Astral Geometree

Astral Geometree

Year 212

Lumoof had finally recovered from the effects of the trip, and he noticed his sensitivity to the soul realm had increased. There were moments when he saw specks of things flying in the air and briefly wondered whether his vision was bugged.

Then it was clear its actually the souls movement in the world. He could seem, faintly, and if he was in a zone.

Is it because of all the mana practice we are doing? Lumoof asked.

Im not sure.

I didnt get a skill, though.

I thought it was a matter of time.

I thought we get the skill first, then we see the results, not the other way round. Lumoof chuckled. We both knew the system can be irregular and inconsistent, even if it broadly tries to stick to a set pattern. Broadly.

Level-specific things have been followed quite strictly, but when do people actually learn or acquire a skill has been one of the weirder aspects of the system. Perhaps a system had to have hard and soft aspects, both RNG and checkpoints in order for it to work?

Mana practice and soul-sight practice took up most of Lumoofs time. His mana control wasnt poor, but now, his mana tolerance has improved.

It made him sick, and he actually got skills to cope with more mana. Just that the quantities we needed to poison the demon king were too high.

He would have to reach even higher levels.

***

For me, Alkas team of scientists finally gave me one demon king core model. It was a replica, constructed from the data gathered from all the demon cores we had so far.

It did not contain all the elements of the demon, just the parts of the runic carvings that we somewhat understood. They said it seemed to open up some kind of network, but it fizzled out before they could get further. The amount of power needed by the model was quite high, and Alka said he saw what appeared to be a very, very large three dimensional map in his mind.

But it hurt his head so much he had to stop. His speculation was that it was not designed for mortal minds, or at least, designed such that it suited how the demons mind worked. Therefore they brought it to me.

My vines wrapped around the object made of some of the toughest crystals we had, and my mana flooded it. The runes within it flared, and then, I briefly saw the entire core glow.

I felt it and saw the magic of the replica core seemed to tap into something. Something that existed in an entirely different place.

It was a mini-portal within it. No, metaphorically, it was the equivalent of an interdimensional wireless modem thats now making a call to this... space in another part of the world.

I felt a connection, and instantly my mind was assaulted. My artificial minds stepped in to protect me. It wasnt a domain-type attack, but more like a DDOS or a Ping bombardment.

[Mental firewall activating... filtering...]

This felt like a nostalgic return to the days of Rootnet.

Then I felt a strange, uncomfortable sensation, like something attempting to pull me from the other side of that connection.

It pulled, and then-

-Snapped.

At that moment, I saw the stars that Alka claimed to see. It was vast, and then, they disappeared. And reappeared again.

The map seemed to twist in unusual ways, and I realised it wasnt actually three dimensional. I wasnt even sure it was a map.

That uncomfortable sensation returned, and then, I felt something push back against my presence very, very strongly. It was so strong that the energy somehow spilled through the replica, and the replica cracked.

The connection was lost then.

Alka just looked at the cracked replica with a look of bewilderment. What just happened?

I saw the stars, and then, something kicked me out. Im not sure what. Alka strapped in as I shared what I saw with him through our dream academy.

Theres a guardian on the other side of that. It might be possible to kick it out, or at least, stop it from kicking you out. My bomb-domain holder touched the cracked demon-core replica. Well have to make a few more of these, out of different materials to see whatll work well.

What do you think we saw?

A starmap. An invasion plan. A path. Or just a history of worlds invaded.

If there was a centralised controller that told demons where to go, it had to be on the other side of the demon core.

In short, my spymasters had to hunt for spies without relying on my trees surveillance. This was good practice for him, of course, and it also hid the full extent of my abilities from the natives.

Working in other worlds would be a common occurrence as this went on, as I foresee my gradual expansion over time.

Eventually, as I get in touch and have a presence in more inhabited worlds, Id see myself become some kind of centralised transportation network. The warp network between the worlds.

Id probably make a lot of money just by charging for transport, and with very few alternatives, well, except the void mages, Id essentially be a monopoly.

Of course, as it is, Id already have tremendous economic advantage because I could easily arbitrage any pricing differences between Treehome and Mountainworld, and the Central Continent, by extension, has access to two economic markets.

