So, time to exploit OTHER tech trees. Like, vat-growing humans.

My Racial Levels were sick and grossly overpowered and cost six times a normal humanoid advancement schema. But instead of a ‘create false persona, grow it, and twist it to Evil upon maturity’, my Hag Curse came with ‘install the Sama Rantha template’.

If it was installed as an infant, they’d be a Human Hagchild baby with the Sama Rantha mental template, but no Karma; awake, aware, intelligent, and a baby. At maturity, the Rantha Hag Curse would kick in, and they’d become a Rantha Hag... and the template that already existed would just absorb the reapplication of Sama Rantha harmlessly.

If I just set them to mature, the same thing would happen, but they’d walk out of the upgrade exactly where I had, as a Rantha Hag, although Advanced instead of ExLite. The Hag Curse would completely bypass all problems mental and physical with being vat-grown as it transformed body and soul into a Rantha Hag.

The ‘Brand’ of the Curse had been altered to pass on our Marks and the Tats. They still had to be powered up with Karma over time, but they didn’t have to be MADE. Sickly convenient, and saved hundreds of goldweight.

How it did all this while keeping us as Nulls... damn, Mom pulled off some sick stuff with whatever genetics she passed on.

Mom’s memory dump had included everything up until I’d been let go, so I knew perfectly well what had been done to her now, what her true intentions were, what needed to be done... and some really crazyass ways on how to do it...

I really did need to conquer the galaxy. Her brain was working at dizzying levels, but the Warp was still ultimately derivative of Reality here. She couldn’t do what needed to be done, because her Null was so heavy it forced her right back out of the mortal realm here again after too short a time.

That also meant her excursion here to drop me off had been completely unnoticed on the level of the Warp, as her Null basically removed that area of reality from conjunction with Warpspace. Since everyone who wasn’t there with me was basically convinced it was a Warp infiltration gone completely bad, the cover story perpetrated and nobody looked into it further, especially since all the Wendlerton alumni ended up getting shot, and a whole lot of excitement ended up happening in high society across multiple worlds. It had kept the Coronals and Umbrans hopping, brought in an Imperial Fleet to stop two planetary rebellions, started three civil wars, and required Omega Sanction on another when Warp resonance basically tore open endless rifts to the Warp, and uncounted demons spilled out...

The Amoureans were very good at what they did... especially when under sentences of death. Mom sure knew how to pick the areas to pop up in, setting off something like that...

All that happened while I was plinking oozes, spideroids, and other stuff in Underspire. It would have happened in Janus Prime, except they were the first place where the alumni were purged, and they didn’t have a chance to really mess things up... although one of the minor kilo-cities on the opposite side of the planet was now a smoking crater after Amoureans had managed to light off all the fusion reactors and implode the city’s Shield to take the whole city out with them, paens of worship rising to Amourae while a unique show of cross-fusion alkalines burning with so many different lights consumed fifty million lives...

I felt the nutrients being fed into the tanks, subsumed by the artificial placenta, and being greedily devoured by the hyperactive constitutions of the children. I eyed six of them in particular, whose Constitution Marks were glowing, linked with my own. I could sense the calm workings of the burgeoning mind inside the child, and would instantly know if there was any outside invasion here.

But the Vakker tech was all arranged in Holy rune-forms, and each Vat had been carved similarly, accentuating the basic Law patterns followed by the Mechanists, and I Interdicted the area every day. Just let someone try to Warp into this place. An attack here would have to be quite direct and powerful, and why would anyone bother with a bunch of non-Powered vat-grown children? It wasn’t like they were super-soldiers. If anyone was looking at that level, they’d even see the girls were Cursed...

Doomed to fight the Hag Curse, and the Warp Gods that had corrupted their prior existences, until the ends of their days?

I smiled slightly. That was like a built-in monster lure, priceless for power gamers...

They were all growing quickly. Three months in Vats to get them to sixteen-year-old equivalents, a third less time than required by normal humans, mostly because they were Advanced and their base Constitutions were beyond human maximums. I’d had to redo a lot of the nutrient base, too, although again the Curse transformation would probably have been enough.

Man, the Warp Gods were not going to like what Hags could do to them...

For security purposes, I couldn’t really leave the city right now, as this operation was just too important. It looked like I was going to be doing a lot of crafting and directing over the next few months... and then, then we would see how things would change...

After all, my little girls were ALL going to want Sword Focuses, and I could hardly disappoint them...

--------

Three months actually go by pretty quick when you always have stuff to do that can fill up the time.

I had 256 Sword Foci to carve using sand wurm teeth, and the Shield Foci to make as well, because why not? And I needed one for myself, too, so no reason not to work on it.

In between that, there was Opening and Awakening people for the Green and the Gold, concurrently providing education and direction for my Marked, and pursuing research and advancing the state of my Vakker-tech. To relax I’d go running outside the city, kill more sand wurms to make money, then hustle on back. I was never out of direct teleport range of the tubes for more than an hour, and they were actually located on the back end of an inventory warehouse selling women’s clothing. Lots of activity around, nothing to see here...

We were consolidating the inhabitants of nine bloks now, after taking out Sharkey. Some of the inhabitants didn’t like it, but they were free to move, and we’d help them do so. If they got violent, we got violent. If they got deadly, we got them dead.

