Tree of Aeons

Chapter 350. Progress in tiny steppes

Year 325

The flesh of the demon king rotted and melted. It had a head once. Or two.

Instead, Lightwood was firmly embedded in the stub of what used to be one of the creature's necks, its magic burning through the demon king's remaining body and slowly melting it from within. The king was dead, and Lausanne let out a sigh of relief. If each world faced demon kings at an average of once every 20 to 25 years, and there are now about a hundred or so peripheral worlds to oversee, that still worked out to be an average of five or so demon kings every year. 

They had faced so many demon kings that she stopped remembering their names. Their powers started to blur, and her instincts responded to abilities that sometimes they did not have. She did not even notice when some of their names repeated, until one of her Order assistants mentioned it to her.

Internally, Lausanne heard that the Order was even working on a classification method to differentiate and rate the various demon kings. It felt quite pointless, because the demons had been known to surprise. There was almost always a little twist to them, like the one that blew up into a swarm of tiny demonic parasites she fought just a few months ago. 

"You should look a little more happy for someone who just killed so many demon kings." Ebon teased and sat on the rock next to her. "Want anything to celebrate for tonight?"

"Says the one who should be picking something and helping me a little more." Lausanne naturally ignored the second part of the question. She was always a little too serious about work.

"I gained a level. Did you?" Ebon, on the other hand, wasn't a very serious knight. Not any more. A weight off the shoulders, Ebon was a very relaxed knight. 

Lausanne brought up her system notification, and nodded. "Well, I believe I did."

"168?" 

"Yes." 

Lausanne got her Level 160 subdomain a few months ago after a battle. 

[New Domain skill unlocked : Starbound Pair. Lightwood is now capable of star mana overload to exceed its regular strength for short periods of time. After overexertion, Lightwood would need to recover. You also unlocked [Starfusion Form], a state where your combat abilities are amplified as long as you are exposed and in the presence of a favorable star.] 

Lausanne twirled, Lightwood levitated itself out of the demon king's corpse and flew back into her hands. 

"Are you waiting for your level 160 to see what happens?" The elf asked the undecided knight. The undecided knight wasn't that far behind at level 157.

It was harder to level. Sometimes, demon kings only gave one level. Sometimes, none at all. 

"Honestly, yes. At this point I might as well stick to it. The [unchosen champion] and the champion that did not choose. It is quite a match." 

"That makes us such a terrible pair." Lausanne cursed, but she was partly smiling. This peripheral world, thankfully, still managed to have large medieval cities where there are still nice restaurants and taverns. They would have a good meal there someday. Some worlds had fascinating delicacies, and in this world, rats were surprisingly fatty and meaty, and that made them a popular staple food.

It still disgusted some of the humans that refused to eat rats, but most of the Order were able to wrap their heads around how each world evolved to have different types of staple crops and animals. 

"You should be thankful that I am here to accompany you." Ebon teased. "We can have stuffed rats tonight, not sure if our other companions would want to join us.."

Lausanne rolled her eyes, she actually tried it already and found it quite good. But the imagery it often evoked in foreign visitors was not so pleasant. "They are not so bad! There's plenty of fellow warriors that can keep me company." 

Ebon looked around, there were indeed older Order operatives, but many more of the warriors that took the field were younger and less experienced. Their roles are minimal, but it spoke to how stretched the Order was. 

But every year, it got better.

Every year, more new people joined the force, most of them from the periphery. Those existing ones gained experience and joined the Order moving about.

***

Order recruitment was a massive, multi-world operation, and many of the recruits were thus transported to Treehome, Branchhold, or Threeworlds, where there were multiple sufficiently sized operation centers to properly train the new people. 

There were also smaller centers spread across the various planets, many of them on the new peripheral worlds.

These centers were small, manned by no more than fifty experienced Order individuals from the three core worlds, while the rest of the infrastructure was manned by the local recruits.  ȑâƝΟβЕ𐌔

The largest of these 'new' Order institutions were located on Twinspace and Darkgard. 

***

Alka commuted frequently and checked into his home on Darkgard. He lived here for a few months every year, where he had the Order build some of the largest workshops known to the dwarvenkind. 

