Amazon Apocalypse 4: Chapter 21

I had Margaret release the prisoners with an invitation for a meeting. I didn’t think things could be resolved peacefully, but just being able to meet this Lich King before things went too far south would be a massive boon. I’d likely never turn him into a subordinate, but depending on how our fight went down, I could turn some of his people into mine, given time.

The three I’d captured back at the farmhouse were eager for freedom, though Wendy was content to stay where she was. Now that she was free of them, she’d realized she’d fallen in with a bad crowd. She was much happier reading her romance books and participating in the occasional monster-hunting expedition with Margaret. Her freedom would be limited for a while, but once we took care of the Lich King permanently, there’d no longer be any reason to keep her as a prisoner of war.

With the invitation sent, I bought Sakura’s precious curtains and hangers at the Obelisk, along with a few other odds and ends I knew she’d appreciate, and then returned home. I received a warm greeting, but then made a hasty escape before I could be roped into doing too much interior decoration work. My telekinetic powers from Master Artificer would have been far too useful decorating the house, and if Sakura and Bridget asked nicely enough, I’d probably spend the whole day holding up tiles and curtains until they were satisfied with certain color combinations.

So, for my own safety, I secluded myself in my barn and worked on the project I’d promised Cyra I’d get to. It was time to make magic from sunlight.

I’d mentally reviewed the design several times since my session with Dane Delverson, and by now had several ideas that I knew would work, along with a few improvements based on studying the cauldron I’d obtained on my recent adventures.

I cooked up the lightning to mana adaptor Dane had given me blueprints for. When that failed to produce anything, I thought my idea was finished at the first hurdle. But a close examination told me that there was mana coming out of the adapter, just a tiny amount of it. Some of the waste was being dissipated as heat, which I expected. The rest of the waste energy strangely went into the shadow realm. I wouldn’t have even noticed it if I hadn’t activated Shadowrealm Stride, but my adaptor glowed like a searchlight in that strange realm. Shadows gathered around it, and I worried I was summoning something evil.

But if Einstein had seen creepy, otherworldly shadows roaming around his mathematical formulas in an alternate dimension, would he have stopped? No! Fear of the unknown would not halt the advancement of science!

So, I strung up several more panels and dealt with the inefficiency by simply pouring more power through the converter. I knew I was successful when mana oozed out the end as thick as toothpaste. It slid around the bronze cauldron, looking for all the world like a turd spiraling down the drain. But instead of vanishing at the bottom, this mass of mana shrunk and condensed into a denser and denser sphere packed full of pure energy.

“Not bad. I bet I could crack a bunch of monsters cores open and do the same thing without the panel...” I muttered as I examined the contents of the cauldron. Also, had I really put one of these things in my mouth? Gross.

I was so focused on taking notes I didn’t even sense the monster coming until a disturbing gnawing in my gut told me to pull my nose out of my notebook and look behind me.

Soulrend Wraith (Level 29)

The wraith let out a horrific wail, which was even worse than what I remembered, thanks to my enhanced senses.

“Damn, you’re loud.”

I shot the wraith in the mouth with a Mana Bolt, which cut its scream off midway. The wraith seemed to realize how outmatched it was all of a sudden, but I wasn’t about to let it escape.

The last time one of these spawned in the farmhouse, Sakura, Bridget, and I threw Mana Bombs at it until it died. This time, a few spells from me were more than enough. Before it disappeared, a fingernail-sized shard of condensed energy fell to the ground. I scooped it up. Darkness aspect cores like this one didn’t last long before disappearing, but I had a few boxes that could store them, thanks to Reluna.

And, as though thinking of her summoned the woman herself, she strode around the corner and poked her nose into my barn, hands clutched over her ears.

“Are you summoning phantoms here or something?” Reluna asked.

“Sorry. That was a Soulrend Wraith. It suddenly came out of nowhere. I’ll have to look around for the source.” I turned around and picked my notebook back up.

“Out of nowhere? Truly? Those things usually only show up in places where there’s a lot of ambient mana returning to the void.”

I froze mid-scribble and turned around.

“Wait, returning to the void? Explain please.”

But before Reluna could explain anything. shadows swelled up right in the middle of my barn.

Darkshade Phantom (Level 26)

Thankfully, this one didn’t have a horrendous scream. Reluna put it down with a spell before I did, though when another shadow began stirring, I put a Mana Bolt into the gathering darkness before they could manifest into a monster.

