Chapter 99: Start of Book 2 | Day 136 – Blue

“Blue, I wish to make a Bargain.”

Iniri, Queen of Tarnil, was dressed to the nines, even more official than when she’d met with Ansae. It was all rather sudden, though I understood why. To call Iniri’s position hopeless might actually be underselling it a bit. Not personally, since she was about as safe as it was possible to get here in my territory, but her country and its citizens were on a fast track to utter ruin. I wasn’t even tempted to joke or be lighthearted here, even though Shayma was the only one who could hear me.

“What do you wish?”

“What do you wish?” Shayma repeated, reading both my mood and Iniri’s, solemn and somber and channeling my full Authority. Iniri had no problem with it, being my Companion already, but Joce and Cheya seemed to be struggling in their positions a few dozen paces back. I hadn’t yet been able to wield that power myself, I hadn’t even had time to practice since I’d found out I actually had such a presence, but fortunately Shayma could do it for me.

“To save Tarnil.” Iniri opened her mouth then shut it again without saying anything, apparently deciding that was sufficient. Which it was. A simple request but a massive undertaking, which is exactly what a Bargain should be. Not that I was any expert, even if I should be. As a Power, it was one of the main things that set me apart from the rest of the world.

A Bargain was a living thing, a powerful thing, something that could alter reality and break all kinds of rules. It was not something born from my own, comparably more mundane, power and not limited by my Skills and Abilities. Yet it still had limits. I couldn’t Bargain for something someone couldn’t give; I couldn’t offer something I knew I couldn’t fulfill.

[Blue’s Sagacity], my only Ability that had thus far reached into the rarefied heights of Power-type Abilities, was helping me a lot as I considered Iniri’s request. It wasn’t a whisper or an overlay, like the rest of my Status, but I did have some comfortably solid instincts. And thank goodness, because the rational part of me was worrying about how the hell I could manage to do what Iniri wanted.

It wasn’t a problem that could be solved normally. Tarnil itself had suffered from the aftereffects of [The Light of Eschaton], its fate Affinity mana pulled out and used to destroy an army of monsters. An army that had outnumbered the defenders over a hundred to one. Then there was the fact that Tor Kot was gone, and the four cities he had controlled were probably melting at this very moment, something that seemed to happen to dungeon structures when they were cut off from the core. That left somewhere over a hundred thousand people, minimum, who would probably die if I couldn’t do anything.

If that weren’t enough, there was a foreign army heading down to take one of Tarnil’s most important strategic resources: the Wildwood mana spring and its accompanying, extremely wealthy fortress and adventurer town. That wasn’t to mention smaller issues like The Hurricane coming to try and extort valuables for me, or some mysterious force coming from deep underground. I actually was pretty certain I knew what that last one was, since I’d known that there was a group of monsters headed my way for quite some time.

I wasn’t entirely bereft of ideas. In fact, I had one brewing ever since I knew Iniri was coming. There was a way that I could maybe deal with all this, but it would take a lot of hard work on my part,and I’d be stuck with it for a while since it wasn’t like I could wave some wand and fix things.

[Blue’s Sagacity] helped here. It wasn’t like I got a clear explanation of what was going on, because that would be too easy, but I did get some guidance for when my thought process was on the right track. Tarnil’s fate had been pulled out, sacrificed to end the massive army of monsters. Maybe driving off Tor Kot was part of that effect too, now that I thought about it. Its past momentum and its future potential had been destroyed. It wasn’t even a blank slate, it was a null. I couldn’t do anything to correct that, since zero multiplied by anything was still zero. But my fate hadn’t been eaten.

Of course, I had to get something out of it. It wasn’t being greedy. I wasn’t going to undertake enormous amounts of labor for free, for one, but this was a Bargain. It wasn’t even an equivalent exchange; it was intrinsically weighted in my favor. I did an impossible thing that was still within my power, and I got something I couldn’t get any other way. The question was what I wanted, because really I had all the mana and resources I could ever need just with my own body and my resident dragon.

