“Reynard isn’t here?” Briggs asked as he watched the mages start shattering the reinforced stone with great enthusiasm. There were occasional explosions of magical energy, but the watching sentries were good at getting shields up to contain them, and they only made the demolition crews angrier.

Rock to Mud and Rock to Sand were both viable forms of a Spellhouse Adept Earth Spell, and they put them to good use here!

“Your Monkey friend is coming along nicely,” Briggs complimented me. “He likes working on the demo teams.”

“It gives him more chances to use his magic,” I agreed. “He’s not really set up for serving in the main force as yet, as he hasn’t had a lot of practice time on his Fire and Light, and he has more problems with controlling them properly.”

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but three Elements for a Monkey is rather special?” Briggs asked, as the silver-haired Marmoset with the natural beard joined the stone-breaking work energetically.

“He’s trying to become a Monkey Sage, which is sort of their equivalent of Typeless. We’re hoping he can eventually learn to use all the Primary Elements, and if we’re lucky, the Celestial Nature of the Wrath I’m feeding him will let him develop Healing.

“However, he won’t have anywhere near the same level of physical development that a Monkey who focuses on a natural Element has. Given how important strength is to Magical Beasts, trying the path of a Monkey Sage is a rare thing, as they have to be protected while they grow. If they make it to the end, however, they are considered the wisest members of the Tribes.”

“Huh, learn something new. I was wondering why there was no gold on him.” Little Turk had gone from Servant-class to Great Warrior already, and would be ready for his breakthrough to Commander very soon. “Is that why you took him in as a Servant?”

“Yes. It’s very hard for a Beast to add later Elements without a Bloodline giving them freely. For a Monkey, Sagedom has to start as a Servant, where you try and work with all the Elements. Beasts have naturally mixed Mana and can use all their Mana for any of their Elements, unlike Humans, who are either Elemental or Typeless. With me dumping Wrath into him constantly, he’s got far more Mana to play with and use than any other Monkey has ever had, hence his growth.

“He’ll probably develop horns and wings, too.”

“Nice! Speaking of which, where’s Reynard? He always likes the explodey spells, watching Monkeys running around having fun killing undead, and lasering down rows of them if he gets the chance.”

“He won’t admit it, but he’s being nice to Little Turk,” I whispered out of the side of my mouth. “If he’s here, Little Turk will feel obliged to groom him, and it cuts into his Casting time. So, Reynard is hanging out at the Broom Closet Pyramid, practicing his Compression. He’s got a long way to go to get to Emperor.”

“Oh, that’s impressive! He’s up to King already?” Briggs was a little startled.

“Duke. He’s working on his 4xMana. I can Compress the Mana I’m dropping on him, so he’s still growing faster while he’s working, but he’s got to convert all his old stuff before he advances to King.”

“A numbers game with a lot of numbers,” he agreed. “How are your numbers coming along?” he asked me quietly. “The Mick and Red both say you’re constantly drawing in more Mana than a dozen Mages in Meditation. They can’t read you, and you keep the Draw subtle, but they can still feel it.”

“That’s because I’m on five-fold Compression off my thoughtstreams, doing a natural draw, Force Reserves, Wrath, and Shards as energy flows, plus dumping the excess on my Contractees.” I did manage to smile somewhat as the top level of the two-acre pyramid fell into sand and muck. Dark gouts of energy blasted into the air, bouncing and hissing off the fields of Light erected to contain them. I gestured at the Ioun Orbs floating above my head. “Filling these monsters up, too.”

“That is absolutely insane,” Briggs said cheerfully. “How fast are you expanding your Syzygy now?”

“It works out to about fifteen Mana a second, although it’s in blips and blops.”

“Fifteen a second.” He did the math on that, and did his whistle in exactly one note. “One point three million Mana a day?!” he muttered under his breath.

“Approximately, if all is ideal. Any spellcasting shuts it off, of course.”

“I, just, wow. You’re adding more Mana per day than most Sages have available!”

“Mmm. Right now, I have potential Nodes for 1,225 Starry Heavens, each of them with 2401 False Stars, which can eventually be filled with 4000xMana each.”

He didn’t look at me as he did the math. “Okay, 11.8 billion potential Mana as of today. Increasing in the future. That’s... 9,077 days to fill yourself up to maximum potential. Almost twenty-five years...” He winced. “We don’t have that kind of time, do we?”

“Two, maybe three if we keep things mixed up,” I admitted.

“And you don’t know if there’s a Mana Limit to get to Realm Lord Status, or if it’s something else.”

“Oh, it’s definitely something else for me. But yeah, might be a Mana Limit, or it might be a 40,000xManapoint, or Tier-9 Stars. We don’t know. If it’s a Mana Limit, it should be about 10 billion as a breakpoint. Can’t be certain, however. It could be as high as 40 billion.”

“...which you could only reach with that 40k-xMana.”

“Realm-Mana, yeah.”

“And you need the time to get there, which we obviously don’t have. How are you going to get there? Can you even make Realm-Mana?” Briggs had to ask.

“In reverse order... yes, I could make one, but it would take a long time, and it would be completely unusable and I couldn’t store it in anything, so it would be a total waste of my time. Dissonance factors alone would kill it before ALL Mana for that type of Node was at Highmana.

