City of Sin (Yanyu Jiangnan)

Breaking Through

Asa had been dragged over to this gathering by her husband, but listening to Mina complain about Richard she started radiating bloodlust and glared at Prince Tumen, “Macy’s your daughter? And you still sent her to seduce Mountainsea’s lover?”

Prince Tumen wasn’t someone to fear any opponent, but seeing his brother glaring hard at him he simply snorted and swallowed his words. Greyhawk gripped Asa’s hand and said softly, “I’d just like to say that our daughter isn’t the only one with him.”

Asa frowned at his words, Sharon’s image coming to her mind. The legendary mage was apparently trapped in the depths of the void, but before she had left the Deepblue she was someone that even the other epic beings of the plane didn’t want to deal with. Her dragon summons and endless mana were frightening enough, but the spatial explosions she had come up with after her hibernation was something no one had been able to replicate. The lunatic Empress Apeiron was the only one willing to challenge her.

Perhaps the only fault of Norland’s most materialistic powerhouse was that she was a little too slow, but even that was only in short distance travel. If it was across a plane or through the void, no one could compare. Even if she was a hundred times as arrogant as she was now, Asa would understand that she simply couldn’t compare to the inhuman terror that was Sharon. Of course, the woman was rumoured to be from an an ancient race that far exceeded humanity anyway.

Having taken care of the thorny situation, Greyhawk finally heaved a sigh of relief and started narrating everything he had seen in Faelor. Empress Gelan started to ignore Asa entirely as she listened attentively, but the two epic beings never once crossed gazes again.

The atmosphere of the little tea party slowly changed, with Gelan and Hidden Sword growing more serious by the minute. Even Asa, who had personally experienced the last battle, learnt many new things from her husband’s retelling. Prince Tumen’s eyebrows knitted together, deep in thought as he felt the tug of laws from the narration. On the other hand, Princess Mina who was significantly weaker had already fallen into a trance, leaning forward so hard that her dress seemed ready to burst. She couldn’t understand the mysterious laws in Greyhawk’s words, only feeling like she was listening to a mythical hero’s tale.

With even Greyhawk himself struggling to finish the story, the three epic beings in the hall remained silent even after it was completed. Prince Tumen seemed to have fallen into deep thought, while Mina’s eyes lost focus as she delved into an unknown fantasy.

A few minutes later, Hidden Sword asked, “You said there was a large soul flux after the final battle?”

“Yes, they seemed to converge around Richard.”

“Was there a change in him?”

“Well… His injuries were healed immediately, but as for his power—”

“His power must have spiked,” Asa interrupted, “For a moment, it felt like he controlled the entire plane.”

Hearing this assessment, both Hidden Sword and Empress Gelan gasped in shock. They understood just how difficult it was to control the entirety of a plane, which meant controlling its laws. Even for tertiary planes this was a near-impossible task, and they didn’t know of anyone who had achieved it.

In theory, such a thing would allow one to… “Is this a way to break through?” Hidden Sword asked, leaving all three epics and Greyhawk deep in thought.

……

While the powerhouses of the plane wondered about Richard’s strength, the nobility was more concerned with what he had made back from his war against the reapers. His harvest was actually far greater than they could imagine, but it fell short of his own expectations.

After taking care of everything he had put off in the past few months, Richard returned to his demiplane and entered his laboratory. There were a number of reaper components spinning atop his experiment desk, but after pulling a few of them down and looking over them he sighed helplessly. These components were the critical parts of the mothership that he hadn’t managed to work back to, but in his spare time over the past few days he had unlocked all of their secrets. Amongst these things was indeed a device that could reactivate ember essence, as well as the thought centre.

Detailed research had allowed him to identify the device used to reactivate ember essence was as a small teleporter. It would transport all the ember essence it collected to an unknown place, and receive it again once it was cleansed in the currents of time. The technology itself was nothing short of impressive, but it was obvious that the reaper civilisation wouldn’t just activate ember essence for him. As for the thought centre, it was similar to a cloned brain; useful more as a node in a network than anything else. The mothership was communicating with something else to make actual decisions, relaying commands to the fleet.

Of course, this technology represented a different kind of law unto itself. There was definitely value here, but it was like catching a broodmother only to find that it was just a cloned brain. The limited abilities made any replicas near useless.

Still, he hadn’t even imagined he would reach a point where he would capture the reaper base intact. Although reality didn’t match with his most recent hopes, he wasn’t too disappointed with how things had turned out. In the end, he did conclude that the reapers were organised in almost the exact same way as the broodmother; the only difference was that one was mechanical while the other was organic.

He would soon come to learn that his true harvest came in the form of all the souls he had redeemed from the reapers. While each one had negligible strength, hundreds of millions of them had added together to give him full control of the laws of Faelor. Now, he was in essence the plane’s overgod. The entire plane was his divine kingdom, and there was nothing there that he did not know or could not do. With the backing of such a system, he would find it much easier to analyse other planes in the future, and even create a brand new plane if he so wished. So long as he had the time and energy, he could construct a new plane of existence in the void and supply it with wind, water, plants, and life. This would require strength that he currently didn’t possess, but the doors had been opened.

Examining the parts for a few hours, Richard then left his lab for Sharon’s treasury, opening the door to find a near-barren place with only a few half-empty boxes in the corner. The once-magnificent horde of the Dragon Slaver was now worth almost nothing, but he was here to fix that. Retrieving some of the reaper metal from his ring, he softened it with his blue flames before contorting it with Kingsteel to form a shelf of sorts. He then took out a metal barrel filled with silver liquid, gingerly placing it on the shelf. A barrier of astral symbols was formed to safeguard it, but he still examined it a number of times before nodding with contentment.

That barrel was full of activated ember essence, essentially containing the entirety of what he had extracted from the reaper mothership. It was enough to upgrade hundreds of pieces of legendary equipment to the divine realm, making its value immeasurable by normal means. If one didn’t count the energy absorbing trees, Sharon had previously been worth less than half this.

Richard finally felt like he had repaid everything that Sharon had monetarily done for him with interest, a trace of guilt he’d always carried fading away. Looking around, he saw the boxes in the corner and suddenly felt like they were an eyesore, walking over and tossing them into his ring so the barrel of essence was even more conspicuous. While the things in the box had originally been useless to him, he would rather have the hall looking neat and spacious.