“Then how did the New Gods come to be?”
“I fear your limited mind is not yet able to grasp the full truth,” Tiamat answered sadly. “But I will try to answer in a way that you understand. Imagine incorporeal entities who can create universes with nothing but the power of thought. As they travel through the great nothing, where there is no time, space or borders, they sometimes stop to recuperate, and fall asleep. They are us, the Sleeping Gods. We are far more than five, but we are the ones who created your universe. I, the Great Mother, and Abzu, the Great Father. And our three younger compatriots: Behemoth, Leviathan and Kingu.”
“The universe is born when you fall asleep…”
“And dies when we awaken. Parasitic creatures follow in our wake in the great nothing, and they have the ability to consume Essential Energy, what you know as Faith, and control it. Eternally hungry and greedy for energy, these parasitic creatures infiltrate our dreams, the universe we have created, and, when sentient life emerges, they begin to act: they whisper to the sentients, ingratiate themselves, send them visions… They gain power and materialize with the help of mortals.”
“So without us, there would be no gods?”
“Exactly! The thoughts of sentients expand the universe! They kindle stars! And the more sentients, the more Faith, the more Essential Energy the parasites get. But the stronger they become, the more destructive their breath. It corrodes the fabric of creation, and in time leads to a melding with the Nether, or worse, the reign of Chaos, our worst, most corrupted reflection.”
“But don’t you need Faith too?”
“That is exactly why we sleep, Initial.”
“So once you drink your fill, you’ll wake up, and the universe stops existing. If more Faith goes to the New Gods, they’ll join the world with the Nether or Chaos. Is there any outcome where the universe doesn’t die? Otherwise the future looks kind of bleak. I won’t know what to fight for.”
“Foolish Initial,” Tiamat smiled sadly. “Your universe is young. By the measures of sentient lives, it is only just starting to walk. Ages will pass and more than one civilization will replace yours before the universe even comes of age. But the Nether and Chaos are threats of the near future. If they come to pass, our dream will change to a nightmare, and we will surely awaken. As we would have awoken if you had not found Behemoth — by then we were almost forgotten, and there is no point in continuing a dream without Faith.”
“You said ‘your universe’… Which world do you mean? Disgardium? Or… the world I’m from?”
“It is unimportant, Initial. But since you can be both here and there, then…” Tiamat smiled. “Why are you so surprised that something can be both there and here? Enough for today. You have much to do. Go.”
My head hurt from all the Sleeping Goddess had told me. To buy a little time to mull it all over, I walked over to my allies as they stood waiting instead of flying to them.
As I reached the spot, I looked back. The ghostly silhouette of a gigantic red dragon hung above the temple.
“May the Sleeping Gods never wake!” I shouted, for the first time understanding what it really meant.
“And may their sleep be eternal!” came the scattered response from those who had destroyed Tiamat’s temple a mere week ago in this very spot.
Chuckling, I looked at them all. My new allies were waiting for me to say something, their serious faces trained on me. The top players of the top clans: Hinterleaf the gnome mage, Yary the human bogatyr, Sayan the titan paladin, Pecheneg the human barbarian, Horvac the orc chieftain and his officers — the troll engineer Cannibal and werewolf sniper Hellfish.
A few minutes later, they all became priests of the Sleeping Gods.
Chapter 28. The Kharinza Fortress
AMID THE SURPRISED and joyous exclamations of my new allies, I quickly said my good-byes and moved to the base.
After my jump, I didn’t quite realize where I was right away, because it had all changed! I looked around and found a familiar landmark: the new tavern on Kharinza had the same name as the old, the Pig and Whistle. A crew of dwarves with Raidohelm in the lead loudly greeted me.
“Scyth!” the foreman shouted, smiling happily and swaying. He headed toward me, embraced me and slapped me on the back. He seemed a completely different man than the serious and frowning Raidohelm I knew. After showering me with greetings, he suddenly sobered up: “Where’ve you been? What was the hurry for? We’ve been done for half a day!”
“Accept the work, boss!” the dwarfs all shouted in unison. “Our wives are waitin’!”
Some of them were barely holding themselves up. In the absence of cooks and waitresses, the builders had served themselves. I saw a row of barrels lined up along the wall along with makeshift tables heaped with simple, but tasty looking food: all kinds of vegetables, cheese and cakes, several boar’s legs and a roast deer. Under the tables were piles of clean-picked bones, one of which a dog was gleefully chewing. Pipes played and a chubby ginger builder danced a furious jig to the merry melody, stepping on his fellow builders’ beards.
“Have a drink with us, Scyth!” he shouted, still dancing.
I saw no reason to refuse. I took a proffered mug of ale, we all loudly knocked our mugs together and I forced down the strong liquid along with Raidohelm and the others, then thanked the builders and went off with the foreman to look around the fortress.
