Year 233

***

The void mages were the busiest group these days. They had so many moving parts, but there’s only so few of them.

Stella had about 1,500 void mages under her, and her four other archmages. There only used to be three, but even one more wasn’t enough. Not with what we wanted to achieve.

One group focused on deciphering the map within the demon king’s core, and developing ways to make most of the map.

There was another group that designed the listening devices, and the potential interference devices. They looked out for demonic transmissions, to figure out how the demons communicated with each other through vast distances, coordinated their attacks and selected their targets.

One group worked on expanding the riftgates, and trying to combine the language of the rift-gates to the maps. They also tried to find ways to work around the limitations of the star mana, which is our main stumbling block for a proper interdimensional league of heroes, and empire.

Now, we had the group working on moving the cometworld through the void sea. On one hand, I realized that the will of the world was able to move through the void sea without void mana, thus I do suspect that void mana may not be necessary for that purpose, but core mana would be the more likely material or resource. Yet, void mages as the ones most familiar with the void sea, and so it is them who commit to the task.

There are smaller groups, like those focused on weaponizing the void mana, and developing better ways to destroy the demon king and that demonic glass droplet.

Mages, as a whole, were relatively rare. Void mages, even more so, and even till this day I feel the lack of high-level mages acutely. We have level 120 mages, but so far, only Stella reached the domain.

I don’t know what a domain-tier archmage or wizard could achieve, but having someone at that level should greatly help our cause.

We see this with the lavaworld, where we lack the means to securely access the core.

Magic, despite its perceived ubiquity, is still quite hard to train even if we have made incremental improvement over the last century. There is a certain level of genius that I feel the system expects from a mage and the mage would not progress far without it.

Even with decades and centuries of magic training, it’s surprisingly hard to reliably get someone to a ‘master’, even if we do have a large amount of competently trained mages.

Madeus, my first resident wizard, many decades ago, once said that it is quite easy to learn the basics, after all, the first spells are not much more complicated than skills.

Now we have an army of mages at his level. But our attempts to grow stronger [archmages] were just slightly successful.

We only have about a hundred to two hundred mages that are above level 100. The highest of those in the level 130s.

Magic was extremely hard to excel in, because there’s a component that’s not dependent on experience, but comprehension of some kind of vague magical concepts.

Our statistics indicated that, although almost one in two individuals gain some type of magical ability and spellcasting, such that they could use simple and intermediate spells, only one in forty has the talent to walk the path of a mage.

Of this small fraction, most just plateau at the level 40s to 60s. In our Valthorns, the number seemed to suggest that only one in twenty mages who make it to level 60, even with magical experience boosts from the dungeon.

Of the almost half a million mages we trained over the last century, we only have less than 200 level 100 mages.

Attempts to brute force the levels didn’t contribute to magic-classes gaining levels, instead our attempts to force them to level caused their classes to reflect a combat focus.

The system essentially starts funneling levels to combat-type mages, instead of pure magic classes. This meant [mages] evolving into [Battle Mages] and [Great wartmages], or similar sort and they gained more combat-spells skills instead of pure magic skills.

This was useful in their own way, but what I wanted was the ‘out-of-the-world’, ‘hail-mary’ type of magical solutions that eccentric mages could provide.

So, over the last century, the way we trained mages also changed. Instead, we rotated mages to various roles on the Central continent. They would perform research, perform exploration of the underground chambers and ruins, conduct classes in the FTC and provide basic concepts on magic to the administrator classes, maintain various magical artifacts and formations throughout the continent.

Combat was still needed, which meant mages would still participate in dungeons, but only after a reasonably good and long stint in non-combat roles.

This was how we discovered the way to somewhat reliably level a mage into proper [wizard] and [archmages], instead of relying on brute-forcing and dumb luck.

It reminded me of the time, during the early years of Freshka, and the FFA, I tried creating [archmages] and [wizards] through class seeds fusion. That didn’t work back then, and it still didn’t work now. My large stockpile of high tier [archmage] class seeds, instead came from the small army of archmages that died over the last century. My artificial minds claim the archmages all have their own quirks and reading their minds often involve great leaps and thoughts that seemed rather disjointed.

Training mages is still a problem we haven’t truly cracked.

We could teach them skills. Teach them spells from our massive library of spells. Let them have the resources needed to experiment.

But it all gets stuck somewhere.

Maybe in that way, it’s the same with everyone else. I have knights that never make it as far as Edna, even if Edna’s path was clear for them to see. Most Valthorns plateau before level 100, even with the level breaking gift.

Only those who breached a level 100 could even try to challenge the monsters we face.