What I was really missing was soft power. Hard power was easy. I had some weapons and was going to make more. I had Shayma to be my voice, Iniri was my other Companion and had a Skill that was practically impenetrable. I was about to pick up Taelah as a third, though I didn’t know what she’d ultimately bring I was sure it’d be useful. But I was still ill-known. The Hurricane, who was a fourth-tier Classer and all kinds of scary, didn’t seem to think I was anything more than a handy farm for valuable materials. Outside Tarnil I more or less didn’t exist, which had some good things, like fewer people making me a target, but many bad things, because that lack of ability to project authority or even my opinion was a vulnerability.

“Okay Shayma, I think I can do this, just give me a second to figure out how to convey it.” Generally my fox-girl did an excellent job of translating my moderately coherent ramblings into something proper and official and mysterious and wise. It was just as well I couldn’t talk to anyone but her and Ansae. In this case, though, I needed to do the heavy lifting myself and actually pay attention to what I was saying. Iniri and I both had to be on the same page for this Bargain. Though I had something to do first. I could learn.

The last time I’d done a Bargain, and several times before and since, when something major happened I went into a fugue and didn’t come out for a while. I could adjust to anything, apparently, but it took time and this promised to be a big one. So far none had lasted more than a day, even the worst ones, but I had to be ready for it. Since I actually had a plan for once, I laid it out for Shayma, giving her an overview of my intentions so she could reassure Iniri and prepare the way. It was just as well I’d boosted up a bunch of Shayma’s Skills while Iniri was out, because she had to be as powerful as possible for what I needed her to do. It turned it didn’t take more than touching the core, just like transcription, which made sense in hindsight because it probably was pretty much transcription. Just, more narrowly applied.

Since I’d taken care of a lot beforehand, it didn’t take long before I was ready to state the Bargain.

“The Bargain is this: for a century and a day—”

“—I will be Tarnil. I will protect it as I protect myself, but it will take my interests as its own.” Once again Shayma repeated me word for word. Iniri hesitated briefly, and I could tell exactly where her thoughts were going.

“I have no interest in ruling Tarnil,” I added for clarification, both for her piece of mind and for mine. “I’m going to be busy enough as it is.” I certainly didn’t want to inherit the crown of Tarnil, I just wanted control over policy for a while. Iniri stood straight and lifted her head, clenching her hands into fists and then releasing them.

“I accept.”

Unlike the first time I’d made a Bargain, I could feel this one spark and ignite, somewhere deep inside me. It felt rather like [The Light of Eschaton] in some strange way, a deep and abiding weight that encompassed the entirety of Tarnil. This one wasn’t taking anything away from Tarnil, though I would be hard-pressed to articulate what exactly it was doing. I could feel that weight settle on me, almost crushing for a moment before something rebalanced itself.

I exploded outward from my mountain, my perceptions and self expanding faster than the wind, faster than light, faster than thought. The wave went north, swallowing trees and mountains and sparsely scattered homesteads before crashed against the northern border, where Tarnil touched the wastelands. It went west, consuming the mountain peaks before hesitating at the far slopes, stymied by the border with Nivir. It went east, to where rock and sand bordered the great expanse of the ocean and lapped against the shore, settling in under the shelf of stone where small boats plied their trade.

Everything else was south. Farms, mines, quarries. Smaller noble estates, marking out duchies and baronies and overambitious townships. Then there were the cities, scattered along the coast. Duenn, Taere, Laerr, Invin. Hundreds of miles were swallowed up in a blink, the expansion blazing south to halt at Wildwood, the Retreat acting as the final redoubt for Tarnil’s borders.

