NOVEL NEXT Chapter 9: Automation
“It’s too cute,” Azrael said with a hard look, “It needs to die.”
I, on the other hand, inspected the disgusting creature with hesitant interest.
The small green orb bounced back and forth in an approximation of fear. The life energy it gave off disrupted the Domain around it, but its small power was not enough to completely displace my might.
“I don’t fully disagree,” I admitted, “But I think I can make use of it.”
Azzy gave me a weird look. “You think you can use it? How? It has Vitasis in it, Ambrose.” She pointed an accusing finger at the little fairy.
“I know, I know…” I looked the Spriggan over once again. “I just think I can, well, corrupt it.”
“Fine, fine, do your weird experiments,” she huffed, “Just leave me out of it and get that thing out of here when you’re done, alright?”
I smiled. “Alright.” She walked up the rough stairs I’d formed from the top of the mountain so she could come down and take a look, and I closed them off behind her.
“Don’t worry, you’ll grow on her,” I said to the little wisp, gently reaching a hand out towards it. “At least, you will once I do… this!”
I condensed a huge amount of my Domain of Undeath’s influence into my palm, and sent it flying at the Spriggan, which had already engaged in evasive maneuvers. Sadly for it, it was within my dungeon, where I was the Dungeon Master, the final say on all matters. The ball smashed against the floating life orb’s frame and formed a small crack.
The crack immediately started releasing Vitasis, the energy of life itself, but I directed my influence to flow into the Spriggan, sealing the gap behind it. A war was waged between the powers of life and death, of Vitasis and Necrosis. Surprisingly, the Vitasis actually started winning, but I sent even more Necrosis into the now-still Spriggan, and quickly won the war within it.
I sent a surge of Animate Necrosis through it, and it began to hover through the air again, but it was no longer intelligent. That was a bit sad, but it was most likely fine.
The reason I’d been so interested in this little creature was due to the effect it had on its environment. As the Spriggan moved, it had left small seeds of Vitasis in the air. Those seeds had fallen down and burrowed into the earth, causing plants to burst straight through the rock. Those plants had died right away, of course, not only because of my Domain but also just due to the location. It was pretty hard for any living thing to survive the Dead Belt, let alone a small seedling. Even so, I’d been curious about the possibility of inverting this creature’s effect.
I bunched together a stream of Necrosis energy near the undead Spriggan and used Create Undead. Soon, the body of a Dualjack Caerbalope rested to the side, unanimated. With a mental command, I sent the hovering ball of animated Necrosis towards it, commanding it to drop some of its energy onto the corpse. It did so, and I watched as the power streamed into the undead.
Sadly, it had not been animated by the act, merely strengthened. I sighed and sent the Spriggan off to one side of the room, deciding to come up with a purpose for it later.
In the meantime, it was time to rectify the lacking defenses of my tower.
I sent my consciousness through my Domain, taking a moment to check on Azrael, who seemed to be pretending to take a nap on the surface. Wait, no, that’s meditation. I didn’t know she did that.
Moving along, I focused on the first floor of my dungeon. Right now, I needed defenders, but I didn’t currently care too much about balance.
I Created an Antigo on the first floor. It sounds pretty excessive, but it’s honestly not really all that bad. After all, I Created two on the second floor. I slowly went through my tower and increased the number of Antigos by one for each floor.
You might be wondering how many Antigos that actually ends up being. Well, this mountain was about 4000 feet tall, which wasn’t honestly all that tall for a mountain, all things considered. When I was originally designing this place, I’d slightly increased the height of each floor by a foot as I went up, starting at 15 feet. My Delinear Sight had helped me work out the calculations on the fly.
I only stopped making floors when the top floor, the one that stored my Phylactery, was 78 feet tall. In other words, there were 64 floors. I didn’t have any Antigos on the top floor with me, but that still meant that I was Creating 2016 Antigos.
Now that’s a lot of Antigos.
Obviously, I didn’t do all that instantly. It took quite some time to do, since Antigos were currently my most expensive creation, with the exception of the Windilope that I’d made only a single time and that was only really worth its expense for travel. In between summoning Antigos, I mostly Spread Undeath, chatted with Azrael, and got to work redesigning my floors.
First off, I didn’t love the staircases. They were just in the middle of the rooms and you could bypass a floor if you just moved quickly enough. To fix that, I completely removed the staircase–much to Azzy’s temporary dismay–and the central column, then replaced them with the same type of stairs but bound to the outside of the dungeon, rather than the inside. To reach the stairs heading to the next floor, you would have to get to the other side of the room first, meaning you’d either need to be incredibly fast or kill all the monsters on the current floor.
When I started going up against human enemies, that alone would prove insufficient, but for now I considered it good enough.
