I swayed and almost fell down at the pure energetic fury of that much thinking, drive, focus, and information swapping. Elements of Mana were manifesting about me in shadowy images as they began to mesh together in every possible way I could imagine, Time Magic came in to become part of the whole thing and borrow from the future to make the present possible.
“Whoa.” Briggs looked over the dancing phenomena about me with great interest. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen your brain at work interacting with the Manasphere directly like that before...”
“One sec. It’s good my public persona doesn’t take a lot of juice to stay active.” I put my hand to my head. “I’m burning several calories a second just on pure thought right now, and on multiple thoughtstreams. If I wasn’t a super-cooled Cold creature, my head would be on fire right now, and you could literally cook a steak on it.”
Briggs blinked. “Okay, that is impressive in all the weird ways. You, uh, might want to upgrade your Sustenance effect off of Zeben there.”
I blinked at my own Ring. “Damn, I hate it when I miss the obvious.” Sustenance was good, but it wasn’t meant to deal with a caloric load at this level. Yeah, I had to Raise the effect something fierce, and give myself even more thinking energy.
Happily, Legendary Infuser/Artisan/Crafter allowed for twenty goldweight a day, so I could upgrade that particular effect very quickly.
Little things...
“So, I haven’t given you the plans for the dimensional holdings of these two Aztec arseholes, have I?” I noted as I shifted around internal energy flows to momentarily compensate for a severe imbalance inside. I hadn’t noticed, so used to keeping everything in the magical area I could leech energy off of, that my actual supply of Sustained energy wasn’t keeping pace with my ability to think so damn hard.
Well, we’d be seeing what Sustained at X would look like, at the very least! It should fuse with and also accelerate Regeneration...
My Ur thoughtstream chased the others away to ponder on this new and improved healing effect that was about to take place gleefully. Lots of new life energy was bound to help me out in several ways, especially since I was an Eternal already and beyond a lot of human limitations as a result.
“Oh, you’ve already scouted out their little hidey-holes?” Briggs asked in the manner of a man inquiring about a fine steak and a good meal to come. “Come, come, indulge a glutton for siege engineering.”
I fed him the layout of the two Pyramids, which, to nobody’s surprise, were linked by a grand marshaling field below their other levels and rooms, said field also possessing the main link to the Netherworld that sustained the whole array and Conduit to Below that existed here.
“Well, well, well.” He stared at the mental map of the non-Euclidean structure thoughtfully. “Let me ask something extremely useful here.” He pointed at that marshaling field. “Could you make that whole place impervious to outside scrying? Or rather, very misleading to outside scrying?”
It was several square miles in area, fully capable of being packed full of netherworlders who could then march out the two main tunnels that led to the opposing Pyramids. It was noteworthy that the Pyramids weren’t connected by any other passageways, so the Field might have been a neutral site that they hadn’t elected to make themselves.
“I’d have to make a small Pyramid to make it stick and have enough power to fool a Realm Lord, but yes, I could do that,” I said.
“Which is also what you could use as a self-destruction explosive to take out the level entirely.”
I nodded slowly. “Also true...”
“And you could use this place as a springboard into the Netherworld for some exploration, if you can avoid the attention of the Netherlords there?” he went on gleefully.
I scrunched up my face. “You really want me going down there and grinding for my Syzygy, don’t you?”
“I’d rather have you at half-Realm Lord than not, and discovering the way to Realm Lord than not, yeah,” he nodded calmly. “If you want to travel the road ahead of you in any amount of time at all, you’re going to need to massacre armies. The Netherworld has all the armies in need of massacring that you need. Sama and I can’t DO that, but you can.”
“I can’t take on a Realm Lord, Briggs...”
“But you can hide from one. Better yet, if you’ve got a mobile Pyramid, you can extend that to an entire area.
“Nothing we’ve seen indicates these bastards have any kind of divine omniscience, be it in their portfolios or otherwise. They’ve just got the same magical Awareness, a level higher in power.
“That means they aren’t aware of everything going on around them all the time, unless that Awareness is extended, and being aware of things on the fringes of their territories would be time-consuming and irrelevant.
“Swallow an area in ‘nothing happening here’ and wipe it clean.”
“Huh. A-conquering I will go, a-conquering I will go...” I singsang back at him.
He just patted my shoulder. “Get that foundation work done to support what you need. Alternatively... the Lords of Light probably enslaved many Good souls over the millennia who shouldn’t be there. Raiding them and stealing them away for Heaven would also be huge Karmic awards, if not so much in Mana... but what are the odds their faithful’s souls have not been ‘temporarily suspended from participation in the reincarnation cycle due to high demand for post-mortal services’ or somesuch drivel?”
