326. Lull 2

    326

    Year 297

    On Triotuga, the Order expanded their influence in the human kingdoms, while they prepared to wage war against the faeries. The faeries, unfortunately, were hostile and did not regard the demons as a problem.

    They saw us, the Order, as an affront to their entire way of life. They were used to faeries at the top of their social order and political order, and so they did not consider any other option than to declare us enemies. Enemies that they killed on sight.

    That was a shame.

    I didn’t like destroying entire races, but if many of them were hostile, I would have to enforce some form of quarantine on them.

    Alternatively, I could step away from Triotuga. I didn’t really need to deal with them. They have no ability to hurt me directly, only my people on their planet.

    ***

    Year 298

    Demon Kings. At this point I had lost count how many battles I participated in. It didn’t quite matter, anymore. I wasn’t really gaining levels from them. Even if Lumoof stood against a demon king with no assistance, we were at the point where we just were not gaining levels.

    I wondered, briefly, whether my resurrection ability significantly affected how they gained experience. After all, if you could restart endlessly, would that actually reflect the overall real difficulty of the task?

    Patreeck and my artificial minds quickly put the data points together, and from a high level estimate, there seemed to be some difference. A slight, not particularly large difference in the rate of experience gained before and after the resurrection domain ability.

    ***

    Magical research was a continuous, never ending affair.

    Every day there were hundreds of Order mages and crafters who were dedicated to the art of creating stronger, more powerful weapons and tools for our expansion. Often, as a side effect of this pursuit of more powerful tools and equipment, the research led to accidental discoveries that would help improve the quality of life of the average citizen.

    Supplements were one of these improvements. The military used supplements to improve physical strength, memory, and all the other stuff. In the very early days of New Freeka, we had started with special mixtures of juices that helped improve survivability in young infants and saplings.

    It was a practice that caught on, and now there were various guilds and industries trying to sell some kind of magical serum that could improve their physical strength and abilities beyond what their normal levels.

    Such marketing propaganda often stepped too far, and the Order had to step in to quell malicious, outright exploitative marketing. Despite this, the use of such magical elixirs proliferated. Even in the old days, alchemists and potion makers made brews that had temporary mental effects, though they were often reserved for the elite who had a test or something extra.

    There was a point within the Freshlands Treetiary College where the Chancellor of the College had to regulate the use of such stimulants.

    It was strangely, a city thing. Demand for such additional boosts to their abilities was often a result of a dense, hyper-competitive environment. The fact that the Order’s own elites used these types of supplements extensively under the watch and supervision of an army of druids, healers and mages, and also the presence of my familiars was often forgotten.

    Most of these elixirs were often diluted versions of more powerful, often, rare materials created by highly skilled alchemists. Adventurers, who still regularly ventured into various dungeons all over Treehome, were often engaged by the various alchemical guilds to procure more raw materials for their lucrative supplements and stimulant trade.

    All in search of that extra bit of advantage.

    Patreeck observed that there was a particular trend of consuming such things especially among individuals around level 80 and those who had not received a level-breaking seed, both within the Order and also in external individuals. Those close to that barrier needed something beyond their levels.

    The dungeons, many of them created through magical leylines of Treehome’s core, continued to ‘generate’ treasure.

    The mages that studied the dungeons of Treehome, Mountainworl, and Threeworlds, connected our discovery of Treehome’s sister planet, Shrubhome, and concluded that dungeons functioned as a lesser version of the world’s creation process.

    The dungeons went through an additional step, but I believe the reason why we could not look into the nature of a dungeon was due to the presence of these void shenanigans. Even now, in dungeons that I created with my ability, I could not observe them directly, but instead only influence their content through the parameters defined by my ability.

    Extending that idea, Shrubhome was a creation that existed within the void, and through some system shenanigans, it was created into the world.

    Dungeons, who were connected to the planet’s core via the magical ley lines, seemed to tap into the same effect to ‘generate’ monsters, treasures, and plants. These things that did not exist before were spawned.

    It made me wonder whether we could trust the histories of anything that were found in dungeons, due to their ‘generated’ nature.

    Are we all living in some kind of gigantic universe sized dungeons, and it was just more dungeons whichever direction we went? We knew from the void layers that worlds existed in these great primordial soup as a work in progress, and there were keys.

    Thus, were the layer-barriers we faced the way to exit to the higher ‘layer’ of the dungeon?

    Anyway, I digressed.

    These dungeons generated multiple oddities, and what was produced within them continued to evolve over time, even if the change was miniscule at first. Over the decades, my minds noticed that the dungeon began to generate objects that were created about three to five decades ago. Copies of old objects could be found, replicas discovered by the adventurers.

    Replicas, with real powers and abilities. Yet, I knew they were not the real creation, because my artificial minds had seen the real things destroyed. It suggested that the system retained memory of all things, both past and present, and possibly, even the future.

