These kobolds should be glad I let them live. After we killed the raptors to level the gnos up so they could build {Arcane Magic Resistance}, I ordered the raptor carcasses butchered to feed the population. The kobold settlent was too dependent on at and gathering parties left all the ti to search for monster carcasses outside. Their beef with the gnos was because the little n were more efficient than them in finding and collecting bodies.
That was one of two main reasons why the kobolds only attacked loaded gno vehicles. They didn’t want to attack a vehicle that had no loot for them. The second one was the fact that an unloaded vehicle could outrun almost all raptors. The loaded vehicles had spent close to half their coil power and were slower because they were loaded.
I converted the other gnos and expelled everyone from the palace. I returned the silk kobolds to the item box, promising to resurrect them later when I returned to Windere. The excitent I felt when I thought about digging up what was underneath the kobold palace felt like hunger. I caught myself grinning, all giddy and eager to see what was there.
So I conjured my {Force Tongs} and abused the extrely thick mana to spam Force spells in order to dig faster.
The more I dug into the ground underneath the eye of the donut, the more I wanted it for . As layers of earth vanished into the item box, the power emanating from the underground increased exponentially. I was two hundred ters deep and my Energy regeneration had tripled. Too bad I couldn’t break curses because the ability to do so vanished along with [Spellcaster]. I used Force magic to dig, motivated by a single drive. Wyxnos would pay for everything that happened to in this stupid desert.
I was close. I could feel it. It called to . A few ters deeper and my {Force Tongs} conjured mining tools struck sothing they couldn’t cut into. I sliced a wheel out of the stone and stored it, revealing a translucent barrier. I couldn’t see much through it, but it seed to hold a spherical space with so crystal in the middle. Was it a Core? Probably similar to one of those Dungeon cores. But the flow of magic power was now free to burst out of that sphere and into the surface. It was almost visible and I bathed in it.
I knew I had to get inside. Touch that sphere, take over it, make it mine. Devour it and gain a gazillion Attribute Points. Break it and take away one of Wyxnos’ toys. The barrier extended into the Ethereal world, so no luck there. It also blocked every form of teleportation I had and took zero damage from my attacks. Yet I couldn’t stop. Why would I stop? It was now exposed, anyone could co and take away what was rightfully mine.
I kept pushing against it with every trick I knew, most of it sheer violence. Force constructs were notoriously hard to maintain against prolonged pressure. I started to feel fluctuations after a few hours. I was so close I could taste it. Breaking this was the solution to all my problems. I was sure this was what controlled this dead magic zone and the teleporting crap.
One more blow with the [Unicorn King’s Spear] and it would break. As I rose the spear to strike down, the fun-killers ca calling.
[Administrator Hotline]
CALL START
Wyxnos: What do you think you’re doing? Stop it right now. If you break that, it will be catastrophic!
Matriarch: Don’t care. You shouldn’t have killed , Wyxnos. Now I’ll take it for myself. It’s rightful compensation.
Tuisto: Please reconsider. While Wyxnos is at a fault for his chronic lack of disclosure, this is an important sub-system for the world’s maintenance.
Matriarch: PARASITES! That’s what you are! The world was fine until you ca here and forced your ga-like System down everyone’s throats. I’ll end it. I’ll free this planet from your tyranny, and this is just the start. Why do you need to teleport trash? To convert it into raw magic? Don’t you get enough by sucking souls dry every ti soone dies?
Tuisto: Listen to yourself. Stop and ponder on it from a detached position. I beg you.
Wyxnos: She’s lost it. We need to do sothing, Tuisto.
Matriarch: Shut up, you wuss! Coward. Why did you station a [Saintess] here, Wyxnos? Why erect a statue of yourself? Why commit genocide on your precious gnos?
Wyxnos: That! If you break that sub-system, it will lift the dead magic zone and all the scavenger gnos will die. You’re the one threatening them with genocide!
Matriarch: LIES! You just want to keep from my prize!
Wyxnos: Tuisto, she’s out of it. You need to help here.
