Chapter 37: Final Preparations

I knew that despite all of my testing and everything else that the teleportation was going to be risky. I wanted to make sure that if anything happened to me my lands would be fine. I officially made Jon my heir, and took care of everything that I needed to within my fief.

It had been a while since I last worked on upgrades for myself, about eight months, and so it was time for a new set. As was usual, I started off with mana sensing and thought acceleration. Those more than anything determined how good my spellcasting was, as the thought acceleration let me manipulate mana faster, forming it into finer patterns before the mana structure started to fray, while mana sensing gave me more fine mana control and precision.

Then I improved my precognition; it was really getting to the point where if I devoted some time to it, then it could start opening up secondary powers. For example, mental partitions by simulating multiple precognitive points of view. I was fairly sure I was capable of that, with some training. I just had to find the time for it.

I continued to improve the mental ward, preventing telepathic intrusion or assault. I also took a few days to finally iron out the kinks in the communications link. Part of the teleporting buffer structure that made calling my creatures to me safe enough to use had involved coming up with a better way of storing mana. With that, I was able to make the communications device self-powered. Creatures could register a specific number, and then be contacted via it.

Honestly, that was one of the most impactful enchantments I’d come up with. It turned my Ravens into a cellular network. I had no idea what long term implications that would have. How it might change and stifle innovation into electricity, for example. But I did know that it meant Robert, Ned, and Westeros as a whole had an unparalleled military advantage.

After finishing with my Blue, I moved onto Green. I improved my supernatural physique to even more ridiculous heights, my unrestrained strength capable of treating steel like particularly dense clay. My oakflesh also improved significantly, to the point where my body was more like tungsten or a super-strong steel alloy. My regeneration factor got stronger and faster, practically remaking whatever part was injured as soon as it happened. Not that that was easy, now; only Valyrian steel wielded with my impressive strength was capable of causing practical levels of damage. I further improved my skeletal structure, making it stronger, tougher, and more able to take the extreme stresses I put it under.

In Red, I continued to enhance my reaction speed and haste effects, applying the concept of freedom from time ever more strongly. I could easily break the sound barrier with my blows by this point, destroying trees with even light contact given the upgrade to my increased impact effect. I also improved my heat resistance, now keeping me safe up to around twenty-five hundred Celsius, about the same temperature as an incandescent light bulb filament, or twice the temperature of lava.

White continue to show good improvements in defensive effects. I upgraded the energy I kept in the stored heal, and applied some of my new knowledge in summoning and teleportation to allow it to try and return a heavily damaged mana-pattern to the original. In Science! test cases, it showed effectiveness in returning a destroyed head with only a moment of memory loss; it looked creepy as hell to watch though.

My conceptual armor had improved from being similar to the protection offered by an armored car to being similar to the protection offered by a Bradley armored fighting vehicle. It didn’t just help against physical damage, but really any incoming attack would have to deal with that level of conceptual resistance to harm. Thinking of it in terms of vehicle armor was just a way of understanding that in a less abstract form.

The projectile shield saw similar levels of improvement. The level of damage needed to break through it was getting insane. A sustained cannon barrage might manage it, or a massed artillery strike, but short of that I doubted I’d have much of an issue. It was, honestly, excessive for Westeros. Even for modern Earth it was getting to the point where, given my speed and everything else, I doubted I had much to worry about.

Other than that, I managed to continue to develop the anti-undead aura, making it both larger and more powerful. I had no doubt that if the White Walker’s wights tried to close with a tight-packed formation of my hounds that the wights might suffer too much damage to fight just from the aura. It made me feel much more confident in the future of Westeros.

Black continued to allow some significant gains in disease and toxin immunity. I suspected that it would take not just a magical disease or poison, but one intended to defeat magical countermeasures to have a chance at harming me. My ability to consume improved a significant amount. Now I could strip food for nutrition, energy, and essence, as well as incorporate a significant amount of whatever natural advantages that food had into myself. My muscles, tendons, ligaments, nerves, organs, sight, hearing, smell; all of those began to slowly improve themselves. I could do a set of upgrades to animals now and then incorporate them via consumption, eliminating the risk of biological rejection and poor matching in biological subsystems that would reduce effectiveness.

