The Flowing Silver Emperor’s Tails twitched incessantly as I finished, considering all that as I watched the mistfires digging out the corruption in the soil and returning it all to the Land.

“Pawns, each important in our own way, each just small things on the scale of events being played,” the great Fox murmured, lifting His noble, slender head and turning it towards the lands beyond, still infected with Dark Magic in the air. “How appropriate. So few are concerned with matters beyond their own lands, including even I. If it were not my lands being so threatened, I would not consider this the great threat it obviously is. The Emperors beyond these borders are reluctant to aid us at best, at least without the direct command of the Lord of Beasts.”

I noted even He said that Title humbly. “This one sees short-sightedness is not limited to Humans, then. This one would laugh, were it not so sad, Your Imperial Majesty.”

“Indeed, it is but our way. Our lands are our territory, our Tribes and vassals and enough space to sustain them all. We do not desire more than we need, nor care much about that beyond our lands. Even as our servants do not look beyond the lands upon which they dwell, we look to the Lord of Beasts for matters beyond our lands, and do not concern ourselves otherwise.”

“Ignorance is both bliss, and a great weakness to be exploited. The Dark Realms is using it against the Realm, but for some reason the Realm Lord is not taking greater action.”

His regal head shifted slightly. “You suggest He is being constrained, Human Fae?” He asked sharply.

“This Breach was made in this Plane despite His resistance. It means His foe is powerful, Your Imperial Majesty. This one has a question, however... is there more than one Beast Lord, and is there more than one Dark Lord?”

He inhaled deeply, plainly not having dwelled on the question before. “The Corrupted have spoken of their new masters in fear and awe of their power. It is believed there are at least four Lords of the Dark Realm, and but one Lord of Beasts...”

The implications were obvious. “He is being restrained by the threat of other Dark Lords also moving on this matter,” I judged softly. “And so the battle plays out between their underlings.

“It is the difference between an aggressive Realm, and one content, Your Imperial Majesty. The Dark Realm plainly has the power to sustain more than one Planar Lord, and they seek to grow stronger yet, even if they might be rivals as much as allies to one another, such as His Majesty is with His own neighbors. It is the game of territories, except it is between Planar Lords who wish to become more, and those who are satisfied with their purview.”

Indeed, the Beast Lord might not have been aware that He could be invaded by other Realms at all!...

The kingly Fox’s jaws parted, teeth longer than I was tall gleaming like ivory diamonds. “A great thirst for power, never outgrown. It explains much...”

“Well, it is time to punish the mindset, and make him pay. With Your Imperial Majesty’s permission, this one would like to take up a position as advisor and servant, to push this process forward, and set up a means that it may be sustained without this one’s presence, at Your Grace.”

He stared below, and slowly His long and slender muzzle dipped once. “Let it be so.”

Quest to enter the service of Flowing Silver Emperor completed!, I thought to myself, ruminating over how to arrange the events that were coming up both to benefit myself and get the ball rolling here.

Doubtless He had servants with powerful Earth Magic who could gather up basic materials, and Fire users who could smelt the stuff.

I doubted I would have problems getting the bone or ivory for a proper Staff in a land filled with Magical Beasts. My priorities were in getting and keeping the Naming Karma going, and a positive Karma flow. With at least some guarantee of safety hovering over me, that shouldn’t be all that hard to do.

------

Testing out the vivus, and furthermore giving me an even bigger audience of His Noble and higher-ranked Vassals, the Emperor brought me to another valley. It did not have nearly as many carcasses, but it was deeply stained with the blood of Shades and other things, and had seen some recent combat.

I set the carcasses there on vivus, and the Wind-users worked slowly on fanning them, expanding the flames. They encompassed first the near-end of the valley, then walked them down and onward. Beasts of Ice and Earth, Fire and Water, Light and Lightning were gathered around us as the vivus advanced, stepping through swirls of mistfire, sniffing at it alertly, and watching with great interest as it did its thing.