All of this came to me only vaguely, drowning as I was in a sudden deluge of thousands or tens of thousands of times more input, more sight and sound and magic. All of it came at the same time, a roar of sensations and viewpoints, of broad swathes of quiet landscape and pinpoint specks of secret and sacred things. For the first time I had some idea of the world outside of Tarnil, the dust-scoured crater of the Wasteland, the mist of Nivir, the lurking leviathans off the shore. The fugue was not as bad this time around, perhaps because I was prepared for it, but I still had to actively struggle to actually think any thoughts. At least this time I was aware enough to see my overlay make a note of things.

Bargain Established.

Size requirements for level increase met.

Level increases by 2.

Trait points increase by 2.

Climate: Coast unlocked.

Royal Enem Tree unlocked.

Springfern unlocked.

…

Oyol weed unlocked.

Under the circumstances my incredulity took a good fifteen or twenty minutes to actually manifest, emotions flowing like chilled honey. I was an entire country and it only got me to level nine? It seemed entirely unfair, proof that I’d either chosen a ridiculously weak path or I was still doing it wrong, with [Blue’s Sagacity] not helping me decide at all which of the two was true.

Time sped by while I struggled against the fugue. It was frankly much improved because I wasn’t completely out of it and I could actually try and actively adapt to the brand new, vastly expanded perceptual range. That said I still couldn’t do anything like actually focus on where Shayma and Iniri were, or what was actually going on in all the land I’d suddenly acquired. The most I could do was notice a tree or a mountain, things that stayed still. It was like all my cognition had been claimed, everything but the tiniest portion I could steal to actually think. By the time I snapped out of it the sun had jumped again, but my day counter hadn’t rolled over, so I considered it more or less a win.

“I’m back, Shayma.” My fox-girl was out in Haerlish, scouting the palace. I’d maxed out her [Phantasmal Path], despite it being devilishly expensive, simply because I needed her to have the greatest possible mobility. Even with that I was a little surprised that she was already within sight of the palace, a thing of carved stone and coral perched on a cliff overlooking the ocean. She was several miles away, looking across at the palace from the outskirts of the capital city. “How long was I out?”

“About three hours?” She answered, leaning on the railing of a balcony perched above the waves. “It only took me maybe twenty minutes to get here, once you told me where it was. [Phantom Path] practically dropped me off in the ocean though,” she added with a grin. “I’m still trying to figure out the best place to get at the palace so we have time to follow through.”

“Looks like a nice place.” We’d learned our lessons from Duenn, and while I doubted Haerlish’s capital was half so scary we didn’t want to end up having to flail around in panic. That was for other people.

“It is!” Shayma took a deep breath, enjoying the sea air. “It’s so weird seeing people who aren’t worried about mage-kings or monsters. I’ve forgotten what it’s like.” The words made me feel a little bad I was going to be dealing with Haerlish pretty sternly, but only a little. It wasn’t like I was going to be punishing the city for something the rulers did.

“Well, I’m going to be working on making Tarnil like that.” I could already feel the compulsion from the Bargain urging me to do something, anything. It was not unlike the dungeon instincts, though less divorced from what I considered my real self. After all, I’d chosen to enter into the Bargain.

Tarnil was in a pretty sorry state. I let myself stretch out a bit, allowing a temporary reduction in faculties just so I could get an idea of the general state of things. The cities were surprisingly not in total chaos, but people were meeting and complaining about the lack of food and water rations, plus making uncomfortable noises about the lack of bells. The so-called dungeon wives probably had it the worst, abruptly turfed out from the central towers that had in fact melted down. I didn’t know whether I’d done it during the fugue or if the removal of the red cores had caused it, but either way they were gone.

Some of that I could fix easily enough. Though the idea of feeding people with bait still disturbed me and I knew it was ultimately bad for them, I could at least manifest enough meals and pump enough water to hold starvation and dehydration at bay in the major cities. In a way Tor Kot’s organization made it easier on me, because every city was set up the exact same way, with the only differences being the number of layers around the spire. So long as I provided food and water where it was expected, which was pretty obvious due to Tor Kot’s rigid city layouts, everyone would know what to do.

