The cities are rather large, though. Instead of the couple-hundred-inhabitant average that any normal medieval human civilization would gravitate towards, these places nearly all got a couple of thousand inhabitants. Limits of food, transportation, infrastructure, and sanitation used to put hard caps on less developed cities back on Earth. In the cultivation world, larger towns only sprung up around cultivators who actually gave a fuck about the mortal people, a rarity unless literally every inhabitant was a sect servant or slave.
So, this is quite the mysterious clusterfuck. Five thousand towns spread over half a planet. A population density that is both too low and too high. Too few cities that are way too large by any mundane statistical analysis. Ambient mana in the air did make the average person a bit stronger than normal mundane mortals would have been. The light and dark mana imbalance has been putting a rather large cap on that, though. Like animals, I have found that in order to passively grow stronger, humans and beastkin needed to absorb equal shares of dark and light mana. The sheer lack of bright mana put a large limit on this process.
Another process chimes in, this time it’s Database who is deciding it has relevant and useful information to present to me. I check the mental information package, and immediately agree with my qi clone.
All sapient life would have been killed off in a few thousand years. Extrapolating from a few data points, I have discovered that the mana imbalance would have literally killed everyone on this rock. The animals would have started mutating en masse, a feat that the sapients just couldn’t have kept up with. Even with a minuscule survival rate, the mana mutants would have overrun all civilised life within a couple of thousand years. Even the most optimistic estimate – which had the Flight joining the battle against the monster hordes – prolonged civilisation by a mere few dozen millennia.
Half of this planet, the entirety of the continent where dungeons are set up to help sapients, contains a population of fifty million people. Ruins are everywhere, literally everywhere, Database tells me. Every single stretch of a couple of thousand square kilometres contains signs of a ruined civilization. It seems that boosting my own cultivation base, and thus Database’s power level, allowed it to take on a lot of the mundane and boring data analysis tasks that I have been putting off.
Actually, the low population makes a twisted form of sense. All that is needed is a minimal occupation of the dungeons. This planet seems to have been designed around those weird places, no matter how inept a design. Those are the true movers and shakers of this planet, those are the machines that turn potential into mana, thus empowering the Flight. In order to operate this planet optimally, a single population group per dungeon is needed, nothing more.
Running another quick calculation, I find that small Dungeon-housed remnants of the Flight and the other civilised species could have held on for hundreds of millennia. They’d need to take shelter inside the massive structures, subsisting on the loot it drops, but they could have survived, if not thrived. The rest of the planet would have become a hellhole of randomly mutating animals at ridiculous power levels after a while, but civilisation could have held on for a while.
All of these sudden realisations shake me from my deep trance. Finding out that I didn’t really screw up anything important with my mistake of spreading qi across the planet is like a splash of cold water to my face. Instead of hiding behind the guilt stemming from the fact that I doomed an entire planet to qi cultivation, I now find out that I’ve merely subverted a worse fate.
Well, there goes my guilt-complex. Shit, I was using that to laze around…
My sudden bout of clarity coming from a large number of processes falling away sets everything in context. Yes, I might have involuntary spread qi throughout this plane of existence, but this planet would have become a wasteland in a couple of thousand years anyway. Yes, I might have fucked up big time, but I did so while making better futures possible. Can I call it a fuck-up then?
I shake myself from more theoretical nagging as I think of what to do next. All of the remnants of civilisation are being taken care of by my students, one way or another. All of the children I had inside Tree deemed too young to cooperate in any true manner are all placed under the careful tutelage of Selis, so that will not cause me any problems whatsoever. All the other people otherwise deemed unworthy, unwilling, or incapable of leading settlements are also included in that hot and dry arrangement. Rhea and I actually had a pretty hefty debate about whether or not to place that blue-haired girl inside the largest desert on the continent, but she vetoed my objections and told me to just do it.
I wasn’t, and still am not, willing to cross a dragon on items she is willing to spend her one veto of the month on, so I let it go. I assigned Selis to the desert, added all the otherwise disinclined to leadership to her charges, and have been receiving her daily death threats ever since. At least the girl can vent a bit using the dungeon sticking up from the rolling dunes, so there’s that.
Taking another mental step back, I call up the statistical analysis from the entire planet. Database has been distilling the masses of information it has been receiving and distributing down to more reasonable volumes of data, which I peruse at my leisure – trawling through neat summaries is much more pleasant than manually digging though massive archives of raw footage, after all. The amount of qi absorbed from the planet is slowly growing, showing the same exponential growth that Tree is even now experiencing.
I note that the amount of life lost is less than expected. Less than a single per cent of all sapient life on the planet has perished since qi started infecting everything properly. The crystals hanging above the towns are busily sucking up the qi inside all the enclosed structures, giving the people cultivating there a chance to reset the ambient qi inside their bodies. This entire thing is a continuation of my tests in cultivation. Ambient qi seems to interfere with a person’s personal qi in a major way. I’m still amazed at the speed by which everyone on this planet is cultivating, a feat I’m attributing to the lack of ambient qi.