Outside of that, I finally finished Spreading Undeath across the mountain, and started compressing it. I considered trying to do the whole thing at once, slowly compressing the mountain by decimals of an inch at a time, but I wanted to feel like I was actually getting something done, so I started at the top. Soon, the top of the mountain shrank, then flattened into the top of my tower.
That was the fastest part, simply because I was taking one shape and flattening it into another. The rest of the tower took a lot more effort and focus, as it was encircling what I wanted to press it into. Flat surfaces were easy to do, but curves took time.
After only a bit of nagging from Azrael, I created a staircase to the top of the tower, where I also placed some crenulations. I was concerned that something might be able to fly in here, but I decided that I could just close it up when she wasn’t up there. Maybe I could also figure out a way to make an undead ballista? That sounds fun. Siege weaponry was often underutilized in games back on Earth.
A couple other creatures wandered into my depths, but they were all undead. Once the Antigo on the first floor had dealt with them, I had their bodies tossed off to the side of the floor just below the Phylactery room. A couple of them were humanoid, and I probably wouldn’t try to use Call on them, just because it would be so much more difficult to fight a sentient’s Willpower and I’d gain so little from it, but the others had potential. For example, I think there was an undead wolf in there and some sort of big lizard.
As I filled up the dungeon with its temporary Antigo defense force, my Create Undead and Animate Necrosis Boons had leveled many times, eventually netting me a level. My Domain of Undeath Boons also leveled wildly, and I’d actually managed to hit the cap for both Skills. I glanced over the options at first, but when I realized that I had multiple levels in those Skills waiting for me, I decided to put it off until I finished Creating Antigos.
When I was finally done, I dug into the prompts.
Seif Ambrose
Spatial Lich 2
Phylactery 2
Undead Possession 1
Reconstitution 4
Incorporate Phylactery 2
Necrosis Manipulation 5 (Max)
Deadsight 7
Animate Necrosis 8
Shape Necrosis 5
Create Undead 9
Available Boon (Necrotic Restoration, Dead Matter)
Available Boon (Construct Consciousness, Bent Life)
Domain of Undeath 5 (Max)
Spread Undeath 9
Mold Terrain 10
Transmute 4
Omnipresence 4
Omniscience 3
Available Boon (Empowered Control, Transfiguring Domain)
Spatium Manipulation 2
Delinear Sight 4
Stitching 2
Folding 1
Calling 2
Taglock 4
Nomantic Call 2
Bondsight 1
Enhancements: Willpower x2
Named Belongings: Caerbalope, Antigo, Arachnomicon
Right. Now that I’d managed to max out both of those Skills, I would need to focus on my lower ones in order to continue leveling up. Once I hit level 5, I’d be able to actually increase their levels again, but for now I needed to focus on what I was lacking.
As for the Boons themselves, I basically took Necrotic Restoration right away. It was simple in that it would allow me to heal my creatures, which I could already kinda do, but it weakened them a bit since it was just a clever application of Shape Necrosis, rearranging their bodies to draw flesh back to the damaged portion. This Boon would allow me to cheaply restore them to peak condition without requiring me to make completely new ones. Dead Matter would have allowed me to make basically whatever materials I wanted out of Necrosis, a little bit like the Solid Death Boon from Domain of Undead that I’d rejected a while back. While it might be nice, I already had Transmute and Mold Terrain. The Necrosis density of the materials that came from them would be lower, but that didn’t really matter all that much to me.
Construct Consciousness was about what it sounded like. It would allow me to make my undead into more than just mindless husks that followed my orders. They would be able to think and reason for themselves, though they would be completely loyal to me and my interests and would still follow my mental commands. I actually got the feeling that it would work on things other than undead so long as they had sufficient amounts of Necrosis in them, but it was clearly intended for use with animated creatures.
Bent Life was more of an offensive ability, and I wondered if these level 5 Boon choices were capstones and were the same regardless of what I’d chosen in the past, since I’d not picked any offensive Boons. Bent Life would effectively allow me to suffuse a living target with so much Necrosis that they lost much of their resistance to Skills that worked off of it. In my case, I would be able to use Shape Necrosis on living creatures.
It was very useful, even for someone like me who hadn’t taken any attack Boons in the Necrosis Manipulation Skill. Still, Construct Consciousness was much more useful for my situation, and I already had some ideas for it, so I picked that instead. A burst of knowledge filled my head, and I immediately realized that the Boon was even stronger than I’d expected. Still, I directed my attention down to the next option.
The Domain of Undeath Boons further supported my hypothesis that these capstone Boons had nothing to do with my previous ones. Empowered Control would let me, well, control my Domain better. All of my Boons would be faster and easier to use. Transfiguring Domain, though, would passively strengthen and even animate corpses within my influence, which was very tempting.