“Two, I’m trying to figure out how to compress the Applying time, where 360x and 3600x Mana merge with existing 40x and 400x Low and True Mana. If I could compress that to exactly one minute per Mana point, well, that’s a twentyfold time savings for the 4000xMana.”

He thought that over as the second tier of the four on the pyramid in front of us began to crumble and crumple down, spitting necroic wisps and blasts angrily as it died. Vivic energy hissed and ate away at the eruptions quickly. “You’re doing it with Gear,” he reasoned, and glanced at Noble, sitting there with his feathers and other Tokens of various Emperors who liked being able to watch what I was doing. “The Orb there?” he reasoned.

“Yes. I’m putting all my teamwork Karma into the effect, but I don’t have the full effect down. It’s a Spellcraft check at least 150, and I’ve only a +134 modifier. I can just hit it by releasing Arcane Focus, and I get glimpses of the entire pattern, but I can only remember small snatches of it.”

“A +134 check, and you can only remember snatches of it,” repeated Briggs, shaking his big head. “How many dimensions is that pattern in?”

“Seven. Yeah, fucking with Temporal Magic. Timesighting what to do and then using power to lock in the results. There are some heady instabilities in doing so...”

“So, this isn’t just a pure Skill Check?” he raised a hairy eyebrow, his pale violet eyes thoughtful. “You have to actively use magic to force this?”

“Yes, and using magic to lock in probability that you’re actively searching out with magic is very disruptive!” I confirmed.

“Use life energy. Take Health damage and use that to power the effect. You’ll be using Free Will instead of Concentration to pick the path and pay for it. It might be extremely painful, but you’ve got Healing spells and Fast Healing.”

Three thoughtstreams worrying at the problem and trying to decipher the proper way forward froze in my head as suddenly massive parts of the Pattern fell into place, the recursive temporal influence that was throwing everything off vanishing as I hit it from another angle.

“Ugh.” I reached up to where a drop of blood had just dripped out of my nose, even before all the various energies running through me could heal it. “Trust a Source to know how best to fuck with time and make it do what you want...”

“How bad?” he asked me.

“Probably a one-to-one hit to Health for each point of compression. So, forty for a Truepoint, or four hundred for a Highpoint. A Sage-level expenditure for each point, so almost a hundred thousand Mana for the one, and then almost a million for the other.”

“That is one powerful effect, then. Even with your insane Mana regen, there’s no way you can pay for that in real time.”

“No, not even close. If I’m in full Meditation on a Pyramid, I can hit nearly a thousand Mana a round if I do nothing but dump everything into Mana replacement. That’s still ten minutes for a Truepoint, a hundred minutes for a Highpoint. If I’m not in full Meditation, recovery time is going to be ten times that.”

“So, what you actually need is a proper Valence spell that does the effect for much cheaper than whatever Pattern you’re working out, and Cast that, instead. Or,” his pale violet eyes twinkled, “you need to start abusing Mana Regeneration. The way to do that is blood offerings, leveraged against Healing spells, or by blood sacrifice. Vivified undead have a lot of Health and Mana to use!” he noted brightly.

“Ouch! That got dark quick.” I frowned at the idea, something I was sure no Dark Mage would even blink an eye at. “Flagellation techniques are pretty painful, but workable. Mass vampiric Drain techniques...” I frowned as the third story of the Pyramid in front of us began to erode and shatter under the skilled attacks of the demolition team. “It’s not against Heavenly fiat to do such a thing to Netherworlders. Reducing them to vivus is basically ending their torment and returning them to the cycle of life and death, an acceleration of the natural cycle of souls. Using that vivus for a positive purpose is fine, just an alternative result instead of condensing Soul Crystals.”

Which sounded facetious, but the fact was the afterlife for the Damned was, well, not at all fun. You lived or died, advanced or fell, at the whim and will of your superiors, beings so powerful compared to you that you had no ability to fight back against them. You could only hopefully arrange for something to happen to them and if you were lucky, be promoted to replace them. You couldn’t earn your way up in a real manner, the power was only parceled out to you, and taken back at the will of those greater than you.

It was Hell, Demonium, Gehenna, the Abyss... all the places. Evil ruled and Sin gathered in those places, and those in power there considered it only Right and Proper that things be that way.

Interrupting their existences by returning them to the cycle of life that had been broken because someone Evil decided it was better for themselves that way was actually the right thing to do!

“Spell research a brand-new spell that will Compress magnificent amounts of Mana for a piddly cost in time and Valences. Then hardcode it into my Orb so I can do it at multiple levels, sure. Tell the Warcaster to do metamagical research and original spell construction, that’s smart.”

He blew a raspberry in my direction. “You’re an Alchemist and an Artificer. They LIVE for this kind of shit. Don’t approach it as a Wizard, get your zany sides looking into it. It isn’t like they are overly occupied by stuff.”

That was true. I generally only brought them out for new alchemical engineering for Coralost Corp, bunches of Energizing or Vivic Brazier Casting, or making magic items, all of which took only four to six hours a day tops now.

My Artificer, Expert, Alchemist, and Vizard thoughtstreams rubbed all their hands together and booted my Wizard and Sorcerer thoughtstreams to the side so the experts could handle this thinking matter. Spellcrafting, Elemental Control, Alchemy, Artificing, and Lore checks started exploding through that corner of my mind with wild glee as they all not only began designing a spell that would be Eternal in power at creation, but could scale up to Valence XVI immediately!