“Letting the stone take all the abuse was a fine idea,” Briggs said. “I’m glad I thought of it.”

“You should share such genius with us earlier. I might have been able to work that into my Warlordship,” I shot right back at him.

He gave me a look, I gave him a stink-eye, and everyone else burst out laughing. Briggs just laughed from his belly and hugged Sama closer, who purred and raked her nails over his hide, Vajras sparking at one another.

“That were a Good fight, and truth to that,” The Mick said, hoisting his own bottle, his arm around Amaretta Blakhamar. “A double Glory award, was that? Quite a rush!”

He didn’t say anything about the twenty-nine Life Diamonds we’d burned bringing people back. Healers and defenders could only do so much, and really, they’d kept alive hundreds of people who would have died in a normal fight.

Perma-deaths were seventy-six, and over half of them had been from the Outsider’s single area bombardment. She had burned a lot of Death Qi on that, and not everyone had been able to dodge in time.

There was a damn reason people were supposed to take the Sun Saves, and it was exactly for occasions like that.

They’d learned their lessons the hard way, and the Sun Saves were the first thing everyone who didn’t have them was grabbing now, along with anything and everything to boost Concentration. The magic number was 30, which wasn’t high enough in the end, but it was high enough for almost everything else now.

After Aelryinth got smacked with that Death Curse, I considered anything under 70 low myself, which was why I was very, very eager to get my Concentration modifier up so high.

More to the point, every single damn person was going to be able to fight tomorrow. Healing magic was just something you couldn’t look down on... and that included the people I’d had to Chain Regenerate to reattach or regrow limbs that had been hacked off, pulled off, burned away, poisoned away, eaten, or some such thing.

Qi wielders had some powerful self-regeneration abilities, which made Blooding quite useful against them, but their ability to heal others tended to suck, given the corrupted nature of their power. Sharing Qi with others was actually incredibly difficult.

Healing, the anvil upon which you Level. While the nadir of Evil was killing one another ruthlessly so that only the best rose to the top, for the Good it was healing, doing it again, healing, doing it again, relentlessly trying over and over, hammering the lessons in with success or failure... and everybody living.

Living to learn! Living to Level!

Evil ate its own to gain power. Good treasured its own, and wanted them all to get stronger. Access to the most powerful healing magic was one of the foundations of the magic of Good, where access to the most ruthless offensive magic was the hallmark of Evil.

I had no problem playing the Healer and Buffer, and Amanans who rarely raised their hand against anything were still able to play support Caster and healer, getting those who fought back on their feet quickly to fight where they did not, ensuring that they lived to enjoy the lessons battle gave them.

I got a mental notice. “Be right back. The Brothers found their hoard.”

Eyes gleamed, glasses saluted. The way there was visualized completely, transferred over, and I Teleported away.

----------

There were three Wayfists among the Brothers here. There were three others working in India with Sama’s forces there, drawn from every continent to deal with the corrupting Qi. Their Brothers had other concerns than Qi, of course, although there were four Lightscepters here among the Purging forces, here to act directly against things which denied the gods.

I came in on a set of stairs, Brother Eurofist there to see me arrive. I held up a fist, he bopped it in amusement, and I wandered down into the vault they’d opened, the outsides carved up in some precious sealing formation that was scarred and chopped in key places, and then streaked with the whites of vivus as the leaking Qi was eaten away.

The keys themselves had been on the scattered undead vivused away in Tiananmen Square. They hadn’t even had to pick the thing.

It was a large hall, and it was stuffed with... stuff.

Einz began TK’ing a spot open for me to put a Tapestry down, and I pulled out the Item Scroll with the box for it absently as I surveyed everything.

“Anything stand out that needs to be destroyed, needs to be read and then destroyed, or is just plain confusing and probably a nasty surprise?” I asked, the dozen Brothers slowly running their Helices through everything. They were moving throughout the entire complex, Weapons burning white with them, tracking down Qi-infused treasures for destruction. They’d been successful, because the Disks I’d given them were loaded down with stuff to Burn.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

Eurofist, who looked like a whipcord of a Slavic boxer, blond with pale brown eyes, pointed. “There’s some scrolls and books of Qi Cultivation and Refinement techniques.” He scowled despite himself. “We’re going to be going over them with some advanced Masters to find out their weaknesses and how to exploit them. Likewise their Forms and Spells.” He indicated a separate sense of books tellingly.

“I’ll review and translate them for you,” I agreed calmly. “I’ll do it during downtime.”

Einz was quickly assembling the boxlike structure of panels and frames atop the tapestry, raising the eyebrows of many of the Brothers.

“You came equipped to loot,” he noted, as I considered the absolute mess of gold and silver items scattered in heaps before us. Bastards didn’t even bother to melt it all down.

“I’m very prepared to loot,” I smiled, tinking a floating Disk nearby heaped up with Potions and Pills made by Daoist alchemists, which I’d Cast for their use hours earlier.

