Year 141

It was classified information, clearly no one knew it, but I did. I first informed the Valthorns, the Valtrian order, my Patriarchs and Matriarchs. It was met with a resounding silence. Patreeck told me they were making plans.

What did this mean? Have the demons won?

I wouldn’t be able to get anything from the regular people. At least, I didn’t think I would. The only person who I thought could even attempt to answer ‘what next’, was Lilies.

> Lilies. The Heroes died. <

> So what now? <

That sounded awfully ominous.

> Tips? <

If we’re doomed, we’re doomed, isn’t it? But I don’t believe so, since... well, I just don’t believe it. I refuse to believe it.

Then, I announced it to the representatives of the various cities, and the nobles of many kingdoms. The heroes have died, all 10 of them have fallen in battle.

The entire hall was in uproar. It was a panic I’ve never seen the nobles exhibit.

One of the noble lords went a little nuts and shouted, “We’re doomed!”

Some said rather strange things. “Why is this happening? It’s the first time in documented history!”

“Is it?” Some nobles challenged, clearly trying to be the level-headed one. “Our historical records only go back so far. What if this wasn’t the first time?”

I recall when I first arrived, the gods always summoned heroes if the previous generation died to the new demon king. But would the gods summon heroes again, if the new batch of heroes died?

“If it isn’t, then we have chosen correctly to break away from the 4 temples! They’ve lied to us all this time!”

But why? Why are the gods restricted from summoning newer heroes, if the new heroes died? Certainly they can try again, right?

“Is that something worth arguing over at this time? We need to deal with the reality before us, that the heroes have all fallen, and yet the demon king still lived. We must focus our efforts on surviving this!”

“Survive? How? I for one am going to be rushing out there and spend all my money and live a life.”

Patreeck’s ability told me all of them are seeing their lives flash before their eyes. This was one of those, ‘if you died tomorrow, what would you do?’ moments.

A noble said. “We must try something. If we must call on the blood mages to perform a ritual of massive proportions, then we must. It is either they die, or everyone dies!”

I’m certain some of the kings and the temples out there would be considering this option right now. But based on Patreeck’s calculation and my own historical data, it wouldn’t be enough. From my observations of the hex to date, and my experiments, the existing hexbomb would not have enough power to destroy a demon king. Unless I sacrificed close to 20 million people, maybe more. I recall sensing the huge surge in magical energies when that hex-like thing, and now that I’ve got access to the hex on my own, I’m able to put the two data points together to calculate the energy needed to replicate a similar power level.

20 million. Did he sacrifice so many? I don’t think so?

Yet, how did Astra do it? Is it because of the amplification power of Star mana? Could star-mana and hex fuse together, or does the star mana apply it’s anti-demon king qualities to the entire hexbomb?

“What are our options?” I asked the artificial minds.

“The hexbomb is a good direction, master. We should focus on amplifying the power of the soul, in order to create a superbomb. To borrow your memories, master, the hexbomb is essentially a massive bundle of 10million TNTs, if we could use the soul-fragments in a significantly more efficient way, it may be possible to achieve the same effect with far lower sacrifice.”

It still required sacrifice. Just less.

“What level of efficiency can we achieve at the moment?”

The artificial minds paused and started calculating. It took them two days.

“Based on our current knowhow and converting the entire valley of the Unrotten, we can amplify the hexbomb’s efficiency and power by 4 times.” Trevor said. “Still, that meant at least 5 million sacrifices.”

Was I willing to do this to get just a single shot at the demon king with the hexbomb?

It bothered me. I didn’t think it was the right thing to do at all. It felt like I’m cutting off my limbs just to live another day.

“From a utilitarian point of view, master, sacrifices are necessary. 5million is a number the Freshlands can afford.”

It took a few days, but I then decided. “It must be a last resort. But we must make preparations.”

The preparations required were massive. Firstly, we needed to make sure that there were at least 5 to 10 million people within a 5 day walk of Freshka. Next, was preparing the structures, formations and runes needed to properly concentrate the energies released from 5 to 10 million souls.

We didn’t know how much time we had, but preparing the formations and runes needed to perform a blood ritual of this size was going to take years.

In a way, this option was dead from the start. There’s no way we could have done the preparations needed in time, if the demon king attacked this year, we would have failed. Even sacrificing 20million people isn’t so simple, since the souls of all 20 million need to be stitched together into a single shot. This endeavour alone required the construction of a massive containment array to control the energies.

How did Astra do it? Was my magical measurement and sensors so far off?

