Chương 488: BECMI Chapter 487 – No Magic is not Everywhere...

Any idea at all on the end of this?" Belle asked me through my Earring-com, fatigue and sharp scorn in her voice. She knew Immortals were responsible for all of this, and Thaum was explicitly responsible. I hummed a Note and looked at the thready, very still manafield, still trying to pick itself up after that incredible shock. There was some color coming back to the thaumafield.

"Mana is coming back from inside Nown, spreading slowly through the mantle as it reorganizes. How it is being regenerated is an interesting question that might not be applicable here. Nown might even be taking some of it from the vivus it's been getting fed for a while now, and other things." Like, Immortal Power, too.

"We're on Day Four. I expect at least a couple more days, up to as long as five. Call it at least a week total in one form or another."" Your plans?" she asked me from Zanzyr City, where she was among the least-nervous of all the wizards of that city now potentially subject to rebelling non-wizards.

I was certain at least a few had been ganked by those they'd once oppressed now, but oddly enough those of Caeledon were very much walking around as if things were completely normal, and their Forsaken guards and spouses didn't look put out at all. Nobody felt like testing the Erendyl elves wearing their gleaming Armor and ready Swords, either.

"I will wander down to the Umbra border and see if there's anything to do, then begin work on their Pyramid as soon as magic returns. I have a feeling it is going to be very necessary if they want to stay on the surface world."" Do you think they've gotten the message that the surface world is anything but safe?" she asked me, only a little smugness in her voice.

The Shaden liked to give the impression that the Underdark was vicious and brutal, and were learning that the surface world had threats coming from so many different directions-!

"It's going to be even less safe when the Immortals really flex, and the others flex back." After all, Thaum had only mis-used the power of the Core. He hadn't really USED it." That sounds quite ominous."

"I would suggest leaving Zanzyr City. Things are going to get excitable there when magic returns, and any staff you leave behind best be capable of removing themselves from the area immediately."" I will dispense Teleport Runes to any who do not yet have them," she promised me gravely.

"Remember when magic returns to immediately put away your tech devices and return to magical usage. Don't draw Immortal ire for employing them broadly."" A shame. The convenience of the communication systems and the power of the rifles is very impressive." But she already knew that, and knew Darkmoor and all its people had died for it. Immortals did not like the way technology empowered the weak to act against the strong. Wielding magic required strength in return!

The place was swimming with Entropic power and residual Energy, catering to its master. My Eternal Avatar was not at all constrained in the magic I could use out here, and my main self not needing any magic to speak of for now certainly helped with that matter. This was just a chunk of free-floating stone, nothing special about it other than a bias towards Entropic decay, something easy enough to Burn away… and conceal by shrouds of darkness out here in the void.

Below my Sims and I was the world of an Immortal, hidden away by a paranoid and delusional master, with only one door that was accessible from one of a series of worlds that also led to the sequestered realm of Thanatos. It was less a case of trust than of convenience, as someone seeking to get to Delphax's realm here would also have to intrude on a place Thanatos watched closely.

Warnings of intruders were easy to pass back and forth, and the two of them were not the only Entropic Immortals with ties to the bridging realm of Undergrave, which itself was primarily accessed from the primary Entropic 'home realm' of Nillusbar where the Entropics tended to gather together and socialize, and Immortals of other Spheres would come to meet them occasionally. Delphax called his realm 'Doomgirt', which wasn't at all subtle.

He had a flair for things blowing up, and so his home Realm was festooned with the damned spirits of his supporters, servants, and victims, and a whole lot of volcanoes that were constantly erupting, filling the air with foul ash clouds and constant electrical storms of hate lightning and worse stuff. There was a volcano erupting somewhere on his main world all the time.

The world of Klau was shaped like a crescent, with the outside airless and uninhabited save by the occasional lost undead, and the inside arcs of it populated by said volcanoes, all of them visible from the great hundred-mile-high tower at the center of the word, looming above all and the whole of the world visible to the eye of the Immortal who dwelled within it. Sometimes the undead inhabiting his realm were driven to screaming battle against one another under Fiendish leaders.

Sometimes groveling sycophants played at spell battles under his eyes, and sometimes great blasts of fire assailed the winds and skies as Delphax constantly sought to prove his mastery over Fire and contempt of Air, twisting the essence of Air and corrupting it as much as he might here. Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.

It was a place clearly designed for someone violently insane and intensely narcissistic, and also easily distracted by his own brooding thoughts, regrets, and inability to regain what was his. That was fine. We were planning to put him out of his misery regardless. ============== Something else I'd like to put out of its misery... Novel Bind and other sites are scraping my stories (and others!) without permission again. If you're not reading (or hearing) this on Royal Road, you're helping pay a thief.

