Year 230

In many ways, many Centaur habits or traditions are persistent even though they are of different worlds. It certainly made it easy for centaurs to adapt to their new life in Hoofhall, and they were quite to slowly form their own sub-clan within the Centaurs.

The news of the land transfer to ‘the Temple of Aeon’, however, spread quickly and reached the Centaurs. It spurred a surge of magic, as they attempted to find out who and what this particular Temple of Aeon did.

The human-faction didn’t outright declare war, but within weeks there were spies in the new area.

All they found was nothing but an empty barren land. A ruse, they called it.

My clone was hidden behind huge layers of illusions and spells that it’s almost impossible for any lesser person to find. They did try.

Yet they didn’t ask the Grand Pyramid directly. Communication between the factions was scarce in the best of times.

Zhaanpu also wouldn’t say too much. The three factions didn’t trust each other, even if they worked together under a pact. They have a status quo that none of them liked, but didn’t and couldn’t break free of it either.

Arjan and Eudoxus, thus, came with a fascinating proposal.

“As the Sandpeople are now aware of our presence, we would like to propose that we open up and declare our affiliation to Treehome. The centaurs deserve to know of the other worlds, and open communication would permit us to do so.”

“Wouldn’t we be seen as lying to them all these years? Our papers were forged. If anything, it should be another centaur that leads the conversation, and we remain as the hidden hand behind the scenes.”

Declaring our presence after being hidden was a scumbag move, so, I believe that wasn’t a good idea. Our goal was to find a nice place to plant my tree, and now that we’ve achieved it through Zhaanpu and the Sandpeople, I no longer needed a spot in the Centaur Lands.

So, after some consideration, I decided that they should remain hidden, and changed the scope of engagement.

I wanted Eudoxus and the centaurs to just keep tabs on them, and make sure they didn’t engage in overtly harmful activities.

Arjan, however, requested to return to Treehome. Unlike Eudoxus, he wasn’t a spy, so maintaining this double-life was more taxing, than to the spymaster who flipped through personas as easily as changing profile pictures.

My [spear saint] just couldn’t take it anymore.

“I’m torn from keeping lies and hiding our origins.” Arjan admitted to me as he made the journey back. Of the original six centaurs sent to infiltrate the Centaurlands, Arjan and one other decided to return. “I’d rather fight ten years in the dungeons than this, I’ve no idea how Eudoxus does it, but I can’t. These centaurs that I know, that I meet and befriended, they are nice people, good folks. Friendly, but I have to be on guard, and I can’t tell them stuff that reveals our own exceptional upbringing.”

They didn’t manage to prevent all of it. Eudoxus did say that the non-spy centaurs did leak a few words or statements that pretty much indicated their foreign origins, but so far their new friends have not picked up.

Arjan thought he was ready for it, before he started this mission. But this long campaign in the Centaur-ruled lands proved him wrong. It wasn’t easy to lead a double life at all.

That was expected, and it was entirely why [spies] and [spymasters] were needed. They had the ability, the instinct to know what to do, and could manage the double lives easily without feeling their own minds tearing apart. It required amounts of mental strength, and intellectual prowess that not everyone had.

In fact, once he returned to Treehome, the two went back to their real family and I witnessed both of them have a small emotional breakdown. It wasn’t that bad, as Freshka is pretty much saturated with my [tree of prayers], which generally improves their moods. [Tree of prayers] become less effective on those of higher levels, however, simply because of the mental protections of a stronger soul.

Eudoxus understood. He had seen this too many times, and as the main ‘handler’, he was familiar with the emotional turmoil. He assured me that it can be managed.

***

Ularans adapted well on Treehome, and Snek was pleased. Stella had withdrawn the portals, but because we already raided a few of the rift gates and obtained their rift coordinates, we were able to access their world.

The young Ularans joined the Valtrian Order’s academies, and they leveled. Meanwhile, Snek was able to share his new blood magic.

The heroes, and Ken specifically, watched with great interest. Ken still wondered about my intentions for Snek’s blood magic, and so wanted to see what Snek collected.

Most of them were benign, but the Ularans used [blood magic] extensively prior to the era of the demons to [augment] their souls, and gain spiritual powers.

“How do you insert a [hero] class?” I asked, wondering whether the Ularans have a mechanism different from how I insert a [class] seed into a fruit, and the Valthorns then eat the fruit. Maybe it worked out the same way, maybe it doesn’t.

I know for a fact not all classes are created equal, and it is possible for the body to reject a class. A [Hero] class is probably the most powerful class I’ve ever seen, so, I wanted to know what Snek’s plan for it.

“In truth, it’s likely we’ll need more blood magic to tie the [hero] class with a new soul.” Snek admitted, much to Ken’s horror.

“What?! More sacrifice?” Ken said, but as far as I recall, removing Ken’s hero class didn’t require living sacrifices beyond snakes. The others just ‘fainted’.

