230. The Heartless Tree

230. The Heartless Tree

Year 233

***

The void mages were the busiest group these days. They had so many moving parts, but theres only so few of them.

Stella had about 1,500 void mages under her, and her four other archmages. There only used to be three, but even one more wasnt enough. Not with what we wanted to achieve.

One group focused on deciphering the map within the demon kings core, and developing ways to make most of the map.

There was another group that designed the listening devices, and the potential interference devices. They looked out for demonic transmissions, to figure out how the demons communicated with each other through vast distances, coordinated their attacks and selected their targets.

One group worked on expanding the riftgates, and trying to combine the language of the rift-gates to the maps. They also tried to find ways to work around the limitations of the star mana, which is our main stumbling block for a proper interdimensional league of heroes, and empire.

Now, we had the group working on moving the cometworld through the void sea. On one hand, I realized that the will of the world was able to move through the void sea without void mana, thus I do suspect that void mana may not be necessary for that purpose, but core mana would be the more likely material or resource. Yet, void mages as the ones most familiar with the void sea, and so it is them who commit to the task.

There are smaller groups, like those focused on weaponizing the void mana, and developing better ways to destroy the demon king and that demonic glass droplet.

Mages, as a whole, were relatively rare. Void mages, even more so, and even till this day I feel the lack of high-level mages acutely. We have level 120 mages, but so far, only Stella reached the domain.

I dont know what a domain-tier archmage or wizard could achieve, but having someone at that level should greatly help our cause.

We see this with the lavaworld, where we lack the means to securely access the core.

Magic, despite its perceived ubiquity, is still quite hard to train even if we have made incremental improvement over the last century. There is a certain level of genius that I feel the system expects from a mage and the mage would not progress far without it.

Even with decades and centuries of magic training, its surprisingly hard to reliably get someone to a master, even if we do have a large amount of competently trained mages.

Madeus, my first resident wizard, many decades ago, once said that it is quite easy to learn the basics, after all, the first spells are not much more complicated than skills.

Now we have an army of mages at his level. But our attempts to grow stronger [archmages] were just slightly successful.

We only have about a hundred to two hundred mages that are above level 100. The highest of those in the level 130s.

Magic was extremely hard to excel in, because theres a component thats not dependent on experience, but comprehension of some kind of vague magical concepts.

Our statistics indicated that, although almost one in two individuals gain some type of magical ability and spellcasting, such that they could use simple and intermediate spells, only one in forty has the talent to walk the path of a mage.

Of this small fraction, most just plateau at the level 40s to 60s. In our Valthorns, the number seemed to suggest that only one in twenty mages who make it to level 60, even with magical experience boosts from the dungeon.

Of the almost half a million mages we trained over the last century, we only have less than 200 level 100 mages.

Attempts to brute force the levels didnt contribute to magic-classes gaining levels, instead our attempts to force them to level caused their classes to reflect a combat focus.

The system essentially starts funneling levels to combat-type mages, instead of pure magic classes. This meant [mages] evolving into [Battle Mages] and [Great wartmages], or similar sort and they gained more combat-spells skills instead of pure magic skills.

This was useful in their own way, but what I wanted was the out-of-the-world, hail-mary type of magical solutions that eccentric mages could provide.

So, over the last century, the way we trained mages also changed. Instead, we rotated mages to various roles on the Central continent. They would perform research, perform exploration of the underground chambers and ruins, conduct classes in the FTC and provide basic concepts on magic to the administrator classes, maintain various magical artifacts and formations throughout the continent.

Combat was still needed, which meant mages would still participate in dungeons, but only after a reasonably good and long stint in non-combat roles.

This was how we discovered the way to somewhat reliably level a mage into proper [wizard] and [archmages], instead of relying on brute-forcing and dumb luck.

It reminded me of the time, during the early years of Freshka, and the FFA, I tried creating [archmages] and [wizards] through class seeds fusion. That didnt work back then, and it still didnt work now. My large stockpile of high tier [archmage] class seeds, instead came from the small army of archmages that died over the last century. My artificial minds claim the archmages all have their own quirks and reading their minds often involve great leaps and thoughts that seemed rather disjointed.

Training mages is still a problem we havent truly cracked.

We could teach them skills. Teach them spells from our massive library of spells. Let them have the resources needed to experiment.

But it all gets stuck somewhere.

Maybe in that way, its the same with everyone else. I have knights that never make it as far as Edna, even if Ednas path was clear for them to see. Most Valthorns plateau before level 100, even with the level breaking gift.

Only those who breached a level 100 could even try to challenge the monsters we face.

Right now, we have about two thousand level 100 individuals, and so far, all of them are sucked into the system, a part of the structure we created.

