Chương 228: Chapter 301 - Disruption

Mirian didn't particularly like tricking people, but she didn't precisely have time to figure out exactly how Gabriel had lied to the population and then find a way to slowly and respectfully convince them to change their minds, complete with a presentation of evidence. Instead, she relied on her understanding of how the shape of history unfolded. People liked a good, flashy show. They also responded to demonstrations of power.

She approached Urubandar under total camouflage and her anti-divination shields to prepare. Liuan, with access to a lot more advanced artificers in Akana would be adjusting her divination engines to detect Mirian, but she doubted Gabriel could have spared the time yet, especially given the resources he had committed to that Labyrinth expedition and his army movements. Once overhead, she surveyed the city, carefully sending out probing divination spells to look for ambushes.

The city was being prepared for war, and artillery was already set up in locations outside the city. One of the palaces had the marks of fire, and one of its dome roofs was caved in. That told her which prince Gabriel had killed. She moved lower, swooping by the Chamber of Guilds where powerful merchants met about policy. It was empty, with several guards standing outside the building. She moved past several large Isheer Sanctuaries in the center of the city. More guards.

On the look out for blasphemy, she presumed. That was a foolish move; Gabriel had sought to discipline the merchants and rectors in order to favor the princes and elites. It was characteristic of his typical focus on the top of a hierarchy. Several hospitals and sanctuaries were still full of injured people; from the wounds, and from damage around the city, she knew there'd been riots that Gabriel's forces suppressed. It was sloppy, and it meant Gabriel's control over the city was weak.

That told her he'd gone into hiding, or else he'd never have even seen the riots with his hand directly on the rudder of the city. By now, she already knew what he'd done. They'd rehearsed dealing with rebellions and crises enough, and Gabriel favored four of the princes. Two were dead already, their hearts and brain stems cut open by her trick with relicarium, and he'd clearly killed a fifth he didn't favor, which meant there were two left he'd recruited.

She confirmed that when she saw government officials meeting in those palaces in a flurry of activity. That was all she needed. Mirian returned to her place high above the city. As she did, she levitated two large chunks of debris from the burnt palace up, masking them with total camouflage too. Then, she used her glyphs to create a deep rumbling sound across the city. That got people's attention. Some thought it might be an earthquake, others, an attack. Many people in buildings came out to check.

People in the streets crowded around and looked for the source. She used her light glyphs to weave a grand illusion in the sky. A thousand motes of light bloomed all over the sky about Urubandar. People gaped and pointed as the motes brightened, then began to float together. As she brought the lights together, she intensified them until they had coalesced around a single point. Then she dismissed her total camouflage and led the light energy around her fade.

There were more gasps and pointing from below as people spotted her high in the sky. Then she cast light of the Prophet. A huge illusionary representation of the Ominian appeared behind her.

"Urubandar!" she called, using amplify sound.

"A false prophet has fed you lies to terrify you into obedience to his whims. But Gabriel Arjen has usurped what power he has. He might use other names and deceitful illusions. He will spin frightful lies and tempt you with false promises. But he is an Akanan spy. A traitor to all of Persama. And a perpetrator of the Mahatan massacre. The blood of children is on his hands." She let those words echo across the city. She could see the Royal Guild gathering their mages.

At the edge of the city, the soldiers were debating on whether or not they should turn their artillery towards the sky.

"I am Mirian Nezzar, true Chosen of the Ominian. I seek to stop a great cataclysm from befalling all of Enteria. I seek not to stay here. In truth, I cannot; there are too many people to bring together, and Akana is already slaughtering the people of Baracuel. A thousand places need my aid, and I am but one." The Royal Guild battlemages were in formation. At least one of the artillery units was turning their gun in her direction. She had moments left to speak freely.