“Great power requires great sacrifice, but if it goes well, no one has to die.” Snek said. “They’ll just lose their blood. It’s called blood magic, not sacrifice magic, even if it does get used interchangeably.”

As we reviewed the old blood magic tomes collected from the various old buried sites in Ulara, it occurred to me most of them are ‘spying’, ‘buff’, ‘transformation’, and ‘summon’ type spells. They summoned various serpents and snakes to do their bidding.

Of them all, I found the ‘buff’ and ‘summon’ type spells to be particularly fascinating. The buff-type blood magics temporarily enhance the soul, and unlock a higher level of power by temporarily stitching itself to the soul. We immediately wondered whether it was possible to forge this into something more permanent, in the same way that the [ginseng] was crucial to breaking the level limits.

As I reviewed the blood magic’s summons, I also had a council of mages pull together some information on summon magic in our worlds.

The concept of a ‘summon’ is particularly important to identify, because, are we borrowing power from another world, or from the system or from somewhere else altogether? Where are these ‘summons’ when they are not summoned?

Eventually, I concluded that summons pulled power from the system itself. That these summons are functionally creations of the system, and not really ‘another realm’. The blood magic, and some of the faux-demonic magic, worked the same way.

The concept of ‘hell’ was a system-creation, a part of this ‘system presets’.

Still, the soul-augmentation through blood magic, essentially taking pieces of souls and adding them to existing souls to strengthen them was worth exploring further.

We already augmented the body and mind with my artificial minds and the wooden-crystal suits, and now, we wanted to augment the soul.

It would make them different.

At some point, would Valthorns still be the races they came from?

**

Khefri made the journey to the far north, escorted by Roon and Lumoof. Though she stomped off, since our last meeting, in truth she didn’t go far. All she did was let out her anger on some empty piece of land and blew shit up. Eventually, she calmed down and returned to her own queendom.

With the barriers down, she was free to travel.

“You two seem too used to this.” The scorpion-heroine was quite chatty.

Roon shrugged. “We’ve been visiting worlds all the time. Once you get used to it, you will.”

“Why can’t we use the way you guys came?”

“Oh. I thought we told you about the star mana-void mana interaction?” Roon scratched his head. He swore he had that conversation.

“You did? I must’ve forgotten. What are we heading to, anyway?”

“Aeon.” Roon smiled.

“What’s stopping me from going crazy once I get to the other side?” Khefri asked.

“Us.” Roon laughed. In truth we don’t really know how well we’ll fare if a hero decides to go rogue and starts bombing the shit out of our world. But I’m fairly certain at our levels of power we could pacify one hero. At the cost of tremendous destruction.

Khefri paused, and then nodded. “Fair. And- what-”

As the mist lifted, and the terrain itself shifted, they arrived at the sight of my clone tree that stretched to the skies above.

“Nice.” She looked impressed.

“We’ll walk close, and Aeon will send us to Treehome. The other heroes are waiting to meet you.”

“Really?”

They approached the tree, surrounded by shrubs, and arrived at a platform, a flat part of my exposed roots.

***

“Hi.” Khefri looked awkwardly at the six heroes. They nodded back.

“This is Khefri, she’s one of the three heroes of the Threeworlds, the other two died in battle, so, she’s the last one left. She used to be human.”

Khefri sighed. “I got the short end of the stick when they made me this scorpion-thing.”

Chung whistled. “On the contrary, milady. I think monster girls are exactly my-” Prabu and Colette smacked Chung on the head.

Roon and Lumoof laughed. “Well, you guys get to know each other, alright? We’ll give you heroes some privacy. You can have a visit to the Hero’s journal if you’re ready.”

As they stepped out, the heroes began to chat. We served them tea, hopefully for some clarity and honesty of thought.

They all shared what they’ve been through, and I listened through my tree, where they had their little meetup. The heroes’ journal was in the tree right next door.

“Man. I didn’t know some worlds have additional rules on the heroes.” Adrian, the Mountainworld hero, cursed. “I thought we had it bad when we were imprisoned by the demons.”

“That’s pretty bad, actually. I wouldn’t want to be captured.” Khefri countered, and it almost felt like I detected a softening of her tone.

Then a dam broke.

“It sucked that I had no one to turn to, no one to talk to, and all these sandpeople just suck up to me. I had followers, but no one I could confide in. That stupid pyramid corpse thinks I’m a child. Like, did he even know I wanted this? I didn’t!”

“No one did.” Adrian countered.

“I had a family. I had friends. I was happy.” Khefri crumbled, and I think this was the effect of the tea. The hero class imbued her with a sense of duty to defeat the demons, and here, all her suppressed emotions erupted. “Then that stupid accident, and three of us flung into another world. And we can’t even talk to each other for long. All we could manage was a word or two! It’s-”

The other heroes didn’t understand, of course. When they arrived, they had each other.