“What in the abyss is that contraption of yours? Some sort of monster conjuring system?” Reluna asked.

“I think it might be, though it wasn’t my intention to create one. I planned on turning sunlight into mana to manufacture experience pearls, but I think some sort of secondary reaction is occurring. I’m only getting a fraction of the energy into the pearl I’m making.”

Reluna looked over my notes, frowning all the while.

“I think you’re right. Your contraption is dumping a substantial amount of energy into the higher planes, where it’s interacting with the lingering chaotic energies left on this world thanks to all the people who lived on your world before the integration. Giving mana to such chaotic energies is creating monsters.”

“Damn. There’s got to be some sort of insulator I can throw onto this thing to prevent the secondary reaction, right?” I eyed Reluna curiously.

She shook her head. “What, are you crazy? Do you know how many people would pay for a monster farm? This is way better than experience pearls!”

My eyes suddenly lit up. “Monster farm, huh?”

Pretty soon, Reluna and I had isolated the area where monsters could spawn. I laid down a few simple defensive enchantments that would prevent them from escaping. If we let too many monsters spawn, they’d eventually overwhelm the crude defenses, but that wasn’t going to happen so long as Reluna and I were sitting on the nearby hill sipping tea and casting the occasional offensive spell.

“To think, the first time I fought one of these things I nearly died.” I chuckled as I fired off several spells in quick succession.

“You really have something impressive here, Carter.” Reluna raised her glass in admiration. “If I was still D-Grade, I might have already gained a level.”

At those words, I turned and looked her over only to realize Reluna had reached C-Grade. She’d been at the very peak the last time I’d seen her, so I wasn’t surprised by her breakthrough.

“It seems congratulations are in order! I’m sorry I missed it.”

Reluna shook her head. “Don’t worry. It’s something I’ve been putting off for a while. I learned all I could at D-Grade.”

“You don’t want to become a graduate student at the Dragon Lodge? I bet you could earn a Jade token!” I offered, curious if Reluna had aimed for that. But she shook her head.

“I learned all the Dragon Lodge could teach me before leaving. You don’t necessarily have to be C-Grade to attend classes meant for C-Grades, after all. But things are complicated back at the Dragon Lodge, and I fear I’d be drawn into things I’d rather not be. I decided long ago to postpone my future studies until I at least reach mid C-Grade.”

“A ambitious task. Well, if it’s levels you want, there’ll be more than these guys can give us coming up soon. I’ll be meeting with the so-called Lich King soon. I’d like you by my side so we can figure out the scope of his chaos god affiliations.”

“That is what I’m here for.” Reluna nodded, then fired off another spell to kill a spawning phantom.

***

A day went by. Eventually, I summoned Sharky in the pen of monsters. I almost felt bad for the phantoms as they spawned, only to be devoured by an ever-hungry shark. Usually, he didn’t even give them the chance to take on a solid form. As soon as a bit of swirling mass gathered, he’d eat it. Soon I’d have no shortage of darkness-aspect cores. I replenished Doomseeker’s energy reserves and put the rest into storage.

The real prize, however, was the experience pearls. Sure, I probably could have used them myself, but I’d already been warned against rushing through levels using these things. I suspected they’d be of greater use to me in the hands of skilled craftsmen like Reginald. He and many other craftsmen were bottlenecked at F or E-Grade thanks to their racial levels lagging behind. While one of these might only be worth a single level to me, to them, the same experience pearl probably equated to dozens of levels.

But there was no reason to just give them all away. The craftsmen in town had plenty of money, after all. Besides, given all the renovations Sakura, Bridget, and Myrina were putting into the castle, I feared they might really blow a hole in my budget. These things would fix that once people understood their true value. I took the smallest of them and put them for auction on the market.

A few lucky gamblers got the first three extremely cheap. The next batch sold for ten times the price of the first one, and the third batch came ten times higher still.

I increased production as much as I could and soon had every solar panel I could get my hands on cranking back at the farmstead. That brought the level of the average monster up to the mid-sixties, which still wasn’t a challenge for Sharky, but was giving a slow but steady trickle of experience points to my women as they worked on the house nearby. I would take my cut later if I needed it.

Eventually, Reluna and I speculated that I’d deplete the ambient consciousness energy in the area. The little experiment had taught me a lot about where monsters truly came from, though. The phantoms, at least, were an interaction between mana and energies generated by consciousness interacting with a higher dimension.

