Year 231

I watched the children play. The void-attuned children.

Perhaps it was sentimental value, but I had requested for the children who spoke to me to call me TreeTree.

My priests quickly spun it into two aspects of my divinity. Aeon, the guardian of the continent, and TreeTree, the tree of youth and children. It was a little cringe to hear the sermon in person, but I suppose if propaganda works, it works.

It was normal in myths and legends for gods to have different aspects of themselves. Just like how Lilies had different faces, different views, because they were a combination cobbled together from the spirits of the dead.

That was a small matter, really, though I did wonder whether this was how those multi-faceted or multi-headed gods started.

No matter, I focused on the small group of children, playing and wrestling. Kaala, and the rest of the void treefolk grew up well, and we witnessed the first of the void-attuned lizardfolks. She had a black olive-skin, her scales shone in a way that was different.

Small, but no less dangerous in potential.

This play-based training was not really combat training. Not yet. Kaala would speak to me, about their friends, about their lives.

They were special, and they sensed it. By now, we had specialist caretakers. Matrons and caregivers that had skills to ensure their children grew up healthy and strong. Some even had the ability to improve stats permanently by sheer exposure, though the amount of absolute increase in stats wasn’t that great. Yet, at that age, it was a relative advantage.

On Treehome and Branchhold, we’ve observed improvements in the children’s health. A regular child of the Central Continent or Branchhold, now had health and physical conditions comparable to the wealthy, powerful nobles of the past.

That said, being sick does sometimes lead to levels. Every kind of setback was measured against their condition, their struggles, the process of healing.

One of the issues that occurred, really, was that as my [healing aura] got stronger, the speed at which my [healers] gained levels slowed. Priests also unlocked less healing spells, and more buff type abilities.

This was a consequence of the challenge-based experience system.

As a mitigation, to ensure my healers still kept pace, they spent more time in dungeons, to heal those injured or poisoned by the creatures of the dungeons, and so dungeons and the city around them transformed into centers where healers congregated.

***

“How many heroes is enough?” Khefri asked the question that pretty much was on everyone’s mind.

“We don’t know.” I answered. The scorpionoid hero wanted details on what exactly she signed up for.

“We are trying to get better reads and sensors on the relative power levels of the black sun, and all the other defensive structures that we can see, but that’s really more of a range, and does not truly convert into power. Power levels are a really fuzzy thing.” Stella explained.

“You don’t know.” Khefri repeated with emphasis. “So this thing that we are preparing for?”

“Wait. There’s some misunderstanding here.” Lumoof immediately clarified. “As I understood it, the League of Heroes is largely a defensive pact. The problem, in short, is that the heroes will eventually stop. The god’s ability to turn the tap and churn out new heroes is either limited by quantity, or limited by some kind of magical distance. The League of Heroes aim to prolong the survival of the living worlds by pooling together the heroes, and so effectively nullify the demon king’s inherent design advantages against the heroes.”

Khefri understood the gist of it from the Book of Heroes.

“So you don’t plan to attack that black sun?”

“Wait. Let me clarify. We, as in Aeon and the domain holders, do.” Lumoof answered. “With or without the heroes. If we can destroy the black sun, we will try to do so. We want to see what happens, and whether there is an end to this stupid wave of attacks.”

“And if there are other black suns out there?”

“Then we’re screwed.” Everyone looked horrified, and Lumoof laughed. “Well, not really. We’ll just have to constantly play this game of whack-a-mole and stomp out the demon kings as they appear, or, take the battle to the demon-lands, free the core, and over time, create a buffer zone between the living cities and the demon world.”

“So this league of heroes. We hope from world to world and defend it from demons. Like a bunch of superheroes.” Ken explained. “What I do want to know, of course, is how the presence of OTHER heroes interact with the pact of the gods that your world has.”

Khefri shrugged. “Do I look like I know such things? All I do is play with my pretty boys.”

The heroes rolled their eyes, but in my mind, it’s likely this was not unique. There must be worlds, where some local powers made arrangements with these faraway gods.

“The plan is to play defense, while we find ways to go on the offense. The demons can see the heroes, we know this, but we don’t really know whether this is true on a planar scale.” Ken explained. “This is why it’s best for Aeon’s domainholders to do the scouting.”

“Alright, but let’s play a number?” Khefri insisted. “Twenty? I mean, to attack that black sun thing.”

“No.” Stella answered. “At least a hundred ”

“Shit. We’re nowhere near if each world only has 1 or 2 like me.”

“Unless we find a way to drift closer to where the gods are summoning heroes.” Stella said. “The issue, from our point of view, is that distance has an impact on how many heroes the gods can summon. It’s also likely each god has a specific range, and some places are just too far from any god to get summons.”

