Chương 156

-0-0-0-0-0- The Creator, Atlantis, The Kalenic Sea -0-0-0-0-0- It only took a couple of days for Mr Losat to judge the island satisfactory. With the Crusade's launching date a week away, I was happy to begin ferrying the innocent inhabitants of Atlantis to the Eleventh. The process went fairly smoothly, in the end.

I was aware of where almost everyone still on the island was, and I had Children approach them with the teleport stones: one-way, Single-use enchanted stones that would teleport any living creature, and the things they were carrying and/or wearing, to a predetermined location. In a little over a day, the surface island was empty. No one ended up staying on the surface, despite my doubts, and while the humans settled in, I made my final preparations for the second invasion of Atlantis.

Firstly, the final wave of evacuations went into effect. Mushu and his group of Kobold Warriors and Shamans began the trek downwards while the last remaining Children on the Sixth, Seventh, Eighth and Ninth were quietly shuffled down to the Eleventh and Twelfth. Except for the suicidal hermit on the Eighth, she was still meditating near the Second Peak. All that remained in the upper dungeon were non-intelligent monsters: vicious Rats, fanatic Crabs, murderous seagulls, and, of course, the manabeings.

On the surface, I had a real predicament. How the fuck did I poison a river? There were the standard ways, of course; routing it through a chamber of festering corpses or feces. I could add a Life mana enchantment that would taint the water, through that might be easily countered... Necromancy, though... No. I'd already tempted fate by having Huea raise that spy into a new Death Knight. I'd go with the life mana enchantment; that was safer.

My first idea was to use life mana to enhance the bacteria and viruses already in the water, but that could have drastic consequences beyond just this battle; the bacteria and other enhanced microfauna would make their way to the ocean, and could spread beyond my ability to contain, throwing the entire world into pandemic after pandemic. In the end, as bad as it was, I had feces, rotting corpses and refuse of all the fully corporeal beings on my lower floors collected, then transported to the surface.

While that was on its way, I brought my sea monsters to the surface ocean. My new Mature Sea Serpent was much larger than the last one; Jormanganr the Second was tougher, smarter, and faster than his predecessor. The Mature Leviathan Matriarch was enormous; easily capable of swallowing an entire ship-of-the-line whole. The Mature Kracken was much closer to what I remembered from that pirate movie with Jack Sparrow, I forgot which one.

The biodiversity in the ocean around Atlantis was absolutely flourishing, which made it really easy to flood a selection of the largest and most dangerous fish with mana, creating a few dozen new mana mutants, large enough to eat a human. Why? Well, I was planning on sinking a few ships. I needed a method to clean up everyone who fell overboard. By the time I was done with that, the cartload of feces and corpses had reached the third floor.

A long time ago, when I'd made the Third and the river that ran through it, I had to deal with the water somehow. I decided to let it run through a pressurised pipe that filtered it as it shot up to the surface, ending in a spring that fed a stream to the coast, splitting Obsidian Beach. After changing the enchantments to no longer purify the water, I dumped all that disease-causing, toxic waste into the small chamber at the base of that pipe.

The water entered the room at an angle and swirled around the edges in a reverse-whirlpool, slowly being sucked inwards and upwards. Now, the water ran through grates of stone contaminated with the waste. Absolutely disgusting biowarfare, and easily cleaned later on. Doing all that had taken a few more days, and when I was done, there were only three days left until the crusade launched.

-0-0-0-0-0- Alantis II, The Eleventh Floor, The Dungeon -0-0-0-0-0- In the morning sunlight, Tamesou Akio stood upon the sand of Obsidian Beach and looked out into the ocean, his eyes narrowed. He stared as if just by willing it, he could see past the veil of Illusion to see the floor beyond. He felt Ama pulse a reassurance at him, though it was vague. She didn't understand his concern and interest, and that was okay. Waves crashed before him, rushing up the sand and swirling around Akio's bare feet.

