Chapter 105: Chapter 105: The Planning of the Yin Yang Sage

Krysta

Krysta La’Vordi looked out over the sea of undead and finally understood why the first trial had put them up against an evil alchemist sect.

Trial VII was to help protect the last of humanity on an F rank planet against an invasion by an undead empire for eight days until rescue arrived, so the normal route would be to take command of the last of the native forces and try to keep as many people alive as possible. There would definitely be bonuses the more people were protected and there would likely be further bonuses if the undead army attacking the last human stronghold was destroyed.

Given the limitations of the trial, in a normal case even the best trial takers couldn’t do much better than that.

But the true key to the trial was it being leadership style. The trial taker would gain points for every undead killed, so long as it was by one of their subordinates or something they’d set in motion, and that meant the best strategy would be to create a quick acting plague that would only work against the undead, such as the various varieties listed and explained in the Yin Yang Sage’s Anti-Undead Treatise which the System had started selling a year ago.

The System was basically just a complicated living spell created by the universe’s gods and it required a lot of resources to run—while the resources given out as prizes didn’t come from nowhere either. These types of resources were generally controlled by A ranks and gods, so, when the System had a hot commodity A ranks and gods would be interested in, such as the techniques that enabled the Yin Yang Sage to force all the undead empires in the universe to pay her tribute for nearly half a billion years, it wasn’t above making knowledge of its hot commodity a requirement for doing well in its hosted competitions. It was a way to force even factions who wouldn't normally desire such a technique to buy in order to stay relevant.

This F rank Trial Tower competition was the first such universe-wide competition since the Anti-Undead Treatise had started being sold, so her mother had suspected knowledge of the treatise would be helpful and Krysta had been allowed to read it. It was also one of the reasons she hadn’t brought her own Heroic grade growth staff she’d been using since G rank and instead brought a Heroic grade staff with its own sub-dimension so she could take everything she found in earlier trials and bring them to later ones, such as the bacteria and tools from Trial I.

Before she started preparing the plague though, Krysta put a little over half her mana into one of her skills and pointed her staff at the approaching undead army, thankfully only coming from one side of the fortress where she’d arrived. The undead only numbered a little more than two million and, when she released her skill, they, along with all the ground they were standing on, vanished, teleported roughly 100,000 kilometers straight up, where the void of space would freeze and kill them without her having to do anything further.

Then Krysta got to work, mostly ignoring the natives. According to her mother, the Yin Yang Sage had been a genius, someone who would have easily been able to become a deity had she not been tricked onto the wrong path by a jealous god, and her techniques for creating plagues were second to none. The best of her plagues for use in F rank, however, relied on multiple Laws of multiple elements working in harmony, and that wasn’t something Krysta was good at.

Krysta definitely had the highest space element affinity of anyone in the trial, and probably of any F rank in the universe for at least the last several million years, and, from her mother, she had a very high life element affinity, allowing her to make the most basic of the Yin Yang Sage’s anti-undead plagues, but she knew she wasn’t going to do very well in Trial VII compared to some of her strongest competitors for taking the trial’s top spot.

Granted, it was quite rare to have Law Larva for all six elements of fire, water, light, darkness, life, and death like the Yin Yang Sage, but she knew from the reports given to her there were at least three practitioners of Yin Yang Cosmology among the scions participating in the trial, so all three of them were likely able to make one of the better plagues, raking in quite a few more points.

Krysta comforted herself with the knowledge at least no one would have the thirteen separate Law Larva to make the best of the F rank plagues and no one with access to the knowledge from the Yin Yang Sage’s Anti-Undead Treatise would have wasted their artifact slot to bring in an artifact capable of readying a plague for instant use upon entering Trial VII.

* * *

Mila

“What did I tell you!” Nana Xara sounded so proud of herself as Mila and Aalam saw the contents of Trial VII. “I can manipulate the universe, even after my death!”

“Yeah, you gave away a secret which in the future we could have used to threaten hundreds of A and B rank empires for A and B rank resources so we could potentially get some amazing F rank resources.” Mila was impressed to have learned just how much weight her teacher used to have in the universe, as a lot of the more shady things Nana Xara had done had not been in the biography she’d read, but she was also disheartened to learn how much the universe operated like she’d thought it did. Back when Nana Xara had been alive, she’d used most of the resources she’d gained from tribute as tribute to a few divine forces she’d angered so, upon her death, she hadn’t been anywhere as rich as most in the universe would believe.

