Year 232

Based on the notifications I received when I placed my clone on both Threeworlds and Mountainworld, it seems that I could only collect hero fragments and souls from the worlds where I placed my clone.

This naturally raises a practical issue with the League of Heroes. My clone should only be placed where there are a lot of heroes.

I have one left, and I don’t know how many I could claim to get over the next few battles. If let’s say I get an extra five seeds in the next fifty levels, and each world only adds perhaps two heroes, then that’s just an extra 10 heroes to the existing pool. It’s clearly a limitation, because the only way heroes can travel and visit each other is via my clones. Without the clones, there is no league of heroes.

My senior leaders also know this, which was why Roon’s idea of targeting only living worlds made sense. Reclaiming demon worlds doesn’t add to our hero strength.

Ideally, if domainholders could gain a full hero-tier strength, that would remove the dependency on my clones, since Stella’s portals and the rift-gate network is quite robust and domainholders could freely travel. It’s also less risky, since domainholders in my pantheon effectively can’t die.

In a way, it totally made sense to throw my domainholders at the grinder, since they’d be able to take risks heroes couldn’t. They understood it, of course, but they still didn’t feel too keen on dying. They may revive, but death must leave a mark.

Someone who revived repeatedly would probably feel the strain of death in some way or form. Very few abilities are without some kind of flaw.

“What if there’s some abilities that are only unlocked after multiple repeated deaths?” Lumoof asked. “After all, one gains resistance to certain events after repeating them. What if it’s the same for death?”

Death is a fairly unique element of the world, since it is the process of separating the inner soul from the body. A person is ‘dead’ when the soul leaves, even if the body may be ‘alive’.

We studied the blood magic tomes Snek collected, and I found the aspect of ‘willing’ sacrifices to be worth pursuing further.

My problem was really a matter of test subjects.

I harvested my ‘sacrifices’ from the scum of society. These were criminals who broke the law, and not just any law, but the serious ones like rape or murder. These are very rarely, willing sacrifices. They all have strong needs, strong cravings.

Snek’s society, at least in the early days, maintained a large cult of the blood, where people truly are devoted to the goals of that blood cult, and at the side, were people who seen the positive effects of that cult.

Unlike our mortals, somehow the Ularans managed to avoid the negative bloodthirsty natures of the blood magic. Their focus on augmentation of the soul revealed something that I soon saw in the Ularans themselves.

Their souls were robust, and could repair themselves from damage far faster than our regular souls. These Ularans essentially had inbuilt soul-regeneration. In their day to day life, I noticed that the Ularans did not face permanent limb-loss. Their souls, even when a limb was lost, could maintain the soul-schema of the limb without any ‘phantom limb’ pains.

Strangely, it was this self-regeneration that allowed the users of the blood magic to resist the corruptive effects of said magic.

When looking at Snek, I couldn’t really notice it, because his soul was already warped in order to survive the void forest.

The young Ularans, despite their tiny size, could recover from most kinds of non-lethal damage with absolutely no drawback physically. This, compared to the other humanoids, where healing or limb reconnection had to be done within a short day or two timeframe or it’s gone for good. But this wasn’t very useful when faced with the giant demon dragons who could kill them in a single strike.

If the Ularans faced a goblin-type demon king, or something more zerg-like, they’d have far, far better outcomes.

Anyway, back to the blood magic, my issue was I didn’t have a way to volunteer individuals for blood magic sacrifices, and I didn’t think using Valthorns was a good idea. They were an investment.

I also found the idea of getting people to volunteer to die for the sake of science a little iffy. But as it turns out, I shouldn’t feel that way.

“Aeon, the Valthorns are willing to die for various causes. We battle great wars, and in doing so we risk our lives. Many will die in the line of battle, that is expected.” Lumoof advised.

Initially, I thought of approaching those who were about to die due to various medical conditions anyway, to volunteer for such experiments. It’s uncommon even back in our world, but for science, many have put their lives on the line.

But, because of my medical and healing abilities, the general health of the populace was very high, so this was an incredibly small group of people, nowhere enough to actually do experiments.

Next, I tried looking for those who were emotionally unstable or wanted to die. Yet, as I spoke to a few such individuals, I wasn’t particularly comfortable using them for such blood magic. There was the issue of ‘contamination’, because their emotional states also affected the condition of their souls, and so, their souls were not high quality.

In the tomes gathered from Ulara, they went at length to clarify the conditions to create ‘clean sacrifices’. From what they explained, it’s likely that if I used those who were mentally not at a good place, I may still end up having hex because their mental states were not ‘clean’.

So, this clean blood magic was a really wonky situation where you needed to be emotionally stable, mentally sound and able to commit to killing yourself for a cause.

Absolutely ridiculous conditions, in my opinion, but the Ularan’s method of augmentation of the recipient soul is without much of the downsides associated with blood magic.

On another hand, I also know and very much preferred my own method of stitching soul fragments together into the soul bomb, since these required no sacrifices. Now, I just needed to find ways to link the two together. They clearly are meant to be linked, since they are both soul-type abilities, but I just needed to figure out the relationship between these two concepts.

It’s a bit like a blind man touching an elephant’s trunk and an elephant’s tail, and now has to figure out how the whole thing is supposed to look like.

***

“It’s quite rare you’ve paid attention to us again.” Yvon said, as I observed the children in their care. Both Eriz, Yvon are in their somewhat humanoid forms, connected to their respective trees.