“Pretty goddamn low,” I had to admit.
“Again, stealing souls away from false gods and shuffling them off to their proper destinations is not something Sama and I can do.” He looked thoughtful. “We’ve still got a good two, three months of work ahead of us to get these Undead Hunters where they need to be, but that’s a grokking waste of time for you, especially with the time constraints we are under.
“Break the system over your knee as fast as you can, get those spells figured out, and start killing armies proper-like. There’s a time to hold your power back, and this isn’t one of them.
“Make them pay.”
I was still Sworn to him, even though I probably had more Karma accrued by now. No? Oh, he was getting monstrous amounts of Allegiance and Warlord Karma, of course. His personal contributions were fairly minor overall, but that was a Source for you, lifted up on the shoulders of their people.
Heck, I was giving him tons of Karma! My Loyalty Rating was exactly as high as his Duty was!
“I’ve got the brains on it,” I assured him. “And you’re right about one thing. Killing forty thousand Commanders to make one Rank 6 Soul Realm Diamond is probably something that can only be done routinely in the Netherworld, if it can be done at all.”
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“They’ve been leeching off the mortal plane. Time to leech them right back, I reckon,” was his only judgment.
Giving bad guys what they deserved was always the best part of being Good.
--------
It took time to make a new Valence spell. Happily, even though I didn’t have a ‘library’, I had a Visual File, and I had forty Ranks in Spellcraft now. I could comprehend up to Valence XX spells and potentially work on them, and in this universe, that could mean some hideously broken stuff.
But, no. A spell to Compress Mana, cheaper than a mere Skill Check and Formation, faster, harder, specifically made for one task, and then scaled up for increasing Valences and effectiveness, the cost passed through the Slot to Magery Mana.
Magery Mana took the square of a Valence to refill it. Since my Valences were all at +4, that meant the cheapest Valence I Slot took 25 Mana to replace now.
It was inconsequential, since I gained about 110 Mana a second in Waking Meditation, all the time.
110,046 Channeling Node False Stars to fill was my fastest path to getting Highpoint Mana, and thus Realmpoint Mana. If I could get the Application part of merging in the Truepoint Mana down to a minute, then I was looking at a mere 76 days to cycle through it once.
Then, then I could start on the Realmpoint Mana. 3600 Mana/minute was 60/second. 36,000 Mana/minute was 600 per second! If I could do that across five energy types-!
I would need a hellacious amount of Mana to do that, and Briggs was right. The only way was to Drain something with the existing Mana.
Corpses going vivic would be ideal.
However, I wasn’t going to do that to the Mexican Ahaws and their bunches of undead. I didn’t want to trigger a Realm Lord reaction from their little marshaling field if I chose to unleash upon it. No, these two chumps were going to be successes of the Undead Hunters, I’d just close down the Conduit at the end.
Nope, I went over to Egypt and started messing it up with them!
This was actually pretty fortuitous, because Ramses II had made a big mistake in trying to invade China in the not-too-distant past, and in doing so pissed off the Emperor of the Dead who claimed China as his territory. Incensed at the intrusion and arrogance of the Pharaoh, the Emperor had used Mok Fan as a cat’s-paw, having him penetrate the Great Pyramid, make it all the way to the bottom, and open up a pathway along the edges of the Netherworld where the Emperor could invade from.
Not many people in Egypt knew it, but the undead forces of Ramses II, and perhaps even some of the other Pharaohs, were mixing it up with the Chinese undead in a delightful scrum that was very distracting, and just the sort of thing I didn’t mind taking advantage of.
Someone who could read the stone and find the entire layout of your little pocket plane was not someone you wanted running around in your base, but alas, the Pharaoh was busy and security was not what it could have been.
Also, I was fully capable of moving outside in the Aether if need be, my mastery of Void, Time, Divination, and Force Magic more than sufficient to survive and navigate out there. A High Emperor couldn’t have done so, as they had so much magic infused into them that they could not help but attract the attention of Realm Lords if they tried such things. They were also so huge that the magical cost to do anything in the Aether (pointedly staying alive!) was magnitudes greater and would have too-quickly exhausted even their massive Mana reserves.
Exemplar Surging for an appropriate spell got me nowhere, so developing what I needed was all on me. A devoted spell to survive the Aether wasn’t too hard to approximate, especially with post-X Valences... and an Amulet of Adaptation which only had to be upgraded to include other-planar environments.
Then Force Mastery let me get through the stone-lined walls and floors with their fields of force keeping away the Aetherial tides that would have torn the places about.
No, they had not the slightest clue that anyone could enter their little demiplanes abutting a Netherworld Conduit midway through, and did not even leave much of a trail after I Shaped the stone back closed.
