Everyone turned to look at me. “Beast Emperors? In here?” Briggs asked, a bit startled.
“If they’ve access to Void or Chaos Magic, they’ll be able to whip up a Portal lock and enter, and exit of their own power once they want to leave. It’s a convenient place for them to gather if they wish, and...” I pursed my lips and put my fingers together, “this place is also connected to my Contract Spaces. If you magnify over by the Pyramid, you’ll see my Imperial Roses are growing all over it, and, uh, there’s a big nest over there where Fire Phoenix and Ice Phoenix Emperors canoodle.”
There was a pop, and suddenly Reynard was right next to me, without any use of Summoning Magic on my part, looking about in surprise and interest. -Oh, most curious, most curious!- he /announced to everyone, looking out above us all, seven golden Tails swishing, and I was certain I saw an eighth Tail budding there.
We all watched him spread his wings to take off and fly up, off on a tour of the place. “Well, it’s a given we’ll make a huge Mana Draw Formation around that Pyramid. Can this place sustain a White Mana Zone?” Briggs asked as Reynard zipped off on his inspection.
“As long as there’s a safe distance from the Void Magic maintaining the dimensional wall, it shouldn’t be a problem.” I pointed down for emphasis.
He glanced down at the sandstone blocks under our feet. “Ah,” he murmured. “Well, looks like I’m going to have to figure out how to move a mountain...” he mused, already thinking up ideas.
“The possibility of being able to ship large amounts of goods in one Portal and right out another to the opposite side of the world where they are desired could be a game-changer,” Cameron pointed out gleefully.
“Yes. We wouldn’t have anything resembling a dominating capacity for commodities, but our ability to deliver to areas with emergencies and move things from and to high-risk zones will be incredibly apt. We could also build factories in here which could connect directly to raw material providers, bypassing a potentially lengthy supply chain. Void Mages could whip up short-term Portals for goods they could transport in their Pockets and deliver them.”
“Itemize and Tapestry spells, too,” Sama nodded along. “The higher-end raw materials often have onerous pricing simply because of the costs of transport. Eliminate that, and we can cut the price to ourselves way down.”
“Koralost Kouriers, When You Kneed It Kwickly!” Swampy framed the Holo with a grin.
“Definitely a PRIVATE messenger service,” Sama drawled in answer to that, to Swampy’s chagrin. “Everyone and their mothers are going to want to know how we did this, if they can do it themselves, or if they can take this away from us.”
“Step one, drain a Pyramid of millennia of accumulations of planar energies wrought from screaming souls,” the Mick piped up. “You might just have to kill off the inhabitants of said Pyramid first, mind.”
“The key part of that is ‘screaming souls’, Captain,” Cameron Dow said softly, still thinking and imagining things. “If all they have to do is sacrifice the souls of others, they can directly skip the beating on Undead and go right to the harvesting. It’s how such things were made in the first place, was it not?”
“Er...” the Mick glanced at me, and I nodded shortly. Every single Death Zone was attached to a demiplane between here and the Netherworld, ruled by Undead or Shade Sages, and wrought out of the deaths of millions over time. “Cam, yer a fine resource on the mindsets of folks with terrible morals, you know that?”
“If you think that the Families I am partners with in India right now were chosen for their upstanding nature, Captain, you are sorely mistaken. There’s a reason so few of them are Marked and in the Allegiance, even if they are holding onto my coattails with a deathgrip,” Cameron replied evenly. “A hundred thousand deaths is just a number to most of them, they have little to no care for anything that does not benefit their Families. The exasperating moral standards required to get in good standing with the Allegiance and I are truly annoying some of them, but losing the Spellhouses and the guaranteed income streams off of them is doing a fine job of keeping them in line.”
“I thought you were getting some excellent results from the new factories, Cameron?” I asked politely.
“The Commander’s designs are unequaled, Lady Fae,” he nodded firmly at Briggs. “The problem is that the factories are shared between all of the Families and myself, instead of any one of us, and thus so is the power and the revenue. A good half of them want the whole pie, instead of a slice, whilst the rest are instead attempting to diversify beyond the bounds of our shared agreement. DuPont and its native partners are already starting to feel the pinch, and pressures are building for alternate resolutions to the trade war that is starting to percolate.”
Sama’s knuckles cracked, and her canines gleamed.
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“Someone is somehow managing to keep both sides focused on the larger problem facing the world through carefully applied applications of sudden death?” Red surmised, looking up at the domed sky innocently.
“Archmages who aren’t helping out are Archmages who are not missed by the rest of society when they go missing. It is very funny how the world works,” Sama reminded everyone guilelessly.
“Centralizing our educational efforts sounds like the very best thing we could do at this point,” I stated calmly. “Specialty production facilities is another very good use, the higher-end the better. Getting involved in the transport of valuable materials is a fine area of endeavor, but the logistics of that business are a bit different from most of the businesses we’re involved in... and we’re going to be disrupting certain existing suppliers, not complementing them, so it won’t be a free thing at the beginning. Production will take a while to expand to keep up with additional transport, after all.”
