The isolated area of strength was naturally a hidden Cultivator, here to monitor the situation and perform actions in the dark. He was taking care not to spread his Qi and possibly be sensed by the locals, but the Land was a bit more pervasive and aware than he was.

Cultivators didn’t have Soak, per se. They had Health, and they used body tempering of various kinds to make themselves tougher in ways humans could not, i.e., taking more Outsider/Cultivator Racial Levels, but their Soak was instead their Qi supply. Thus, to kill them, you literally ran them out of power, down to just their physical forms.

It meant that they could be very hard to kill, as that was the equivalent of me having Soak equal to twice my Slots and Spell Engrams, which could amount to hundreds. On the flip side, as they executed forms and techniques, their toughness dropped quickly, unlike Powered, who could be hanging on with one Health and if they had spells or chi left, just keep on going.

The biggest problem for Cultivators was actually a lack of Gear and knowledge of proper techniques, as they didn’t have advisors, and they didn’t have a functional Akasha. The Techniques of chi-practitioners were generally far more developed, but didn’t work for Cultivators, and while Casters could give them ideas, spells didn’t work for them either, Qi being the alien and inefficient stuff it was.

Thus, in terms of staying power and pure offensive ability, Cultivators tended to lag. It was just harder to kill them fast because you had to burn down their Qi.

On the flip side, when a Warlock with a Might of 40 Rides the Shadows and comes up out of your own shadow and locks you in a grappling hold while burning you alive in 11d6 of Wrath, having all the Qi in the world doesn’t mean a thing, especially when that Wrath has a Dispel worked into it.

I Blinked into place in front of the man, his alchemical disguise of Chinese-hued skin burning away from the true milky whiteness below as he writhed in Master Fred’s four-limbed lock, trying to get away as he hammered his Qi against the Silent Warlock.

I lifted a sword hand across my chest, Shards gathered into a blade of cutting force down my arm along the guidance of Force Blade Reserve. His eyes went very wide as I cut back across his neck.

His Qi exploded and gave way under the assault of Force energies as the Touch-Shards discharged, and See the Flaw completed the motion, sub Concentration Check for weapon damage.

I had a very impressive Concentration modifier, after all, and releasing Arcane Focus, took 15 on it.

His face was frozen in disbelief as his head jumped free of his neck.

Gold-black-red blood jetted into the air, was consumed by Wrath, and his seared and smoking corpse, local clothing styles burning away on it and revealing more of the milky white skin beneath, fell to the floor as Master Fred released it.

I caught the head in mid-air, and stowed it away. I turned my attention down, and kicked aside the rug dominating the middle of the room. The floor looked perfectly fine, until Master Fred washed it with a Devouring Pulse, and the illusion it concealed revealed the trap door there, Wards hissing and spitting as they were ripped apart by his Wrath.

He politely wrenched it open, and when the two oriental vampires surged forth, they blew into vivic ash below the neck with a fusillade of Shards. Their heads and faces, complete with the talisman script still attached to them, joined their master in my Masspack.

I glided down the stairs, Master Fred swinging down after me silently, but there were no more defenders waiting.

What was down here had me gritting my teeth, despite knowing it was likely to be here. Loathing the very idea of it not being blown to ash and slag instantly, I instead examined it all quickly but very thoroughly, especially verifying how many times certain aspects of the equipment had been used to make certain things.

I left it intact behind us, but I did use my Shaping Stone to erect a Wall of rock around the house, making sure nothing could get in casually, and put an Alarm on top of that, so I’d know if anyone did manage to get in.

I had Detect Qi up at V, effectively VII, scanning the area for nearly a thousand feet in every direction for signs of those with Qi.

There were quite a few more individuals than I wanted to see, but they would have to wait if they were Ones and Twos. If they were Fours... then I had to clean them on the way, because they knew the jig was up, and they had to run. If they were Threes, they had to die, too, because they were on the cusp of power, and there was no way they’d ever stop before they took that last fateful step, and got themselves eaten for their hunger for more strength.

Sleeping the households kept everything quiet, and Sleipner was of course an invisible ghost as we played phantom killers through the city...

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The areas of lesser Qi contamination were naturally neighborhood dojos, spread around the city to teach the ten to twenty percent of people who had meridians suitable for Qi harvesting and nurturing a Golden Orb. Of those, only a fraction would ever get truly strong, just like the Powered, but the additional strength was only more support for the city in its struggle against the Druids and the sea, so it had been encouraged by the government here.

Two of the areas were barracks where soldiers practicing Cultivation trained. I grit my teeth again, seeing they were all Threes, and they all had to die.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Perhaps it was mandatory service, perhaps it was volunteering to defend their home and people, but they were loyal soldiers, and I still had to kill them all.

I hated Cultivators even more.

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The dojos died quietly, because I set up large Sound Bubbles over the whole area. They had nice walls up to contain and intensify the Qi they were converting, creating a more suitable Cultivation atmosphere for themselves, so the occasional flashes of light when some of the more advanced Cultivators realized something was going on and came to investigate weren’t noticed outside the compound... and generally speaking, they died far faster than they imagined they would from Powered.

The Ones and Twos got their Dantians punctured, and the core of Qi they were developing were burst like punctured balloons as they screamed in horror at the loss of their power.

