Now that the students had learned the basics of bone magic and had some practical experience fighting monsters, it was time for them to finally be of use to me.

Time was running out faster and faster, the big confrontation would be soon. Maybe an hour or two, it was hard to determine as the Devourer’s speed was increasing gradually as he gained more skill and experience with flying.

I gathered together everyone available with the needed attributes for the Grand Ritual. This included the first class of the Mage Academy, they had advanced quickly due to a combination of factors namely Education and Mana Saturation rates.

Due to the higher educational status of the citizens of this world, a lot of information about spell casting could be overlooked and or skipped. Subjects such as mana absorption rates, human anatomy, geological and chemical compositions and reactions. What would be considered higher learning in my world was considered basic for them. It made the process a lot easier.

Mana provided by the Bone Dragons had saturated this world and had yet to be siphoned off by monsters, dungeons or Gods.

The student mages gathered along with my forces, namely the Liches and Skeletal Sorcerers outside the building.

I was of course accompanied by Cucumber who was eyeing up the attendants with suspicion, which was new and interesting. If only I had the time to properly observe and account for Cucumber’s accelerated psychological development. He was my first Dracolich summon after all, I’d never been desperate enough to create one before this world. The knowledge would have made a fitting tribute to Herbert the God of Knowledge, one of the handful of Gods I actually liked. Sadly I simply didn’t have the time to do so.

I sat on my throne, with Cucumber by my side, surrounded by a circle of senior Liches, around them was a larger circle of less senior liches, then skeletal liches, then skeletal sorcerers with the student Mages making up the outer circle.

Each group channelled a portion of their mana and mana regeneration towards the centre of the circle, myself.

I drew upon the power of my soul, along with the mana of Cucumber and the other mana batteries. Their combined power rivalled that of the average demi-god, bordering on the power of a Divine avatar.

Their mana poured into me and through me as I chanted beneath my breath, the spell for [Soul Drain], using all my prodigious intellect and spell casting experience to use my own soul as both the focusing agent, resonating agent and destination.

This would be dangerous, the risk to myself was great, the potential backlash could be catastrophic, with a risk of destroying me body and soul. What was the point of existence if you didn’t take risks from time to time?

I needed to do this in order to counter the Devourer and as a prelude for Ascension.

I focused all the power on my soul, diving deep into it, finding the familiar frequency of my soul wavelength and reaching out for everything that resonated with it.

The Liches around me responded with varying resonance to my soul wavelength as they had been shaped by my knowledge and power, linked together through the Lich Network. I added them as secondary conductors of this great symphony, so that they could help channel the backlash and direct the incoming flow of soul energy. Their minds and souls linked with mine in order so that we could move as many and as one alternatively with split second speed and unerring precision. This would take everything we had and possibly even more than that. It would push us to the edge and maybe even over that and into damnation or divinity. Only time would tell.

Then we reached out with our collective spell power, thoughts, soul power and practised our control on the Student Mages. Most of them were infected after all with the Soul Virus, which gave them certain advantages to normal aspiring mages, namely increased mana absorption rates, glimpses into greater spell casting knowledge, among other things.

This would be their second service to me, being our test subjects. We teased out the dangerous corrosive elements of the Soul Virus out of them, wiping the Soul Fragment within of any data other than basic mana absorption. They and the rest of the world would have to learn spell casting the old fashioned way, with hard work and experimentation.

Their first service of course was to provide a boost to my mana pool and regeneration. They would have other roles to play if we survived the conflict.

It took time we couldn't afford to lose to carefully manage the soul extraction without damaging their soul too much.

It was a mostly successful run with only some of them being soul damaged enough that they could no longer participate in the grand ritual of reclamation. (Disincarnation can be so inconvenient)

The previous ritual in China of withdrawing the Soul virus from the Chinese had been a dry run for today. It had reduced the risk of re-exposure due to the nature of the conflict but it didn’t remove the risk entirely as other people were infected throughout the world. This ritual would seek to redress this problem and deny the chance for another Devourer to rise with my knowledge of necromancy, or seek out my knowledge through my soul fragments.

My soul fragments were like DNA in a way, each fragment consisted of a blueprint of the total design of my Self but a single fragment didn’t have the power to express it before being consumed. So a single tiny fragment was like a jigsaw puzzle piece and a soul draining abomination could simply collect enough pieces to gain the same arcane knowledge I had.

That kind of knowledge and power could not be allowed to stay on the loose. The Soul virus had been a quick and dirty way of expanding my influence, making the stock of humanity more worthwhile as potential minions and for collecting soul energy. It’s usefulness had been outlived, the Soul virus needed to be exterminated.

The grand ritual commenced to the next stage, from local to national, Japan was far smaller than China, which allowed us to take greater care during the mass soul extraction/cleansing. We spread our net wide, capturing those with fragments of myself in them, removing the Soul Virus from them, along with varying amounts of residual soul energy. That went extremely well with only a few thousand deaths, their souls were of course collected for future incarnation.

Then things got more complicated as we moved past the national level and into international levels of soul magic.

We spread our net past the oncoming Devourer as cleansing his soul fragment would mean nothing as the knowledge had already been internalised. That and we didn’t really want to engage him at the moment, no need to poke the beast before the final confrontation.