We left the tavern onto the main square, at the center of which the noticeably larger Tree Protector spread out its branches. It began to tremble, the entire canopy shook, a shoot poked out of the ground nearby, touched my foot and pulled back again. The tree calmed down.
I’d already seen what was here when I teleported to the fort, but I still listened to Raidohelm’s commentary:
“The castle is the heart of it all. Square-shaped from above, with an inner courtyard open to the sky. That’s where we’ve put the garden and the Sleepers’ temple. Around the castle are the houses, stables, two taverns, the workshops and market stalls. Right beyond the central gate is the square, the merchant rows, the portal hall…”
While the foreman led me around the fort and showed me what was where, I called my friends over. I suspected it might take us more than one day to figure out all the castle’s settings.
“… and it’s all surrounded by a fortress wall with a moat outside it,” Raidohelm said. “Decide for yourself what to fill it with. I recommend something rotten, if you have a lot of enemies. The bridge raises, and from it the road leads to the jetty and the mine. If you want to put a road anywhere else, your builder will be able to do it. Thankfully, we have plenty of stone.”
“How many sentients can the castle accommodate?”
“Even the jungle had to give up some space. There’s easily enough room for ten thousand. What you have here is basically a small town.”
The boys and Irita joined me. We walked all around the fortress and explored every last room of the castle, and then the work began… Bomber went to fetch Patrick and he and Irita enthusiastically took to sorting through items and filling up the new clan vault. Crawler, now with ownership rights, dove head first into learning the control panel and shouted in glee:
“Scyth, we can choose what the serving girls look like! I mean, set the hiring criteria!”
“I want in on that!” Bomber shouted from the end of the corridor.
“Any preferences for cuisine? The castle has its own tavern, we can keep it for officers and hire a grand master chef!”
“Holy cow!” Infect yelled through my comm amulet. “I’ll be damned!”
He stopped, saying nothing to explain his surprise.
“Alright, we need to get some people in the town, feels kind of deserted,” Crawler said. “Scyth, how about some crafting grand masters? If we offer them a stall and accommodation, they might move here.”
Time flew by in happy turmoil. I don’t know when or how they got there, but soon the castle grounds were filled with cobolds, troggs and the cu
ltists of Morena who had returned unnoticed from Shad’Erung. Several were having a lively chat with a lost dwarf miner by the city wall. A miner who was, judging by the earsplitting snoring, asleep, but somehow still actively involved in the conversation.
In a third-floor corridor of the castle, I ran into a handsome man in a frock coat.
“Elvish wine, sir…” he said, presenting me a tray of full wine glasses.
I took one reflexively and thanked… um… Butler Roberts. That had to be Crawler’s work already.
“Would you like lunch in your chambers, or..?” Roberts raised an eyebrow.
“Or! Where do I go?”
“Follow me, sir!”
On the way, I found out where, in the butler’s opinion, my chambers were. We turned at least three times, then went down a level and met Ryg’har the shaman, who barked joyfully:
“May the Sleeping Gods never wake, chosen one! Nature has purified herself! Life has returned to Kharinza!”
“What do you mean?”
“The great dinosaur has become your battle companion!”
At first I thought the shaman had been living under a rock, but he continued his thought:
“Now Kharinza is full of animals! They have returned, chosen one of the Sleepers!”
“No way!”
Leaving the impassive butler with the kobold, I ran into the yard and took flight. As I flew over the fortress wall, I saw that Ryg’har was right: mobs had settled in Kharinza. I doubted it had to do with the castle. It was more likely the Montosaurus’s absence. He’d already disappeared before, but the undead had occupied the island then, whereas now… A family of level 6 boars peacefully grazed at the foot of an acacia. I smiled: now the workers could level up on their own! This was a full-fledged sandbox for them! Mobs meant loot, which meant resources for leveling up crafts!
Returning to the castle, I didn’t bother looking for the internal tavern or the butler, but went straight to the castle’s heart instead. There, at the center of a room with walls reinforced by Corrupted Adamantite, the fortress control crystal glimmered. We hadn’t yet arranged our traps and guards; the castle was weakly defended for now.
I opened up the control panel and mentally thanked Kusalarix for the royal gift. The dwarfs had built us a maximum-level fortress with a unique design. Even Pecheneg’s castle was built to house only twelve hundred sentients. Raidohelm was right; they’d built us a whole town.
Welcome to the Kharinza fortress control panel, Scyth!
Owner: clan Awoken.
Level: 10.
Population: 1978/10000.
Structures: Castle, Vault, Taverns (3), Storehouses, Portal Hall, Stables, Barracks, Houses, Cemetery, Merchant Stalls…
I skimmed through the tabs and found what I was looking for: Defensive Artifacts. The tab wasn’t empty; it already contained our Flesh-Eating Tree Protector. I went through the various categories until I reached the one I needed.