The merchant lords easily saw the economic opportunity to exploit the pricing difference, but all these depended on me agreeing to teleport the goods.

I decided against it, as it would not be good for me to crash the prices by flooding the market with essentially imported goods from another world.

***

There were some ideas that came out before our supposed invasion of the parasite world.

What if we shifted daemolite from our world to the Mountainworld?

No. What if it triggers a permanent increase in demonic invasions to our world. That would not be good. Kelly and Adrian refused, and frankly, I could see their point. I wasnt sure how the demonic surveillance and targeting mechanism worked, and if I shifted it there, could I essentially trigger more demons without reducing ours?

So I considered some more alternatives. One was to shift the daemolite to the Parasiteworld, or to the Cometworld.

I didnt want to shift it to the Cometworld, because, if the demons could somehow see the daemolite, essentially these daemolite were surveillance bugs. I didnt want the demons to target a hyper-mobile void explorer.

Thus, we settled on sending more of these daemolites to the Parasiteworld, and see whether it affected the frequency of the demon kings invasion to Treehome.

We shifted almost all of our daemolite to my clone on the parasiteworld.

No change to the existing astral paths. Stella said. But the further ones are wobbling and fading. It seems removing daemolite only reduces the frequency of demon kings multiple decades down the road.

Stella later theorised those that have already locked onto our world are coming as scheduled, but those further away have not properly locked on, thus removing the daemolite made targeting more difficult. Essentially, that meant daemolite was some kind of aiming-aid. Without it, the demon could still find us, but just a bit harder.

We kept the daemolite in the parasite world.

***

Lumoof kept practising with mana and trained hard. He needed to be ready for the shit I was gonna throw his way, and after the shit I put him through, he clearly understood he would be seeing things way out of his league.

Even the invasion to liberate parasiteworld essentially depended on Lumoof to provide support, since the heroes demanded his presence as a condition to the invasion.

My trees were busy draining the waters from the parasiteworld to create patches of drier land. Strangely, now that my trees covered a large part of the parasiteworld, some normal weather had returned.

A return of seasonal rainstorms, and small snows during the colder period. The parasiteworld had always felt a little hot and humid, a bit like being in a tropical swampland, but my large patches of trees had gradually repaired some of the weather. I found it weird, because this wasnt a conscious thing.

I didnt actually attempt to change the weather, but the changes on the Parasiteworld over time had been rather dramatic and some parts absolutely no longer resembled what was still a demon-controlled world.

With more mana coming from the Mountainworld, I gradually inched closer and closer to the pit of the Parasiteworld.

Each piece of territory was won through a constant war of attrition against the hordes of the demons. They spawned more creatures, newer variants, but we had improved beetles to counter them.

The demons clearly had some ability to learn and adapt, especially on the demon-controlled worlds, since they were able to spawn new variants. The fact that demons in the invaded worlds did not adapt that strongly, when compared to the demons on their controlled worlds, made me wonder whether demon kings and demon mothers had some control over the development of demons.

Or perhaps, because the system considered demons to be native in this world, thus the system spawned adapted demons? Or was there some kind of automated learning, or just through recombining known traits in different ratios, in the same way nature adapted to changes in the environment through reproductive processes?

The only Id know is if I controlled a core.

My trees encroached on the areas around the pit to the core and we began the process of draining the pit of water. Moving water wasnt difficult, and I eventually released the water throughout my controlled areas, essentially creating rivers out of these once shallow lands.

There was a lot of landscaping to do.

The water from the pit had to be cleaned and filtered too, as I noticed it contained far higher quantities of demonic presence within it.

I didnt know how long it took for the core to spawn another demon king, but from what I could detect on the surface, there was hardly any progress, and it seemed like an exceptionally long spawn time.

New lakes appeared too, as more water was shifted out of the flooded pits. The fact that it was an exposed pit made it significantly easier for me to remove the water because I could spawn trees all the way to the edge, and those roots at the edge functioned like pumps. Water was then gradually sucked out of the pit and then channeled through the root network.

At the rate we were draining the pit, I estimate it would take about two years to drain the water and reach the core.

Good enough. By then, Lumoof and the heroes should be ready for another fight in the depth.