Emperor’s war.
The Crimson Fog Array was a specialized and potent tool, following its creator’s Heuristic Truth, one of the Order’s numerous Pseudo-Truths. Its main role was to capture, ensnare, and entrap large numbers of mortals and weak cultivators across a wide-spanning area. It was also easy and fast to put up, allowing a small team of formation experts to encircle a target area and deploy the array before they can be detected. Even more importantly, it was ritualistically non-disruptive; unlike other capture arrays of similar size and potency, any rituals conducted within its limits could be carried out as if no array was in place at all, requiring no adjustments.
None of these things was a coincidence; the Crimson Fog Array had been designed specifically for this eventuality. With supply of human resources from the Land of Lingering Smoke and the Meat Market in particular dwindling due to anti-human-trafficking actions taken by various groups, the Order of Six Truths now had to act openly. As far as Roderick knew, the Six Truthseekers, elders of the Order, had planned to remain in hiding despite the Emperor’s lifting of the Cultivation Suppression Mandate… Until the whole issue with the stoppage of human subjects. The Order still had years, perhaps decades of supply for normal operation, but with the Third Truthseeker on the cusp of a major breakthrough, they had been burning through people like kindling in a pyre. Thus, they had scoped out mortal cities in the region, and decided to exploit the weakened state of the mortal world; they had decided to harvest one without too big of a population and without a strong cultivator presence that could put up a fight. From there, the plan had expanded.
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Third’s ambitions had pushed it from “let’s conduct a harvest and go back into seclusion for another 50-100 years” to something beyond that point, though Roderick wasn’t high-ranked enough to be allowed to know what it was, let alone participate. That was, after all, why he was here, guarding. A mass sacrifice ritual of some kind, no doubt.
Even now, his subordinates and one of his puppet bodies worked on gathering the sacrifices, the few who had managed to elude them for this long. One by one, they were dragged from their hiding holes, be they random, already-checked dwellings or places obscure enough to have previously evaded notice. Mere mortals that they were, their struggles were in vain… But the weapons some of them wielded had become bothersome indeed. Nothing sufficient to wound or kill any besides the weaker among outer disciples, but then, a large mortal with an axe could kill an outer disciple if he got very lucky. Their proximity to mortals was why they were, and usually remained, as outers.
Besides the circumstances and environment, this was all rather routine. Roderick had to actively try to keep his attention on the capturing and wrangling mortals part of the job, rather than the architecture, the Crimson Fog Array, the special hidden weapons issued to him… Basically anything besides the part where he and his subordinates sought out stragglers to throw on the sacrifice pile for Third’s breakthrough. With this many bodies, though - tens of thousands - it might as well be equivalent to the Creation of a Great Man ritual, even if the Order didn’t know how to carry it out.
With another group of three - a man, woman, and young girl, possibly related - extricated from their den, Roderick shifted focus to another of his bodies. He was always aware and in control of all his flesh puppets, but his true focus could only be split so many ways; at any given time, he could control four bodies with full efficiency, with exceptional focus dedicated to one. Personally, he thought of himself as a human battle formation. His superiors treated him as a human panopticon… And right now, he saw something alarming. The dome, rippling. It absolutely wasn’t supposed to do that. A breach in one of the weak points didn’t look like that, any proper array expert would just scatter the Fog in a small area to open a passage. He sent back an alert, but only received a deluge of admonition, from which two sentiments arose: “We can see it too, you fool, it is nothing” and “disturb us again and you will count among the sacrifices”.