“Sama... the stars above the Shroud aren’t the stars of Earth.”

She blinked once, then leaned forwards. “This planet has been moved, just like Terra-Luna?”

“A lot more subtly, but yes. The Shroud didn’t just introduce open magic here; it had to move the planet to a reality that would make it possible. A low-magic reality would have ground down on the Shroud and the undead, eventually neutralizing both. The Shroud is powerful, but it can’t fight an entire low-magic universe’s laws.”

She leaned back, her eyes wide and thoughts obviously churning. “This is a magical universe, and when the Shroud goes down, we’re going to be right in the sights of everything...”

“I would like to recommend at that point that a substantial number of the population be Forsaken. Also... Allegiances will destroy any semblance of standard governments, as will your Markspace.”

“So, I have to literally turn an entire generation of Terrans into Forsaken, build up an organization that can intimidate the Powered Allegiances that are going to manifest, prep the world for dealing with the interest of powerful things from across Creation, and make the Earth a player by sending people out to save other worlds, even if I can’t go there myself?”

I made a face, while she just looked thoughtful. When she started putting on the crazy smile, I knew she’d bit.

“Damn. It’s so nice when the ultimate stuff I could be doing becomes the stuff I need to do. Convenient, that.” I smirked at her expression. “But what about you?”

“I believe I’m tied to the Shroud. When it goes, I go.”

Her eyes sparked. “Not that I don’t believe you won’t be a holy terror in the false night when that happens, but that sounds damn grim, Trav.”

“Yeah, being forced to go to Shrouded world after world, fighting the undead there until there are no more, does make for a grim retirement plan,” I had to agree.

She studied me, and we both grinned at the same moment. “Being immune to fear includes dread,” she pointed out, as we tinked glasses. “That is so horrifying a future I don’t even want to think about it.”

“And the Emperor of all Karma grinds!” I observed. “Be nice if I had a whole lot of armies to share it with, or something.”

Sama nodded slowly, her eyes flashing. “That’s a lot of Good people to be sending away, leaving the shitty and the cowardly and the uncaring behind.”

“Gonna need a ruthless bitch in charge to keep the greedy fucks in line,” I observed sagely.

“Ain’t that the bloody truth.” She cracked her knuckles, her eyes flat. “Let’s just say I got experience with Neutrals who only care about their own agenda, and go fuck the rest.”

“Amen.” We tunked again. “Ael always hated dealing with the Neutrals. Perfectly happy to let the rest of Creation go hang as long as they got what they wanted.”

“Yeah, yeah, and Good is a bunch of busybodies dragging folk into other people’s affairs we have no business being involved in and making trouble for everyone,” Sama snorted.

“But they are the first to complain and beg for help when those affairs and troubles are theirs!”

“Of course!” We sighed together. “Okay, we’ll have to read in Briggs on this, as he’s basically going to shoulder it all and drive it forward. Gotta love them big, fuzzy Sources.” Her mood brightened as soon as she mentioned his name. He was out with the boys, having a good no-women time, and I’d even had Master Fred go along with them. I had graduated to the point of being able to take care of myself, and although I liked having him around, he needed some time off of me, too.

“Yes, he’s got that engineer frame of mind, wanting to fix everything and make a perfect solution for it. What to fix, and making sure it gets done, is something else.”

“My job,” she agreed without batting an eye. “For such a massive Source, he’s rather open-minded and not an egotistical showoff. Part of the template?” she wondered aloud.

“No. He’s a Rantha Hagspawn, and you’re a Rantha Hag. You’ve got gender dominance on him. He’s very much a dominating authority figure when you’re not around.”

“Mmm!” She blinked acknowledgement, already factoring that in. “So, I’m going to be cleaning up the Daoist Immortal problem, or at least spearheading it, while he takes over getting as many Forsaken trained up as possible.”

“We don’t dare open up the world while there’s Daoists around. The trouble they might bring down on the planet is horrible to even contemplate.”

“A world where strength is everything. I got it. Haven’t messed with any of them yet.” She quirked a small smile. “They aren’t going to like dealing with a Forsaken.” Suddenly, her smile faded away. “You’re missing out on something.” I lifted an eyebrow. “Remember, China isn’t the actual home of kung fu and stuff. You forgot there’s another branch of profound martial arts with negative connotations right next door.”

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I blinked. “Oh, shit.” I put my hand up to my head. “Please tell me no.”

She didn’t say anything.

I rolled my eyes and looked up at the ceiling. “The Buddhist Mantra has established itself in India.”

She nodded at me. “There’s been a rapid decline in technology of all sorts in some areas there, and religious fanaticism is now the byword. The Buddhists are basically holding off the undead, and leveraging it into absolute control of the local populations. The Enlightenment Engine is starting to churn.”

“Enlightenment my arse!” The Buddhist Mantra devolved to an Axiomatic Hivemind Nirvana state, and Enlightened Buddhists were no more human than Daoist Immortals. The main difference was the Buddhist version of Qi devolved towards Light and Axiomatic concepts, with a heavy focus on suppression, obedience, mental will, and subservience to the Buddhist Mantra.

It was just another invasive otherplanar philosophy, like a disease of the soul, making inhuman creatures out of normal humans with the promise of power and enlightenment, this time cloaked in fake holiness.