I went ahead and opened portals from Meil to the center of each of the cities, even though I couldn’t properly communicate to Iniri what I was doing. I figured that she was smart enough that she could figure it out, and there was always someone posted in the center square anyway to keep an eye on the teleports. For the sake of clarity I flipped Guidance up again for her, just for a moment, but I could have sworn she was moving before I even got that far.

I was glad to see that she was looking a lot less stressed than before the Bargain, with the unhappy lines gone from the corners of her eyes. It wasn’t like I had done much yet but maybe just knowing I was taking care of it was enough. She started handing out orders, sending some of her various agents through the portals to start restoring order or whatever equivalent they could manage. The Ells went to their old home town of Invin, in charge of a number of other Classers, and I left them to it while I moved on to fixing another one of the many, many problems Tarnil had.

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Until now I hadn’t really had a good sense of the mana flow for landscapes outside myself. I knew it existed, of course, and I’d seen some of it at Wildwood when Shayma had first gone there, but my mana perception had grown by leaps and bounds since then and I could tell there was something deeply wrong with Tarnil’s mana. Before, I could tell in the vaguest terms that there was a clear trend in toward the Wildwood, along with local circulations somewhat in the vein of my own mana dynamos, but of more natural origin. Now, everything was stagnant. There was barely any movement at all, and the actual mana seemed to be slowly evaporating away.

Really it wasn’t that surprising. If I could make mana from nothing, clearly mana could go away through some process or another, and I could add two and two. If [The Light Of Eschaton] had ripped away Tarnil’s fate, that might well be or at least affect the intent that its mana needed to properly function. The mana of the entire country had stopped, which was roughly the same as saying that the weather had stopped, which as a point of fact it had, with roughly the same consequences. Fortunately I had experience with giant mana engines, although admittedly not this big.

I’d already burned through all my biomass providing food to four cities, but now I had uncounted acres of trees and grass and wild fields that I could simply absorb. To date I hadn’t really used [Reclaim] too much, preferring to just relocate things, but now it was extraordinarily useful in refilling my stocks. I wasn’t about to replace Tarnil’s native ecosystems with my own, if nothing else because I didn’t have any animals and it’d irritate me if someone came along and replaced my backyard with differently colored grass, but I could use it to fill temporary shortfalls.

That said I didn’t have the leverage to make the mana flows behave as things stood. I had [Mana Finesse], sure, and I was the entirety of Tarnil, the length and breadth and fifty or more meters of the surface, true. But this was a huge, diffuse thing that I had difficulty grappling. I knew how to start mana flowing without me manually hauling it from place to place though, so I started sprinkling chrystheniums throughout the country. Lots and lots of them.

Green in woods, Blue in rivers and lakes, Grey in mines and quarries. Lofty went on mountain slopes and tops of hills while White got placed on snowcapped peaks, deepwater got seeded offshore, far beneath the waves. Radiant and Umbral went where I spotted light and dark mana respectively; Illusionary where hidden grottos rested, mossy where rare whorls of healing mana made knots in the skein of magic covering the land. Thousands, tens of thousands of the things, scattered about without all that great a care since all I really looked at was the Affinity of the mana. What mana remained.

I pruned a goodly amount of random forest, snapping up bits of trees and bushes here and there, converting them to biomass at whatever loss and startling birds or deer or, closer to Wildwood, more exotic things. Most of my biomass acquisition, though, came from near the recaptured cities, where something like a bastard child of kudzu and bamboo had been planted and was in the process of breaking out of the tidy bounds Tor Kot had placed on it. I eradicated all that real quick, since it didn’t seem good for anything but biomass farming and looked hideously invasive. It was called Controller’s Garden so it was clearly made with the red core dungeons in mind.

It took me more than an hour to get all the flowers I wanted planted, which might have ended up being overkill but I’d rather overshoot than undershoot for the task I needed to do. With each flower I grabbed a bunch of the local mana and connected it into the chrysthenium, plugging myself into the network that was supposed to exist over the country. Then, finally, I hurled my weight behind it. Metaphorically, at least.