“All the research facilities that don’t need a White Mana Zone,” Briggs added on. “That’ll be most of the traditional magitech and not the science, but we’ve got a whole lot of terraforming to do, I expect.”
“There has to be some legal complications to this kind of place, right?” Glenn asked, still trying to digest such a massive empty place waiting to be filled with... stuff.
“Oh, without any doubt, Glenn, without any doubt,” I nodded at him. “We’re in a massive extradimensional space, explicitly outside the boundaries of any terrestrial power back on Earth, and it’s not anchored to a Pyramid sitting anywhere outside, either. For all practical purposes, this is just like an island nation in dimensional space, and could be treated by law like the same thing.”
“Putting it under one nation’s laws implicitly gives those governments access to and control over it, and I’m sure they would want to take advantage of it,” Cameron pointed out with disapproval. “I’m sure you’re not willing to have that happen...”
“Flowing Silver Nine-Tailed Fox High Emperor is aware of and capable of entering this space. I believe, by fiat, this space basically belongs to Him.”
Some of the people whistled at that proclamation, Sama and Briggs pointedly laughed at the irony of it. “Oh, that is so rich! And when they start blathering about border controls and immigration and such, we can just turn to them and say, ‘Do you really want to do that to the territory of a High Emperor?’ and watch them cave...”
“Doesn’t that bring the influence of a fourth High Emperor to the Mortal Realm?” Archmage Obai blurted out in shock.
“Yes,” Briggs smiled grimly. “I believe that was part of the whole point here, was it not?”
“Damn right it was!” I confirmed. “He won’t be able to set foot on the Mortal World, but He’ll definitely be able to reach out and touch it if He needs to!”
“Wow, won’t that send the Humanists screaming in alarm...” murmured the Mick, drawing soft words and nods from everyone.
“How does Flowing Silver’s power compare to the Big Three?” Sama asked reasonably.
“I have no idea. If you want to go visit them and see...” I let that trail off, and even Sama Rantha smirked at the idiocy of doing that.
“Not going to Summon Him and introduce us?” Briggs asked carefully.
“No. He’s a High Emperor. He might like me, but I’m not going to disrespect Him or treat Him at all casually. He’s not my buddy or my pal. He’s older than the Human species is and functionally equivalent to what we’d call at least a Demigod, maybe a Lesser God. I’m a very intelligent little bug who can run around without tripping over my own feet. He’ll blink a few times mentally, and I’ll be dead and gone. Maybe if I stick around a thousand years or so, I can take a more casual attitude towards Him.”
“Oof,” muttered the Mick for everyone, blinking at that statement. “I’m so used to hearing you deal with Emperors that I forget how respectful you are of them...”
“A True Emperor can potentially wield eight hundred times the amount of raw energy that I can.
“A High Emperor, multiply by another ten to forty.”
Everyone sucked in a breath. “That’s... comparing an Archmage to a Novice in Casting...” Sannina, the head of the SAR team, blurted out. “But aren’t you a Sage, Fae?” she asked helplessly.
“They have similar advantages in the amount of Mana they have available,” I replied to that. “If not more,” I amended.
Everyone grimaced... except Sama, who looked around with a sharp grunt of adjusted perspective.
“It’s too small,” she judged firmly, her gaze slowly moving from right to left. “It looks huge to us, but to Emperors, especially a High Emperor, this is going to look like little more than a mountain valley.
“This isn’t worth being called a Territory of a High Emperor, however grand and awesome it is on our Human scale. This is the cloak room off the antechamber.”
Everyone glanced at me to see how I took that, cutting down a grandiose accomplishment that had likely never been done in Human history. It was totally probable that none of the existing Pharaohs or other Death Lords had Demiplanes that encompassed so much pure area.
I just let my shoulders slump, to the disbelief of some of them. “I know, but I wanted stability and resonance more than size, and I didn’t have time to build a better Pyramid with all the crap that was going on. A proper Pyramid should have started at a hundred steps, and probably been twice that.”
Multiple whistles broke out, dominated by Briggs’ single note. “Twenty-feet a step?” he asked faintly.
“Yes.”
Everyone craned their heads back, imagining that, so I just flicked up a 2D Holo in front of us, imposing it over what was visible there.
They looked up at a four-thousand-foot-high mountain, and left and right.
Full-stepper, so double-size bases. Eight thousand feet on a side, four hundred by four hundred Blocks.
“That’s a hundred and sixty thousand cubes just for the foundation!” Briggs hissed. “Something that large would take you years, Fae!... unless you’ve got some kind of accelerant you’ve not told us of...”
I shook my head. “There’s an effective minimum time I need to Shape each facing of a Cube, in addition to purifying the crystalline structure of it. The only accelerant would be more people working on the project who can Shape Stone to a standard 55 QL.”
There were a bunch of Earth Mages here. They opened their mouths to say something, considered my words, and shut them.
They couldn’t hit a 55 QL...