=============

Some months ago...

I had just completed killing the Old God Hastsezini, spending time getting the ley line and the caldera under control. Naturally, that meant I was alone.

It also meant I could pull something off without observation.

Teleporting back along my Lived-Line to a certain garage there was somewhat surreal. I even came in at the same chamber where I’d first appeared on this world.

The decaying zombies all around me, three of them, were a bit surprised to find someone with scarlet skin and burning hair pop up in the middle of them. The next second, they were sprayed white over the dark concrete of the room.

I looked down, and was not surprised to find that any indications of me once being there before had been moved or vanished... or gnawed.

There were a couple other random walkers around, which I dusted instantly as I made my way out the back.

The van was still there, doors yawning open. I looked around calmly, Bitchood up and scanning the area. Nothing particularly alarming around, and the two walkers in the parking lot there were dusted without anything noticing.

I Cast Invisibility to Undead, and rose up into the air as I popped my borrowed wings, succubus wings flaring with silver Runes and burning slightly as they did so.

I had studied the maps of the city from before, and knew right where the Federal Reserve was. There was just getting enough height to Linejump over there above it, evading the shadows and other incorps milling around in the sky, dropping down from the sky, and entering the shattered front door of the building.

I wasn’t surprised at all when I saw the starving vampire spawn waiting nearby. Heavenbound Hall had indicated that at least one of the Vampire Clans had an Elder trapped inside the New York Shroudzone, and some of their living descendants still supplied them with blood on a regular basis.

Bitchood could encompass the whole building, but the walls and floors naturally restricted it. Still, I had sensed dozens of vampires and their ghoul servants as I’d descended from the sky, so this was anything but surprising.

There was no power, so the elevator shafts were all pried and left open, to be either climbed up or used as movement routes for vampires in bat form.

I calmly dusted the sentries, not at all concerned that an alarm would be raised. Layout said that the elevator down to the vault would be over there, but an alarm might be going off if the master vampire(s) noticed their minions were dying off.

I wasn’t worried about any amount of undead at this point. I could also track anybody on this level precisely, and Seeking Shards didn’t care about corners.

I paced through the building for the heavy-duty elevator heading down to the vaults. With the power off, there was no way they could bring it up or down, so they’d likely just collapsed it and left it down there. Bringing up the gold would have been a slow, gradual process, the metal probably exchanged for blood for thirsting vampires mad to assuage their hunger.

There were a few other undead scattered about, some slouched on chairs or desks from seventy years ago, stone bored and just going blank with the uselessness of their trapped lives. If they left, they just burned up in the sun. If they didn’t, they just stared at the same walls in timeless boredom, waiting for a random magos to wander by and vivify them on the fly.

I found the elevators, and dropped down, trailing my hand against the wall.

The cables were still hanging, surprisingly, possibly to help ghouls move up and down? When I looked down, the top of the cabin of the elevator had been torn open, peeled back to allow man-size beings to drop on through.

I took advantage of their opening to drop through, and my Bitchood lit up with the presence of undead. I walked out into the area here, feeling a touch of surrealism. The architecture was older, but the layout of the place was identical to Terra-Luna’s copy of this place.

Not as many raging angry claw marks along the walls, or fallen insulation and things shoved in the corners, though.

There were plenty of gaunt undead standing around, their skin slick and black, obviously reinforced for strength.

I had to lift an eyebrow, because all the gold was out of the various cells for the different countries, the vampires obviously not caring about the balance of exchange between countries once carried out here. The forklifts which had once moved stuff around here were shoved off to the side in the corner, now decaying, clawed up, and useless.

They had stacked all those bars up into giant cubes of gold, from which they seemed to be removing bars on a regular basis, by the display of symmetry there.

Well, that was bloody convenient for me.

Shardrays flashed through the place, with a follow-up set of Shards to pick off a couple stragglers flopped into corners here and there. Piles of vivus fell to the ground, heavy white mist crawled over the tiles and fed on necroic residue, and I had a big pile of gold all to myself.

I pulled out the first Itemized cloth for the Tapestry spell, spread it out perfectly on the ground next to the first of the neatly stacked cubes of gold in the center of the room, easily a ten-foot cube of the stuff. The weight of this gold was colossal, but Tapestry didn’t care. All it was worried about was volume.

A Widened Tapestry was twenty feet cubed. Eyeballing the rows of stacked gold, it looked like about thirty thousand cubic feet of the stuff. Meaning I’d have to move the stuff, and I’d need four Tapestries.

Moving it telekinetically would be far too slow given the volume of stuff here, but building links of bricks between stacks? That was perfectly doable.

I started flipping off weighty bricks of buttery golden metal, making links between sets of four stacks on the ground, officially connecting it all together as ‘one big set of gold’.

Then I Animated the whole bunch, which, when cast at VI and 30+, meant I Animated the whole damn set of golden bricks, a mass weighing hundreds of tons.