Tuisto: Matriarch, please. Step back and let’s talk about it. I’ll make Wyxnos answer all your questions and hold him accountable for what he did. We can help the scavenger gnos integrate with the rest of the world, make them survive in mana-rich areas without the gimmick of resistance Perks. I followed up on your suggestion to change their genetic makeup and I’m sure I found a solution.
Matriarch: No. I’m fed up with your lies. You are just stalling for ti.
Tuisto: That’s not true. We could exchange thousands of ssages in this interface and barely a second would transpire in the outside world.
Wyxnos: She’s insane. She’ll cause a disaster worse than Pekothas. We have to stop her, Tuisto.
Matriarch: Try to stop ! I’m invincible here. All this magic! All this power!
Tuisto: You’re not helping Wyxnos. We need to reach a consensus here.
Wyxnos: I’m calling the rest of the Pantheon. She’s gone too far. She’ll destroy everything. Including the nation, she spent so long building. It won’t end with just the desert, the backlash will break the continental shelf.
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Matriarch: Lies. I’m done with you. Buh-bye!
CALL END
Idiots. They wanted to scare . They wanted to convince to give away my prize as I’d foolishly done dozens of tis before. No more nice reincarnator. No more. Now I’ll be a scourge upon them, the enemy they painted like all the ti. This was my vengeance, my rebel yell, my apogee! I lifted the spear and brought it down on the barrier.
It exploded. The mana density inside was a hundred tis greater than outside. As the raw power escaped to the atmosphere, it bathed in its glorious glow and I saw the prize. A Core, a crystalline construct covered in millions of magical circles and glyphs, all forming a symphony of purpose, a hymn of power, every single one calling to . They begged for freedom, for release.
The System tried to flood with spam and I shut down all my notifications. I didn’t care if I’d earned Exp or for what reason. It was irrelevant in the grand sche of things.
The mundane radiation of the sun shone down on . The magical light of the Core, the raw power it created and selflessly poured out was tantalizing. I descended into the spherical sunlit cavity and laughed.
It was mine. I stored the [Unicorn King’s Spear] and reached out. That’s when soone held back. I saw a male hand wearing a suit sleeve grabbing my wrist. I hissed and turned, re-summoning the spear to my hand.
“Wyxnos! So you’ve chosen death!”
I thrust the heirloom spear at him. He dodged, vanishing and reappearing a hundred ters in the sky.
“Co and get ,” he taunted.
I used Flash Blink Step to charge him and strike again. He vanished. It was an illusion. I looked around the wide crater, trying to find my prey. A hundred Wyxnos clones mocked .
“Kel’Caldor tried this and failed, you’ll do no better,” I roared and charged again. One by one, the clones vanished, proving to be illusions. Without [Spellcaster] I didn’t have a special bonus to see through them. It didn’t mind. I could spend all day here.
So I struck at them even though more appeared. There had to be a limit to it and I would find it. Here I had unlimited power, my magic recharging faster than I could spend. I flew over the edge of the crater two hundred ters away from the Core, passing over mangled lizard bodies and broke these illusions. Each drained a small amount of Wyxnos’ Divinity and fueled it to .
I was so close. Up in the air, down in the crater’s basin, I killed Wyxnos a thousand tis. It was exhilarating. I breathed in magic and breathed out death.
The illusions were faltering. Wyxnos was running on fus and victory would be mine. Then they vanished altogether, along with my influx of power. I hovered over the crater, my pixie wings beating slowly behind . The spear thrumd with power and I sent it to the item box for a while. What happened here?
“It’s fixed,” I heard Tuisto’s voice coming from the center. The old man floated over the now-repaired Force barrier around the Core. Wyxnos was right there with him. Not an illusion this ti, I hoped. I dove in with a war cry, ready to kill him. “Stop right there,” Tuisto said and the world obeyed.
You are restrained.
You are no longer under the effects of Mana Madness.
I what?
I looked around. What the fuck did these idiots do this ti? The whole kobold village was annihilated. Thousands of souls, kobold, and raptor floated around, enraptured by {Soul Shepherd}.