After I was done with my own upgrades, I began to push them out to Jon, Togo, Aethon, Ghost, Shadowfax, and all of my other friends, adopted family, and loyal Guard beasts.

As October came to a close and I finished with the latest round of upgrades, I had one more preparation left: to make sure my army was unbeatable at least in the short term. There was an easy way to do that; I summoned a full half of my maximum summoning limit, instantly tripling my Guard’s complement of Hounds, Ravens and Horses.

It took a truly obscene amount of mana, nearly a million all told. But I had a pool of over nine thousand, and my mana-recharge time was under forty seconds. I had a mana supply of over eight hundred and seventy five thousand mana per hour. With my lands safe and secure, Jon warned of the possibilities, letter written just in case, I was ready.

I tried to teleport to one of the staging grounds where the Hounds of Watch-Force North lived.

It was a total success. I was one step closer to getting home.

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The next step was to figure out one of two things. Either I had to learn how to make a bond with a distant land, and use that as a teleportation target, or I had to learn how to send a creature to a place where I didn’t have a bond, and use that creature as a teleportation target.

I spent a few weeks working on the first option before giving up. It just wasn’t working. Oh, I could use my mana-bonding spell, and with relative ease have it target somewhere far away. With the amount of mana I had available, I could send it all the way around the world. I just couldn’t get it to leave the world.

I was starting to get a little disheartened, so I decided that it would be better to take a break and do something I knew I could manage. Specifically, adapting summoning, calling and pushing to provide and store equipment. It didn’t take long, merely being a mildly different variation on the teleportation spells. It did mean that I had the next best thing to an unlimited inventory though; while things weren’t stored on me, I could easily send them to a storage room in Harrenhal or retrieve them from the same.

Reassured that I could, in fact, make progress with teleportation I dug back into it. Remote land bonding wasn’t possible, but I figured that pushing a creature to a location that I wasn’t truly connected to might be possible.

I had an idea that I might be able to use a search spell to create a temporary location marker to push a creature to. I tried a lot of things; spells meant to identify specific geographical features, spells meant to home in on specific mana patterns, matching blood, matching features, matching astronomical signs even, and on and on and on. None of it worked consistently on Westeros, and there were zero successes in managing to get to another world at all, let alone the world that I grew up on.

November came to a close, and it was looking like this would be another Christmas where my family had no knowledge of my whereabouts or even survival.

Fuck that, I decided.

I was resolved to figure out a way.

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The answer literally came to me in a dream.

Dreams.

They were naturally nebulous, thought to link humans on a mental and spiritual plane that transcended distance and even time. Beyond that, they fell under the domain of the mind, which was Blue, the color of magic that I had the greatest affinity to.

I hadn’t been able to cast a curse through a sympathetic blood link a couple years ago, when that shitty Lannister incest baby Joffrey and his wicked bitch of a mother were being so problematic. But that was a long time in the past. I was a much stronger mage now; it was like comparing Monet’s first finger paintings as a child to his later masterpieces.

I offered a gold dragon to several members of the same families who worked in my castle. Many were nervous, but enough took me up on the offer. Within about a week, I could form a sympathetic link between immediate members of the same blood family.

I worried that my upgrades might make it difficult for me to establish a link, so I tested that out with drops of Jon’s blood and that of Daenerys and Lila. Interestingly, I only had problems with establish a link between Jon and Ned.

It made me suspicious as to his true parentage, but I didn’t say anything. Whether Jon was truly Brandon’s, the dead older brother of Ned, and had been arguably denied his birthright, or whether Jon was Lyanna’s and thus truly a Targaryen, I saw no potential for good coming out of an investigation, and much potential for harm.

With that done, I just needed to learn how to enter someone else’s dreams. Luckily it only took a few days to manage a sort of astral meet-up where I specifically targeted Jon while sleeping. The trick to it was in the state of mind. I had to be at peace, meditating, and almost but not quite asleep when I cast the spell, while Jon had to be not just asleep but also dreaming. It was a good thing I’d gotten so much practice meditating, concentrating and spell-casting because that whole combination was pretty tricky to pull off at the same time.

Once I could enter dreams and do sympathetic magic, I just had to combine the two. By December twentieth I could manage it, and on the twenty first I could finally make contact with my family.