"Therefore, I speak to you candidly. Persama deserves liberation. But your liberation will not come from your oppressors. You must rise up and seize your own destiny. You must not tolerate the grip of tyrants, nor must you let fear rule your hearts. Soldiers and guards! Do you serve a master, or do you serve your family and people? Does the true Prophet of God command obedience—or enlightenment?" Battlemages, armed with levitation wands, started ascending towards her.

"DIVITRIUS! Your servant asks for your sign!" Mirian shouted to the sky. Behind her, the illusion of the Ominian stirred. And Mirian cast meteor. It was a spell designed not for efficiency, but for awe. It used a combination of force glyphs and gravity glyphs to drastically accelerate an object—in this case, the two large chunks of stone that she'd dragged up from the ground, still invisible.

Like her levitation spell, meteor used a shaped cone of force to help the targeted projectile cut through the air even faster. Below, it would look like two streaks of fire had descended from the heavens, from just behind the Ominian. They smashed into the two palaces Gabriel had commandeered for his government. The spell hit the buildings with more force than an Akanan battleship's main gun. The stone palaces erupted as stone shattered, and pieces of their domes and walls were flung thousands of feet.

The ground trembled with the strikes. The battlemages that had been rising to confront her paused their ascent in shock.

"Urubandar, I bless you," Mirian said, and then dismissed the illusion spell as she cast illusionary luminous smoke and total camouflage. The Royal Guild mages surrounded the area she'd just been in, casting divination and light spells to try and find her, but she was already moving away. She plunged down into the city, gathering soul energy from her repositories. As she flew invisibly through the city, she paused at the hospitals and sanctuaries she'd scouted out.

Quickly, she flooded the wounds of those there with soul energy. It was rough work that used minimal runes, but as she passed, deep cuts grew over, broken bones knit back together, and fevers came down. It was nothing that an Isheer healer couldn't do, but it would be the quantity and speed of the healing that would impress them; to a city full of exhausted healers and thousands of wounded from the street fighting that had occurred a few days ago, it might appear a miracle.

Within a half hour, her work was done, and she flew east along the Setarab River. Again, she knew the shape of rumors without having to hear them. To those she left behind, the tale would evolve and twist. People would only remember that a great healing took place after her speech in the sky; what had occurred over time might be retold as something that had happened all at once, magnifying the miracle. Rumors might circulate that the Prophet could teleport.

Her blessing of so many wounded would be hard to reconcile with whatever lies Gabriel had told about her. As would the next thing she planned to do. Soldiers could be cruel. They could commit atrocities. But it was the leadership that had sicced them on the innocent. She'd had no mercy on the princes, but she'd have mercy on the would-be-killers they'd sought to manipulate. Battle wands, rifles, artillery, and kinetic engines used to move barges and carts all used common glyphs. She knew them well.

Her first forays into destroying key glyphs were in freeing Arenthia from execution and disabling detection schemes in banks she was defrauding, inspired by the broken glyph sequence in the train from Torrviol. She had shaped a specific spell that used the same philosophy to target armies: destroy weapon. Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.

Artillery and engines had basic ward schemes to make messing with their glyphs difficult, and as the spell engines burned fossilized myrvite, the toxic mana exuded also provided some degree of spell resistance. Wands, carried on a person, were well within the aura of a given wielder, and therefore generally not a good target. Wands, guns, and spellbooks were also far more replaceable than people, and the effort in killing a soldier and destroying their wand was about the same; armies therefore preferred the former.

Mirian preferred that as many people as possible might live. She swept up the Setarab River, using tiny threads of soul energy to pierce what resistance she needed to, targeting the dozens of key glyphs the wands, guns, and kinetic engines needed to function. The spell reached out, melting the glyphs, causing thousands of small but harmless fires.

As the crackle and hiss of breaking glyphs swept through the ranks of the marching soldiers along the bank of the river, they started breaking into combat squads, searching around wildly for the source of the attack, or diving for cover. Panic moved down the line. Mages cast wild divination spells in every direction, but even if they'd been able to bypass her anti-divination shield, the amount of mythril and adamantium she was wearing was enough to shield her glyphs even further.