Add new defensive artifact in the Forcefield Dome category?
I accepted, then watched as a hatch opened in the foot of the pedestal containing the controlling crystal. I took out the defensive artifact, which looked like a cut glass egg, and triumphantly placed it inside.
Righteous Shield
Divine artifact.
Unique item.
Creates an impenetrable stationary magic bubble with a set radius. The effectiveness of the defense drops in proportion to the size of the bubble.
Fed by mana battery crystals. Ability to transform 10% of absorbed damage into mana to maintain shield.
Requirements: level 3 clan fort.
The hatch closed. Something rustled and clicked within the pedestal, and I heard a sound like the hum of high-voltage wires. It got louder, then hit a peak and cut off.
Forcefield dome Righteous Shield successfully installed.
Activation mode: automatic. Activates when sentients who are not in the clan or the clan’s friends list approach within 100 yards.
Mana battery crystal slots available: 10.
Mana battery crystal slots active: 10.
Mana battery crystal type: legendary, volume 100,000,000.
Total available mana: 1,000,000,000.
It seemed the builders had taken even this into account and equipped the fortress with the best crystals! A hundred million in each crystal was the absolute maximum known…
“Scyth, you have to come see this for yourself,” Crawler chirped through my comm amulet in conspiratorial tones. “This is something else!”
“Where are you?”
“The food hall. That is, our own tavern. First floor, east wing.”
“On my way.”
I took a step toward the door, then it hit me that I didn’t have to walk. Opening Depths Teleportation, I saw a dropdown list below Kharinza Fortress: ‘Castle, Level One’ and ‘Castle, Level 2.’ The third hadn’t yet appeared, but I had no time to figure out why.
I jumped to the first floor and used the minimap to get to the tavern, unnamed for now. Its internal decor reminded me of the bright and spacious restaurants of Darant: not broad oak tables roughly hammered together, but small ones covered with tablecloths. Not a dirty floor with creaking boards, but marble. And lots of daylight and panoramic windows.
The boys were gathered at one of the tables in the center of the room, two servants standing behind them with trays. Going closer, I saw on the snow-white velvet tablecloth some shards of stone. They’d been cleaned up some, but still looked dirty.
“Oh, Scyth!” Infect said with a smile. “I didn’t want to say anything until I put it all together, but I couldn’t help it. Take a look.”
I focused on his find. Eight equal shards, all arranged to fit together like a jigsaw puzzle into a single piece. There was just one shard missing — a jagged hole yawned a little to the right of center. Each fragment had the same name:
Structure Design Fragment: Sanctuary of the Departed
Archeological artifact.
Assemble all the parts (requires Archeology rank III) to learn this design (requires Construction rank III).
“What do you think it is?” our archeologist asked excitedly. “I mean, obviously it’s a design for a builder, but what do we get if we build it?”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself, partner,” Bomber said to his friend. “Nether knows what materials it needs!”
“Bomb!” Crawler shot the warrior a reproachful look. “Don’t be a killjoy!”
“What? I just don’t want him to get upset if we end up needing some crazy…”
“First we need to find the missing piece,” I said. “But this is awesome, Infect!”
I hugged my friend and slapped him on the back. Whatever this was, it was definitely something incredible.
“Thanks, Scyth!” Infect said, almost in tears. “I was starting to think that was it, I was gonna be a loser forever! I mean, you’re a Threat, so is Bomb. Crawler’s up to his neck in clan business and even Irita is involved. I’m the only one who…”
“First of all, you’re our bard,” I said, trying to cheer him up. “Second, you’re the only one out of all of us who’s going to the Demonic Games except me! What if you win? And third…” I pointed to the shards on the table. “Are you going to find the last piece?”
“I don’t know. I’ve gone over the whole dig site on Mengoza. There’s nothing left there.”
A memory bubbled up in my head, something from the distant past… or not so distant… That was it!
“Listen, I remember something. When I was farming Smoldering Nether Shards in the Nether, I found two places with ruins of the Departed on Mengoza. I don’t remember exactly where the second is, but fly over the island!”
Infect’s face brightened, he looked a question at me and I nodded.
“I’m going straight there!” the Bard said, disappearing into thin air through the depths.
“Huh, he forgot his shards,” Bomber muttered, scooping the design pieces toward himself wit
h his huge hand.
Then we all sat down for lunch. Olivier, a Grand Master of Cooking hired by Crawler, personally came out of the kitchen to greet his new bosses. He rattled off some long and convoluted names of dishes, which waiters immediately placed on the table. I didn’t remember any of the names, but they were all delicious. Soon Irita joined us and we used our remaining time to discuss our plans and swap news.
Path of Spirit (Disgardium Book #6): LitRPG Series Page 29
