Year 209

Lumoof returned to the Sandworld alone. The place had not changed, but this time, we were not here for the sand or to study the solar radiation.

We wanted to mess with the mechanisms used to send the demon king through the worlds, and see whether we could essentially shoot down an intercontinental ballistic missile while it’s ascending from its silo. Or mess with the delivery vehicle such that the ICBM could not even hit its intended target.

My plan was simple. We’ve seen the mechanisms used to create the portal, and the goal was to simply smash them before the demon king could use it. After all, the demon king itself may not be able to stop me, since it has to teleport to another world. If it did interrupt and attacked me, that was a success.

If it lured the demon in the core out of the core, that was also a success.

If that failed, I’d attempt to mess with the mana balance of the portal, and see whether I could stop the demon king from teleporting.

Any delay was a success, even if they still eventually made the trip.

“I don’t think it’s ready yet.” Lumoof said, as we stood above where the hole once was. I could sense the massive pit to the core beneath us. There was no structure here, no tower of void energy. Not yet.

Just the rift gates built into the walls of the pit. We could destroy it, of course. So we did, but I reckon the demons would be able to regenerate these gates fairly easily. These rift gates, built into the walls of the pits, looked more ‘flimsy’ than the normal gates.

During the day, the pit was covered, and we took advantage of the daytime to enter avatar mode, and my roots pierced through the ground beneath us. It was a demon champion that functioned as a mobile cover, and it wasn’t hard to kill it once I found where it’s core was.

The path between the two worlds was solid, and now, from this side, I sensed tremendous amounts of that ‘core-void’ blend had been injected into it.

But I couldn’t interact with the path. Only Stella could, which made me wonder. I know it’s possible for a normal person to gain void mana, and I myself already have small quantities of star mana. But could we train a regular person to possess star mana, or to possess any other kinds of mana?

Anyway, I digressed. I focused back on the pit and its immediate surroundings. How did the demon king ‘create’ those structures, and could we destroy it, copy it or change it?

There was currently nothing around us. Except for the structure at the edges of the pit, which we have destroyed. Yet, I had a feeling it wouldn’t be so easy.

The next likely candidate was the demon within the world. Maybe it coordinated the transportation and the opening of the ‘rift’. It must have had a mechanism to ‘create’ the structures needed to open the gates to the worlds beyond.

If so, I’d try to intercept it.

“We have two years left.” Lumoof repeated. “It’s not here yet.”

“But the rifts will open soon. Let’s head further underground and try to reach those riftgates, and observe from this end.”

Lumoof gulped. “Some days, I think this avatar ability is cursed.”

***

Back home, war preparations continued, and I used the expanded range of my roots to continue my expansions into the sea, and also underground.

There was nothing much to find in the sea, not with my now increased range. Even underground, it was more of the same thing.

Still, with the expanded range, I could reach even further out of the sea, and even deeper, and for once, began to connect to a string of smaller islands further out to sea from the Central Continent mainland.

Places I could never reach before, and with it, more mana. I realised the folly of my earlier attempt at the womb of the demon king. I was still underpowered, and if I sought to unmake the demons with mana, I would need a lot more than then mana of just one continent.

I needed the mana of at least an entire world. Maybe two or three.

So, I shifted my attention to the parasiteworld, now in a state of flux. Do I still need this world?

I needed a world where mana was plentiful. A world that could fuel the war that is to come, and this wasn’t it.

Actually, as I reviewed all my clones, I concluded both the moon and the Parasiteworld should be on the chopping block. Cometworld too, but since it had the value of travelling through the void-space, I decided it was worth keeping despite the mana shortfall.

My moon seed was now a waste, even if it was the first ‘experiment’ we did. It had no mana production, and Stella’s attempt to mess with the void paths into our world did not work. Not even when she tried to block the astral paths on the moon.

It was the equivalent of trying to stop an out of control truck with a piece of paper. A really thick black piece of paper. Naturally, it didn’t work, so I decided I would recall my moon-clone. It was the ‘easiest’ to recall, since it was so close to me that Stella could open a portal to the moon. Thus, the opportunity cost to redeploy was the lowest, if some day I were to find some other use case for a moon base.

I felt my close tree shrivel, shrink, and then... vanish.