Right now, we have about two thousand level 100 individuals, and so far, all of them are sucked into the system, a part of the structure we created.

Reality is, if they all turned against me, I’d have a big problem on my hands. But they won’t, simply because they’ve all seen what was beyond, and realize, we are all still just small fishes in a very big pond, and together, we are stronger.

More importantly, I begin to think the reason the guilds failed to entice the true powerhouses to their camp is because of the level 100s’ increasingly long perception of time.

Capitalism is meaningless, when one gets better at visualizing the changes after some passage of time. The powers that the guilds try to claim and control, is nothing more than holding on to a candle.

It is bright, and warm, but momentary. It will fade, and is not something that would last.

They know, as weird as it sounded, that whatever they created outside, would collapse in decades, and they would return to our fold anyway. They didn’t have to look far. Even on our central continent, guilds come and go, kingdoms as well.

Even creations of heroes could collapse once their heroes fall. Whatever the guilds are doing, it would be just a fling.

A summer’s dream.

A project made for profit.

Gone, once they got bored of it. Canceled, once it wasn’t profitable.

I wonder whether I’ve trained my Valthorns too deeply in my own ideals, that they fail to relish in the beauty of momentary flings.

***

My artificial minds, the thousands of them that now crowd around the valley and also near to all my various clone trees, essentially sustain and operate the entire continent. Without my artificial minds, I would be immediately overwhelmed by the sheer amount of things that require my attention.

I’d pretty much attribute the modernity of the Central continent, down to the artificial minds organizing, maintaining and monitoring the various aspects of our continent. Without artificial minds, I would not be able to achieve any kind of omnipresence in the Central Continent.

I would be stuck to just the area around the valley, and even then, I’d be able to focus on just a few things at a time.

The topic of artificial minds came up fairly recently, as Alka tried to do some resilience tests, to see how we would fare in various types of events.

We have a massive vulnerability because the entire beetle network, the application of ‘growth’ boosts, the monitoring of crime and trade, monster attacks, all essentially relied on my artificial minds. They did the heavy lifting, supported by a smaller army of administrators and druids.

If, by some event of a magical virus or disease were to sweep through my artificial minds, or say a demon king with an EMP-pulse ability that could disrupt communication with my artificial minds and the trees, we could face a huge setback.

They would need to design some backup systems and processes, for such an unlikely event. All of this was additional cost and manpower.

***

“I have envoys from the Crystal King, and the message clearly requests your presence.” Zhaanpu said with a chuckle. “Your attempts to stay hidden didn’t work, and it seems to have figured that we made contact.”

“I figured as much.” I said through a tree located in the Pyramid City’s parklands. My trees, cactuses and shrubs covered vast areas of the sandpeople’s land, and also segments of the Centaur lands. “Domain holders are not so foolish.”

More mana. That was what I wanted, and I was getting it. Zhaanpu merely grinned. “Then have your priest be present.”

Lumoof smiled as he saw a familiar face. The envoy was the lady he met, Fourth Archpriest of Maelas, Yaddah. “Ah, lady Yaddah, it’s nice to see you after 30 years.”

She had aged quite a bit, but at someone at level 80s, she clearly had at least a few more decades in her. She froze for a moment, as if a memory she long suppressed reawakened. “It IS you.”

She didn’t say a word to him after that.

Zhaanpu did not appear in person, instead, he had one of his own senior ritualists attend the meeting, dressed in the most gaudy and overwhelming attire ever.

“Speak, envoy of the Crystal King.”

Yaddah said, but she didn’t dare point fingers. Instead, she unfurled a scroll, and said. “The Crystal King demands, as per the pact, to know the deal with this Aeon. Outsiders are not a party to the pact, and the Pact of the Three dictates that the land is shared by the three parties, and not to be yielded to third parties.”

Zhaanpu’s priest was quiet for a moment, and then responded. “The Great Pyramid merely leased the land to the temple of Aeon, to conduct some farming activities. They are just customers of the State of Sand.”

Lumoof didn’t respond to the lie.

“Is there an agreement?”

“We can provide the documents in due time.” They would have to create a fictitious set of agreements, but Lumoof didn’t intervene. This was Zhaanpu’s territory, and he should handle it as he saw fit.

“Now.” Yaddah insisted.

“The Crystal King is intimately familiar with the concept of patience, we highly suggest he apply it. Retrieving documents takes time.” Zhaanpu’s ritualist responded.

“Fine. We will wait three days.” Lumoof could feel there was some kind of communication happening. A set of encrypted magical messaging. But she looked away every time Lumoof glanced at her.

