Aalam
It took over 7 hours to make all the required tools. Then Aalam packed them and the Shadow Thief’s most dangerous artifact into a spatial storage ring and he and Isaiah made their way to Hira’s teleportation platform, transporting themselves to the Carium Galaxy Cluster’s capital planet.
As the capital planet of the Violet Mountain Sect, it wasn’t open to outsiders, permission from the sect required to use the teleportation platform. But the number of forces with those permissions were in the millions and the Violet Mountain Sect made a lot of money through trade, so, even though the Violet Mountain Sect’s scanning formations could easily tell Isaiah was a monster, and, even though both of them were new to the planet, security still wouldn’t be alerted so long as they either didn’t stay for more than a day or found accommodation.
A new E rank and G rank, like Isaiah and he appeared, just weren’t considered any kind of threat.
This of course, however, was a very wrong assumption.
Aalam and Isaiah walked directly into a hotel which was right next to the teleportation platform, booked a room, and went up to it. Then Aalam took one of the devices he’d just made out from his spatial storage ring, a metallic one-meter-high three-sided pyramid, and plugged it into one of the room’s universal outlets.
The two young men then walked out of the hotel, headed to one of the city’s local travel businesses which Mila’d confirmed in the past didn’t check for violet mountain marks due to being a front for a smuggling operation run with the permission of one of the sect’s elders, and bought tickets for a magical train to one of the planet’s other cities, leaving the bomb growing ever more powerful behind them.
The device started by taking a very small amount of energy and then ramped up to the full amount it could use over the course of a couple hours, so, to the city’s formations, it would just look like the hotel was taking up more and more energy. And, as the hotel was personally owned by the Violet Mountain Lord, it was allowed to do so, left to its own internal formations for regulation. And the hotel wasn’t worried about safety, so, even though the energy drain was immense, given Isaiah’s universal credits were automatically taken to cover the cost with a little extra taken off the top, and Isaiah could cover the expenditure due to inheriting all of Epecteos’s wealth, they wouldn’t care.
About ten minutes into the train ride, Aalam used Telekinesis to sabotage the vehicle’s engine, triggering an automatic alert and forcing the driver to stop for an inspection and the conductor to have everyone onboard disembark.
As this process would take about half an hour, and the train had stopped in the middle of a beautiful forested valley, the passengers were allowed to walk around while they waited, and this enabled Aalam and Isaiah to just leave without anyone noticing.
The Violet Mountain Sect’s security was focused on entering and exiting cities, and through making use of the under-regulated train they’d bypassed any inspection.
Mila had moved around the planet while sharing her senses with Aalam multiple times, the two of them working together to find mechanical and process loopholes in the sect’s security, and Aalam was now exploiting that knowledge to the fullest.
He and Isaiah then moved through the open and scenic wilderness of the planet and, after only a half day of travel, they arrived at their destination, the Kimali Mountains. Aalam then easily created an array in the air which allowed them to bypass the formations the Violet Mountain Sect had around the hunting grounds, and he and Isaiah moved to the center of the mountain range.
With Id active, Aalam’s Spirit was fully in the C rank realm, and his Sensory Domain was still quite large, so there weren’t any real threats in the mountains and they arrived at the den of the strongest beast quite quickly, a roughly 30-meter-long panther-like creature. Aalam then used Telekinesis to hit it once in the head with a rock, not using his full force, and the monster drunkenly ran away.
The den of the beast was a large cave in the center of a quite large mountain, likely carved out by an earth element monster long ago, and it was the most concentrated location of power on the planet which wasn’t guarded by at least D ranks of the Violet Mountain Sect.
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Even though it was a planet with an artificially raised rank, the power of the Violet Mountain Blessed Land having raised it from E or D rank all the way up to C, the Violet Mountain Sect’s capital planet was still a planet filled with mana. And, like every other planet, that mana wasn’t distributed evenly.
The ambient mana in the cave, for example, was about six times higher than the planet’s average, and that was enough for Aalam’s purposes.