Then I buried them all in stone and the dark until we finished our work.

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Wiping the two barracks areas, as well as the Cultivators on patrol, required speed and silence, and the necessary use of illusions to replace them long enough to get the job done. I had to reave them with Humanbane Shards back and forth, most of the men and women fast asleep, to kill them before the alarm could be raised. Those on patrol stations had to be subbed out with Phantom Servants clad in short-term illusions to alleviate any suspicions, and we had to move from one side of the city to the other with Linejumps to do all this fast enough to outrace the alarms.

The alarms did start to go off as we hit the main dojo.

It was a showy thing, done in the pagoda style of the ancient Chinese, red tiles and dragons and Tai-Chi symbols and carved statues of great magical beasts and things. As the alarms began to go off all over the city, we hit it hard and fast, and naturally they came boiling out to meet us, running into a shitstorm of Shards like nothing they had ever imagined.

I was popping Pyroclasms and dispensing Shards non-stop, using triangular patterns so they couldn’t deal with more than two at a time, the Holy Metas tearing at them as my Cultivator Baneskull dripped black-gold fires and ripped into the milk-skinned bastards who were coming for me with their fire and cold and lightning and poison bugs and killing mists and mental attacks and every damn thing they could.

The continuous Pyroclasms three hundred feet in radius naturally could not be concealed, and repeatedly shredded them and destroyed the surroundings, setting the buildings aflame and tearing them apart. While some of them were Fire Resistant, this was Primal and Divine Fire, and their Resistance could not stop the spell proper, the Banefire, or the Holy Metas attached to it.

The advanced students died almost instantly, the combination of Pyroclasm and Shards enough to exhaust their Qi and kill them. The Masters could only grimace and unleash their Techniques, trying to reach me in return as I hammered them back... and found their Qi was being used up with explosive speed as one, two, three Pyroclasms and volleys of Shards came seeking them and obliterating their dojo.

None got away, I saw to that. Stillflight and Interdiction were both up, so they couldn’t fly, couldn’t flit away with some esoteric movement technique, and I could track them precisely. I didn’t need to actually see them, nor did my Seeking Shards.

The Fours and under died in seconds. The Fives died in the second volley. The Sixes died in the fourth. The four Sevens and the Eight tried to flee, but with only them to concentrate on, the sixth volley was enough to bring them all down, with Master Fred coming out of shadow to cut the master of the place in two with Idiot, and end this fiasco.

I looked over the obliterated, burning courtyard and buildings, hammered and already starting to collapse by the waves of fire that had washed over it.

I turned into the smoke version of Gaseous Form and went plunging into the flames.

There were Qi signatures down below, doubtless wondering what was happening, yet still keeping their stations.

------

Kentai Yamamoto was the grandson of Isoroku Yamamoto, the great Japanese Admiral who had taken his fleet home during the Fall, and then escorted the remnants of the Japanese people south to Australia to beg for succor and settle what remained of them, leaving his homeland to the multiple black clouds of Shrouds and their undead masters. His family name was venerated in Darwin by all the people of Nippon, as he had prevailed against dissenting opinions to save who he could, instead of fighting a war against a foe that would not die.

While keeping what they could of their homeland’s culture and language, they had assimilated into the English-based culture of this land, learning its tongue and customs for their own. They had also immersed themselves into the magic and martial powers that had come about from under the Shroud, and which might hold the hope someday of reclaiming their ancestral homeland.

The grave responsibility of managing the Japanese people and keeping their spiritual heart had fallen to the Yamamoto family, and they had become the default royalty of this new land. They kept their people on course, growing their strength, hoping that one day they could return and reclaim the lands of their ancestors from the undead spirits that had claimed their corpses and were desecrating its mountains and hills.

Things had been going well for the past generation. Although racial purity was a thing, there had not been enough women of Nipponese descent to assure all the soldiers that had remained faithful would have wives, so some had to be taken from among the natives. While the core families prized their purity, making sure that there was no discrimination against those of mixed blood had been an ongoing headache he had to deal with, as well as the natural discrimination against the Chinese and other Asians who had mutated into orcs, goblins, or snake-men. At least the Europeans who changed were more like altered humans than such creatures. Such devolutions did not happen among the Japanese, who were alternately proud of this, and envious of the natural beauty and magic of the elves, in particular.

Within the past few years, the arrival of Cultivators willing to share their skills and power with the people who were not Powered had been treated first with suspicion, and then embraced when such additional fighting prowess for those born without magic or chi proved useful, especially in the ongoing conflict with the native Aborigines and their mastery of Shamanic magic.

The losses of his gifted Powered subordinates in this conflict still haunted him, and the black-skinned natives were even striking at the young Powered, those still in training, kidnapping them and spiriting them away into the night. His outrage at such tactics was met with equal rage from the aborigines, who accused them of doing the same thing to them!

Very recently, word had come through the Church of Harse that a way had been found to kill Shroudbound undead forever. Such news had caused a fervent explosion of hope among his people. They now had a way to strike back, and their great goal of freeing their homeland was possible, they only had to build to it! On top of the advent of the Human Tongue, a mixed blessing that basically allowed all Humans to speak with one another equally, without language getting in the way, it was clear that momentous changes were on the horizon.

Now, this had happened...