Zhaanpu’s priests quickly gave some land transaction records, and it was clear this was a fake set of records. Some kind of large scale forestry and farming project.

“It is less troublesome that way.” Zhaanpu admitted later. “I dislike dealing with my peers, even if I do respect them for what they are.”

“What exactly is the Centaur’s uh... guardian?”

“You’ve not seen it? Last I recall, a possession-linked formation where the two joint patriarchs of the Centaurs would meld with the formation, thus granting the Centaur leaders access to the ancient wisdom, and also the means to control the formation over Hoofhall and it’s surrounding lands.”

Just like the Pyramid, the truth was also shrouded in mystery. Even until today, my centaur spies are still trying to piece together the identity and abilities of the centaur’s guardian.

To some extent, I wonder whether I could force them to react to me. My trees had also begun to spread to the lands owned by the Crystal King and the Centaurs, and though I kept it low profile, I was sure they’d realize it eventually.

Would the Crystal King wage war because I had trees in their land?

My bet was, no.

It was just posturing.

***

One thing became clear once the guilds controlled kingdoms and nations. Capitalism didn’t inspire loyalty in the same way as a monarch or a religion.

The loyalty a guild leader had, was just not to the same degree that a King, or a priest. Hired mercenaries bailed when the risk-reward ratio no longer made sense, but a loyal knight or fanatical zealot would keep fighting under their last breath.

The guilds, after decades of prospering as a business and treating it’s lower ranking people callously, now needed to find ways to brainwash their men to fight with their lives on the line. A guild leader cared about the bottom line, cared about the salaries of its people, and operations, but now it had to think further, of winning loyalty, of winning over hearts and minds.

This lack of loyalty meant the guilds often had to deploy larger forces, stronger forces with bigger, better equipment, just to convince the mercenaries they had good odds of winning, or it’s quite likely that there’s a sudden collapse in morale, where mercenaries, particularly multiple different groups, all quit in succession.

The guilds also discovered that they needed to ‘insource’ military might, to have internal competence and ability. Guilds that built up a stronger internal military arm, or have adventurer-guild subsidiaries or partners performed better than those that had to hire all their military strength from mercenary guilds.

Various mercenary and assassins guilds, many of which merged with the merchant guilds over the decades, began taking on larger roles and used their growing importance in the war for new territories to take over their own conglomerates. When the merchant guilds concentrated on just trading alone, and focused on Central Continent businesses, the leaders of such guilds tended to be pure administrator/merchant and assassin types. But with their newfound colonial ambitions, the military and combat leaders had more visibility, and so they moved up the ranks.

There was no space for weaklings, when the assassins began to target the leaders on the Central Continent.

There was also a growing schism, when some of the leaders sent to ‘rule’ their newly conquered territories began to amass wealth in their new territories, and used it to defy the central continental guilds leaders.

After all, the heaven is high, and the emperor is far, far away.

Even with magic, the central continental guilds needed the means to ‘enforce’ its rule, needed ways to ensure loyalty of its’ far flung representatives. Some guilds relied solely on the loyalty of it’s invasion leaders, which, as they soon discovered, wasn’t very loyal.

Some realized they didn't need the central continent, and convinced the entire invasion army to rebel and set up independent nations.

It was such a clusterfuck across the world that my leaders began to discuss intervention methods

Even the kings and representatives, who meet regularly at Freshka for their own quarterly updates and discussions, were very worried about the chaos created by the guild wars.

We’ve tried our best to sequester the conflict to specified zones, and ensure innocents harmed were minimized.

There was death.

Death cannot be avoided in a conflict.

Lilies spoke, they too were aware of the guild’s chaos.

> I am afraid so. < I realized that Lillies was right.

I thought about the past decade, and realized I was beginning to drown in the big picture. I wish I could sigh. > I am torn between choice and life, and I am often reminded that I prefer choice over life. This is an extension of that decision, the consequences. Mortals must be given choice, and they must suffer from the consequences. <

> Then I must engineer them away from such mental frailties. It is a flaw to be corrected. <

I realize my earlier sentence was dangerous. If I began considering mortals as flawed, and such, began engineering them away from such flaws, how is it their choice?

But I have been doing it. My void treefolks, the void lizardpersons. The augmented children.

I have been engineering with their form, trying to fix their flaws. Their weakness. Give them skills, give them advantages.

I veer so close to the edge of darkness.

And I felt Lillies’ minds.

I mentally sighed. It is an incredibly hard challenge, to balance the two opposing poles.

To focus on the big picture, yet not lose sight of the small things in life.

To focus on the arc of civilization over the decades, and still live in the minutes and hours of the people.