Please read it in its original home, it's still free! You get the foreword and afterword, author comments, and answers to people with questions! I have not given permission for this story to be copied by a bot and posted ANYWHERE ELSE. ============= Accessing the Plane using his own Truename was simplicity itself, as he hadn't truly sealed it, it was simply unknown to almost anyone save by the route from Undergrave.

Negative Plane Protection and Death Wards were required to survive, of course, but then it was simply a matter of finding something to do what we needed done, and to prepare it. Stone Shaping a wandering asteroid while shrouding it in Darkness spells was a very good way of doing that.

Delphax had never sponsored another Immortal, but he had plenty of souls he'd promoted to Fiends who served him in one manner or another, confident they'd be not a threat to him with their absolutely limited Immortal Power and inferior Stat lines. He could simply rip them apart and they'd be incorporeal and powerless until he created a new body for them, too, or they'd have to Possess some inferior Construct or mortal Shell, a fine punishment for a demon used to superhuman physical ability.

It was the Present, no longer the Past. We could and were making moves of our own, in many places and locations, and Time was perfectly happy to let us. There was a Pyramid underneath Delphax's little fetish of a coping mechanism (the Tower complete with launched spuming plumes of magma rain to unwholesome heights, indeed), and it had been there for nigh on three thousand years now, building power, sapping at his own invested Immortal Power (contributing to its nature as an Entropic Plane, right?).

It was waiting for this rock to come down and end him. Negative energy was a nice catalyst to what we were doing: Shaping this stone, empowering it, moving it into position, and getting it ready to move exactly where it needed to go and when it needed to get there. The fusion engines attached to the rear of it didn't use magic and definitely couldn't be sensed by magical senses this far out. They were going to be very useful when it came time and we turned on the inertial dampeners to deliver this thing.

Sims. A Clone. Eternal Avatar. All operating off of Nown, all of them unaffected by this No Magic crap going on… an event that was drawing tons and tons of Immortal attention, and so proving to be a massively effective diversion allowing me to get things into place and get other things done as Immortal attention focused on all the very interesting things going on.

There was an explosion of faction politics as the free-wheeling and independent Immortals pulled their disruptive shenanigans on the organized dominant magic-is-all faction… and Entropics played both sides and contributed to the continuous violence and all the fun that it entailed. But I had four thousand years of history I could walk through, play with, and use to prepare for them. Multiple times over, if I was acting off of Nown.

Time only let me do so much stuff, but prepping unseen and slyly on the side for moments thousands of years in the future? That was totally permissible. Tek was helping, of course, providing an excuse for teams to be out in the Astral Plane, mostly going to dimensions over-run by protean life-forms and needing to be cleared out to sustain normal life, generating easy Karma and Immortal Power for doing so.

Most Immortals did this duty at one time or another, but as Immortal Projects flowered and grew, they gained their IP from other sources and left it to the younger Immortals who needed to grow and sustain themselves somehow. That didn't actually help much thousands of years in the past, except for discovering the ways there in the present and funneling the knowledge back into the past proved very useful.

Those teams in the past could then divert to other Realms and Planes to explore, discover interesting things, and then start making surprises there. Just ants digging around in the dirt, rapidly gone from sight and mind and not worried about. There were a lot of grudges to be settled, all put into place in the past, and well, they certainly weren't expecting a time traveler to come back and start judging them for the things they'd done wrong. I had plans.

They were violent plans, they were angry plans, they were very self-righteous plans, very judgmental plans. I was still going to pull them off, because there was nobody else on this side of the Timestream who could do so. If that required me acting like a god all high-and-mighty, even if everything I was doing did not directly benefit me that much at all… I was still going to do it. And if everything was pulled off correctly, maybe I wouldn't ever have to do so again.

I looked up at the sky, the moon not visible right now, and thought about that Immortal City of Nexial there, looking down at us, making judgments on what mortals were and were not allowed to become, tourists and zookeepers and scientists looking at their entertaining monkeys in a cage and deciding the Next Big Thing to hit us. Delpha wouldn't even be here if it wasn't for Immortals leading them to this world.

That was both good and bad, but the introduction of an Overmagus-heavy civilization that no native force could possibly match (except maybe Sythia, and we all knew how that turned out) had skewed the entire paradigm of the world in a direction dominated by high magery and a people who were not even of this world. Huh. Humanity might not be native to this world, and elves and dwarves and what-not were all created races.

Be it Immortal experiments and creations or genetic puffery from an advanced civilization changed by magic, there were probably almost no creatures here native to this world at all. Might not have had any native intelligent races at all, originally. I shouldn't be mad at the Delphans for being successful and coming here to start anew. I just loathed the idea of a magocracy, only spellcasters being fit to rule, as anathema to everything.

Spellcasting sure might help, but just being Powered didn't mean you were ultimately the best at anything… and certainly not at understanding those without Power!