Out of the Left Hand of the Runescribe, he summoned four specialized artifacts which looked like large glass crystals, each two meters in diameter, and put them in the four corners of the cave. Then he summoned the Left Hand of the Runescribe’s twelve needles and spent the next thirty-eight hours carving intricate array formations of at least D rank power and complexity all over the cave, most designed to hide energy flows, but many to summon souls of the dead into the four large soul containers he’d already placed.
The array formations were incredibly intricate and writing them required a lot more energy than Aalam had, so he needed to wait for his resources to be fully refilled three times, but the end result was an array formation which would slowly attract the souls of anyone who died on the planet to the four soul containers, and do so in a way almost no one would be able to notice.
Almost no one didn’t mean no one, however, but, as the array formations wouldn’t activate until he triggered them, it was Aalam’s hope that everyone able to see the abnormal movements of the planet’s souls would be unconscious or dead by the time he activated the formation.
Without much else to do, Aalam then began carving defensive array formations around his new temporary base as he and Isaiah waited. And, about a day later, when the ground shook slightly, he’d managed to create an offensive array formation around the mountain which could use part of the collected souls to attack anyone who came near.
“Mila,” he sent over their bond, stopping his block on her ability to talk to him now that there was no turning back if he, Isaiah, and she all wanted to live, “are you able to meet up with us in the Kimali Mountains?”
“Give me an hour.” Mila’s voice didn’t contain any anger, fear, or sadness, but through their bond he could tell she was feeling all three emotions to a very high degree. She just wasn’t letting them control her actions. “You have a way to block my Violet Mountain Mark, correct?”
“Tell me when you want it gone and it will be gone.” With the power of Aalam’s Spirit and the amount of psyforce in his mental forges while in his Id state, along with his now middle grade Law Pupa of Severing, Aalam had the ability to completely sever Mila’s Violet Mountain Mark from the artifact which created it from anywhere on the planet. He didn’t need to get close.
“We don’t have to meet up?”
“No.”
There was a pause for a bit as Mila was likely thinking, or maybe escaping. She wasn’t showing him what she was doing. “Alright then. Sever it now. Then I’ll join you and Isaiah in about a day.
“I have some things to set up first so we’re all less likely to die.”
With that, Mila stopped talking to him, and Aalam, no longer blocked from the next steps by Mila still having an active Violet Mountain Mark, proceeded with his plan, summoning thirteen different vials from the Left Hand of the Runescribe and passing six of them to Isaiah. Then the two of them traveled to two different nearby cities and, unable to enter them without Violet Mountain Marks, poured out the contents of the vials right near their entrances.
Their main job done, they then returned to the cave and Aalam took out a large altar from a specialized spatial storage ring he’d made, one about ten meters by ten meters square and made almost entirely of what seemed like the bones of powerful humans, and placed it in the center of the cave.
This was the Altar of Sacrifice, the most powerful weapon the Shadow Thief had ever stolen, and an artifact powerful enough that the sacrifice of a million F ranks could create a curse powerful enough to have a slight effect against even a max level B rank dragon.
The curse the Shadow Thief’s soul fragment had been thinking of unleashing, however, would have used the sacrifice of the B rank’s own grandson, Isaiah, as a method of targeting, making it a bloodline curse, and that, with some slight tweaks to the curse itself to make it bypass Isaiah’s father, would have resulted in the War Dragon King being hit with at least 80% of the curse’s power.
When it came to curses, normal bonds wouldn’t work if the range was too high, but bonds formed from bloodlines could affect a target almost anywhere in the universe.
The Violet Mountain Lord, however, didn’t have any descendants, and Aalam didn’t have any way to get any of his flesh or blood which would still have his power, so targeting him would be a lot more difficult.
Targeting anyone else in the sect, however, would be easy, as every single member of the Violet Mountain Sect other than the chief elder had a tattoo on their very souls which allowed them to be tracked anywhere in the Carium Galaxy Cluster.
With the mountain marks, Aalam could use a curse powered by the deaths of everyone on the capital planet to kill every other member of the Violet Mountain Sect, increasing the power of the curse even further. And a curse that powerful, even poorly targeted and only able to inflict less than 1% of its might, had a slight possibility of being able to kill a powerful B rank like the Violet Mountain Lord.