The Power of Ten

The Chinese had seized the anchor fortress at Jiayu Pass, reduced it to white dust, and now were literally cutting their way down the Great Wall, vivisizing it with the bones and dust of the uncounted multitudes of undead chained to it and what it represented, and were advancing along it grimly.

It had rapidly become a rite of passage for the Chinese to undertake, a purging of the last elements of their past trying to hold them down, and breaking the dead free of the chains upon them as they did so. For outlanders, it was a grim fight from dusk to dawn, the undead never stopping coming, and then more work destroying all the vivisized stone from dawn to dusk, rinse and repeat.

To the Chinese, it was more like a holy calling.

The other anchor of the Great Wall was at Shanhai Pass, right on the ocean, but that was surrounded by territory completely dominated by Cultivators at this point, near North Korea, where some of the most vicious fighting in the land was going on.

The Great Wall cut through multiple other Shroudzones on its way east, and there was no doubt it was not going to be resolved quickly... but it was indeed getting resolved, as the undead were slaughtered and pushed back by Weapons-wielding Chinese and vivic fire. As the Greyfield was pushed back, the Great Wall was crushed and obliterated repeatedly and forever.

They all knew that when the Great Wall finally ended, the Cultivators would be done, the last Shroudzone would have fallen, and the fight for the fate of the rest of the world would be here.

The freeing of China was great in scale, grand in demeanor, magnificent in tenor, and legendary in meaning. A lot of journals were being written about it, both in Visual File and in print, and there were many people vying to be the Great Historian of the fight.

But, as Briggs was warning them, it was all just a warm-up for the final battle that would determine the fate of the world, and what would come after.

The common Chinese were rising to that fight, determined to have a say in their own destiny, and not one chosen for them. As Forsaken, they could determine the course of their own Fate, and make their choices among gods and mortals.

Perhaps the Cultivators thought they were defying Heaven, rewriting Fate, changing their future, and making the world itself bow down before them.

They would likely have been very surprised to learn that the Forsaken rising from the powerless peasants they had subjugated and slaughtered in their millions were doing much the same thing, and one of the Fates they were going to overcome was the will of the Cultivators themselves!

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I sat there and watched all that happening, as Einz finished up his +II Luck Protection and started on the +III.

I was making trips up and down the Pacific now. The numbers of targets I had painted was growing, and grim plans were being finalized to deal with them all. It would take almost three months to paint the Pacific properly, and then I still had to do the Indian Ocean.

Coincidentally, tomorrow would be May 24, and Clavus would be finishing up Slot Zehn come Renewal.

I would then hand Clavus over to Commander Hara’Aru to begin his Legendary upgrade, which would take 100 days to complete and literally a solid two and a half tons of gold.

That meant it was time for me to make the first Rod, as I still needed an Implement.

From a magical standpoint, Rods and Scepters were counterparts to Staffs and Wands.

A Staff increased damage and Spell Penetration. A Wand increased the chance to hit, and the Spell Potency for Saves to resist spells. One was raw power, the other tighter control and focus.

Rods and Scepters exchanged those. Like a Staff, a Rod was designed as a potential weapon, either a light mace or jo, and was directly designed for Weaponized spells, increasing the chance to hit and damage... and could be used to thump heads, too.

A Scepter was not designed as a Weapon, purely a focusing Implement for Spell Penetration and Potency, usually made with precious metals and gemstones. Enchanting it as a Weapon was possible, but the materials it was made of and the weighting made them unwieldy at best. If they were useful as Weapons, they’d instead be Rods.

It then was just to determine what kind of Rod I wanted to have.

Getting the Title wasn’t hard, as an Immovable Rod was naturally the first feature I wanted mine to have, after a basic Ki-Bound Weapon Enhancement.

The usefulness of this effect was debatable at my level of power, but I didn’t care, because I wanted one. It allowed the Rod to get locked in place, and be VERY hard to move, as well as extend up to a total of eight feet long so it could be separated into four two-foot sections.

I wanted one, it was cheap to make, and it was a springboard to a Function Rod. Thus, a simple black Rod of adamantine, with the necessary Runework to be upgraded as I went along. I removed Clavus’ Orb while I handed him off to Commander Haru’Ara, and he started off on a thousand goldweight of upgrades to get Clavus past the Legendary Cap at Twenty.

I’d have a lesser Weapon for a while, but that was fine. I could spend Pool on it and upgrade it as needed, and I still had my Baneskull collection.

A minor event, but huge enough in its own right, as the first Legendary Weapons for the Shrouded Earth were being formed. Sama and Briggs would get the first Eternal Sword and Hammer respectively, and I would get the first Stave.