There must be some star-mana or hero-level shenanigans at work.

-

“The heroes died.” The Valthorns’ upgraded classers spoke among themselves. “This meant the demon king may very well be on the way to kill the rest of us.”

“Does Aeon have a plan?”

“I say we hide. Construct massive installations deep within mountains and wait it out. The demon king may rule the world outside, but with our skills, we’d live. Faris and the druids, the mages together could generate all the things we needed to live.”

“Ah, Aeon’s underground bunkers taken to the extreme, huh?”

“Well, yes. But we’re talking extremely, extremely deep. Far deeper than before.”

“It’s a good possibility.” Some of the Valthorns considered the idea. It had a good merit. “The demons certainly can’t sense us if we hide that deep.”

“Then let’s do it. We can expand it if we can create enough space.”

“We better not tell the nobles. They’ll demand we protect them if they know.” All the Valthorns nodded.

The Valthorns started what they called the ‘trench-hideout project’. They, using their powers together, started to dig really, really, really deep underground. Their project would take a few months, but if they do it right, they’d probably survive.

-

At the same time, Lausanne’s still alive. That was a good sign, in the sense that the entire Eastern Continent has not fallen under the demons. There must be pockets or nations that survived.

As the year went by, captains and sailors began noticing that the temples’ blockade now had holes. Some navies still maintained the blockade, but there were pockets where the ships left. The temples after all are a hodgepodge of contributed forces, so some of the kingdoms may have given up.

Then, we began capturing some ships that strangely sailed into the harbors of our allied kingdoms.

“What’s happening out there?” We interrogated the crew.

“We don’t know, but our supply ships stopped coming and we were starving. So all of us had to come here! We either starve, or sail to the nearest harbor.” They didn’t know much. Even the captains were not very well informed of what was happening back in their home country.

Jura sat and asked me one day.

“TreeTree, remember that time when you unlocked my limit?”

“Yes?”

“How far can you go with it?”

“Hmm?” I didn’t get his point. Was there multiple roadblocks on their levels that I have to keep unlocking? Do the native souls have a gacha-style level cap where they need multiple upgrades before they achieve max capacity?

“How high can you push it?”

I don’t know, really.

Jura paused. “Actually, maybe I should cut to the point. Treetree, are you able to make something like a hero? I know you tried with Lausanne, and it didn’t go far, but that was then, before all of the Rottedlands. We all know you’ve gained strength as the forests and the lands expanded. Now, would you be able to do it?”

Hmmmm.

I probably cannot create the [hero] class. There’s something divine about it, or at least, the god’s version certainly is divine. But is the [hero] class truly the pinnacle class out there, or it’s essentially possible for any class to achieve a similar power, even if they need to be a far higher level?

It is worth trying.

-

“Astia. Did you get fragments?” She did.

She paused, her mind raced. “Sorry?” She wondered how I knew.

“Fragments of heroes. It’s a thing that reincarnation of other worlds receive. I wonder if you received it.”

“Yes.” She decided to be honest. “They’re dead, aren’t they. How did you know, Aeon?”

I lied. “As a being that’s close to the divine, we can sense it. Their fading presence in the fabric of the world.”

“Close to the divine.” She repeated. She’s been gaining levels in [scribe] and [artist], aided by the boost provided by the fragments. Her work was a lot of painting and paperwork, after all. I wondered whether she had the potential to achieve what I did, maybe she could even do more. “But that’s not enough to take on the demon king?”

“Heroes are specialist demon-king exterminators. We are not.” It was a statement of fact, as far as I’m concerned.

-

I wondered what the demon king would do, or what the gods would do. I got my answer as the year almost approached it’s end.

[The Gods have summoned three new heroes.]

It’s almost as if the gods themselves panicked? Why did they do this?

Year 142

So, new heroes. The nobles and the Valthorns all relaxed considerably once I told them of the new heroes. I wonder where they will appear.

> Has this happened before? <

Lilies responded a day later.

I wonder how long LIlies must have lived. But then, most of the time, they don’t?

Again, not exactly new under the sun, is it? Life goes on. We’ll deal with the demons when they arrive on our shores.

In the meantime, we continued our preparations. The school was doing well, and this year, I had a few exceptional students from both the Valtrian Order Academy, and also the Freshlands Treetiary college. Talent was a strange thing. It almost seemed like they came in waves, with some years just having a lot more good people than others.