It took a while for her to settle down, and eventually, she too went and read the [heroes’ journal].

Over time, the heroes’ journal had gained quite a bit of power. I sensed the stored star mana and other energies within it grow and get stronger over time, but I couldn’t look into it. Strange.

She too shared her memories and thoughts with the journal, the combined effort of so many heroes before her. Her reaction was very similar to the other heroes.

“Now the sappy part’s over.” Ken said. “Let’s take you out on a tour of Freshka and the nice places. I think it’ll feel quite nostalgic.”

“I’m not sure if I’m ready for nostalgia.” Khefri admitted.

“You need it to move on. Come, we’ll be there with you. Like it or not, the seven of us are unique in this multiverse.”

***

Kei was very, very interested in Alka’s supercomputer-crystals. As a bio-crystalline golem, she was a natural fit to using the crystals, though we were a bit leery of directly experimenting on people.

But over the past two-three years Alka had gotten more comfortable with the inner workings of the supercomputer-crystals, and began testing out versions with Kei.

Simply put, Kei wanted to know whether it’s possible to augment her body by replacing it, or converting her entire body into a supercomputer, essentially transforming her into a living supercomputer.

We are all intrigued by the idea.

Kei, as she is today, was fairly weak. At level 120 or so, even with the extensive powerleveling in the dungeons, she was still really far away from even getting back her previous strength as a hero.

In a way, she was stagnant. Many Valthorns plateau at this stage, the level 120s to 149 is where each level feels like it takes forever to climb. Roon and Johann vividly remember the long struggle of this particular stage.

In hindsight, I really, really lucked out with all the fragments I hoarded.

The first small scale experiment started with converting a bit of her shoulder into the supercomputer, and then somehow wiring it to connect to her mind.

At first, she didn’t feel any different.

But within a month, she claimed it was nothing short of exception.

“This is what sci-fi wants to show us, but always fails. It’s like certain regimented thoughts, like calculations can be made instantly, instead of manually going through the numbers in our head. It’s just amazing. Memory also seems far more fresh, more vivid, and I just store way more detail. I know exactly what’s the fastest way to go from here to there. I know the time it takes to do certain things, what and who said stuff.”

“So you’ve become better at crunching numbers, storing information and retrieving them.” Alka repeated. “Sounds like an artificial mind-assistant.”

“Yes, and I’m not selling it short here. Even with the [hero]-class’s intelligence augmentation I don’t feel like this. The [hero] class’s effects feel more like a really strong gut feeling of what to do. This is... I know exactly the calculation that was made. It’s like seeing the options available, instead of having a gut feeling of what is the right path.”

Kei’s newfound computational power did improve her ability to make computations, but it’s still all about asking the right questions, and the crystals themselves don’t understand complex or vague questions.

Garbage in, garbage out.

It would take some time for standardized process and computations to form. We have some ideas of what would be useful in battle against the demons, but I’d like to see them tested.

***

On Threeworlds, I expanded my trees as quickly as I could. Though most of it was barren, I could still, via roots, spawn other types of trees that fit the terrain. Cactuses, certain types of shrubs were naturally adapted to such lands.

I spread them quickly, and eventually, the trees also reached the city of Pyramid, home of Zhaanpu and the Great Pyramid.

“Your presence is interesting.” Zhaanpu said. He spoke to a palm tree in his city’s courtyard. “No wonder the Crystal King claims you are an invader.”

“I see you can sense me.”

“We are inanimate objects. I am a corpse bound to the pyramid, my life sustained through this connection. This connection extends throughout the city, and into the land beyond. I know when trees appear out of nowhere. Still, it is nice to finally speak without the presence of children.”

“It isn’t so bad.”

“There must be some things you want to ask.”

“The pact with the gods. Does that allow you to communicate with them?”

“Rarely. When the stars align, and the wobbles of the sun happen to be in the right place, we could.”

“How?”

“We pray, and sacrifice two of my priests. Their blood and my magic unlocks a key, which allows us to speak to that faraway God once more.”

I chuckled. “It seems that the gods’ have a poor reputation.”

“Well deserved, for a distant god, what could we say except he is not here when we need him?” Zhaanpu sighed.

“You could get there, gain the levels. You do gain levels, right?”

“Me? In the last hundred years I gained four levels. Four.” Strangely, at that moment, Zhaanpu didn’t look like the powerful pharaoh of the Sandpeople, instead, was just a sagging, tired corpse.

“The system benefits combat.”

“And I failed as a ruler, if I had to take the field, and the battle reached my city. Failed. How contradictory, don’t you think?”

“Couldn’t you nominate those to fight on your behalf?”

“I did. They die too quickly.”

There was nothing much to say beyond that.