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The existence of the Greyfielded Great Wall did, however, start to ripple across the world, and once again military advisors got a bitter taste of their own wishes coming true.

Yes, they wanted a way to contain and control me. Yes, they wanted a defense against mass magic that could wipe away armies.

No, they did not want the enemy to have it and be using it, and shutting down my ability to slaughter them with great speed and few casualties. If other Shroudlords became aware of it and started using it, that would definitely hamper the magical edge of their chi and magic-wielders, sure enough.

They were less than happy when the Shroudlords of the Zones the Great Wall cut through went Grey.

It didn’t seem to affect the smaller Shroudzones, so there was probably a threshold that had to be passed to do that. Estimates plugged it as somewhere between a million and five million Hit Dice of undead, based on the size of the Shroudzones that made the change, most of whom had been skirmished by living attackers at least once and shown the business by Dragon Warriors and Casters, both of whom were abruptly nerfed.

When large Shroudzones that could not possibly have had contact with the Great Wall also went Grey, why, I could just imagine all those expressions by people who had wanted to call the shots and could not off in the distance. They could only solemnly contemplate my insistence on stronger Weapons, stronger Armor, and broad, low power among Forsaken, instead of me going grokking crazy taking down Shroudzones myself.

If I had not, they would be literally months behind on the power curve and what had to be done, especially with their own focus on the Powered, who they thought would be of the most use.

Once again, they had to wince at the foresight that had trumped their own, and try to scramble harder to get more normal soldiers and people who could fight into the conflict.

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I spent sixteen hours a day mapping oceans. The other eight were for whatever I wanted to do, and nobody got to decide that for me.

Sure, I shuffled precious metals and gemstones from the Firezone to Detroit, and what had rapidly become the single largest gathering of crafters magnifying goldweight value and Infusers and Investors driving that goldweight into magical items. With Penitent Hall there helping out and anyone who was Powered running a Pattern virtually every day, the amount of money we were literally Burning away was astonishing... and that was even before the billions we spent of it!

Yes, I still popped a spell a day out of Paragon Surge, and even the Sylunar were starting to get numb about it. Yes, Bloodbonded Spells were still being sold, and other Faiths were contributing to the war effort with twisted faces and hungry eyes for the newest secrets of magic, while new researchers continued to come to the Church of Sylune to validate their discoveries, and not the Church of Uruth...

I also Energized a lot of stuff, and made Life Diamonds and other valuable materials. After all, I could still Meditate while mapping, get ki back, and continue Empowering pure materials for use, even if I wasn’t mass slaughtering anything.

Making Life Diamonds couldn’t keep up with demand, after all...

I had expanded my overland trips through Russia, making Lived-Line tracks between the Gulagzones, as they were all coined, tracking and charting them... and the Felldeep below, of course. Continental scans were being clamored for, but I’d get to them after I was done with the oceans... and those places got nuked.

I still needed at least a few minutes a day for Naming Karma. Einz had places to go, things to be, and other Rings to help me boost up, after all.

Vivic Enchantments on nuclear bombs were happening all over the place, and if I was Itemizing them and moving them aboard naval vessels here, there, and everywhere, well, the fleets were getting into position for a grand plan that had no real purpose to any outsider looking on, especially since they weren’t prepping to move as fleets, but as separate ships on separate missions...

I wasn’t worried about their purpose being Divined. They didn’t have contact with things outside the Shroud that could Timesight effectively, and as for things Inside the Shroud, well, Commander Haru’Ara could obfuscate things very, very easily, so trying to predict that so many places were going to get nuked was simply not going to be an option any of those Scrying entities had.

It didn’t help them that I was Beyond Law and Chaos and so my actions were always branching off new possibility threads they could only sense by directly interacting with them. Mundane intelligence-gathering might scare up something, but the sheer idea that hundreds, even thousands of nuclear bombs were being moved all at once was not something that anyone was going to talk about, and those that could had all been Lesser Geased into silence about the matter, and couldn’t reveal anything even if they wanted to.

A Teleporter (or two, or more) moving Itemized nukes around in such numbers was just something that wasn’t in the cards they could see.

Now, that didn’t mean that disinformation about security protocols and deployment exercises and contingencies and stuff couldn’t be floated around, but the numbers of active nukes was a tiny tithe of what was actually being put into play.

The military’s most trusted scientists had confirmed the same data we had, and all that nuclear-enriched material was going to go violently wild and had to be disposed of. Ergo, ALL the bombs were on the table.

For some people, it was truly a happy, happy moment.

For others, it was just something that had to be done, and unlike the people wanting to see ALL the big explosions, it also had to be done Right.