Chapter 14-394: Force is all that Matters

I started my hunt on May 14, in the midst of getting the Woodcarver Mastery improved. Doing so required that I head on down to the Hollow World, but given I had Lived-Lines going the whole way now, that was simple enough.

I had taken other trips down there, of course. Some of the castaways and survivors wanted to come back home, and I brought them there, some of them leaving families behind. I wasn’t bringing any bunny-women to the surface to be gawked at and treated as sex toys.

There were people who wanted to come down here for various reasons, and one of those reasons was to hunt and tame dinosaurs... which turned out to be pretty popular, once people knew about it. If they were willing to pay the money, I wasn’t worried about it as long as they didn’t start a slaughter.

Goldweights for the Hall found another way to sneak into our hands! The great white hunters would find out the dinos here were a lot smarter than they thought soon enough...

For those who had remained behind in Waterdown, they ALL up and followed Professor Shellington to the nearby Shroudzone.

It utterly shocked the Corsars, who basically were handed the entire abandoned and highly upgraded town and many of the farms around to do what they wished with. Many of them found it hard to understand how the ‘Downers could give up such a fine living space.

Of course, they hadn’t seen me put up most of that stuff in one day, and the Downers had. I’d said that I’d help them with a settlement when they got where they were going.

Not sure why the Professor chose the Pharaoh to go after first, but whatever. It was just arranging for shelter from the sun and a water supply. I had brought down weapons with sufficient QL to be made magical, and all the men and women, natives and not, older and not, were itching to go.

Giving some of the old survivors a +4 Strength Blessing so they could move around helped tons, too. They all wanted to make Seven and Forsaken, earn back their youth and be badasses, so they were totally down on risking their lives for this.

They were taking care of a Shroud problem down here for us, so I was also totally fine with this as a side project.

It also happened to let me study the Professor’s Dragonpact and its ties to his Grantor, the Amethyst Dragon Umryxigorz... and then go looking for other ties in other places.

Blowing Valence VII’s on Divination spells could look for all sorts of stuff down here, where the Shroud wasn’t getting in the way of everything. Line of sight went for a long, long way here...

Legion and Shvaughn were also perfectly willing to let me look at the Bonds between Pact and Grantor, as were the Angelos and Windgraf Mochtal. While even basic Divination defenses would totally obfuscate this kind of tracking, as long as I had living examples to work from, I could start verifying such connections and whether they existed. Who and where they were was easy to conceal, but I could at least confirm they existed by exploiting Pact Resonance.

Umryxigorz had nine Dragonpacts active, all he could sustain at his age and power. He naturally had Wards up against Divinations, but most of his Dragonbound did not.

Four of those Pacts were among humans, all of whom had once been energetic and outgoing explorers of their people, the other three now having withdrawn into placid leadership and oversight of their communities, with no real drive left.

The other five Pacts were among the Mahars. It didn’t take much to discern that those flying dino-men were also displaying advanced psychic abilities and strange magical powers, such as spitting ‘violet lightning’, and maintaining absolute control over their mammalian and reptilian underlings.

That was enough for me. The dragon had definitely taken a side, totally expected for a Cold Blood dragon, and I was going to do something about it.

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His actual lair was in the Twelfth Tier; high enough for him not to be disturbed by 99.9% of anything, but not so presumptuous as to be up in Sixteen or higher, where it would inspire challenges from the things that lived up there. The creatures that lived in the Twelfth Tier had no desire to mess with him whatsoever.

I could have held off going up against a nigh-thousand-year-old dragon, but it was plain that the dragon had already taken sides and removed certain human players from the board simply by being a dragon and influencing them subconsciously.

In addition, he had made Pacts with the Mahar, who were using them actively, and he was probably even teaching them about active psionics, even if such couldn’t be manifested easily here.

I was aware of the Empire of Cold Blood, whose name didn’t refer to being cold-blooded, but for the icy and pragmatic decision-making typical of dragons intent on dominating all. I knew they were always looking for new worlds for their spawn to settle in and eventually take over, and that such an instinct for domination and control couldn’t be stopped, even if they played at being aloof from such things.

Only power constrained power. It cost the dragon nothing and generated interesting things to wile the years away for it to ‘gift’ out those Pacts, which would eventually be freed up by those receiving them dying out in a handful of decades from age, if nothing else.

The Mahar would make suitable draconic minions, given their reptilian nature and natural psychic abilities. When the Empire fully spread here, the Mahar were already used to being dominated by Old Gods. Powerful dragons would be no different, and had the power to fight with those Old Gods... and the numbers to win.

No, the Empire of Cold Blood also had to be eliminated from this world before it opened up. The last thing anyone needed was a mass immigration of dragons hitting the Hollow World once the Shroud lifted, and that meant killing off all the dragons here who would make such a thing happen.

Something else I was going to have to get into motion.

I then had to find the purple bastard. That wasn’t as hard as it could have been.

First, amethyst dragons like fish. Second, amethyst dragons like stone. This was a combination of our own studies and investigations, and questions asked of Celestials with the appropriate world-spanning information.

Using a cloud island for privacy is fun and all, but no fish and no stone would mean the dragon simply wouldn’t use it. So, I simply had to go looking for an actual floating cloud or hill up in the higher Tiers... and out over the water.

Oh, and I did so after I popped all of his Mahar Dragonpacted, making sure that they all died, and he had no idea how or why.