The majority of the power I’m absorbing these days comes from the chaos continent, actually. The ordinary drones I’ve sent there are all destroyed by now. None of the relatively fragile flyers managed to survive the increasing amount of powerful flying creatures, animals and mana mutants over there. I’ve been putting the same drones as I placed on the south pole across that continent. The near-indestructible spheres of black metal are filled with three types of formations. First and foremost, the strengthening runes keep the items in one piece. The second formations suck up as much power as possible, while thirdly, small sensors allow me to keep an eye on the place.
The south pole is also a large source of power, but I’ve got that place covered in qi absorption formations to such an extent not a single ice elemental has managed to form over the past week. The amount of qi I’m siphoning from that place for my personal use rivals that of the chaos continent in sheer quantity, though. The super dense items scattered across the most southern area are helping in generating lots of juice and tasty power for me, so I’m oddly thankful for whatever being slapped this world together in that regard.
As far as the weird trash heap of mysterious items goes, I’m slowly developing theories, but I’m not certain of anything yet. The absurdity of some of the things I keep finding, and the fact that despite their complicated and convoluted designs they do nothing useful, are obvious hints in and of themselves. I’m thinking that the systems operating here are not used to a mundane universe at all and that all the esoteric and mystical laws that they ran on previously are not present.
This is all theoretical, of course, and I will need to start looking into this with a bit more seriousness once I can manage to do more than a surface level scan of the hyper-dense trash. Now is not the time for that, though. Instead, I should be going to the north pole and getting Rhea back.
Right, there I go again, thinking like she is a possession that I should just go and retrieve. This is t
he exact thought-pattern that I despised and spend a full millennium running away from and avoiding. Let’s not go down that path, right?
Instead, I should work on my own skills some more. You can’t be frustrated and hurting when you’re too busy to realize the futility of existence, right? I start thinking of ways to design better drones, but quickly realize that all I can do at the moment is to over-engineer the things. Adding any additional complexity will just make the production time skyrocket. The balance I’ve got going between production speed and design is pretty good, so I abandon that avenue of distraction.
I pop outside a few times, checking what the density of the stone bullets is as the drones gather the bits and pieces of the rocket barrages. I’m sending a couple of thousand small rockets skywards every hour now, netting me excess of twenty thousand new projectiles an hour. The density is around thirty per cent at the moment, and I fear that it might be plateauing soon.
Forcing the double density gold to become my own matter already took half of the qi inside my cultivation base, and thus inside Tree. There is no way that I’m going to be able to manage to make matter that dense mine anytime soon.
I end up spending most of my time setting up distillery equipment on the newest celestial object inside my cultivation base. Lola pops in now and then, screeching at me whenever she sees me puttering around on the purple mud ball. I just wave at the worried rabbit, assuring her that I won’t go bald anytime soon.
Placing a working setup on the muddy ball of toxins and acid turns out to take way more effort than I initially thought it would. The traditional copper vessels all start corroding within seconds, and the first few items I install turn into goop within minutes. It takes me at least a day – I sort of lose track of time at this point – to make something that won’t melt or corrode eventually.
The ceramic solution I come up with instead doesn’t transfer heat properly, requiring me to bake the heating, control, and condensation formations into the clay itself, using trace metals and different types of finely ground minerals. I first think that not a single yeast bacteria could possibly survive in the toxic swamp, but the bubbling vapours coming from some of the boggy parts prove me wrong rather quickly.
I work together with Tree for a while, slowly letting a wide variety of fruits, grains, and herbs adapt to the teeth-melting conditions on the toxic moon. Slowly but surely, I manage to piece a working process together, letting the juice from the least-gross-looking adapted fruits ferment before running it through the pristine white distillery equipment a few times.
Tree and Database both give me plenty of hints that I probably should be focussing on something a little more productive as I spend my days tinkering with my latest project. I know better than to listen to the whining of my own cultivation base and qi clone, so I persevere until I’m satisfied with the entire process. Once the booze that drips out of the extremely corrosion resistant spigot at the end of the entire distillation process is spicy enough to burn away my nose hairs when I smell it, I’m satisfied.
I then spend some more time automating the entire thing, setting up defensive perimeters to keep the annoying bugs out in the meantime. Only when the large storage cellar I made inside the planetoid’s core is slowly filling with small gold-plated glass barrels – the only combination of materials I found corrosion-resistant enough to survive more than a week – am I truly satisfied.
“There, that should be good, right?” Lola just looks at me. “It’s nice, though? Right?”
The entire production line makes for a rather impressive sight. Large pristinely white fences surround the small farm, keeping out the bugs, deer, and other sickly-looking animals. Gold covered drones harvest and feed the plants to the booze production process. The resulting dregs are slowly fed through a complex industrial plant, the white pipes and shining vessels making a complex weave of tube and frame.