With that said, I wanted to try my idea with Construct Consciousness first.
The undead Spriggan from earlier made its way towards me, and I focused on my new Boon. A nascent intelligence began to form within it, and I found myself shaping its desires, wants, and needs. Most importantly I needed to give it a purpose, and that purpose could be almost anything I wanted. It would be sorta like a child of mine, in a way. I mean, not really, but it would be a semi-sentient creature of my creation, and I could teach it whatever I wanted.
Whatever I wanted…
I turned a small portion of my attention back to my Phylactery. Specifically, a certain Boon of mine. After a tenuous moment of processing, I felt the forming Consciousness accept the purpose and knowledge I was pushing towards it, and a nearly-invisible rune formed within its core. I snickered as I used Create Undead to summon a Dualjack on the floor nearby. Straight away, my brand new creation floated over to the body and Necrosis flowed out of it and into the body, binding the two together. Soon, the Dualjack stood up, now under my new creation’s Animate Necrosis, and my snicker turned into a full cackle.
I had just automated the animation of undead.
Focusing on the Wisp–which was what I decided to call the undead Spriggans–with my Omniscience, I used Create Undead. A large amount of Necrosis flowed out of me, which made sense considering it was a being of pure energy, but at the end I had yet another Wisp. This one didn’t have the same Consciousness, which was sort of good and sort of bad at the same time. Obviously, that meant that I would have to manually Construct each individual Consciousness, but on the other hand…
This time, when I focused on the purpose of this Wisp, I focused on an entirely different Boon, one from a completely different Skill. Still, it was accepted, and a completely different rune formed inside it.
I didn’t use Create Undead, instead nudging an Antigo to bring up the body of the once-undead wolf. I activated my Bondsight and pushed with Calling, and soon a living wolf stood trembling before me. The Antigo quickly cut it down, and I healed the corpse with Shape Necrosis. As soon as the process was complete, I gave the new Wisp the go-ahead, and it shot into the corpse of the creature, making use of my Undead Possession Boon.
I spent quite a while with my new distraction, tinkering with which Skills could be used with the Construct Consciousness Boon, both with my Wisps and the Antigos. Mold Terrain let my creatures effectively earthbend, Create Undead would let them make new bodies for the Animate Necrosis Wisps to utilize, and Shape Necrosis made them into shapeshifters. Once I figured out what they did, I immediately Created as many Spread Undeath Wisps as possible, and my influence started passively expanding.
The issues with this method were twofold. Firstly, I couldn’t imbue more than a single Boon into a Consciousness at a time, since any more than that was simply too much for their limited mental capacity. Secondly, the creatures didn’t actually generate their own Necrosis or Mentum, meaning that I needed to refill them with my own occasionally.
As for why I wasn't using any of my Spatium Skills, I had thought about it, but initially dismissed it because my creatures were made of Necrosis, not Spatium. Then I’d realized that, like with my own body, it was possible to combine the two.
I messed around with that for a while, but even when I managed to blend Necrosis and Spatium into a single Wisp through a careful use of Create Undead, I wasn’t able to push any of my Spatium Manipulation Boons into the Consciousness. They were simply too complex. I moved on to Calling, but the issue there was a bit more fundamental. Boons were always a different way of using the original Skill, but in the case of Calling, the Skill itself was completely separate. Taglock was simply a way to lock onto a target, and then the Skill portion would kick in. If I’d gone with Mass Summon, that issue would be resolved, but then I would have had a different issue entirely, in that I wouldn’t have had any way to lock onto the target.
Eventually, I had to admit defeat and concede that I wasn’t currently capable of getting my creatures to wield the powers of reality. To be fair, that probably would have been quite overpowered if I had managed it.
I’d still gotten something out of my experiments with Spatium, though. One of Spatium’s most immediately obvious effects was that it increased the mass and power of an object, so I’d gotten a very powerful top-floor Antigo guardian out of the deal. Eventually, though, my testing came to a close, and my new mobs filtered their way through the dungeon.
That was when I turned my attention back to my Phylactery and snatched the Empowered Control Boon. Don’t get me wrong, Transfiguring Domain was cool and all, but I’d just figured out a way to automate every single one of my Necrosis-based Boons, which made it almost completely redundant. The only reason I would have taken it would be because of its passive Necrosis imbuement effect, which would even last outside my Domain, but I had no intention of sending my creatures outside the dungeon for offensive purposes and had turned down similar Boons from this Skill in the past.
With my newly-Empowered Control, I turned my attention back to compacting the mountain around me, and found that it moved much more quickly. My issues with the circular shape of the tower had been completely resolved, and a smile returned to my face.
It wouldn’t be too much longer until my tower was complete, and then all there was to do was find a way to get people to throw themselves to their deaths.