Ken nodded. “That’s one merit for going in the other direction, instead of towards the demon sun. It’s likely that we get closer to the gods, and in doing so, we access worlds with more heroes. That should bring us up to the number we need.”

The mountainworld hero nodded. “If we ever encounter the gods again, I’m going to give them a piece of my mind. Like, fuck em so hard.”

The scorpionoid heroine rolled her eyes. “I should be first in line. I’m not even human!”

“You have a point, what’s up with this humanoid supremacy for heroes?” Ken agreed. “It’s almost as if all the heroes are derived from humans with just minor cosmetic changes.”

“Maybe the first gods are human?”

“Or maybe the source worlds are human?” If all the ‘source’ of heroes were from these earth-clones, it’s only natural that this gets propagated over the multiverse. Especially with how frequently heroes set up harems and mate with the locals.

“You do realize that means every human in these worlds are descendants of some horny hero somewhere?” Chung interjected.

The girls had a horrified look. “Ewww.”

“So you’re saying the constant introduction of heroes, which are majority human, function as ‘super-breeders’ into the population, which helps lead to a humanoid-majority population.” Ken nodded thoughtfully. “That’s a very interesting theory.”

“That’s like Genghis Khan's lineage.”

The girls shook their heads. “Guys, let’s not take this conversation there.”

“We’re all adults here. Why can’t we have this conversation?” Chung responded. “It’s fascinating to consider the implications of heroes on the long term trends of the human population. Our extended aging also means we could have more children.”

“Goodness that makes heroes sound like super-breeders. Heroes as hypersexual individuals, and that’s really uncomfortable to think about.”

“Harems have effects.”

Khefri paused uncomfortably. She had a harem, and as it turns out, Hafiz and Adrian also possessed a harem. A small one, but a harem nonetheless, so they kept quiet during the conversation.

“Shouldn’t this apply to all long lived creatures? Even high level individuals.”

Ken coughed. “You do realize heroes have many cards stacked in their favor?”

***

On Branchhold, it was an era of relative quiet, and my attempts to build a vertical, denser city encountered some obstacles.

On one hand, there’s a clear increase in overall quality of life, on the other, the density, noise and hectic environment, even when suppressed by [tree of prayers] did turn off some of the inhabitants, which led to emigrations to the surroundings.

Sprawl, essentially. Lifestyle.

Some people just prefer a quieter environment, but still desire the safety that we provide.

No one tried to attack us so far, but based on my spies and trees, it’s an inevitability. Jealousy, fear, all these factors still pop up, though some are wise enough, or, their system gave them enough warning that they’ll lose, that they decide against it.

***

Lillies finally created an avatar. An inferior one, well, I suppose everything would be inferior when compared to Lumoof, but an avatar nonetheless.

The avatar was essentially a soul fragment of that greater hivemind, possessing a wooden puppet. It was created from a combination of a permanent [scry] spell and some kind of projection ability.

That said, it had zero combat power, and the range of the wooden puppet was still fairly limited. For now, it could only travel a small region around Lillies.

With more levels, it would gain extended range. Something they really looked forward to, because they really wanted to experience and see the other worlds for themselves.

Aria and Aispeng also tried to do something similar, because being repeatedly shown what I’ve seen on the other worlds was strangely tempting. They tried to create an ice-avatar, since that was where their shaping and sculpting abilities were best, and Aria insisted that they wanted to look good.

I privately felt like they were spending too much time on appearances, but it was inconsequential. That’s how they chose to spend their efforts.

As fellow members of the pantheon, I tried my best to communicate with them, and so Patreeck helped schedule me to talk to them at least once every three years, and ad hoc if there are any big developments.

Three years felt quite regular, for my two fellow immortals. It almost felt like we were meeting every other week. I wonder whether as my age increases even more, it’ll feel too frequent. But for now, the conversations with the two were mostly about showing what we’ve seen, and they would give commentary and ideas.

***

On Treehome, the Continental Guild Wars, some called them the Vassal Wars or Puppet Wars, were quite messy. For now the fighting were mostly smaller scale skirmishes, and targeted attacks. Due to the guilds’ history and exposure to combat on the Central Continent, their first instinct was to conduct surgical strikes. Attacks to remove the leaders of the respective kingdoms, and replace them with their own puppets. Essentially a replica of how they fought on the Central Continent against each other due to our rules of engagement.

But over time, this morphed into conventional warfare, and this was where the guilds noticed their first flaw.

They lacked the high level commanders needed to lead large scale conventional invasions and maintain invasion-period logistics, again, due to their lack of experience on the Central Continent.