“Something to be proud of, right? So, what has been happening in the outside world?” Lola keeps staring at me. She must still be pissed that I ignored her for a few days. Projectile density is around ten times ordinary matter. Getting there, but still too thick. Yes, Tree, I could have spent this time researching those necromantic tomes some more, but it’s not like that will help any, right?”
Tree remains silent.
“I mean, I know I could go there and just get her back, but what if…” Worries that I’ve not thought of in days keep cropping up now that my most recent project is done. “She has known him her entire life, right? What if…”
Lola licks my cheek. Her tongue sizzles as the residue of the toxic mudball dissolves the upper layer of her pink organ. I push her away, but she keeps licking my cheek. “I’d be furious if some asshole told me he could resurrect my family member, and my loved one turned into a shambling mess of a person. I would start resenting that person, that’s a fact. What if she starts hating me, Lola?” She keeps licking my cheek as I wipe away the tear streaming from my other eye.
CHAPTER THIRTY -ONE
Manducate 8
“I’m giving up.” Lola, Tree and Database all look at me like I’m trash. “Fuck it all. I need to listen to Bord more. I want her back, so fuck everything. I’m going to get her.” This sudden epiphany comes at the end of a – in hindsight – rather sad month. I’ve moped around most of the time and filled the rest of my days with all kinds of nerdy projects.
Making rockets, launching the ever-smaller projectiles into orbit, automating production lines, and setting up distillery processes are not activities that a normal person fills all their time with, right? “Ah, who am I kidding. I’m going crazy over here. I keep talking to a tree, a massive chunk of white rock, and a flipping bunny. I need to get laid.”
Putting my words to action, I phase back into the real world. I will myself into reality, using the drone the nearest to the north pole as a focus point. I’d been making bigger drones, but they were just spotted earlier. The model I got the furthest north, before it was detected by dragons and destroyed, turned out to be a small crawling insect type bug that keeps low to the ground. No matter how much I armoured the large ones, they got worn down by continuous dragon attack eventually.
The moment I appear, I regret my rash decision. I’m largely immune to all environmental conditions on this planet at this point, but that doesn’t mean I don’t feel cold. I can’t help but shiver as I grasp my shirt tighter around my frame. I also grip my sword a bit tighter as I send some qi running through the item. The warmth coming from the large chunk of metal banishes the cold like it was never there.
Despite the fact that I’ve been standing here for over a minute now, complaining about the cold like a little bitch, I’ve not yet been attacked. Even though there is a perfect circle of dragons hovering around me, they are holding at a distance of around four hundred metres, just far enough for me to not notice the slow flapping of their wings sooner. The perfectly rhythmical manner in which they move their wings seems to overlap just right, causing a general droning sound instead of the chaotic swooshing you’d expect.
I grip my sword tighter as neither me nor the dragons staring me down move. I’m the one to break first, but that’s just because I suddenly realize I left my sword inside my castle. I don’t have it with me, so what am I holding, then?
My braincore, which had zoomed in on my sword, only showing that object inside my head, goes back to its normal state of blank neutrality. The heavy item in my hand vanishes, and I feel a certain electric feeling leave my body. I stare at the dissipating particles of blue, black, and orange with a dumbfounded look on my face. I just materialised a physical object from qi? Traditional cultivation knowledge tells me that that’s not possible until much further into the path to immortality, usually at the part where stuff gets truly freaky. Sure, I can make an illusion of an object no problem, but the handle felt real, and it had actual weight instead of some trick that simulates gravity and momentum.
Suddenly, I think of the sandworm. Before I can realize what I
’m doing, a small brown snake pops into existence and falls down to the cold ice. It looks at me accusingly for a few seconds, before it starts wriggling frantically, slowly turning blue. To my amazement, each and every movement the small little creature performs is copied in my braincore. I even feel the cold penetrating its sandy scales, along with the extreme confusion that comes from suddenly finding yourself in a completely alien environment.
I realize that the sandworm is actually slowly dying, and release the being from my mind. Inside Tree, the previously lifeless sandworm’s body starts thrashing around in the desert. Did I just become a summoner? I imagine my super comfortable chair, and lo and behold, the majestic piece of furniture pops into existence right in front of me, my braincore now completely filled with the item.
Just when my butt hits the high-quality leather, the dragons attack. They do so without breaking formation, their flight patterns mechanical and graceful at the same time. The front row all open their mouths simultaneously, each large lizard head aimed at my locations. I stand up, feeling slightly uncomfortable at the rather large amount of vitriol aimed my way. A multicoloured radiance supplements the pale morning sun as the closest ring of dragons all start blasting their relatively simple breath attacks my way.
The previously seamless ring of flying bodies is split up in perfect coordination, forming several smaller concentric rings as they start rushing me. I’m pretty sure that my castle would be able to resist that kind of force, yet I’m not so sure I’ll be able to come out of this one unscathed. If I still had my heartcore, sure, I’d be able to manage all of this perfectly.
The Dao of Magic: Book IV Page 25