She kept a steady pace as she flew, using the repulsion effect of the Elder artifacts on her back to keep herself aloft more than the anti-gravity levitation glyphs. Below her, the spell barges had lost power and were now getting carried by the current down river as the crews all shouted and gestured. One massive barge loaded with artillery smashed into another that was loaded with supplies. Water sloshed about the decks, and crews armed with buckets started working feverishly to bail out the water.

As the giant barges continued to drift uncontrolled, the chaos would continue to spread downriver. Mirian continued, dashing forward with supreme levitation to bring herself close to another marching division. When she'd broken most of the weapons along the river for several miles, she at last stopped. Even her auric mana had its limits. She'd sped to multiple Labyrinth Vaults, drained most of her stored soul energy, then pulled this stunt.

She needed to keep enough mana in reserve to deal with a significant attack. That, and she still had plenty of tasks to take care of. With her father tied up in Ibrahim's camp, she'd need to check on the patrols on the routes to Mayat Shadr, harvest soul energy from the nearby myrvite populations, and she'd need to teach the priests more of the soul magic they'd need. Mirian had told the truth to Urubandar; until this was over, she'd hardly have time to rest. There was simply too much to be done.

She dismissed her invisibility and let her mana flow into supreme levitation, shooting eastward towards Mayat Shadr, that great ruined city of the long-gone Triarchy. It was too bad. Several major possibilities now branched out for Urubandar: One was that people would take to the streets, and that the guards, realizing they didn't want to kill their own people, would support them.

With the nearest army units largely disarmed and the oligarchs Mirian had just killed no longer there to direct them, with both Baracuel and Akanan navies held back by either each other or the patrolling pod of leviathans Mirian had recruited, the power vacuum might let Urubandar establish a new, popular government. Two was that they'd take to the streets and the guards and soldiers would fight them. The fighting might die down quickly as the population was cowed, or it might turn long and bloody.

Either way, the resulting government would be less stable and more centralized, relying far more on force of arms than trust. Three was that no one took to the streets, already afraid of what might happen. Gabriel's intimidation campaigns were effective, and depending on what exactly he'd done, this could very well be the case even in his absence. New oligarchs, likely pulled from the minor nobility or the rich merchants, would take the places of the princes.

They might promise a return to order, or they might promise great change, but either way, the government would fundamentally stay the same. Those that resisted would be driven underground, small and disparate groups that might cut at the government, but that would not overthrow it. There were layers to each scenario. Perhaps a religious cult would be founded in Mirian's name. Perhaps some districts would rebel while others stayed quiet. She'd seen it all play out before.

If she was there, she could have helped steer events. Saved lives. It wasn't to be. If Gabriel was hiding nearby, or even if he was far but using zephyr falcons to relay messages, he would push events towards that third possibility. For the thousandth time, she mourned what could have been. If humanity could stop fighting wars, imagine the beauty and joy they could build. How could one live a lifetime and still lack wisdom? Her head knew, but her heart still didn't understand. She continued flying east.

The days flowed like water, and Mirian did her best to take time to rest. She needed time to replenish her aura. Through her soul ascension, she could even accumulate soul energy from fragments around her if she just had time. But after so many decades of having it in abundance, now it was in short supply. When she'd arrived at the leyline regulator, it had been behind schedule.

The major trenches where the six giant conduit crystals would go hadn't been completed, and the nagual were still working on growing the first round of myrvite plants that would help prepare the soil for the next round of plants needed to weave together the energy dispersal spirit-construct. Bandits and disagreements were causing delays in moving fossilized myrvite mining teams away from their quarries and to Mayat Shadr. There were delays on rune production. There were delays on the modular glyph artifice.