Out there, beyond the wards and illusions that protected the island, was the Eleventh Floor of the dungeon. A place none of them had even gotten close to reaching. Akio and his party hadn't even made it through the Souls-like castle, let alone the entire five floors between there and here. Sensei Haythem and the platinums he normally delved with had apparently reached the Tenth, though Akio'd been told even the village there, Minos Village, had been evacuated.

The entire sentient population of the dungeon was concentrated on the Eleventh and Twelfth. And yet, it was beyond his reach. The Creator had promised that they'd be allowed to participate in its defence, but...

"Yo. You alright there, Akio?" Akio startled at the sudden voice- Bruce, approaching from the town.

"I'm fine. Just a little... Listless," Akio admitted. Bruce walked up beside him, letting the ocean's waves rush in and engulf his feet. They stood in silence for a minute, listening to the cawing of the gulls and the crash of the surf.

"Hard to believe we're in the dungeon at all, ay?" Bruce commented, waving a hand out at the ocean.

"The island, the surf... even the tides are about right. The sun's a little wonky, but that's understandable. And don't get me wrong, it's nice seeing the Milky Way again, even if the stars aren't quite right." Akio nodded. He understood what Bruce was doing.

"How are Elize and Sophie?" Akio asked, turning his head to look at the Aussie boy.

"I know I left before the rest of you woke up." Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

"They're fine," Bruce waved him off.

"They're big girls. They ran off to beg training from the platinums almost as soon as they'd finished breakfast." Akio snorted softly.

"Speaking of training. How is your cultivation coming along, Young Master Bruce?" Akio smirked, getting an eye roll in return.

"It goes," Bruce commented, a little offhandedly.

"I'm cycling my water mana almost constantly, now, and I have actually noticed some improvement. My spells are quicker to cast and more powerful." Akio's eyes widened. Bruce's method was... actually working?

"So, what, your meridians are wider, and your Qi flows faster?" Akio snarked. Bruce snorted, shaking his head.

"Really, though, that's incredible. I might have to start copying you, if it's that effective."

"Go right ahead," Bruce said, pointing his chin.

"I'd be interested to see how it works for you. You said casting spells for you is like programming, right? Should just take a for loop, right?"

"Oh ha, ha," Akio replied, turning and walking back up the black sand beach. His eyes drifted right, to the cliff and the lighthouse atop it. The only discernible difference between this fake Atlantis and the real one was that the dungeon's entrance wasn't there. It was... odd. Together, the two boys walked into town, past the guild hall and over the bridge. The gates were unguarded, and the town was mostly empty, as expected. The only movement was down by the docks and a portion of the market square.

"It's like a ghost town," Bruce commented, looking around at the dark, empty homes.

"I wonder if any of the children will move in, if the crusaders reach this deep?"

"It would make sense," Akio said, his eyes drifting to the upper floors and their shuttered windows.

"They could hide here, totally safe. If they evacuate to the Twelvth... they wouldn't have anywhere to go after that." They reached the part of town that was actually inhabited a few minutes later. There was a ship in port, crewed by humanoid crabs, drake-kin and a few other humanoid monsters. They were unloading crates of food, supporting the town until their farms were productive again. A few streets away was the area the guilders had moved into, centred around an empty square. Well, it wasn't empty anymore.

Dozens of guilders milled around the edge of the square or trained against each other. In one corner, Akio spotted Sophie and Elize training. Sensei Haythem was nearby, making comments on Sophie's form as she brutalised a training dummy. A few more of the Platinums were hanging around, though one had his nose in a book.

"Where were you this morning?" Sophie asked as they approached, lowering her shortswords. The wooden post she'd been striking was littered with cuts, some almost bisecting the log entirely.

"I went to the beach," Akio answered, before nodding at Haythem and Beatram. Elize was at the small open-air clinic nearby, listening intently to a healer as the woman healed a laceration.

"Needed to be alone for a bit. Get my head on straight, you know?"