[Clone Seed recalled. 10 years of cooldown before it can be redeployed.]

Ah fuck.

At least I know it takes 10 years. A blink of an eye, actually.

My immediate thought was to deploy it on Threeworlds. If I could use it to unlock the new soul forge color, I would be willing to make enemies for it.

***

With the enhanced mana from the Mountainworld, we renewed our offensive against the demons on the demonic parasiteworld. The parasiteworld is also linked or ‘near’ it’s own set of worlds, though I couldn’t see them clearly.

The sky was littered with the effects of the collapsed void path that acted like ‘clouds’.

With more mana at my disposal, I could maintain and support more trees and more beetles, and so, we expanded the controlled areas to cover slightly more places.

Over the years, I realised that it was better to ‘claim’ territory that led to a demon structure I wanted, or a place I wanted my Treechikomas to investigate, than to just claim the land for the sake of it.

Like a blob, we gave up our land where we found nothing, and used the ‘saved’ mana to push elsewhere. We captured a few demonic spawning pools, and these ones just generated more of these parasites.

It improved my understanding of these parasites, but not much else.

At the same time, as my tree looked up to the cloudy astral skies, I made a note to send Lumoof into the demon’s pit once the skies began to clear. Maybe there was something we could learn about how the demon finds new worlds to target.

That said, I think I may have to wait decades for it to target another world.

Still, I could discover another world this way, by hitchhiking on the demon’s targeting system. I could frontrun its invasion by sending Lumoof to the other side.

A future plan.

***

The demons did not take any precautionary measures even after our invasion into the core. That was, of course, strange. If they were intelligent, they should’ve done something.

But they didn’t. Or maybe, this wasn’t something they normally reacted to, so they didn’t know how to react.

In any case, it took about the same time to reach the horizontal tunnels again, and we found the lesser demons massing.

There were more spawning pools, and as we explored the tunnels, we realised that these tunnels were everywhere. In a world so large, there was no way I could find all the tunnels without a thorough magical scan of the world.

The demons resembled the creatures we fought on the surface. Hardy, physical, and tremendous magical resistance, and had a soft underbelly, and some know weakpoints.

My domainholders had already made sketches and gave briefings on how to fight these monsters. Training for the Valthorns, and mock-demons made from stone elementals.

I also used my [dream academy] to simulate battle against these demons. Because of the physical nature of these demons, it took quite a bit of effort for my Valthorns to learn ‘mana-less’ combat methods. We also distributed skill seeds to help my Valthorns augment their arsenal of skills, so that they could have some mana-less skills.

Honestly, the skill-spell issue is still confusing to me. They both feel like they should be one and the same, and yet they are not. It remains one of the puzzles of the system that I didn’t really understand.

***

Now that there were only two years left, the energies of the rift began to gather, and it was now possible to get a general sense of where the rifts would appear.

It was going to be in the Eastern Continent, again. Naturally, the Aivan Triumvirs were not pleased to learn they would once again face a demon king on their land. It felt like they just had one a few decades ago.

The energies from the rift were still unstable, and because of that, I couldn’t properly pin down the location of the demon king.

Not yet, anyway. Maybe next year I would get a location, and then we could start planning an ambush. I

For now, it was time for the smaller rifts to appear, for the lesser demons and champions to grace our world.

The first rifts opened almost at the end of the year, and the lizards walked out. We didn’t intervene immediately, my deployed forces mostly just monitored their movements. We knew from the parasiteworld that there were some differences in the demon’s abilities and behaviors between the demon world and our world, but we were not sure how significant this gap was, and whether that was a common thing across all types of demons.

We watched as the Aivan forces tried to fight these physical demons to relatively decent success, and eventually concluded that they were actually weaker here.

Their bodies were so used to the dry, manaless environment that their hard, dried outer shells, that when they came to our world, their bodies hungrily soaked up the ambient mana, and it changed their tough bodies.

We did notice that when sufficient of these demons were around, the ambient mana decreased significantly, and made spelling more laborious.

As a whole though, the regular mobs were weaker, but the demon king won’t be subject to the same restrictions. It’s likely, from extrapolating our initial findings, that the demon king would have some kind of anti-magic ability.