The hidden Shades in the area didn’t get far before they died, streaming from the shadows, stepping out of folds in space they couldn’t keep intact under the rapidly hardening Veil here before finding themselves before literally hundreds of Beasts, none below Commander-rank. They tended to die most explosively, bodies scattering, and just to be on the safe side I quickly pummeled their remains with volleys of burning Shards.

Got me a nice haul of Soul Crystals of various sizes, too.

The vivus was billowing up waist-high on the ground from where I was riding my Disk next to the Emperor, as high as I could ever remember seeing it burn. Great Beasts of all kinds were wading, slithering, even hopping through it with great interest and herding it onward, their eyes occasionally drifting to me as I ignited new sources of it.

---

Dawn rose, and even the Beasts paused as the light came across the land, penetrating further than it had in recent memory as streams of vivus sparkled here and there in the air, drawing down and devouring the Elements of Darkness.

I silently Saluted Aru, reckoning His influence would be welcomed here and now by the Beasts themselves, if not by their Lord.

I also felt my Stars surge, and knew I’d just hit Human/5, maxing out the Novice Levels. Suddenly I could feel a definite pressure around the Stardust that contained my Matrix and Stars, as if the existence of the world around me was weighing down on my magic and my soul.

Really, really weighing down, as if it was truly forbidding me to grow any further in that direction.

I’d been told that breakthroughs for Humans could be painful and momentous affairs, especially the first one, which would determine their destiny for the rest of their lives. Failing the first attempt made it increasingly unlikely to succeed in future attempts.

I was pretty sure it was the Mana of the world around me that was suppressing me breaking through here. It simply wasn’t designed to accommodate the Magery magic of Humanity, likely deliberately so, and so was actively lined up against me breaking through.

Fair enough. I didn’t really care if the Rules were different here, because it didn’t seem to have restricted my Matrix the same way. It was probably because my Matrix didn’t deal with the massive quantities of energy the Stars seemed to represent, and was much more about finer control and regulation of more limited energy supplies.

On the other hand, I had more Health than your average grizzly at this point. My body was magically reinforced and as durable as oak, capable of taking a lot more punishment than the flesh and blood of normal people. Aelryinth had needed a lot more investment to get this much Health, and I still had some ways to go. No Heart of the Dragon as yet...

I waffled about what Class Level to take, and ultimately settled on Mystic Theurgy/1, as I wanted all three lines of Arcane, Eldritch, and Divine Magic working together seamlessly. Being able to recharge Cure or Healing spells without limit was hugely valuable, better even than a Healing Reserve... although I’d be taking that, too, eventually.

My effective base Caster Level was Six - three from Warlock and three from Human - while my Character Level was Five, from my Human Levels.

I wondered if I was breaking some rule by being able to have more than two Caster Levels as a Human/5. After all, I should be limited to a Caster/2, if the Human Rules I had learned of from that Sending were appropriate...

I also began the process of figuring out the Startrails for as many Spheres of Magic as I could. That actually wasn’t too hard, as all I had to do was accompany a different Beast who used the Element, and ask them to display the most basic power to me for a time. It took less than an hour each to run through all the various attunements for the ‘Novice Spells’ for a dozen different Spheres, which I had to admit was pretty cool on the face of it.

Among the key things I gained was the use of the Telekinesis spell for Void Magic, which had much greater range and power than the equivalent from Valences, almost sickeningly so. Another was the zone-chilling effect of the Ice Magic, which let me Snowcast at full strength, always a win.

For the moment, I couldn’t actually Craft anything, so there was only to get stronger and gather resources. Basically, everything was going to happen when I could Cast my III’s, and then things were going to simply explode.

The Beasts didn’t mind collecting the Soul Crystals that fell from the Shades and Tainted things they killed and burned, even if they stacked up and I couldn’t use them all.

I wasn’t going to have the Emperor’s ear and eye all the time, of course. He delegated taking care of me to a Great Commander-ranked Silver Fox named Winkle, a six-tailed Grandson of His, who got over his annoyance at having to play guard to a very weak Human after seeing all the stuff I could do.