Darkgard's change over the past few years and decades had been surprising, especially since the three Darkgardian worlds reunited. The strength of the magical ley lines that were once weak were now much stronger, and the local Order dwarves worked extensively to study their nature and use them for various functions.

Ley lines were the closest thing to 'free' mana in the many myriad worlds and were how the Will of the World extended their reach. 

Using a series of magical tools made of crystals, these crystals stored the raw magical energy supplied by the leylines and then converted them into usable forms of magical energy. This was later used by dwarves to power heavy equipment, powerful forges, and tools. 

Though the dwarven forges could not make things like the [Hero Forge] or even the spiritual equipment of the domain tier, size had a unique quality of its own. 

The dwarves loved the challenge and the thrill of constructing these large war machines, and though Treehome continued to be the master of individual equipment with their overall industrial ecosystem and huge range of highly skilled and high leveled individuals, Darkgard had now transformed into the large-sized center of manufacturing. 

Here, they built massive plates and armors that would go and outfit the two great beetle carriers, Gantreethor and Dionaea. 

Here, they built the massive cannons and defensive tools that protected Hytreerion on the peripheral worlds. 

And here, Alka had the Order's mages and researchers work on research for large objects.

Darkgard was extremely sparse, even if it was now home to more than ten million dwarves, mostly from immigration and high natural growth. Darkgard's Stand, the first city constructed here more than 40 years ago, was almost to half of that number.

So, most of Darkgard was open space for experimenting on large weapons.

Powerful tools and more exotic weaponry. Here, they tried to push the limits of magical bombs even further, with exotic materials brought from the peripheral worlds.

"The things you do to make your bombs more powerful." Ezar said as they watched one of the bombs go off. It was all the way at the edges of their vision, but they could still feel the explosion. 

Many parts of Darkgard were bomb testing sites, where many mages tweaked their tools. These new tools and weapons, helped Ezar, Kafa, and Alka, a rather odd combination of domain holders take on powerful demon kings. 

They were still no match for Lausanne, and their battles often involved heavy preparation and spawncamping.

But a victory is a victory, and their levels spoke for themselves. 

Alka was the highest level of the three now, at Level 180. His level 180 ability, [Attack Reabsorption], allowed him to absorb any magical or energy attack, nullifying it. 

At the same time, the stored attack could be 'encased' into a crystal bomb that could be then reused against others. He could effectively store up to twenty attacks at any time, and any excess stored would detonate around Alka, but could also damage him. In theory, if he could store any attack into a crystal fast enough, he could functionally be immune to magical attacks. 

Unfortunately, it didn't absorb physical strikes, but it meant demon kings that relied on magical type attacks such as magical breath, and even the self-destruction abilities could be nullified by the [Attack Reabsorption]. 

So, Alka, the ever so slightly suicidal one that already died once, was on the hunt for more demon kings with the self-detonating ability. 

As it so happened that it was fairly common amongst demon kings, and he eventually found one on the third demon king. Though statistically, the Order generally realized it was one in five demon kings who had the self-destruction ability.

Kafa and Ezar were still lagging behind, only in their high level 150s, and not yet reaching their Level 160. They would have to do better. 

***

Across the many worlds, the Order scrambled to prepare for the coming war. 

***

An egg.

A small, stone egg with little carvings. It stood, perfectly ordinary in his hands. Unlike the bomb, this thing leaked no energy. It leaked no divine power. 

It looked unassuming. 

[ Aivan Realm Egg - The Faith and Power of a Thousand Worlds condensed to create a New Will of the World. Will Spawn a New Sun and Two Orbiting Worlds. Locked to Aeon and Lumoof] 

But just holding it, we knew it was a powerful item. Incredibly so. So much of that power was locked within, perfectly stitched such that none of it escaped from the egg. 

"Can you make more?" Lumoof immediately asked.

"I am afraid plucking one of the Will of the Worlds from the [System]'s creation process and hiding it within this thing is not at all something so easily repeatable. I can make another, but it will be in about a hundred years. Any more within a shorter period, the [System] will temporarily bar my access."

"Temporarily." Lumoof countered. "That doesn't sound like much of a problem."

"It would also prevent me from creating normal planets and worlds to my existing ones, and that is a price too steep for me to pay. Time is the real currency you deal with."

Lumoof waited, and sighed. "We've seen what is on the other side."

Aiva paused. 