She had worked feverishly to bring things up to speed until Zhuan had arrived from the Zhighuan route and forced her to sleep. Then there were patrols to establish, myrvites to cull for soul energy, and her own artifice she needed to work on. Down in Persama, Gabriel's forces along the Setarab River had withdrawn, but she'd received no word from Urubandar. Alatishad was still wracked by strife, but her people in Mahatan were secure. North in Baracuel, the Rift Sea was quiet.

Her people reported sighting dozens of leviathan spines along the coast, and scouts using levitation and lens spells put Akana's navy as still tightly holding to its ports. Ibrahim was besieging Florin City. Other than that, the war was quiet. Everyone was preparing. In the moments she could snatch from directing the project and organizing the chaos, Mirian worked on her next major project: her gift for Ceiba Yan. For the first part of the device, she used her workshop in Alkazaria.

Working on Equinox had given her a good idea of the productive forces of the second capital, and so the five-ton artifact was being built in record time. The device integrated most of the lessons she'd learned on Enteria, and before the loop had started, she and all her professors in the Academy would have said it was impossible for six different reasons.

The base architecture was glyphwork, but the device used several nodes of tri-bonded glyphs—the first impossible thing—to allow the perfect melding of glyphs and runes—the second impossible thing. The device used dozens of parallel conduits to allow the manipulation of large amounts of mana, taking advantage of the advanced crystals she'd developed for her armor.

Atop this base, Mirian had created her own miniature econode, using hundreds of glyphs and runes to regulate conditions inside and interface with the life growing there. This accounted for two tons of the weight. In it, she'd created a habitat allowing for Gaius's ebonbloom lotuses to grow. Using that, the device could actually absorb the kind of toxic mana that fossilized myrvite produced—a third impossible thing.

Another habitat, this one only weighing one ton, contained other myrvites that could deal with the low grade mana, the kind most organisms found deadly. Together, the ebonbloom lotuses and the other myrvites were woven together into a spirit-construct—the fourth impossible thing—allowing for almost any type of mana to be siphoned by the device, including leyline energy, which had also been thought impossible.

The spirit constructs also allowed compatible organisms to merge their auras, which is what allowed Ceiba Yan to draw mana from the device as it was procured. That brought the total number of world-altering magitech principles she was using to six. From Xipuatl's first critique of Baracueli magical knowledge in a last-minute study session, she'd eventually arrived at this.

The device wasn't just for helping Ceiba Yan touch and regulate the leylines; it also assisted the giant tree in regulating and manipulating energy, allowing it to balance forces and transmute energy with greater ease. She also had a special addition to the device from her expeditions to the Labyrinth: the same Elder artifact that let her father's ring link with Meu at a distance. Hopefully, it would be unnecessary. She delivered this part of the device to Ceiba Yan through the Elder Gate.

By then, the Sacred Tree's roots had made their way down into the deep soil and surrounded the Gate, walling up the shaft they'd dug to reach it. Right now, the tree was in the process of growing to touch the Labyrinth itself. For the second part of the device, Mirian moved back to Mayat Shadr, working on that portion as she oversaw more of the construction, installing the control-conduits and glyphic framework within the center of the device where the six conduit crystals would meet.

The leyline regulator could work on its own; this contingency existed because it would be foolish to simply assume nothing would go wrong and no redundancy was needed. Two layers of redundancy were already built into the device; this would be the third layer. Mirian would be the fourth. It was about a month from when she'd left Urubandar that Mirian received the message via zephyr falcon: An Akanan attack was on its way. The message was dated from a week prior, sent by Idras.

In the next hour, three more messages came in, relayed from observation posts along the coast, confirming the movement. She met Zhuan. From one of the reconstructed ruins, they looked over the leyline regulator and the thousands of people hard at work.

"I think this is the last reprieve I'll get until the end," she said. Zhuan nodded.

"Do your part. I'll do mine. It will be complete."

"I know," Mirian said. Their hands linked, and squeezed together. They needed to share no more words; they had traveled together for too long not to understand all the meaning that came from that touch. Then Mirian departed, flying west with the wind.