The College had one exceptional centaur [Chiefling], and over the period of the 4 to 5 year course, transformed into [Warlord] at just Level 25. Right next to him was a master [Ranger Lord], again, he started just as a [Noble], and as the course developed his administrative and archery skills, it fused together at Level 30.

On the Valtrian side, a young [archer] hit Level 43 at 16 years old, mostly from hunting hybrids and participating in all sorts of archery competitions. There was also a [knight] who managed to hit level 35 as they graduated from the academy, and his class evolved into [Guardian Knight] without needing any prompt or special class seed from me.

It made me wonder what’s really the evolution threshold of classes? Jura’s [Warlord] class happened very late, when he was almost level 60 plus in his warrior-type classes.

The nature of class is a perplexing thing, almost as if the rules don't apply uniformly. Everyone’s class system had different thresholds and triggers.

-

On the blood magic front, we continued to make preparations for the grand ritual, should we ever need one. Again a last resort, and I wondered whether I should shelve the project since the heroes arrived.

“We should prepare the formations regardless. It can be repurposed for other uses.” My artificial minds suggested, and so I agreed with it.

Indeed, a massive formation used for containing souls seemed useful, even if just for my [soul forge].

The other preparation was partly Jura’s idea, to create a mini-hero by fusing classes together. This was also where I spent quite a bit of time.

It’s a process of knocking class seeds together to see what worked, and what didn’t. It’s a lot of tracking and math, so I created an artificial mind to help keep track of all the ratios and numbers.

There were some successes. I could not upgrade, or maybe, I have not found the way to upgrade some classes, but in the process of tweaking the [Knight], [Druid], [Spearman] and [Soldier] classes, I’ve somehow merged them with my own essence, and created the [Tree Knight] class, and I could then further upgrade it to [Knight of the Woods], and even further to [Knightmaster of the Woods]. There were some classes that I thought could be further evolved, like [Sharpshooter], or [Grand knight], or [weaponmaster], but so far, I didn’t make much progress on those.

If there were a class that made life difficult for me, it would be the [mage] classes.

It was easy enough to fuse [mage] with [druid] or [mage] with [knight]. Mage classes also could be fused together at the first layer, into [Great Mage]. But things got wacky from there. The higher mage classes repelled each other when I attempted to create [archmages] or [wizards].

It’s not as if these classes were rare. I have [archmage] classes, collected from dead archmages. I even have existing Valthorn mages who managed to evolve their [mage] classes into [archmages].

Yet the class fusion resisted my attempts to create [archmages] out of [mages] or [great mages]. I wonder whether this was a deliberate system restriction for high tier magic, or there’s some quirk to it that I didn’t know.

I needed time, and I was partly throttled by the number of class seeds.

Experimenting with class seeds required and consumed huge amounts of class seeds. Even if it takes just 10 seeds of the same type to fuse it to the next level, by the 3rd level it needed 1,000 seeds.

It was just lucky that I had trees that could grow the normal class seeds by the bucketload, so I could do so. I could also create a tree that grows the upgraded class seeds, but then theft remains a huge concern. As my reach extends throughout the continent, all my trees aid me in the process of collecting more class seeds, via various death rituals, via my [soul harvesters].

All in, the entire Continent, now under my direct or indirect control, produced between 5,000 to 50,000 class seeds per year. A rise in the class seeds usually arose from a massive war or battle where many died. Or a slaughter or something.

Per the statistics provided by my artificial minds, it’s roughly one in every fifty deaths would result in a class seed. That ratio is about 1 in 10 if the dead were buried via the Aeonic burial ceremonies. The ratio’s better if the ceremony was performed in Freshka, where almost 1 in 2 burials result in some kind of class seed or skill seed.

There’s clearly a problem of proximity. I can’t be everywhere at once, not all full strength. As it is, many abilities are just better when they are done near to me.

I suppose if I could split a tree into multiple copies of myself, such that I could be 100% there, everywhere. As it is, the [Giant Attendant Trees] can only push up to 50%.

Decent, but not great, and that ratio’s wonky for certain kinds of abilities.

As the year went on, we didn’t see demons crossing the oceans. Maybe they went to the Northern Isles or the Southern Continent, instead of directly west to the Central Continent.

Why?

If the demons have a head start, they should push hard and expand. After all, if the demons can fly, what’s stopping them?

Also, none of the heroes were on my continent. I tried looking for them, but nothing. No stragglers either, unless they died. Or took a form different from the normal humans.

I wonder whether there are others like me out there, taking their time to hide away. Or have they all died?