[Mana Finesse] was stretched to its limit as I pushed and pulled and shoved and cajoled the whole thing into motion. It wouldn’t do to just focus on one area at a time, since it was really a single tapestry and I’d already found that trying to do it piecemeal would simply result in one part stalling out while I focused on the next. I started burning through my own mana as I pressed harder, lending momentum to a million different threads over tens of thousands of square miles. Ten, then fifty, then a hundred thousand mana disappeared into the Skill and I really was worried I’d still skimped on the flowers. But finally, slowly, sluggishly, Tarnil’s magic lumbered into motion.

[Mana Finesse] advances to 7.

[Mana Finesse] advances to 8.

[Mana Finesse] advances to 9.

It wasn’t failing anymore, but it wasn’t the same. Even if I hadn’t really seen the enormous, monstrously complex mana system in its full glory, I could tell that much. My flowers shifted the threads, and I could see places where mana had once eddied one way and now whirled another. In one of the places I actually knew from before, Khiral Town, I could see that they’d have to relocate some of the crops with higher mana demands. Not much, but a little bit.

Then there was my mana, or what I considered my mana, bleeding into the natural mana flows. It altered the natural tone and tenor of the mana, not by much, but by enough that I could see the difference. If nothing else I was pretty well convinced the mana density was higher, which might have some long-term consequences, especially when it started hitting Wildwood.

I noticed right away that an entire country’s mana didn’t act like one of my dynamos and give me an inconceivable boost to my mana regeneration. There was a little bit of a bump; after all, I’d planted an enormous number of those chrystheniums. But it was frankly less than one of my Climate-based dynamos, despite everything involved. Unlike my internal ecology, Tarnil consumed almost as much mana as it produced, with only a tiny bit moving onward toward the mana spring at the southern end of the country.

That was a little unfortunate but it wasn’t like I didn’t have enough room to make more mana dynamos, and after having exhausted what I considered a pretty damn immense mana supply in the process of fixing it, I went ahead and started the process of making more. I’d need some extra mana to deal with the next thing on my list, which was Nivir’s army.

They were maybe a quarter of the way between the border pass and Wildwood Retreat, and they looked rather more reasonable and like an army than either the mercenary rabble of Vok Nal or Tor Kot’s endless hordes. There was a baggage train staffed by people with [Caravanner] type classes, complete with scalehoof-drawn wagons of rather fine design. It even had runework that acted as shock absorbers, and there were some other runes here and there that might have done something for weight or drag or the like.

I’d found the technology or magitek levels to be somewhat inconsistent in Tarnil but considering that the country was sort of postapocalyptic that wasn’t surprising. With Nivir’s army, I had more of an impression of what normalcy was. People with matching armor styles and color schemes, every single one with weapons and kit heavy with mana. Runes everywhere, and people with support Classes to take care of all that materiel. Smithing, leatherworking, tailoring, and cooking Skills were all in evidence, along with squads of Classers with mutually supporting abilities.

They were completely within my power, all except for maybe the one person that made me a little nervous. There was a fourth-tier Healer type, Tekaomi Jude, level 92 [Mother of the Gentle Rains]. Now, I wasn’t about to underestimate the potency of anyone who’d gotten that many levels, but she seemed more a support type than an army-wrecker like The Hurricane. Every so often a soft mist rippled outward from her and everyone’s stamina jumped upward. Which was pretty impressive considering it seemed to apply to everyone in the army at once.

Even with her around, I probably could have more or less massacred the army, but I didn’t for some very good reasons. One was that I didn’t actually have to. They weren’t really much of a threat at the moment, given how far they were from anything of strategic importance, and with all the extra room I had there wasn’t any way they could threaten me. That said, there were better reasons.