    The multiverse had repetitions in methods, but at different scales.

    Many other dwarven worlds, each with their own special metals and steels. There were dead dwarves deep underground, and with humans. A hollowed out world, a world that looked more like a carcass with broken innards. A world of steel.

    One. Then two. Then three.

    Then the demons came, and the cores of the worlds were ‘ordered’ to break itself apart. Three worlds cracked, forced apart by the demons.

    Then, I saw a location and then another.

    Two places in my star map, each another part of itself.

    ***

    Darkgard was part of a world with three planets, but somehow it had cracked apart. The location glowed within my [astral map], as if updated by the system itself.

    In short, Darkgard wasn’t just Darkgard, but Darkgard I, Darkgard II and Darkgard III. There are two other planets that belonged to Darkgard.

    Alka frowned as he realized that there seems to be a series of dwarven-centric worlds. “So there seems to be an early dwarven god.”

    “That supposes that there are early elven gods as well.”

    Hawa’s response was noncommittal when we probed. It seemed to be a story that could not be verified. “These races came before I came to be. Humans, Dwarves, Elves, and the many other human-derived races that are occasionally called the Dreamed Races. They are the dreams of the great primordial void. The First Gods came to be, according to the legends, before the world faith system or the demons, and are more like forces of nature melded together by the raw power. They emerged as champions of the first races, some as dreams of the first worlds, and many of them, like animals eager for territory, fought each other to death. Perhaps Gaya would know the tale, Gaya was the oldest of us, but even he came after the First Gods. But there are patches where these races are dominant. Elves and their long lived ilk. Dwarves and their dark, industrious worlds. But beware of the dwarves, it is said that dwarves are those closest to the demons and are perhaps, their distant ancestors.”

    “We met the boarfolks.” Hawa’s memory was strangely disjointed, as if separated by its nature.

    “Creatures that can connect to the demons came to be, made from the dried, ashened lands. There is an old tale from when I was a young god, that the dwarves are the children of the land, molded from primordial dirt and metal. Unlike the elves who are carved out of the first trees, or men, who are cut out from the first primordial beasts.”

    “Is that a fact?

    “I do not know. The nature of the void is that there are many truths, and many of these truths are true in some places and false in some other places, all at the same time. Perhaps one old god made it one way, and another god made them another way. Their origins do not matter, but they exist out there, and their worlds have strange metals, many of these relics of the older worlds.”

    “Why do they not exist everywhere?” I countered. The nature of the void sea didn’t prevent these metals from occurring naturally.

    “I believe they do. It is just so rare that we don’t find them. Their intense presence in these old worlds was the act of the old gods. They desired special metals for their world, just as how you made special woods for your people.”

    I was surprised by that last statement, but then, I realized that many of my Valthorns carried some of my unique equipment, made and derived from my flesh and wood. Hawa must’ve seen them as we passed through his territory.

    The demons clearly made use of these unique metals. The Sun-Rings were made with a strange metal, which we theorized was some kind of Sunsteel alloy. So, there was some reasonable evidence to support the idea that demons might be some kind of dwarven god’s creation.

    Could it be that the god in the demon’s prison was really Eras?

    Or was the demon just something that came to control Eras, thus, by extension, it gained power over dwarven-linked abilities and claimed dwarven technologies and alloys as its own.

    “A captured dwarven god.” Alka wrote on a record. “That seems to be the most likely theory at the moment.”

    “It’s been long theorized, but I am uncertain. Eras was around long before the demons appeared, and even after the demons, Eras was still around.” Hawa countered. “Eras is not the first or only dwarven god, either, and during the old era, Eras himself would not want to be referred to as a dwarven god. Eras’ craft is open to all, not only dwarves. The creation of machines is one all can adopt.”

    It was a conversation that led nowhere.

    ***

    “Well, since we have these new locations, it makes it a lot easier to find them.” Stella said. “Let’s free these two worlds. I’m pretty sure we can hack the rift gates to use these new coordinates-”

    The rift gates hummed.

    “Ah. I need a little more power. It’s too far. No worries.”

    A few days of void mana charging later, we tried again.

    “Well, there we go. Having coordinates is sure handy as hell. There’s no way we can brute force the coordinates with how much void mana it costs to test each coordinate-” Stella said, and then the rift gate hummed. This time, the hum continued and finished with a loud connection sound, as if two cymbals were slammed together.

    The rift gate was active.

    The void mage was happy that the coordinate system finally led somewhere. “Well, what are we waiting for?”

    Lumoof, Alka, and a few others looked at the swirling riftgate.

    It led us to Darkgard II, a world located a long, long way from us. So far that it was pretty much on the other side of the demon’s territory.