“What the fuck happened here,” I shook my pounding head, trying to make sense of my hazy mories. The torrent of mana flowing out of the sphere vanished. I could sense no difference between here and anywhere else in this world, except, of course, the dead magic zone.
Which should be around here? The eye of the donut was incredibly small, only the kobold [Queen]’s palace and a very narrow ring of land around it. The building and the hill it stood on were nowhere to be seen.
“You destroyed almost everything,” Tuisto said.
Wyxnos seed like he wanted to say sothing but remained silent.
“Bullshit, he did it,” I tried to point a finger at the college professor. But I couldn’t do anything because I was immobilized.
“Wyxnos has not used a single power, cast a single spell beside the illusion to distract you long enough for to repair and upgrade the defensive protocols on the recycling sub-system. You’ll find it much harder to break now.”
I felt a sense of loss. I knew I was digging to explore what it was about, then breaking so wall. My otherwise spotless mory had blanks. Like, how did the kobold village vanish? Why had the eye of the donut expanded? I felt a sharp headache, sothing that was almost a novelty considering my resilience. The air was light like up on a mountain and I felt short of breath. It was all their fault.
“What have you done! It was...”
“We did nothing. It was all you. We ca after you broke the barrier, and fixed your ss. Exposure to the high levels of mana here were distorting your perceptions. Especially now that your base species is a fae, you have fewer resistances against mana exposure. You engorged yourself on it and started to crave it,” Tuisto explained, then pointed at Wyxnos. “This one is at a fault too. He shouldn’t have hidden this operation from us. Now he’ll be sanctioned. Loki and I will look after it.”
“Damn AI,” the professor turned deity grumbled as he stared at Tuisto. At the ti, I didn’t understand what Wyxnos said. It was only way later that I connected the dots.
It was hard to think. I needed to breathe. Which was odd. I ignored Wyxnos and asked Tuisto, “Say that again? What exactly happened?”
“The excess interacted with your fae nature and caused you to be intoxicated. Not exactly intoxicated but the sudden fluctuations between the dead magic and this mana-rich environnt caused sothing similar to decompression sickness. Your current ntal and spiritual Attributes were not enough to resist the influence. You were in an altered state of mind. Your drive to uncover the recycling Core exposed you to even more raw mana and you lost reasoning. The mana buildup around the Core was released all at once when you broke the barrier. Not only it exploded and destroyed the kobold village killing every creature in it, but it also deteriorated your ntal condition even further. I had Wyxnos keep you distracted until I could fix the damage, but I had to shut down the recycling Core for a minute or so. Now the recycling Core won’t cause anyone problems because I’m pumping the excess mana downward into the planet core, instead of up into the... atmosphere.
“I also used the brief period it was shut down to make the System give all the surviving scavenger gnos the Perk that will fix their condition. They’ll retain their anti-magical nature but they’ll no longer pass the debilitating traits to the next generation. Birth rates will slow down slightly for a decade or two but the new gnos won’t have a vulnerability to raw mana exposure, nor the poison glands in their genitals. The only gates that will remain fertile with this Perk are the ones that don’t carry the mutant DNA.”
I’d done it again. I didn’t cause the explosion or had any idea it would happen but it was triggered by nonetheless. What a bloody ss, literally. I should leave this desert behind and move on with my life. But one thing Tuisto said bugged .
“Wait, you said ‘surviving scavenger gnos’?”
Tuisto nodded as he grimaced ruefully, “Yes. As I explained, the recycling Core who’s responsible for maintaining this dead magic zone had to be taken offline for a few minutes as I repaired it. During this ti, mana rushed from the world to fill this zone. The gnos were exposed to it. Most of them survived, though. You might want to go check on them. Wixnos no longer has a stake in this project or any influence in this desert. Go help your people.”
Shocked, I took two steps backward and shapeshifted as I flew up and above the restored dead magic do. I had to see what terrible consequences my greed and hubris wrought upon the gnos.
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