Cloud islands normally drift around. Cloud islands that stay over water are not really moving around. Thus, it was a matter of verifying where Professor Shellington had met the dragon before, in what had seemed to be a terrestrial lair on an island out in the local sea, and then simply looking upwards to find a cloud island with actual stone on it, and a lake.

How they got a hill of stone up into the sky was a different issue. Probably some old magic, and I didn’t care... okay, I did care, because mass levitation of stuff was sooooo cool, but everything I could see was that it was 10th+ Valence magic, and thus off-limits until you were Eternal. I could look at the stuff, memorize everything I could see, and that was about it. It wasn’t an Intellect thing; it was a spiritual thing with profound implications totally based on Level and Ranks.

There were times I really wished Stats could sub for Ranks, but oh well. It was what it was.

That said, laziness was also a thing. The sea that abutted Waterdown was actually located between the locations of the Mahar, the humans of various types who had Pacts, and Waterdown itself. Once that was apparent, I simply used the island where the Professor had encountered him decades ago as a starting point, and a circling Commune with Nature up in the Cloud Tiers on an invisible Air Walking Sleipner soon located an appropriate place that ‘wasn’t there’ in my Commune, despite being there visually.

Technically I shouldn’t have been able to reach the Twelfth Cloudtier. Realistically, when I was Humming, I could probably reach Tier Thirty, as the magic that discriminated against Levels reacted wildly to my effective Caster Level, especially when Natural Theurgy was active... such as with my Commune with Nature, which basically told the Warding effect to shut up and stay away from me.

From there, noting the Divinatory Wards and the identity of their Caster wasn’t too difficult. Also, the psi-based foundation of the effects here was impossible to miss.

Psi-based stuff didn’t hold together well here, and basically overlapped with magic as far as special effects went. It was also severely genetic-based, and the mortal races here didn’t have the genome... unless they were involved in some very nasty genetic engineering. Sama noted the Templars had succumbed to that, courtesy of exhumed relics of the cephalids, a species whose debased Aberrant remnants still existed in the Felldeep in places nobody liked to talk about or go into.

More shit to prepare for and kill. It never ended, and it never would. The Alignment War and the existence of things Outside Creation made sure of that.

Quite invisible, Sleipner immune by dint of being effectively a bound Construct or magical item by classification, we swooped in on what looked like a mountain lake set atop a cloud, a waterfall pouring out of nowhere from atop it.

It wasn’t that a dragon couldn’t see us coming, but he had to have line of sight to us, and I quickly noticed the crystals jutting out here and there that were emanating Scrying magic. Astral Ward protected me completely, and the dragon wasn’t using a basic light-relay system like optical fibers to overcome the effect. Ergo, the dragon didn’t see us arrive.

Nor did we actually set foot upon the cloud island. Dragons had superhuman senses, and gem dragons especially had Earth affinity. He would quickly hear the sound of anyone walking or rolling over the surface here, and so staying just above the surface was essential.

That didn’t stop me from touching the surface with Clavus, and sending out cautious pulses along the magic here to get the lay of the place.

The lake was stocked with fish, growing fast and fat with the cloud island magic that benefited all the local flora and fauna. Still, there were no random beasts flying about, because this was the Twelfth Tier, and things like small birds, rodents, and the like simply couldn’t survive the pressure up here. I assumed the water was supporting the fish by the dragon’s power, and their mental make-up could definitely feel its presence. It didn’t have Wards set up in the water itself, which made finding the access tunnel hidden under the surface and away from the obvious waterfall entrance not that hard to locate, actually.

From there, it was Wraithform, staying Invisible and unnoticed by any of the aquatic creatures it had linked itself to... including the very large drak-blooded giant constrictor that dwelled in the lake, exactly sixteen Hit Dice in size and probably the main reason why the dragon was lairing here, as up on Sixteen it would be a snack to something really dangerous.

I was expecting the dragon to have a familiar or servant or mentally-dominated monstrous creature outside to both deflect attention and provide early warning, but there’s still a big element of surprise involved when a hundred-foot purple-scaled snake with dragon’s wings comes coiling out of the surface of the crystal-clear lake water a hundred yards away and takes flight in a spray of light-refracting dewdrops.

I thought of Aelryinth’s familiar Feature as I looked at the thing, shrugged, and got to work.

Sleipner and I watched it from out over the surface of the lake, still Invisible. It didn’t have any natural ability to see the invisible, although it would have an excellent sense of smell... which I had naturally suppressed on both of us.

We watched the purple-winged winged draco-snake go flying stiffly out on what was probably a regular patrol route, and a way to display ownership of the island. Something from up Above would know better, things from Below would not, and it was easy enough to believe. The draco-snake wasn’t a very fast flier and was pretty clumsy, so it didn’t go far past the cloud’s edge in its circuit.

There might be something else down there, but the lake didn’t look big enough to sustain another drak-child.

The advances the Nymph was bringing to my Blighter Level had also advanced my twisted Wildshaping Class Ability. Normally I wouldn’t even think of using it, as turning into an undead animal was not appealing and potentially dangerous around Shroudzones. But being able to turn into a spectral animal or form was basically the same as using Wraithform, albeit through warped Natural magic, and could last MUCH longer.

Ergo, Blightshaping myself into a fake spectre, I headed down into the water of the cloud island’s lake, incorporeal and invisible, to do my scouting, while Sleipner withdrew to the coverage of the vegetation along the shore.