With my routes in and out open and clear, it was time for me to be a stealthy leech upon Realm Lords and the Netherworld!
==========
Author’s Note: Some of the stuff Fae found out when she started upgrading her Sustenance!
Sustenance I: You do not need to eat or drink, and all your energy needs are taken care of. You only need two hours of sleep a night to become fully rested, although this does not affect the eight hours of time needed to renew Valences. Used in a normal Ring of Sustenance.
Sustenance II: As I, but you have so much energy you are immune to fatigue. If you are afflicted with fatigue, it is removed at the start of your turn. If you are inflicted with exhaustion as an ongoing effect, it is reduced to the equivalent of fatigue, instead. You are always treated as if you were resting all day for recovery of healing hit points or ability damage.
You have hypertrophy: your physical and mental condition will not lessen during long periods of inactivity, and you always default to your most idealized and developed physical and mental state (in short, you don’t get fat and soft from sitting around, and your normal physical and mental conditions can only improve with time.).
Sustenance III: As II, but you are also immune to exhaustion, which is removed at the start of your next turn if you are afflicted with it. You no longer need to sleep, different parts of your brain resting at different times during the day when not needed, and you automatically stabilize when below 0 HP. Bleed effects on you automatically close after one round of damage.
Sustenance IV: As III, but you regain hit points and ability score damage by the hour instead of the day. You may either save every round against an inflicted nauseated, sickened, or weakened condition, or it is removed at the start of your next turn if no save is normally allowed.
Sustenance V: As IV, but you save against poisons every round regardless of their normal effects/onset period, and if you make the required number of saves, the poison immediately ends, possibly before its secondary effects go off. If you have made a save against a full dose of the specific poison before, your saves are at +4.
Feat: Sustained Recovery: If you are Sustained, every ten points of mundane or magical Healing spells also heals one point of ability damage, starting with Constitution and then by most injured Stat point.
Feat: Sustained Healing: As Sustained Recovery, but includes Fast Healing or Regeneration also. This feature kicks in only once you are at full Health, however.
Feat: Sustained Effort: Due to your boundless energy and disciplined use of your extra time, when you gain ability score points by leveling up or aging, you gain the mental/physical opposite of the Stat point selected as well as the one you elected. Str/Cha, Int/Dex, and Wis/Con. (this one she was aware of and has used)
Feat: Sustained Tolerance: You gain Cold Endurance and Heat Endurance. Your extraordinary amount of personal energy allows you to remain warm or cool in extreme environmental conditions.
Sustained Mastery: Requires being under a Sustenance effect.
* You automatically qualify for the Endurance Mastery. You gain an additional +4 on Endurance checks, System Shock checks, Disease checks, and against Sleep/Dream effects.
* Your XP cost for maximizing your Health and Soak is always figured at the level of the Hit Dice you are maximizing, if it is less than your current Level.
* You gain the Hardy Traveler (+2 Str for carrying, +10 Move for overland/long-distance travel). For purposes of recovering from anything, you are always considered Fully Rested with medical care.
* An amount of damage equal to your character level is also changed to temporary damage whenever you are subjected to at least a d6 of Healing magic.
* If you are above half Health and fail a save against a Death Effect, you are instead reduced to 1 Hit Point and are still alive.
Feat: Sustained Synergy: with Strong Soul: The bonus against negative energy effects increases to +4.
Mind over Body: The Feat also heals ability drain (1+Con in pts/day).
Great Fortitude: You increase the amount you are healed by any non-continuous effect (such as Fast Healing or Regeneration powers) by +2 (normally spells or potions).
Added by Elorie's recommendation: Deep Breathing: Your ability to hold your breath is greatly expanded as your internal air supply is recycled. You normally need to breathe no more than once an hour to replace leaked oxygen or water or whatever. This does not render you immune to air or water pressure, poisonous gases, or the like.
Corollary to Deep Breathing: Necklace of Adaptation: Your need to breathe is completely removed, as your internal air supply is completely supplied by the Necklace, in addition to the other effects of the Necklace.
Cold Endurance, Fire Endurance: You are considered to be under the effects of Endure Elements for the appropriate temperature. If you have Sustained Tolerance, you gain Resist 5 to the appropriate Element.
Melee Resolve/Vigor Class Ability: Your Melee Level is considered four levels higher or at your character level for purposes of the Vigor Class ability (uses/day, speed of healing temporary damage), whichever is better.
A Ring of Regeneration: This item will also heal ability damage or drain, and if you are at full Health and Soak, Restore Drained Class Levels at the rate of 1/hour.
(There are definitely other synergies I haven’t thought of!)