The soul energy collected so far poured into me, refilling my depleted soul energy from the trip to this world with the overflow pumped into my chair.

Technically it wasn’t a chair, well not just a chair, it was a homunculi, a phylactery and a future Avatar, presuming things went well.

The knowledge gained from the Soul Virus, was channelled through the Liches and the Lich network, gaining a near complete knowledge of the Soul Virus’s former hosts.

Their books were added to the Soul Libraries, or the Soul Database as it had become. A mix between an archive and a visual media presentation/slide show/ digital file. It was a mix of metaphors and imagery, as it straddled the nature between medieval and modernity.

The soul books had become soul tablets, with each ‘book’ an inch wide and able to play the entirety of a soul’s memories back as a holographic video, complete with sensations such as taste, smell and touch. It was a tablet version of a VR technology that had barely been explored as of yet.

We tackled China first as it had been cleansed once before, it was relatively easy due to the low rates of reinfection caused by mass death and displacements of native populations.

Then things got messy as our Soul Net absorbed the Russians into us…

Their knowledge becoming part of our network, their soul energy becoming part of me and my potential avatar. Their resistance made things more difficult and more energy needed to be expended to overcome their resistance and overwhelm their defenses. Their deaths flooded into our system in greater numbers than Japan, with a couple of million losing their lives and bodies temporarily.

Their deaths were quick but their dying energy flooded into me as I orchestrated their collection in as great as detail possible. The fresher their souls, the more complete their eventual resurrection would be. As with most things, the fresher the better.

Then our soul net expanded globally, stretching out over the world with one noticeable gap and pulled on the Soul Virus.

Collecting soul energy, knowledge and a finicky semi sentient Soul Virus from out of billions at the same time was messy, painful and excruciatingly difficult.

The flood of power, pain and pride fed into me and was channelled by the Liches and flowed past us and into our batteries, filling them with unexpected power and knowledge.

Some embraced it fully; heart, body and soul (as applicable), with quite a lot of Skeletal Sorcerers advancing into Skeletal Liches and joining in the Grand Ritual, helping even more to channel our efforts more efficiently. They advanced from mere mana batteries to fellow conductors of the orchestra of souls.

A lot were simply overwhelmed by the flood of unexpected power and knowledge, some of them overloading and dying and being reabsorbed into the soul collective.

The loss of mana regeneration from dead Student mages made for increased difficulty in managing the truly unbelievable spell casting.

This was God level casting.

Still we scraped past the peak difficulty section of the Grand Ritual as the effort needed to effectively cleanse the souls reduced as the volume of souls reduced and our collective skill levels increased. As such it finally got easier to cleanse the souls in greater volumes with greater speeds and less incidental disincarnations.

We barely managed to complete our task on time, with only a few minutes to spare until the Devourer was in range. I didn’t have the time to enjoy the satisfaction of a job well done or the notifications that popped up within my thoughts from the God of Order.

I only had a little time to catalogue the results of the Grand Ritual before he arrived and attempted to eat me.

Primary purpose successful. The Soul Virus had been essentially eradicated except for one notable vector, the Devourer and it was unlikely that anyone would survive an infection from him. Potential for my arcane knowledge to be absorbed absent of my interaction had been reduced to a negligible threat.

Secondary effects…

Surviving student Mages had progressed significantly as casters, gaining increased experience and expertise. They could now be considered master Mages by human standards as they had experienced life times of spell casting experience from the multiple fragments of my soul contained within the Soul virus and absorbed by our collective casting.

The number of Liches at my disposal had increased dramatically, as had their overall strength, due to the influx of soul energy. They were a far greater force now that they had been fuelled by the soul power of billions of souls (to varying degrees). Many of them had ranked up and were capable of greater spell casting and control than before.

Cucumber’s max mana pool had exploded even further as his mana production was pushed to the very limits during the Grand Ritual.

My chair had become mobile, becoming a Second Self, admittedly weaker than me, soul wise as he had insufficient tempering. I would have loved to get my hand on a time mage to solve that issue but gaining one of those remains elusive. The spatial mage had been captured and bled and his affinity was being processed by the Lich network for the purposes of mass production and transportation. If things went smoothly, they’d be ready for that within a day.

If only there was more time. Stupid incredibly rare Time Mages. Time was the ultimate power that I wanted to grasp. I still remember with a certain fondness and annoyance that time I was trapped in a time bubble for a hundred years by an enemy time mage. He was most upset when I survived his ultimate attack and he paused me just long enough so he could run away.

On a personal level, I had gained a significant boost to my mana pool and regeneration and significant class experience to four out of five of my classes along with a new title.

Title gained: God Caster. - You’ve managed to cast a spell over an entire world, you’ve demonstrated a skill of casting on par with the gods themselves. Effect: ten percent increased in casting efficiency.

Overall conclusion, it had been a total success, sure several million people had lost their bodies in the process of completing the grand ritual. Millions more had suffered small to significant soul damage but still… Those minor issues were insignificant considering what I had gained.

Reports from my minions (wraiths mostly) had it that The Devourer was nearby eating the souls and bodies of those in it’s path. I had told my minions not to engage, I didn’t want them being eaten by anyone but me. The complete deaths of the human civilians in the way were regrettable but unavoidable.

It was almost time for the Devourer and me to have a final battle for the fate of this world.