Chương 467: BECMI Chapter 466 – Aging Empires

On the Other Shore, there was a subtle and unseen shift below the perception of virtually everything. It was a flowering of the Priests of the Orders of Heaven, spreading out from the central tenants of the Church of the Morning. They took a central simple tenant, but acknowledged there were many ways to heed the call of Heaven, and although closely tied and allied, they could and would approach matters differently. There was no one church that did all things.

Mortals were different, and the different approaches to rise to Heaven were thus open, too. It did cause some consternation within the Church of Morning, but the feedback was stern, uncompromising, and repeated. There was no war within Heaven.

Those who sought to be eminent for the sake of ego and pride were completely missing the point and meaning of their own faith, and attempts by mortals, some of them put artfully in place by rival Immortals, to guide doctrine and influence the direction of the mortal church failed rather violently and disastrously during this building period. Multiple Immortals lost multiple servants, Avatars, minions, and candidates for Immortality during this time.

It was quickly obvious that whatever powers were behind the Churches of Heaven, they were extremely united and extremely competent at their tasks, and they were watching for corruption vigilantly as just one aspect of their doctrines.

Clashes with the Immortals forming the Pantheon of Sythia were inevitable, but the Church of Heaven did not seek out such conflicts, being content to defy them and make it known that Sythia's missionaries and advocates were unwanted, their agents were unwelcome, and if mortals were blind enough to serve them in Sythia without thinking there would be consequences, well, more fools they.

The fact the Immortals of Sythia could not duplicate the simple power and universality of the Salutes caused no end of consternation among themselves and their most powerful priests. Even Quarizon Himself could not replicate the simple blessing of the Salute to the Morning, nor tap it for the benefit of His own servants, a truth which stung His pride and power. But the Churches of Heaven didn't convert by the sword, even if they would definitely kill those who lived by it.

People came to them because they wanted to, because it was a better way, and good neighbors becoming great neighbors was something everyone could understand. Brightmoor focused on its own internal growth, clearing lands and farms steadily, educating its population as few kingdoms did, and in the process building a nation that was head and shoulders in standard of living above those of all of its neighbors.

Better education, healthcare, and carefully advancing technology was leading to a population boom that easily rivaled the one the blessings of Immortals was helping along in Sythia, only at the normal and mortal level. In more distant lands to the south, other kingdoms were slowly starting to gather, too, including the tribes that would one day form the basis for Siricil… but all that was many years off, and those tribes were still barbarians.

The ancestors of the Hellenar were slowly starting to gather and form a mutual alliance of city-states that would grow into the kingdom of the Eonics, giving rise to many heroes, several Immortals, and yet another empire that would rise and fall to internal corruption once again. But those were all things I was watching from the side and around the world, while Captain Emeril and Master Lalo slowly stitched together the whole world, insinuating themselves into many cultures on multiple continents as they did so.

Emeril's Spock Identity was (un?) lucky enough to stumble across a world visited by mortal explorers and possessed of a slight magical favoritism for single-celled creatures. Bacteria, viruses, and amoebas from the skin of the explorers had fallen off, continued to mutate and to grow, and over time had developed into a massive voracious tide of oozes and plasmoids that had devoured everything organic on the world, and were working on the non-organics to the point the seas were starting to become slime, too.

Such worlds were always identified and marked for extermination by Immortals, and the IP gains for doing so were immense… and so were the Karmic benefits. As such, I ended up making a full set of Sims JUST for cleansing that world and feeding all the stuff to the Land, and Emeril used the opportunity to set up several extra Avatars for the same purposes.

The Karma of the Sims passed back to me, and I inherited a LOT of practice with Reserves, Mass Area of Effect spells, and gained a lot of experience dealing with slimes, molds, oozes, jellies, and puddings of many, many varieties. Also, they had to set up a ring of overlapping Pyramid Domains reaching around the entire world to filter and purify the air and oceans, so another long-term project out there.

It was monotonous and slimy, but the rewards in Karma and IP were totally worth it, so doing ooze-killing duty was something that Spock and his team were actually looking forward to. The fact the cleared worlds could then be moved into Prime Plane alignment and eventually repopulated by one means or another was a secondary goal very useful at the Immortal Level. Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

Drakkunport continued to grow, as did the Moor-dwarven population of the Rings of Fire. More and more clans from across the world were choosing to escape the Immortal influences which were tilting against them and evacuate to my realm.

I didn't warn him. I didn't talk to him. I didn't ask him what he thought he was doing messing around under my realm, manipulating the earth and metals there, and starting to reach towards the surface and probably affect the flows of water and mix of minerals in the volcanic soil there, rendering it all more and more barren. Nope, I just killed him.