I needed a term for this conciousness energy, since I was coming across it more and more often. Sadly, none of the textbooks I was going through covered the topic. Given my recent experiences at the Dragon Lodge, I was pretty sure that was intentional. But I had a hunch that there was one book containing the information I was interested in. And it was already in my possession.

I cracked open the Book of Sacred Knowledge and raided from the crumbled city beneath my very feet.

I cracked open the old book. It was probably older than all of human civilization, but the pages felt crisp and clean. They had an almost plastic-like feel, and I experimented with trying to fold or bend one of the pages. While I could flip through them with ease, trying to crease the corners was like a normal human trying to bend a titanium plate with their fingers. It just wouldn’t budge.

A lot of care went into making this book, that was certain. Going over my memories from that underground church, this seemed like a culture for whom science was a religion and religion a science. I supposed that was to be expected from a culture that discovered and refined magic in the way I knew it.

I started flipping through pages and looked at the dense lines of characters. The language this was written in was immensely complicated with hundreds of letters. Was this a pictographic language?

Even with my Forerunner title, the System refused to translate the words for me. And yet something drew me in nonetheless.

Staring at a character was like looking into the center of one of those hypnotic spirals. They naturally drew the eye, and if there weren’t so many, I would have already been drawn in.

I pulled out my phone and took a picture of the first page, then on a computer blew up a single letter at random until I could print it full size on a sheet of paper. The copy came out clean, and though the effect from the page was much diminished, I still felt that strange draw.

My class’ upgraded analysis ability, Study, told me that I was looking at a piece of paper. Nothing more.

And yet, with Dragoneyed Mage, I sensed mana slowly flowing into the piece of paper, and as it did, the hypnotic effect grew. It never reached the draw I felt from that page, but it was certainly there.

The paper itself was reinforced as well, though again, not to the extent of the pages in the book. It took nearly an hour of study before I realized what I was looking at. This character was a mana pathway, just like I made when enchanting something.

“Could it be...?” I frowned as I copied other characters and isolated them. Sure enough, all of them were mana pathways. I felt a grin splitting my face as I figured it out. This ancient culture was so steeped with magic that their very words were written in the language of magic. Every page was a spell of incredible complexity, and each letter could be considered a talisman by today’s standards. Which meant the total contents of this book were immensely complex artifact of power.

Unfortunately, I was no closer to understanding the book than when I started. Still, even if I never figured out its contents, it was a rich source of novel mana pathways. It would take a truly exceptional artificer just to figure out the grammar of this language. My experiments told me that arranging letters in the wrong order could have explosive side effects. Being a scribe from this ancient civilization was probably a very dangerous job.

I flipped through the book until I eventually got to diagrams. One of them pictured a human head with energy streaming from it. I’d nearly forgotten what I’d opened this book looking for until I saw it, but when I did, I copied the symbol down and printed it out just like the others.

Printed on paper, the character drew me in just like the others. No, it did more than just draw me in. The world on all sides of me faded.

For a moment, I was in a vast expanse of nothingness. Then I had a thought, and the thought rippled outward, forming something akin to kindling. The ripples of thought energized the nothingness until it was something more than nothing. All it would take is a spark.

I gave it that spark, and from thought, all creation formed.

The vision shattered after just a moment. I suspected there was more to the vision than what I’d seen, but my crude copy wasn’t able to hold the concepts in mind. By the time a few seconds passed, I wasn’t sure I’d really even had a vision at all, or if I’d just been daydreaming.

Only the feeling of drifting in that void remained. All I remembered was the thought of turning the endless void of nothing into the kindling of creation.

And suddenly I knew with certainty that was what the ancients called this consciousness energy. The Kindling.

I sensed I was on the verge of something important. Knowledge places like the Dragon Lodge considered forbidden.

Now, the only question was what I could do with it?

But before I could begin my experiments, Reluna knocked on the door.

“We got a message through your enchanted long-range speaking box.” Reluna slipped past the door, eyes lingering on the pieces of paper with strange characters hanging around me as I meditated in the middle of them all.

“The radio? From Margaret, I assume?”

“Yes. Apparently, the Lich King is willing to meet with you.”

I stood. The lost secrets of the universe would have to wait.

<Note>
The people who wanted long chapters will be happy this week. The next few chapters are on the longer side as we go into confronting the Lich King.