Among other things, Winkle showed me how to create a personal Pocket Space for storing stuff. This was nominally akin to just a cubic Hammerspace effect that everyone absolutely stayed away from on Terra-Luna, but I immediately made the leap of its similarity to a Sanctum Sanctorum, and I definitely had the Will to make an impressively large space.

Void, Psychic, Chaos, and Sound Magic all ran off of Will instead of the number of Stars; the Stars just determined the breadth of the possible effect and the amount of raw energy one could put into the spells. Learning the spells was thus possible well before I got to a higher form of magic, and Winkle watched in astonishment as I very smoothly ran up the Void Magic displays of spells he made with the familiarity of old friends come to play. I was soon Casting Mage-tier Void Magic spells without much difficulty or even much Mana usage, although their effectiveness, range, and area of effect outside myself was duly limited.

He was really impressed by how far I could Jaunt and how easily, despite still being a Novice mage. But I had silver eyes, the sign of a Void Mage, so in the end he could only be impressed at the learning ability of a Human.

Taking Mystic Theurge on Day Five would normally have been a sign to attempt the whole Dawnstopped Spell/Divine Metamagic Feat synergy, so I could get a day-long Buff. However, with all the instant recharges available, I only had to tie off the spells to renew themselves if I wasn’t Casting something else, and I effectively had what defenses I could Cast up constantly if I needed them to be.

Thus, to my amusement, the broken ability of getting a powerful day-long Buff spell up all the time was simply not of as much priority, at least until I got Shape Stone.

The Feat and Mastery I took for Mystic Theurge were Imbued Healing and the second Holy Meta, Sacred Spell. The Racial Feat I took was Arcane Toughness.

Imbued Healing was a quasi-Reserve effect that enhanced Healing spells based on which other Divine Domains you possessed. The Kickers varied widely depending on the Domain, ranging from granting Darksight for a time to granting Damage Reduction and many other things. It also gave a +1 Caster Level to all Healing spells, ding ding!

What I was using it for was how it dovetailed with Good Spells. To wit, Cast a Healing spell on someone, and in Conjunction with the Good Domain, your patient gained temporary hit points equal to your Caster Level for up to ten minutes.

That didn’t sound like much, except I was using my Healing offensively in the form of vivus. Evil creatures vulnerable to hostile Healing magic took those temporary hit points as damage, not as a shield, courtesy of Goodness, and with Zealotry, the spells’ effect could affect even Neutrals if deemed appropriate, and if they were susceptible to Positive energy.

An extra +15 damage from my Shards was absolutely no laughing matter if you were an Evil Undead or Fiend, or saturated with Corruption or Taint from Dark Mana. It was very convenient that things vulnerable to Healing damage were almost all Evil by default, anyway...

Sacred Spell turned half the damage the spell inflicted to Divine damage, in effect becoming typeless, or, as was very quickly pointed out to me by the astonished Winkle, a Higher Tier of magic. This effect got around many forms of energy resistance or immunities quite nicely, as suddenly the creatures I was hitting with it had no defense against a good chunk of the spell, and were taking bigger and harder hits from the base damage that absolutely ignored their defenses against types of different magic, effectively elevating my magic a full Class in lethality.

When Imbue Holiness was combined with Silver Magic for some nice Spell Penetration that also cut through their absorption defenses based on the amount of Holiness I could apply to the spell, the hitting power of my Shards went up even before adding in the Imbue Healing effect to add to the misery of the Shades and the Tainted.

Arcane Toughness was the magical counterpart of Toughness, working similarly to the Stars in how it reinforced the physical body with Arcane energy. It let me substitute my Intellect for Constitution at first level, and then added more Health based on the level of Metamagicks I knew. Each +0, +I, +II, and so forth tier added +1 Health, cumulative, ending at learning a +IV Meta and gaining +5 Health, for a total of +15 possible.

I already knew +0 to +II Metas, so another +6 Health.

It also started the Arcane Toughness Mastery tree, which I would also be building on in time, and keyed up my important Skills to 5 Ranks each.