"I suppose," Sophie nodded.

"This has all been... so weird, ya know?"

"Oh, yeah. Anyway, want a duel?" Akio asked, pulling Ama from her mounting point on his back and drawing his sword. Sophie's eyes glittered as she raised her own shortswords.

"Took the words right out of my mouth," Sophie answered, grinning as Bruce stood to the side, ready to officiate.

"En Garde!" -0-0-0-0-0- The Creator, Atlantis, The Kalenic Sea -0-0-0-0-0- I cannot overstate how much more I got done in the few days before the crusade launched than I had before my transformation. Being able to focus on multiple things at once was a game-changer, and even though the Hyperbolic Time Chamber wasn't complete yet, all the mini-experiments with Time magic had done plenty to test its limits. The first limit was that Time magic could only slow or speed up the passage of time.

Any spell or enchantment cast with the intent to reverse time, or make it flow backwards, sputtered out. To my manasenses, this looked more like an artificial limit than a natural one. As such, it could only have been put into place by the personification of Time. As for why? I could only speculate, but preventing paradoxes and stopping anyone from messing with the timestream was as good a guess as any. Beyond that, there were also limits to the scaling of Time spells, as there was with many other mana types.

In most cases, the more mana pumped into the spell, the larger the effect. This, however, wasn't exponential; it was closer to Logarithmic. After a point, pumping more mana into the spell started providing less and less benefit, until the power increase was negligible. This made sense when you saw the effects of such a spell. For example, there were only two differences between the Slow Time spell and the Time Stop spell. Slow Time was relatively cheap and made anyone struck by it slowed.

To them, it seemed as if everything around them was suddenly moving much faster. Time stop was an AOE spell that made anyone within the bubble experience time so slowly that to others it seemed as if they weren't moving at all. If you pumped more mana into Slow Time, the target would become slower, eventually reaching the same level as the Time Stop spell. Haste, named after a spell I remembered from Dnd, sped up the caster/target. The world slowed around them; they could move, react and attack faster.

If one party in a duel was buffed with Haste, and the other debuffed with Slow Time, to the slowed fighter, the buffed fighter would practically teleport around. OP as fuck, to be sure. Of course, these spells could also be implemented into traps or programmed only to affect certain materials. Modified from the Haste spell, Rust and Decay caused any non-living material, inorganic and organic, respectively, to decompose incredibly fast.

Weapons and armour would rapidly deteriorate, or their food would spoil, by just passing through an otherwise empty hallway. The Wither spell did the same for living beings, though I reserved that for only the worst offenders. Though very expensive to cast, these spells were game changers and found their way into traps throughout the dungeon, though with only one or two per floor. As for larger-scale effects... Here, as the area affected by the spell became larger, the cost grew exponentially.

This, notably, applied to the internal area, not the dimensions of the spell. My dream of speedrunning civilisation on the Twelvfth was, in the end, dashed. I moped for a bit, but moved on. I had too much to do. Another part of me was running through the dungeon, making adjustments to the terrain, monsters, traps and a dozen other things. Yet another part monitored the guilders and humans on the Eleventh, while my avatar was spending time with Cadmus, Wave and Taura.

The female wyvern was due to lay her eggs any day now, so they were looking for a good cave to settle down in. I ended up making a lovely abode for them in the middle of the mountains, in a verdant valley with a lake. They had food, water, peace and privacy. The high mountains meant it'd be practically impossible for anyone else to get in there without flying, and it wasn't exactly obvious. There were a dozen such valleys spread throughout the mountains. It was the perfect place for them to raise their family.

The rest of my attention was spread throughout the Eleventh and Twelfth, watching my Children spread throughout the floor and build homes for themselves. There were two well-traveled paths through the forest, now. One led north, to the Drake-kin's town and the prehistoric jungle, while the other led east to the plains and the desert beyond it. The Scorpan's most advanced scouts has just reached the volcano, and the ruined city at it's base. -0-0-0-0-0-