"They've developed star-mana resistant demons."

The god seemed pensive, as if recalling ancient history. "I had hoped it would not come to that point. Our core worlds will survive that, we have many ways of fighting beyond star mana on the core worlds, but it is the periphery that will be undefendable. It will take centuries for us gods to develop a countermeasure." 

"Why centuries? Surely you can work faster than that! Just spend faith points."

"Altering the [heroes] to have something other than star mana is a fundamental change of what they are and will take the combined intent of all the gods. It is not so easy."

Ah. So it was a systematic change, but that didn't mean anything. 

"Skip the hero system. Use your faith points, make powerful warriors, and send them to the periphery directly."

"And how do you propose I send this large army there?"

"I can transport your defenses. Help me shore up the peripheral worlds." Lumoof countered. "Develop a force able to counter these star-mana resistant demons, and if they don't have star mana, my void mages can help deploy and station them close to where they are needed most."

My proposal made a lot of sense, and Aiva ate a grape. And two. And three. They were golden grapes, and they looked tasty. 

He offered Lumoof some. Lumoof took a bite and it was incredible. It was as if liquid bliss exploded in my avatar's mouth.

[ Additional Crop Type acquired : Golden Aivan Grapes ]

"That was an experience." Lumoof admitted. 

"Your proposal is a fair one. Capture some of these true demons. Send them over and I'll see what I can do to defeat them. If we presume that the demons know that they will be able to claim more of the periphery, that only makes me certain that their true goal is to shift the [system]'s preference even further."

I thought that bit was obvious, but I wondered whether there may be someone who knew the truth on the other side of the demon's barrier.

***

Elsewhere, my experiments on the [soul forge] and Jorkun went surprisingly well. 

I spent more time trying to understand what Eras had wanted to achieve with his soul structure, and whatever Eras did was fairly standard artificial soul creation, though Hoyia's idea of duplicating Jorkun's existence was surprisingly tricky. 

Though I was fairly certain it isn't impossible, this required fashioning existing soul fragments into a one to one replica of Jorkun's soul and transferring memories, a deep component of anyone's inner soul, was actually far harder than I thought. 

Memories were not bricks in the soul spring. They were contained within the inner soul as some form of entangled sequences of spiritual string bound to the soul core. To an outsider, each string on its own was meaningless, and yet together as a whole, they formed the basis of one's existence. 

It was a new thing for me, and we went through multiple failed attempts at recreating the memories of Jorkun. 

Shape. Pattern. Texture. Arrangement. It required an even higher level of precision than repairing damaged souls and bodies that lost their limbs.

Though I enjoyed the process of learning about this, and at the same time, I also examined other specimens' souls just to get a holistic understanding of the inner soul. 

It was strange that I had never considered duplicating or cloning memories, and to some extent, I realized I likely inherently did not like the idea. 

I may have gone way past my initial racial types, but during my earlier days, a [soul tree]'s primary purpose was to facilitate the movement of souls back into the reincarnation pool. 

Retaining memories and giving these dead folks an additional 'artificial' extension to their lives by duplicating memories felt like a subtle perversion of these goals. Somewhere, a part of me has a slight sense that I've veered away from what was true. 

Maybe it was that remnant of my origin [soul tree], now suppressed by my domain. Or maybe somewhere throughout my vast numbers of trees, billions of normal trees spread across all my clone-connected worlds, these trees innately believed in the cycle of life and death and to clone something and let them retain their memories was unnatural. 

It was strange. 

And contradictory. 

My powers as the Tree of Life clearly granted me powers to meddle with life. 

As they say, life finds a way, surely this form of cloning was also life finding its own way to continue on. 

The thoughts were bothersome, and I shut them off. 

"I'll need more time." I told Jorkun, but I had seen far more than I needed. Deep in my soul forge, I began to practice stitching and weaving soul fragments into those thin strings that formed the jumbled mess that is one's memory. 

It felt like reconstructing a brain, neuron by neuron. Tying strings in knots and patterns into a specific shape. With the exact thickness and length. Distances. I experimented and realized they all influenced the outcomes. A slight difference in length or thickness seemed to imply the strength of connections between two things, but they did not operate on their own. 

So, as my domain holders ventured outwards, I turned my efforts inward at the inner workings of an artificial mind.

***