The four Orbs were laden with reversed Water Magic that desiccated the Avatar of Wulshar the Maker, known to the dwarves of the Far Shore as Clangyr the Mountain-Father, then unloaded half a million years of temporal influence to blow the absolutely dry shell into dust and powder and rip it apart.

The variant Disintegration effect caught the Immortal in mid-spell and blew him and his Avatar apart in the typical violent eruption of vivus doing its thing, giving Him no clue what had happened and likely amazing the Hell out of him that his sturdy Avatar could die so damn quickly.

Three days later, when he came to carefully investigate what had killed him, a Spellflare ripped away his spells, and then a pillar of stone two hundred feet high with Bane to Immortals and Vivic on it slammed down on him, crushing his Avatar to thin paste and lighting off that corpse, too. When He came back one more time in his ghostly Immortal form, impossible to truly detect, trap, or stop, he found the area saturated with dangerous energies that felt absolutely tangible to his Immortal ghost.

He was wise enough to deduce that entering the area might just lead to the capture of his primary soul, but wasn't wise enough to predict the spells that were waiting for shadowy whorls and wisps in the ethereal material inundating the area. There was a burst of power, and the whole area blew outward, clearly limning him in shadows between motes of power and influence, the only static thing in the incorporeal state.

He tried to flee, but the Circle and the Seal exploded up in a fountain of Elementally Pure Water, capturing him inside a sphere of the Element most hostile to him. It was somehow run through with energies of Thought which bound even His immaterial form tightly to that sphere of Water, icy Runes crackling with lightning scarring the rock about Him before detonating with a finality that wiped away yet a third Avatar of His.

A continent away, a cheerful older smith laboring away over a forge to create a new cookpot jerked and died abruptly. The corpse did not explode, but it did dissolve to ash and dust before the shocked eyes of his apprentices. None of them saw the Namerippings pull out very specific pieces of information from those dead Avatars at the instant of their deaths. The Empyreal Wulshar the Maker finally got the message that He was poking around where He should not, and abandoned all interest in the Ring of Fire forthwith.

Four days later a river of tempus fugul, literally liquefied Time, punched through the planar wall of Wulshar's home plane, swept across his primary world therein, and reverted everything on it back a million years. Millennia of Immortal investment, sculpting of the world, erection of buildings and monuments, reserves of materials and museums of wonderfully created objects, as well as countless numbers of servant races, chosen minions, faithful souls, and Constructs were washed backwards in time and unmade.

When the river of regressive temporal momentum washed itself away and back towards the future of another place, everything Wulshar had ever done to the whole world had been undone, as was anything and everything not Immortal upon it. Indeed, the volumes of Immortal Power He had vested into his home were gone and washed away as if they had never been spent!

It was going to cost him much in negotiations with the Hierarchs of Time to undo what had been done, and even then they weren't going to be able to restore everything. As to who and what was responsible, there was no clue whatsoever, but He very well understood that He had provoked someone who He should not have, and sticking His nose where it was not wanted had earned Him some dire consequences.

Wulshar the Maker decisively abandoned his project of forcing the current iteration of dwarves into 'extinction' so he could remake them in his preferred image, realizing that if he wanted a new dwarven race, he would have to make them up himself, for far greater cost and investment...

It was buried under a great mountain the size of Olympus Mons, on a dead moon orbiting a lifeless sun-blasted rock, forever in shadow and not a place to be remembered or discovered by anything, deep in Wulshar's home plane. I looked at the thousand-foot Seal, rising into the darkness, doing with simplicity, pure size, and perfection what would be done by others with complexity, synergy, and resonance.

Wulshar was completely focused on his primary world at the moment, and was not paying any attention to this world located so much closer to the sun of his home plane of Materio. This moon was where the Seal was placed that cut off worship and the voices of the dwarves from reaching the home realm of their actual Creator Immortal, Harnadin, basically erasing the dwarves on Nown from the attentions of their maker, who had spread his creations across many worlds and merely thought they had been wiped out on Nown.

He had many worlds to pay attention to, and so paid no thought to a world where His favored race was no more. That, of course, was a complete lie. I did not have to truly worry about this place in the Other Shore's timeline here.

But I was going to study it, because I was going to find it on the Far Shore of my home, and with the power and authority of Immortal Clangyr/Wulshar's True names there, I was going to crack this thing open and see what the ancient Immortal of Crafts and Community was going to do when an irate Eternal burst into his quiet isolation and confronted Him about his ass-hattery there. The revelation to the dwarves of their true history and what was done to them would likely be quite crippling to Clangyr.

What the relationship of the modern dwarves and the Moorian dwarves would be when their creator answered their prayers was another matter…