One was that they were just soldiers, not monsters. They weren’t part of some existential threat and I’d already seen the problem it could create if they simply died. Duke Sarthi had turned against Tarnil because I killed his son, so generating entire countries with the same sort of hatred was not in my best interests.

Another reason was that some of them had Esox as a last name, the same as Keri, and Classes like [Duke of Blossom Waters] or [Baron of Thirteen Lakes], which I really wanted to raise with our resident healer before I did anything. Finally, I didn’t want to get into the habit of killing people in job lots. Not that I was overly squeamish about killing in general, but mercy is the virtue of the strong. It was nice to finally be strong enough to practice it.

There was also the rather more material fact that I didn’t get any experience for killing armies, just for driving them off.

I could do any one of a number of things, like take their supplies, or raise walls around them, or put lakes of lava in their way. Really though, I wanted to drive home exactly how helpless they were, and for that I needed to make sure that I had the punch to get it past that fourth-tier healer. With a little bit of regret I went to my traits and spent one point on Field Potency. It wasn’t just for dealing with Nivir’s army, as I’d need massive Fields of [Light of Hope] and [Verdant Light], and maybe [Growth] or even [Abundance] if I were to fulfill my Bargain, so it wasn’t like I was buying something I didn’t need. I just really needed to find a different way to get trait points. As it was I wasn’t going to get much above level ten, given the current rate of advancement.

That done I set up an enormous [Lost Woods] field, twenty kilometers on a side and encompassing the army and its support train. It was dialed as high as it would go, which was damn high with the new trait, and took a hell of a bite out of my mana regen. Not to mention, it consumed Fertilizer, just like most of the flora growth Fields. I wasn’t too worried about it though, since I was going to be setting up multiple new dynamos, but it still illustrated how much I needed to scale up.

My new dynamos that went in underneath the cities weren’t just glacier-volcano, but glacier-swamp-forest-grassland-desert-volcano. The brand new climates unlocked a bunch more species of flora, to the point where I was absolutely spoiled for choice when I decided to actually customize things, but not much in the way of Affinities. Swamp gave me Rotting Chrysthenium, for the associated Rot Affinity, plus a mangrove sort of thing that absolutely sprawled throughout the hip-deep muddy water of the Climate. Desert had a number of spices, growing close to the ground in burning heat, while Forest gave me two new tayantan variants in the form of a rambling vine that bore berry fruits and an evergreen with nuts and sticky sap. In the grand scheme of things those weren’t that amazing but I was looking forward to seeing what Taelah had to say about them.

When I was making the chambers for them I also found out one new benefit from the Fields trait. When I went to push my standard-sized sphere to the usual ten-times expansion, I could go further. Much further. A full order of magnitude further. I could push a mere fifty-meter sphere into an immense five kilometer diameter chamber, so long as I could pay the cost for all the extra stone. Which I could, because even when my own stocks ran dry I owned entire mountains, plural, that I could just skim from whenever I fell short. I would put it back when I had the chance. There was clearly some degree of shenanigans going on with the atmosphere for these huge spatial chambers, just because there was no way I could make them without generating the air, plus the pressures would be all kinds of absurd if it followed normal atmospheric laws.

With the new limits on my Spatial fields it took a lot less time for me to set up the five new dynamos, bumping my income up above what it was before I instituted the [Lost Woods] Field. The Grasslands Climates also completely offset the Field’s hunger for Fertilizer, so I went overall net positive on everything so far as I could tell. It might not stay that way long, but for the moment I was feeling pretty confident. Watching the army wandering around inside [Lost Woods] helped.

I had been a little afraid it would be obvious and put everyone on guard, but there was nothing obvious about what happened, at least at first. Inside the Field the sun set a little sooner, the trees grew thicker and taller, and the shadows lengthened beyond what they should. Mists rose and swirled, obscuring sight lines despite the best efforts of the water-affinity Classers. Slowly but surely the army began to be separated, and then started going in circles. Any trees out of sight of people even for a moment twisted and moved, changing the clear paths and guiding people in different directions. It seemed to confuse navigation Skills as well, something I put down to the extra punch it got from the potency trait, and I was more or less satisfied that they were stuck for the moment.