The number of drug users in Sharkey’s areas was naturally waaaay too high. With proceeds from selling sand wurm teeth, I invested in some biochemical equipment, made up some Weird Science formulas for anti-addiction drugs, and force-fed them to literally hundreds of thousands of addicts. The unfortunate bastards found that all the shit they were trying to use did nothing but make them violently sick, nauseous, and the only high they could get was from natural endorphins and eating healthy food. Workers for my hydroponics operations exploded just so they could be around green stuff and smell it, and take away the pangs of withdrawal.

There was still constant violence. Zwilniks wanted to keep pushing their stuff, there were always customers, and there were always fools who thought selling drugs was an easy way out of poverty. However, these people were finding, more and more, that there were a LOT of eager people on my side who were hungry for something else.

Karma!

The biggest problem with the average person is that Leveling up was ephemeral. They couldn’t feel that sensation, of the increase in soul and capability, of advancing and improving and getting better. Their whole lives were spent in the grind of trying to learn and survive, instead of really earning Karma and moving along that path fast.

The fastest way to earn Karma was to be out there and doing something, defying the default shit of this society, and fighting back against it.

Also, it was a nice way to discharge a bunch of them Ghost Knight quests, not all of them violently. After all, the dead Habbers weren’t murderers in life, they had different requests and desires. But anyone who was anyone wanted that Road to Seven, and I could open the road, and show them how to get there. They just had to walk it.

When they had nothing else to shoot for, they went down that road with everything.

‘Freaking busybodies’ were everywhere, on their own self-imposed quests to do Good Stuff, earn that Karma, and if anyone tried to crack down on them, earn even more Karma that maybe wasn’t so good. Termite Kill-Teams fanned out, cleaning out everything above ground, crawling over everywhere Downspire and the near-Underspire, expanding The Map. Lots of contacts and requests were coming in, often with low or moderate rewards, asking for help. The Goldilocks crew was vetting them, and then the self-dubbed Squires of the Green and Gold were going out to resolve them.

The ones from kids got special attention.

The recruits flowing in were constant. People who wanted to do something that mattered were trying to get here and sign up. New people meant new income, new labor, new need for jobs. They had the Skills required as rapidly as I could Mark them, so I was hiring scores to hundreds of people every day as my tech, hydroponic, and security/management industries grew, and the budding anti-addiction industry also looked promising.

Pushback continued, in ways big and small. It sort of slammed into a burning wall of mindclaws a lot of times, and I and the Goldilocks crew, really, Really, REALLY enjoyed the challenge of tracking back those who attacked me to those who dispatched them. I also had no scruples whatsoever about removing those people, or rather violently suborning them.

When the Coronal Knights completed their anti-Warp testing of the Vakker-tech and promptly issued me a contract for basically everything I could produce, it was rather startling how fast some of the violence dropped off.

Interfering with me and mine was now basically screwing with the Coronals, and neither they nor the Umbrans took that well. It was also a nice excuse for us to get in good with the Juris and gain some devoted support for what we were doing from the government.

Since demand for Vakker-tech far exceeded supply, naturally the price of it was impressive. Of course, everyone and their mother could duplicate the semantics of the tech, but the Coronals had already tested alternate suppliers of the same stuff I had given them, and mine was demonstrably massively superior to them, every time.

They didn’t know why, and I wasn’t required to explain. If other people couldn’t duplicate it, that wasn’t my problem.

But whatever, I now had an income stream whose potential was literally as massive as I wanted to make it. My customers were the highest-ranking organizations in the galaxy!

Banks were falling over themselves to loan me money to expand, with that contract as collateral. While the Mekkers were reluctant to sell me the highest-end production stuff directly, I had no problems getting stuff to advance steadily up from Tech Level 7, to 8, to 9, offering varying tiers of performance to the Coronals, priced fairly at each Tier... and they bought ALL of it, without hesitation.

The Umbrans, of course, weren’t going to let the Coronals monopolize everything, and soon came in with their own offers. Like the Coronals, they were a bit miffed that I simply couldn’t spend a billion credits, set up appropriate facilities, employ a few million people, and come roaring to life giving them everything they wanted.

No, no, no. If they wanted the best stuff, everything had to proceed apace, everyone had to be vetted. If they wanted the next best stuff, maybe half as effective, well, I could probably expand faster...

They stopped pushing and urged me to devote my time to vetting more people. They were amazed that I could find so many qualified people to work in such facilities without drawing on the guilds who generally educated such workers, but the primary need for guilds was when the workers were treated unfairly. My workers loved working for me, loved that they were making stuff that helped out the Coronal Knights, and I paid them a fair wage with great working conditions.

And a Mark of Intellect administered with a Karmic Debt at +2 granted one skill point per Level in a Skill I possessed and chose. Like, oh, machining skills, computer programming, high-end manufacturing, engineering of various sorts, electrician and other trades...

If they fed it, it could increase to +4 and add another skill set. Synergy bonuses and pay raise time...

The only thing stopping me was the making of Marks. So... true uber money meant I needed to make more Marks. A lot more Marks. But they were coming, any day now...