Getting rid of them might involve having to wipe out entire monasteries and temples full of Buddhist monks and nuns. Like the Daoists, the Buddhists couldn’t tolerate the actual gods being around and not being able to channel them, and so would turn persecution of the Faiths and the Powered who championed them into a religious war. As Powered could only be mind-shackled slaves of the Buddhists, not Buddhists themselves, there was no compromising with them, as any being able to touch the Divine would be able to identify the Buddhist doctrines as false promises.

Daoists and Buddhists got along like fire and water. That meant they were fine as long as they ignored one another, but they were both competing for the same human hosts: those with the strong meridians that could tolerate Qi enhancement. Other humans were just babymakers for future hosts, and so inevitably they’d come into conflict.

The Buddhists would cloak themselves in righteousness and unity, the Daoists in free will and independent power, and then they’d go to war, destroying anything caught between them in a clash of ideologies not much different from the Alignments, only this time the property being warred over was the humans who could be absorbed and turned into more of them.

Breeding grounds for supernatural alien invaders needing humans to generate more of their own ilk. What a fate for a planet... especially when the powerful ones among those aliens would throw away the planet on a whim if they needed something.

“So... they’ve probably been butchering their orc and goblin servants too, or enslaving them as useless for anything other than pure labor, right?”

“Impossible to confirm. There’s been no reliable intelligence coming out of either land for over two decades. Everything I’ve been able to discover from shipping channels and embassies indicates everything is very carefully controlled and foreigners aren’t allowed to wander outside of specific areas.”

“That’s not all kinds of suspicious. I’m sure those who do inevitably meet with accidents by foul undead and dangerous beasts, too.”

“Amazing. That is exactly how the reports of their deaths end up. Your prescience is astonishing,” she complimented me drolly. “Did they not have much presence on Terra-Luna?”

“None at all. India was ravaged by undead, so there was no chance for them to rise. I totally blanked on them.”

“But the Daoists did become a problem...”

“A lot of Chinese did manage to make it out, and something leaked the Daoist method to them. It spread secretly and like wildfire, a way to get power that didn’t involve dogshit luck or being born that way.” My voice dropped sadly. “They ended up having to kill over a quarter million Chinese who had started practicing the art. When your population on the planet is under twenty million, that’s a lot of people.”

“You must have hit them with experienced Tens, and they couldn’t fight back properly, or it would have been much worse,” she noted heartlessly. “How many of their own did they sacrifice for power?”

“About the same.” It had not been a good time. Daoist Immortals desperately sacrificing people for the power to fight back against enraged Tens, and exploring all the dark arts they could for a chance to live. Mind control, poisons, life-leeching, memory rape, body stealing, undead control, spiritual enslavement... the Daoists had no qualms and no restrictions, and any righteousness they had went out the window when it came to their own survival, and they had only ever had the thinnest pretenses of it when it came to gaining power.

Sacrificing Powered for their own benefit was one of the best ways to get stronger, after all!

It hadn’t saved them. No Daoists were alive on Terra-Luna, it was something checked literally every day. After all, while Daoists were perfectly willing to sacrifice others for themselves, they were almost never happy to sacrifice themselves for others, and the Powered coming in were generally willing to die to extinguish them. Fighting to the death was always a personal decision for Daoists, it rarely had anything to do with anyone else.

So, their group morale and cooperation sucked, even if some of them had Ironskulled up and were remarkably powerful in their own way. I remembered Qi spells powered by the sacrifice of infant souls...

I had inherited a powerful hate of Daoist Immortals. Enlightened Buddhists, with their instilling obedience and compliance into all beneath them, weren’t going to be much better. Their slaves would die singing Buddha’s praises, but they were mind-controlled all the same, just hapless people who would lose all the light in their lives when that control was lifted, and either die of apathy or live on like automatons without the subsistence from the Mantra that had been drilled into them.

We were going to have to go into India and kill hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people.

If we didn’t clear their Shroudzones, it was entirely likely they’d hear of it and try to forcibly emigrate to lands without undead, too, so we were going to have to fight sooner or later.

How much of that land was already Qi-saturated?...

“You have that ‘I’m-going-to-have-to-slaughter-a-lot-of-innocent-people Migraine’ look on you,” Sama noticed, totally empathically heartless. “Content yourself that they’ve probably been slaughtering their Powered under the guise of ‘demon-bloods’, troublemakers, cursed by the gods, and similar excuses. Their hands won’t be clean, and the people are going right along with it, be it from fear or fervor.”

“There’s fighting for a Good cause, and then there’s religious bloody wars, which are rarely Good at all. I hate having to kill people...”

“Here’s an excuse from me. Here’s consolation from me. Here’s a quiet talk and crying into my shoulder from me. Here’s more excuses.” She slurped that turpentine she called a drink loudly, and I had to snort. “You’ll have to do it, and now you know. It’s why I told you.”

I inhaled slowly and deeply. Yes, it would have to be done. Yes, I was willing to do it. The Buddhist Mantra couldn’t be allowed to exist on a world that wanted free will, any more than Daoist Immortals could be allowed to establish their Might Makes Right doctrine...