If they hired generals from the regular kingdoms, they didn’t have a level advantage against the kingdoms of their respective continents, in fact, they were frequently outleveled by the generals of those kingdoms who had more conventional war experience due to the constant kingdom wars.

The last large scale conventional wars on the Central Continent were during the Sabnoc era, and most of the great generals of that time died during the final explosion, and many more were killed during my subsequent expansion to the rest of the Central Continent.

As I remembered it, my expansion to the Central Continent was primarily led by the elite force, supplemented by a near-infinite army of beetles, and against the tide, the kingdoms folded.

The guilds didn’t have such an advantage, and so, the local kingdoms of the other continents adapted and hired significantly more security.

As the Guild War raged, the guilds themselves found that superior equipment and technology was incredibly helpful during the first strike, but the advantage it provided diminished over time as survivors counter-leveled and managed to steal those equipment from the dead.

Survivors adapted, gained skill-counters, and began to fight back.

My Valthorn strategists and leaders collected data on the various wars fought by the guilds, and used them to create learning experiences and case studies on what the leaders should’ve done. Patreeck and my artificial minds also used the data to build simulations, where my strategists and leaders could try out different tactics and attacks.

I quickly learned that the simulation was incredibly taxing, because it was impossible to account for the use of skill and level gains by the troops on the field.

The system’s pattern of awarding levels was also something that we didn’t have much data on. Most reporting of the levels, at least by my Valthorns, was done after the fact. That meant we couldn’t specifically tie level-gains to specific events, even if we understood the patterns.

We deployed Alka’s crystal supercomputers to supplement and speed up the simulations, and I really, really found it sad that all this computational power is used to fight wars.

My first observation from this conflict was wars of attrition had to be done quickly, and more overwhelmingly, with no combat survivors. It essentially encouraged slaughter, since survivors have the highest chance of gaining counters.

So, if I were to, hypothetically invade these kingdoms, it had to be swift, and strike with overwhelming force. Once the conflict drags on, the winning percentage will shrink and casualties will increase. I’m still confident of victory due to the massive level gap, but more people will die.

The second observation was that the temples were rallying the other kingdoms in defense. Aiva and the other three temples came to support the defenders, and fought against the guilds. For this reason, the Eastern Continent was the least attacked by the guilds, due to the Aivan temples’ higher levels and constant shared training with the Valthorns.

The other kingdoms and temples tried to retaliate by cutting off the guild’s finances on the Central Continent, by attacking caravans and trade shipments.

On this front, I was forced into a rather annoying situation, whether I should continue to protect trade shipments from such attacks. After all, the incredible prosperity on the Central Continent was due to an active internal trading between nations, and allowing attacks on the trade routes fundamentally attacked our economy and our overall prosperity.

In any case, I decided to stick with the principle of non-interference, and instead, marked all the expeditionary guilds as ‘war participants’, and therefore not subject to our protection. This extended to subcontractors and shipment partners. That meant trade shipments were separated, by convoys, into “protected” and “not protected” convoys. Even trading posts had to be separated into protected and unprotected. The markets had to be reorganized as well, to prevent collateral damage.

I wonder whether the guilds were trying to force my hand, but from Patreeck and my tree’s observations, they stumbled into it. Isolating the war participants led to an outroar from the guilds, because non-war participants could undercut them for waging war, since their shipments were protected.

Yet, this process added complexity into trade, because everyone traded with each other at some level, so where did the line stop? Who was subject to the protections, and who was not? Was the baker who sold bread to the warring guilds a supporter of the war? Where was the line where one was complicit?

I wondered whether this was similar to money-laundering issues, because protecting these warring guilds was essentially subsidizing their war effort.

It’s also interesting to observe the new [Merchant Kings] and [Guild Lords] in action, as they consolidated their powers and responded to the challenges both in their new vassal kingdoms. Communication and oversight at such distances was a problem. [Message], [Scry] and all that helped, but didn’t compare to the full time surveillance state that I employed.

They couldn’t match our speed of reaction, or how quickly news of an attack spread. They were always a few days behind, and things changed.

All of this dictated deployment of high level individuals, dependable ones on the ground to take over, but left them exposed.

Some of the defending nations had [hero items] and heirloom artefacts that gave them an edge. The guilds, despite their immense wealth, could buy some from the other kingdoms, but most of the time, these items were not for sale.

The deteriorating and ‘stress’ placed on the guilds due to the war also invited attacks from non-war participant guilds, who used the chance to muscle in on their poorly defended territories.

It was very much a criminal gang war, and I really wonder whether stepping in was the right choice.

For now, the Central Continent remains largely unscathed. The Valthorns continue to protect unrelated parties from these gang wars, but the embers of war are spreading.