The cities would also sort of keep for a while. Tor Kot had set them up as machines and while they were broken now, there was still enough inertia there that so long as I supplied the food they wouldn’t immediately dissolve into anarchy. Taking control there was not exactly my job anyway. At some point I’d have to change the cities so they weren’t some dystopian monochrome prison, but not today, not this hour.

I kept checking in on Shayma during the process, watching her saunter unnoticed through Haerlish’s capital city, circling the palace and basically casing the joint. Her [Liminality] and [Phantom Presence] meant that nobody saw her, if they saw anything at all. I figured that the palace would have magical protections that would be a lot harder to fool, but apparently [Liminality] had a hell of a punch and she could walk past the outer wards without them stirring. The inner defenses were rather more potent and she didn’t want to deal with those, but that was fine with me. The purpose was more to find a good place to stage the plan than it was to infiltrate the palace.

“Most of their higher-level Classers are gone,” Shayma reported. “There’s still the Kingsguard inside the palace, but since they’re inside the palace I’m not too worried. There’re wards all around the palace and I’m not sure how much they’ll interfere. My rune knowledge is still pretty sparse.” She smiled though, swishing her tail. “But considering it’s you, I’m not worried. I’m still looking around, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be ready by nightfall.”

“Great! I’ll be ready by then, too. I’ve got some of the most pressing Tarnil issues taken care of, too, so I had a productive day.”

“Already?” Shayma’s eyes widened. “Iniri will be happy about that.”

“Well a good thing, too. Tarnil’s magic had basically stopped and if I’d found out much later I’d have to remake the whole thing from scratch.”

“That does sound pretty terrible. Also, amazing that you can fix it.”

“Turns out there are benefits to being an entire country!”

Shayma giggled, and I turned my attention to making a new chamber so I’d be ready when she was. I enlarged another fifty-meter sphere into a giant empty chamber, but this time I put a platform in the middle, suspended by columns sprouting from the bottom half of the sphere to support it. Even though I was using Stonesteel for it I still had to add [Mana Reinforcement] to make sure it didn’t collapse under its own weight, let alone that of the a palace, and I made a note to work on putting together more anvils. [Reified Manastone] would make these things so much easier. Once I had a nice big stable platform, I saturated the sphere with [Purgatory], which gave the impression my stone shelf was floating in an infinite, featureless void. Perfect.

Soon Shayma was ready too, using [Phantasmal Path] to jump to a tiny, dusty, forgotten storage room off some disused basement adjacent to the palace. Glancing around with [Genius Loci] I was actually convinced it was part of some secret escape tunnel, which tickled my sense of irony. I wasn’t exactly invading through their escape route, but it was close enough.

“Ready,” said Shayma, putting her hands on the walls, and I reached out to take hold of the stone. The mana cost for [Assimilation] wasn’t as daunting with my mana reserves and regeneration, so it didn’t take me long to appropriate a massive slice of stone underneath the palace ground. That gave me the foundation to spin up a huge Field, namely, [Panopticon]. I wanted to make sure there was nothing too unexpected inside the palace before I moved it, but all the Field revealed were some guards and maybe one foreign spy, plus a few camouflaged bits of magic. Nothing I needed to worry about.

The next Field was a teleport. I didn’t want to [Assimilate] the entire palace and [Relocate] took a lot longer anyway, maybe long enough that someone could interrupt it. I’d never used a teleport on anything the size of a palace before but I had the resources for it now, and while some of the wards put up a feeble resistance I could slam a hundred thousand mana into the teleportation.

So I did.

There was an almost audible snap as the entire building vanished, reappearing in the isolation chamber I’d made for it, and Grand Theft Palace was complete.

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