“I hope you do not feel neglected. My minds tells me you are all doing well.” Well, I was aware of them through my artificial minds, but my attention was on the children.

“I still feel it. A little.” Eriz answered, as one of the focused caregiving trees of Freshka, naturally interacted heavily with the children in our care.

Children like Kaala, or the void-attuned lizardfolks and treefolks, needed our best nursing and care, and so it naturally fell on people like Eriz to look after them. Once they were ready for any kind of training, it’s also my training trees, like Yvon, that trained them in the basics.

“They are well, if that’s what you are wondering.” Eriz answered, she’s in the level 70s as some blend of caregiver. “Some of the new caregivers have gained specialized skills dealing with them.”

The health of children throughout the central continent was good, though there are areas with spotty coverage, where the Valtrian Order’s childcare services were less robust, or the persons handling the task of lower levels.

One of the bigger issues that we face, that people like Eriz and Yvon help tremendously, was staffing and resourcing. These sort of administrative and domestic work leveled slowly, and training young women and men for these roles was a challenge.

It’s not perceived as a ‘sexy’ or ‘glamourous’ role, even with the high salaries the Valtrian Order gave for these roles. To me, caring for children is part of my talent management program, part of the pipeline, so it is only natural that they are paid a good salary.

But after decades of stability on the Central Continent, the general population’s mindsets shifted, and now began to resemble earth-like societies, where young men became ‘pickier’ with their roles and [classes].

My own obsession with giving the people choice, essentially led to these folks choosing certain careers, and leaving certain careers understaffed, even with higher pays.

The young also wanted to move to the bigger cities, where everything was. For full time mothers, we do notice that younger children tend to be healthier than the older children, as a result of mothers’ themselves gaining more skills related to caring for their children.

In the Central Continent, the cities with strong Valtrian Order presence have good birthrates, mainly due to the nearly free end-to-end childcare services provided to those who want to have children. So, with the mental load of caring for children taken off most parents, they were free to fornicate as they please, and that kept birth rates decently high.

I did this, not for altruistic means, but merely to make sure that the modern society didn’t face a population crunch, which would lead to a talent and resource crunch. The cost of providing such services was essentially my talent cost.

As the society progresses and individuals have more choice, I would have to add more incentives, in order for the society to produce what I want it to produce. For caregivers like Eriz, this was a role I’ll need more.

I noticed that certain races had aspects that made them excellent at certain parts of giving care. For example, treefolks and dwarves were persistent, and encouraged a great ‘connection’ to the ground. Treefolks and elves are both very good at looking at the effects of actions after longer periods of time.

They could visualize how hard work today would payoff decades down the road, and don’t perceive it as a pointless exercise. So that made them great ‘guides’ and counselors, because of their long-term views. Humans and the shorter lived races were better at quickly emotionally bonding with the flock, establishing passionate relationships and rapport. But these also comes and go quickly, unlike the longer, respectful and mutual trust that elves and treefolk usually tended to have.

Usually.

For longer lived creatures, I noticed how Laufen and Lausanne’s relationship evolved over time. To Laufen, it was expected that her daughter would be an adult, and that was the same for their children, Arlisa and the boy, Lauda.

As full adults, they lived normal lives, though Arlisa did go through what essentially amounted to two decade-long rebellious phase. Her mother had to bail her out of trouble a few times, though frankly, everyone gave Lausanne a lot of leeway.

We rarely speak these days, though she did make regular trips to the Northern continent to meet up with Meela and Alexis.

Old friends, she said, and Meela’s hospitality was impeccable.

Speaking of Meela, my domain holders approached her on the idea of a multiverse arrangement, whether her [branch hotels] could be used as a replacement for my clone trees. She seemed agreeable, but her branch hotels did not have teleportation ability, and without the teleportation ability, what use was it?

***

The heroes were curious on the next step. “Alright. What’s next, what’s next. We can’t be waiting here!”

My people explained that it’s a slow process. We are, after all, trying to plot against something that has the corpse of the dead god, or something to that effect. If it could destroy gods, it certainly could destroy us.

“But what are we doing offensively? Surely there is something that can be done.” The heroes said, and I wondered whether this was an effect of their mind control.

Since we’ve disclosed the presence of the black sun, I’ve been curious whether the gods would take action. I long suspected that the gods had some way of seeing the world through the heroes, though nothing has truly been confirmed.

But, they have a point.

Perhaps, I am moving too slowly.

How do I get closer to the black sun?

I want to avoid a situation where I send people after the black sun only to die catastrophically. There’s no way to test it out, the best I could do is a simulation.

The void mages came with an interesting idea.

“The will of Treehome said that they could move through the void sea, correct?”

“Yes.”

“Therefore, it is likely that any will, or any world, could move through the void sea, sensible?”

Yes, that sounded right.

“So, we have the Cometworld, barreling through the void sea. It’s moving too fast, but it is a small world. Tiny, in fact, and we believe, almost invisible to the demons.”

Oh.

Ooooooooooooooooh.

“It would be interesting to attempt to control or manipulate it’s movements.” One of the void archmages suggested. “I don’t know what it’ll take, and if you can ask the Will of Treehome for details that would help. If we can control and direct the Cometworld-”

We could turn it around and aim it towards the black sun. We could, essentially, have something that could deliver a strike team right at the enemy’s heart.

If the demons sent a comet at Treehome many, many centuries ago, why couldn’t we do the same?

It was just poetic justice.