That tribute had stopped with her death, however, so the credits she was earning through selling one of her ultimate sets of techniques went directly into her own account which, at the next System hosted major auction in twenty-one years, would allow Mila to act as her intermediary and buy whatever she, Aalam, Diana, and anyone else in their force needed, though they would then need to earn the resources through quests.

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“It’s not like I sold the best stuff anyway.”

Nana Xara sounded a little annoyed and Mila found herself smiling as she walked up to the man who looked like the head of the defenders, an F rank warrior

Then, as she charmed and enslaved the man, she responded. “Yeah, but the stuff you didn’t sell could pretty much only be used by Aalam. It’s not like anyone else has seventeen of the nineteen Law Larva necessary to create Silent Repose of Undeath at F rank.”

Silent Repose of Undeath was Nana Xara’s true ultimate F rank plague against the undead, but it required at least early grade Law Larva of Cells, Order, Deprivation, Entropy, Passion, Tranquility, Energy Transfer, Cleansing, Energy Storage, Contamination, Multi-Dimensional Geometry, Temporal Acceleration, Plasma, Solid, Liquid, Gas, Matter, Shadow, and Illusion. Aalam on his own could create all the components which made the plague stable and deadly, but Mila’s Laws were necessary to keep it hidden from the undead’s detection before it was too late.

“Where are the undead’s portals off world and what is the quickest way to get there?” Mila asked her new slave and, as he quickly answered her due to the nature of the contract he’d signed while charmed, Aalam started destroying all the undead heading for the fortress, mostly using psyforce empowered runes to attack the undead’s artificial souls.

From the man’s information, they learned of a set of portals located roughly 60 kilometers away which led to the main hub of the undead on the planet, where there would be portals leading to the local undead empire off world, and that was all they needed.

Aalam, having been listening in, then acted as they’d planned for a situation like this and grabbed Mila with Telekinesis and flew toward the nearby portal at his max speed. At the same time, Mila used Trickster’s Guise to make herself look like a Nightwalker, removing all the color from her body and then inverting black and white, leaving her with nearly black gray skin, black eyes with white pupils, and pearly white hair.

Aalam then gave her the Left Hand of the Runescribe and Mila dropped down on her own roughly 6 kilometers away from the portals, flying the rest of the way on her own as Aalam headed back to keep destroying the army.

Using the excuse of the army getting destroyed, the energy of which could be felt even from the portals, Mila was able to trick herself through one of the portals using the undead’s inbuilt deference to high grade species like Nightwalkers. She was then let out in a portal complex at the undead’s main base, where there were multiple portals to other locations on the planet as well as a single portal which led off world.

The portal complex was at the center of a large city filled with undead which had a sort of magitech feel like a city from one of the higher tech Final Fantasy games and Mila quickly stepped into an ally, hid behind some refuse, and took out the second artifact they’d brought in a copy of, a specialized container for quickly empowering and multiplying magical plagues.

It looked like a large brass cylinder with three small cylinders inside and each cylinder held a different plague. Over the last six trials, Mila and Aalam had used all their spare time, even sacrificing bonus points for finishing some of the less valuable trials quickly, to make three varieties of plagues. Then they had placed them in the artifact to accelerate their growth and fed the artifact all the qi, mana, and psyforce they could spare.

As a result, there was enough of the Silent Repose of Undeath bacterial plague that, when she opened the cylinder and the plague started leaking out and spreading with the wind, there was already enough of the plague that everyone in the city would be infected within a couple hours. Silent Repose of Undeath was also attracted to spatial gates like the undead preferred to use, so, given how close she was to the portal complex, about 80% of the plague would end up going through the portals instead of just infecting the undead in the city.

At the other end of the portals, the plague would then spread, something in the way spatial portals worked and the plague was designed making sure the individual bacteria wouldn’t reenter the same portal for at least 24 hours.

Done with everything she could do, Mila then put the device away, waited an hour, and then tricked her way back through the portal she’d come through, heading back to join Aalam so they could prepare for future trials, there not being much more they could do to improve their score in Trial VII.

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