“Maybe we’ll get some global anti-magic?” Edna speculated. “We haven’t seen global-effect demon kings for some time.”

“You sound like you’re looking forward to it.” Roon said. “Those were unpleasant times, from what I heard from the survivors.”

“No. I mean, that’s just what it is. Trends repeat themselves, and the demons eventually rehash the same ability types. A global magic-interruption is likely.”

But how do we circumvent a global anti-magic ability anyway? We would once again see the collapse of the global [message] system, but if it’s anti-magic it could do more than that. I recalled that they could even interrupt my communication with beetles.

The previous heroes made ‘transmission towers’, something I was only able to replicate to a much lesser degree. Again, we would need to workaround the magic with skill and system.

I made a note to train a ‘physical-only’ Valthorn, and relayed the message to elites.

“This is a bit too late, isn’t it?” I heard one of the Valthorns naturally grumble about my request. “If the coming demon king is a physical-type, how are we going to get anyone ready?”

I know, of course. But if the demon kings eventually repeat itself, a physical-type domain holder would eventually have value. Maybe 50 years, maybe 200 years, but eventually, we will encounter this type of demon king again.

I acknowledge my failure to consider this anti-magic, physical-only type of demon king, so, the right thing to do was to prepare for it.

Essentially, as we reevaluated why we ‘failed’ to prepare for this type of demon king, we began to realise that we were ‘guessing’ what kind of demon king was coming, but that’s actually unacceptable. For us, as an institution, I had to predict at least 50 to 100 years ahead in order to prepare someone for that eventual outcome. 50 years was the estimated amount of time it took to ‘train’ a domain holder.

I wasn’t thinking far enough. We needed to brainstorm, and start to prepare for the demon kings after this one. Not just the coming one.

Look at where we failed, and what ‘kinds’ of powers we could have. I needed to be Batman, and prepare for every eventuality.

In fact, this was where the heroes’ pop culture and media knowledge became useful. Ken and the rest of the heroes were more than happy to brainstorm, during the lulls and rest periods, the kinds of creatures that may exist on other worlds.

The ideas were wild. Vampires, werewolves, slimes, spiders, eldritch horrors, human-like creatures, machines, supervillains, goblins and ogres, golems, oversized snakes. They essentially recited all kinds of monsters they could remember, and tried to imagine ‘demon-king’ versions of those creatures.

It was a fun exercise, and I found it strangely calming. It was great to be reminded of stories from our world, and it also reawakened my memories of the games I played, the books I used to read and the stories I’ve heard.

My domain holders, except Lumoof was still in the sandworld spying on the demons, were naturally horrified by the kind of creatures they imagined.

There were also some really good ones that made me think, such as the possibilities for one of the captured heroes to be somehow turned into a demon king, perhaps through the demonic parasites, or something that’s non-physical like a ghost, or a water-based demon king. Or, a weapon-demon king. Ken, as a joke, suggested a beaver-demon king.

I personally suspect a water-based demon king was the least likely of them all.

That said, even though they were speculations, it made sense to make some preparations, and start training individuals to be able to ‘counter’ or ‘mitigate’ some of the threats. I wouldn’t see the payoff now, but fifty years down the road, who knows what could make a difference?

In this entire world, I’m probably one of the best placed to make this kind of moonshot investment. So I must.

***

We didn’t face much difficulty with the demonic mobs, so the heroes could breathe easy. Prabu suggested that Adrian and Kelly take a visit to our world. A point I agreed with, since they would fight here, so I had my agents in the Mountainworld make the necessary arrangements.

The nobles were not very pleased, but what could they do?

Adrian and Kelly made the trip to my clone, and I sent them here, right to Freshka.

The transportation went well, and there were no system prompts.

Personally, I was pleasantly surprised that there were no ‘punishments’ or ‘system-problems’ from sending gods’ summoned to another world. My personal gut feeling was that they didn’t think it was sufficiently likely, so they didn’t create any security measures.

Maybe they might, for a future batch, if they realised that heroes were fighting in places they were not ‘supposed’ to. Oh well.

The two heroes were most fascinated by the assortment of snacks, and the relative modernity of Freshka.

Their first stop?

The hero logs. I suppose it’s like a guestbook that the heroes have to sign every time they come here.