Reality is, if they all turned against me, Id have a big problem on my hands. But they wont, simply because theyve all seen what was beyond, and realize, we are all still just small fishes in a very big pond, and together, we are stronger.

More importantly, I begin to think the reason the guilds failed to entice the true powerhouses to their camp is because of the level 100s increasingly long perception of time.

Just like the Pyramid, the truth was also shrouded in mystery. Even until today, my centaur spies are still trying to piece together the identity and abilities of the centaurs guardian.

To some extent, I wonder whether I could force them to react to me. My trees had also begun to spread to the lands owned by the Crystal King and the Centaurs, and though I kept it low profile, I was sure theyd realize it eventually.

Would the Crystal King wage war because I had trees in their land?

My bet was, no.

It was just posturing.

***

One thing became clear once the guilds controlled kingdoms and nations. Capitalism didnt inspire loyalty in the same way as a monarch or a religion.

The loyalty a guild leader had, was just not to the same degree that a King, or a priest. Hired mercenaries bailed when the risk-reward ratio no longer made sense, but a loyal knight or fanatical zealot would keep fighting under their last breath.

The guilds, after decades of prospering as a business and treating its lower ranking people callously, now needed to find ways to brainwash their men to fight with their lives on the line. A guild leader cared about the bottom line, cared about the salaries of its people, and operations, but now it had to think further, of winning loyalty, of winning over hearts and minds.

This lack of loyalty meant the guilds often had to deploy larger forces, stronger forces with bigger, better equipment, just to convince the mercenaries they had good odds of winning, or its quite likely that theres a sudden collapse in morale, where mercenaries, particularly multiple different groups, all quit in succession.

The guilds also discovered that they needed to insource military might, to have internal competence and ability. Guilds that built up a stronger internal military arm, or have adventurer-guild subsidiaries or partners performed better than those that had to hire all their military strength from mercenary guilds.

Various mercenary and assassins guilds, many of which merged with the merchant guilds over the decades, began taking on larger roles and used their growing importance in the war for new territories to take over their own conglomerates. When the merchant guilds concentrated on just trading alone, and focused on Central Continent businesses, the leaders of such guilds tended to be pure administrator/merchant and assassin types. But with their newfound colonial ambitions, the military and combat leaders had more visibility, and so they moved up the ranks.

There was no space for weaklings, when the assassins began to target the leaders on the Central Continent.

There was also a growing schism, when some of the leaders sent to rule their newly conquered territories began to amass wealth in their new territories, and used it to defy the central continental guilds leaders.

After all, the heaven is high, and the emperor is far, far away.

Even with magic, the central continental guilds needed the means to enforce its rule, needed ways to ensure loyalty of its far flung representatives. Some guilds relied solely on the loyalty of its invasion leaders, which, as they soon discovered, wasnt very loyal.

Some realized they didn't need the central continent, and convinced the entire invasion army to rebel and set up independent nations.

It was such a clusterfuck across the world that my leaders began to discuss intervention methods

Even the kings and representatives, who meet regularly at Freshka for their own quarterly updates and discussions, were very worried about the chaos created by the guild wars.

Weve tried our best to sequester the conflict to specified zones, and ensure innocents harmed were minimized.

There was death.

Death cannot be avoided in a conflict.

Lilies spoke, they too were aware of the guilds chaos.

> I am afraid so. < I realized that Lillies was right.

I thought about the past decade, and realized I was beginning to drown in the big picture. I wish I could sigh. > I am torn between choice and life, and I am often reminded that I prefer choice over life. This is an extension of that decision, the consequences. Mortals must be given choice, and they must suffer from the consequences. <

> Then I must engineer them away from such mental frailties. It is a flaw to be corrected. <

I realize my earlier sentence was dangerous. If I began considering mortals as flawed, and such, began engineering them away from such flaws, how is it their choice?

But I have been doing it. My void treefolks, the void lizardpersons. The augmented children.

I have been engineering with their form, trying to fix their flaws. Their weakness. Give them skills, give them advantages.

I veer so close to the edge of darkness.

And I felt Lillies minds.

I mentally sighed. It is an incredibly hard challenge, to balance the two opposing poles.

To focus on the big picture, yet not lose sight of the small things in life.

To focus on the arc of civilization over the decades, and still live in the minutes and hours of the people.

Spaizzer

After 4+ years of writing Tree, I'm finally headed to Amazon. So, that means some of the earlier chapters will be taken down as of end Feb 2023 to comply to Amazon's exclusivity rules. So, if you know anyone who hasn't read Tree of Aeon, now's a good time to start. Or you can wait for the heavily EDITED version on 28 March 2023 :)

Also, if you want something to read, go check out Tongtian. It's awesome :)

-> /series/663812/mythic-cultivation-my-tongtian-cant-be-this-cute/