“THIS...” Deepwater Pearls Sea Dragon Emperor hissed, clearly taken aback, but His instinctive rebuke was swallowed after another glance snuck at my Tokens. Clearly, the name of His lord wasn’t going to have any effect here. My Emperors simply didn’t give a shit, and trying to press me with it was only going to offend THEM... which He didn’t dare to do.
“If the Emperors wish for Columns instead of Braziers, there will be an additional price, and they must supply the desired stone, if it is to be other than Sea Basalt. If they wish them individually carved instead of merely rote repetition, there will be additional charges.”
Those additional costs also played out on the great Stelae before them, and the Sea Dragons hummed with great interest despite themselves, their tails in the waters behind them flipping and swishing anxiously... and eagerly.
“This one shall leave True Emperor Deepwater Pearls to consider what He wishes to happen,” I bowed to Him with formal politeness, turning to the dark-eyed Sea Dragon with scales of turquoise, gold, and aquamarine. “Emperor Dancing Waters, have you come to trade?” I asked her calmly.
She glanced at her lord, who seemed deep in thought, and whose dangling beard-tendrils worked dismissively for a moment. “YES!” the Sea Dragon exclaimed quickly, her coils first bringing forth a sphere of hard water, with several valuable things within it, including living Fish with sparkling colored scales.
I swept my gaze over them, and nodded once. “You seek one thousand Braziers, on individual columns, wrought of stone you will provide.”
Her coils twisted, and the Sea behind her surged. A massive hunk of gleaming stone, heavy with the Water Element and gleaming with all the greens and blues of the sea, yet rippling with gold like the sun dancing on waves and whites of foaming waves, was brought surging ashore as if it was not the incredibly valuable Deepwaters Jade that it was.
Her dark eyes were intent on me as I swept my gaze over that stone, over which probably less than ten tons had ever made it into Human possession throughout history. Now I was looking at thousands of tons of it!
“Shall I begin, Dancing Waters Emperor?” I asked calmly as I gestured, and the pearly sphere of hard Waters, each drop worth its volume in gold, was summarily plucked from her grasp and vanished with a pop into an instant Portal.
“I WISH FIVE HUNDRED OF THE COLUMNS TO BE OF ME, AND FIVE HUNDRED OF MY MATE,” she further indicated, staring at me as if daring me to refuse.
“Shall I instead make one-quarter of Emperor Dancing Waters, one-quarter of Emperor Raging Waters, and one-half of the Waters together?” I proposed to her calmly.
She actually drew back at that, even the other two Dragons glancing at her. “YES,” she said softly, after further thought. “THAT WOULD BE ACCEPTABLE.”
I naturally had an extremely good representation of the physiology of her mate, as I’d helped kill the greedy bastard, dissect him, and take out all the good parts.
Oh, and had a lot of Sea Dragon Stew. That stuff had been sooooo good!
The massive chunk of Deepwaters Jade almost seemed to grow legs as it slid up and off the littoral zone onto more level ground. Dancing Waters Emperor trailed after it, and if the other two Dragons did not follow, they were still watching very closely.
I made the Braziers themselves first. It wasn’t very difficult, as the bowls were almost identical, and I only had to make enough individual alterations to progress a pattern that their Awareness could sense, follow, and exult in when they understood it. I had it all mapped out in my Visual File, a rendition of the mating dance of the Sea Dragons as provided by Leviathan Emperor, and so each of the Braziers was subtly different from the one before, like seeing a stop-motion of elements of the mating dance between Dancing and Raging Waters Emperors.
At four thousand cubic feet Shapable at a time, the Braziers themselves were Shaped up at a dozen per second with casual ease. Telekinesis spun them out by themselves as they were made, each flash of motion and spinning Brazier turning into a display of breathtakingly precise art and capturing of the two Sea Dragons. Each settled to the ground in a formation of twenty-five by forty rows of them, each very similar, yet to the Sea Dragons staring at them so intently, incredibly different and unique.
The Mass Vivic Eternal Icefires, set to just above freezing, went up in series that wooshed into existence, one after another, forty rows of them marching into existence one after another as they burst into being, and suddenly the air about us was being devoured of any residues of Dark Mana entirely.
The three Sea Dragons inhaled as one.
The Columns themselves had to be made one by one, so ten to a minute, six hundred to an hour, one hundred minutes.
The Deepwater Jade seemed to liquify as it flowed along after me and poured itself into becoming the winding, thirty-foot Columns that Dancing Waters Emperor desired.
The two watching Sea Dragons didn’t hide the soft hisses of envy that escaped them as the first two hundred and fifty of the Columns rose into being, and Dancing Waters Emperor had to visibly restrain herself from dancing in glee as each Column arose. Each was unique, each displaying a different look and emotion, poise and stance, nuances of captured motion and feelings the Sea Dragons had no idea could even be emulated, let alone displayed like this.
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When those Columns were done, I did the ones of her mate, and the little hisses of wonder and appreciation as I very accurately replicated the manner and appearance and poise of the dead Raging Waters Sea Dragon Emperor were every bit as enraptured as her vainglorious appraisal of herself.
Then I combined the last five hundred with both of them. More accurate renditions of the coils of the mating dance, obeisance to The Sea Emperor, combat swimming, singing to the deeps, coiling about eggs, and they were even accompanied by tiny just-hatched Dragons who I could draw down to the scales, but did only roughly since I didn’t know any of their actual spawn.
She shadowed me through the rising Columns, inspecting each one as it rose, each of them far enough apart to accommodate the girth of her coils easily.
If she was looking for errors or flaws, she found none, even marveling that I’d replicated her first nest of seventeen eggs in proper number... another tidbit from Leviathan Emperor.
