Chapter 56 - It's always darkest before the dawn

It had worked, perhaps even too well. They had fed one hundred and three Wendigos into the array, giving them enough SP to refill Adam’s spirit sea a dozen times over easily. Echo’s GTAs were busily tiering up everything there and building more to house the energy. At this point, they decided to use a PD to house some of this excess energy, a sort of safe house or emergency backup.

They also created the smaller PD that was more like the size of a few football fields than a house.

They surmised that this was what winning the lottery felt like.

But still, more Wendigos were coming, and Adam was again worried about the damage being done to this place. It was confirmed that the Wendigo infestation would have caused a similar result in the long run.

All the Wendigo corpses were being dumped into the shadow realm, sorry, shadow realm.

Mi Quo had to turn back the concentration of dark energy too much for even him. So he instead sat down to meditate and at least use this abundant energy source while figuring out what to do.

Toy Pu-Che’s currently had a similar problem; his men had reported the anomalies within the forest. He had even sensed it himself. The problem was that he couldn’t even get his skeletons into the area without them exploding from excess dark energy.

“Just what the hell is going on?” he said, chewing on his bony knuckles. Had his experiments gone wrong? He wasn’t sure if he wanted a super Wendigo. Which is what he worried he had produced. Great experiment but not the effect he was after at all. He wasn’t sure he would have any chance of controlling such a monstrosity and would have to flee the area.

The plan had been to make this his zone and wipe out the surrounding villages and towns. Then start creating an army, one of Wendigos and one of zombies. However, he had discovered an exciting sight of relics nearby and wanted to make this his base of operations while investigating. He had thoroughly checked out the area beforehand and had found no threats to his plans whatsoever. Nevertheless, he would have to prepare to leave, just in case.

Adam asked Libby if there was anything they could do about the devastation caused to the surrounding area. Although a hundred-square-mile death zone was not really what he had intended, he did have to live here after all.

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So Libby did a bit of research, as Echo and his GTAs were doing all the work once the PDs had been constructed. First, she used her mana field to examine the things within reach that should have some form of life energy remaining within them; there were no life forms remaining in their current location. Nothing whatsoever, even though she sent her mana field deep into the earth.

She instead switched tact and set up a field around their area—a shell of sorts, mimicking the shells that existed within their spirit sea. The shell stopped dark energy from escaping and also absorbed it from inside and outside. It was her hope that this would vacuum up some of the damaging energies as well as prevent more wasteland from forming.

This by itself would have stopped their trap from working, but as she had an almost endless amount of energy to place with, this was only the first component in her design. Next, she channeled the dark energy through the shadow realm to points much further afield to bate Wendigos. When a Wendigo came into range, they would then be shadow-jumped into the awaiting trap arrays.

This, although very energy intensive, had the added benefit of allowing her to try and track down the remaining Wendigos without annihilating the entire region.

It was not until the early hours of the following morning that the last of the Wendigos were bated into the trap.

Adam had been asleep and was woken by Libby only due to the fact that she sensed someone in the area.

It was a few hundred of Toy Pu-Che’s minions. They had all been dispatched to find out what was going on. Pu-Che had noticed that the dark energy had subsided considerably. Well kind of, it has stopped emanating from a central location and was now moving about. So he presumed the super Wendigo, was coming in their direction. He should have just left, but he really was curious by now. And at least he would have got something out of this mess up if he found he had managed to create something unique.

Instead what he found was enough dark energy to seemingly vapourize his minions but no Wendigo.

It was more like a mindless demonic spirit. Well, he supposed that was also a success. They also found some more of the spirits. It was like a minefield of dark spirit energy as his minions were either exploded or simply disappeared when they got too near.

Echo noticed that other beasts were now being drawn into the arrays and just presumed they were from another area. Strange that they also held dark energy, although unfortunately far, far less. It seemed more like a few tiers below. Still, energy was energy. Actually, he didn’t mind where the energy came from as long as it kept coming. But he knew Adam was touchy about that kind of thing.

Toy Pu-Che was still curious so he took a few of the minions that he hoped wouldn’t explode and they carefully traced their way to where the dark energy had originated from. What he saw apart from the expected devastation was an interloper.

Someone was just sitting and meditating, at least that’s how it seemed to Pu-Che. Meditating in that density of dark energy could only be done by King Lich. Any self-respecting necromancer would have stopped and thought about an acceptable gift for such a one. But Pu-Che, just froze then turned tail and ran. He planned to be a King Lich himself and not beholden to another one for eternity.