When I was done, I floated back and waited as her winding coils, fully exposed on land, wove through the precise formation of risen Braziers, each surveyed personally by the Sea Dragon.
“Is this to your satisfaction, Dancing Waters Emperor?” I inquired of her calmly. I was fully aware I’d set a massive bar for any of the other Brazier Shapers of Coralost to match at QL 40... but if they had the skill to hit a 40, they could ask me for design advice, and they didn’t have to work as fast, they just had to finish them.
At a hundred thousand dollars of value a pop, they wouldn’t starve if they were a little slower.
“YES, THIS IS... SATISFACTORY,” she replied, trying to remain aloof, but having far too much emotion thick in her voice for that to happen. Well, it wasn’t like I was going to mock her for it.
Waters surged forth from the sea, wielded with both power and delicacy. They wrapped up each Brazier and its Column, misting flames and all, and like a whole lake in motion, plucked them up and away. They followed after Dancing Waters Sea Dragon Emperor as she made for the waves of the Pacific Ocean, plunged into its depths, and vanished from view.
I gathered responsibility for the greater purchase had been deferred to her lord, and she was going to go home and make herself a showcase of her small Demesne, no doubt.
Also, she had left almost half the now-misshapen Deepwater Jade behind, clearly not caring about what was left of it.
I turned to Deepwater Pearls True Emperor. “Has Your Imperial Majesty any thoughts on what He would like to trade?” I asked Him respectfully.
I could tell Emperor Subtle Currents was almost frothing at the mouth, anxiously ready to place his own order and was barely holding himself back.
Deepwater Pearls Emperor opened his jaws slowly. “BY THE AUTHORITY OF THE SEA EMPEROR, I WILL PLACE A TRADE FOR ONE MILLION BRAZIERS OF THE VIVIC ETERNAL FLAMES, WROUGHT FROM SEA BASALT, WITH NO ORNAMENTATION.” I could almost hear him swallowing at placing the order, but clearly his authority only went so far, and asking for more likely would have taken too long and gotten him in trouble. “I WOULD ALSO LIKE TO PLACE A TRADE FOR TEN THOUSAND BRAZIERS OF PEARL-NIGHT ALABASTER, AND THE COLUMNS TO GO WITH THEM, CARVED TO MY PERSONAL HONOR.”
I nodded at him. “Merely return here with the trade value, and this one will render unto The Sea Emperor in exchange. Merely return here with the trade value, and this one will render unto Deepwater Pearls True Emperor in exchange.” I bowed to him, and He actually bowed back to me in response, the golden slits in his abyss-black eyes probably a little dazzled by his own thoughts of so much art in His honor. “And Subtle Currents Emperor?” I asked, turning to the last Sea Dragon.
His tendril-beard was working in the equivalent of licking his lips, but he wasn’t a fool. “I WOULD SEEK A THOUSAND BRAZIERS WROUGHT CUSTOM OF ABYSSAL BASALT, AND THE CUSTOM COLUMNS TO GO WITH THEM.” He certainly couldn’t do any worse than Dancing Waters Emperor, but he dared not overreach his status compared to his lord, either.
I bowed solemnly to him again. “Merely return here with the trade value, and this one will render unto Subtle Currents Emperor in exchange,” I intoned formally to him, and also received his own careful bow in return.
“Then, if our words are concluded, Your Imperial Majesties?” I asked them.
A glance at the Tokens, and it was they who withdrew first, turning and sliding regally back into the seas, no doubt eagerly planning on gathering their own purchase prices and getting back here as rapidly as they could.
I gestured up a Portal once the Dragons were out of range, and Swampy’s crew of Swamp Mages, all Water-Earth specialists, almost fell over themselves coming out of the opening, letting out cries as they beheld the remaining Deepwater Jade in all its sublime glory.
There was a lot of stuff they could make for Earth-Water specialists out of this stuff, but just being able to touch and feel something that only a few hundred Humans throughout all of history had even been able to work with had them all reaching out to lay hands upon it in awe at feeling the magnificent purity of the Mana within the massive chunk of it.
“Awright, quitcher gaping and get it out of here. We don’t want the Dragons getting ideas of conserving their wealth,” I chided them. The men and women laughed as they joined hands to first change the misshapen thing into the form of a perfect sphere taller than any two of them put together, and then proceeded to roll hundreds of tons of precious stone through the Portal into the Broom Closet and out of there, leaving a clean, windswept beach and the monolithic stelae tablet behind.
I reflected I should smooth off the section of the island we were going to be doing this sort of work on, and I needed to make up some very formal customs for dealing with the Sea Dragons to keep things steady and on an even keel. With customs set up, deviations from rote would have predictable meanings and keep everything nice, formal, and predictable...
The most important item we were going to get out of this trade? At least a few tons of Imperial Tears! It was the purest, Mana-heaviest Water known, made only by The Sea Emperor Himself, and doled out in dribs and drabs to the Dragon Emperors of His Court. They were the single best aid known for Water Element cultivation, and so absolutely precious to any Water Emperors, and to a lesser extent, Water Element Mages.
Heck, I wanted samples myself, to see if I could duplicate them!
Leviathan Emperor, the other Whale Emperors, and Queen Gichigumi were all going to be ecstatic when the Sea Dragons paid up... and I knew they would pay up, because something The Sea Emperor could make on a whim could not possibly be seen as something so precious by Him, and He wanted these Vivic Braziers badly.
Now, if He wanted something artistic, well, my Emperors had their own demands on my time, so I had little doubt I would be setting limits on that, while some of the Coralost Shapers with +30 Sculpting Mods were probably going to be getting some additional work...