Chronicles of the True Wizard

Chapter 212 - Book 14

Walking through the cave he had carved out for himself, Felix walked into the small room he considered his current workshop and began finally putting the finishing touches on the constructs he had been creating. All he had left to do was bind the souls he had already created and power them up with his own mana. The souls themselves were as simple as possible because they didn't need to do anything complicated. The construct's mana computers handled their own control so all the soul had to do, was bind them together.

Pushing mana into a small palm sized metal orb, the opening on its surface suddenly shot open, revealing an eye ball that darted back and forth. Had Felix not been the one to create it, he would have found it a little creepy and disgusting, as it was though, these eyeballs had literally been grown in his body.

The last step left, was to have mark open a portal to the construct's internal anchor, connecting it to the overall system.

Felix had already given Mark's soul the spark of life and bolstered it so it had some measure of mana control but not nearly enough to actually cast spells the way Felix did, at least nothing as complicated as a portal. The connections to these constructs were actually engraved into a series of small discs that were arranged within a simple enchantment that acted as a switchboard. All Mark had to do was channel mana into the respective slots with his new found, very basic, mana control and the connection was made. It also allowed Mark to close the portals if necessary from his end.

The way this was all set up, if the constructs were destroyed or captured, Felix really didn't lose much. The constructs were powered from Mark's mana through the portals so there were no batteries. All the materials used in the constructs were simple and cheap, the entire thing relatively easy to recreate now that he had the designs finalized. He couldn't really mass produce them just yet but, he had managed to create 36 of them for his first batch. That allowed each one to handle a slice just 10 degrees wide from their starting point.

As each one was powered on and connected into Mark, Felix opened a portal to the coordinates they had chosen for that construct then tossed it through. Each one of them zipped off and began flying across the land before Felix closed the portal and turned to the next one.

In the meantime, Grim and Mark were monitoring the feedback to ensure everything was running smoothly in terms of them using Felix's mana and then updating his map in return. Luckily, everything seemed to be working even better than Felix had expected. Not only was his mental map updated, but his System map and most importantly, his quest list seemed to be updating as well.

Tossing the last one through its respective portal, Felix dumped Nova unceremoniously on a mountain top then hurried to the first dungeon his constructs had found. Smacking his hand against the door, he smirked as he saw that he was the first one to have found this specific dungeon.

It's like the universe, or System rewarding me for a job well done.

It only took him a few minutes to clear as it was a heavily combat focused dungeon and Zeraxes trick of requesting all the waves at once made it fast. All Felix had to do was blow absurd amounts of mana into ridiculous spells.

As soon as he stepped out of the completed dungeon, he opened a portal directly to the next dungeon his constructs had found.

Not only were the constructs mapping and finding quests for him, but the constructs were also measuring the coordinates at the dungeons themselves and periodically all over the map. He could open portals to the dungeons directly and also had a quickly filling grid of portal coordinates in his mental map so he could get just about anywhere in seconds. Were the coordinates to portal not some undecipherable, arcane gibberish, this wouldn't have even been necessary but alas, even Mark couldn't find any kind of pattern to them.

I feel like if there isn't a pattern… that must mean these coordinates aren't actually some universal law but rather a System invention… Or maybe I just don't have the prerequisite knowledge to understand them yet.

With his new constructs, he had completely removed the time it took for him to

It didn't behave like anything organic but it also didn't seem to move robotically either, instead it felt to Felix like a being beyond his comprehension. Despite its elusive nature, the way it smashed and pushed against the crimson barrier was oddly childlike.

Once he managed to get over his awe, apprehension and general confusion, Felix opened a portal even closer and found the source of the crimson barrier. He could have guessed what had created it but even then, he was astonished the barrier had managed to hold back what was likely trillions of points of mana.

Finally opening a portal just a few hundred meters away, Felix realized the spell form wasn't entirely without effect. The ring of demons from before that had formed a perfect ring with their arms buried in the sand were still present but not entirely intact.

Many of them were actively collapsing before Felix as the strain of trying to maintain whatever ritual was holding the orb back became too much to bear.

One by one, almost like dominos considering how they accelerated, the ritual demons collapsed.

As they did, Felix expected the crimson barrier to crack or give way but it didn't. Instead, it seemed to almost reinforce itself as streaks of gold began to swirl their way into the barrier. At first Felix just watched as the gold slowly spread and the barrier grew increasingly more opaque. Once the gold made up half of the barrier though, something else changed.

In the same dirty, black and brown tainted crimson color that formed the barrier originally, a ritual circle even bigger than the barrier itself began to rise and with it, so did the city itself.

Once he realized whatever was happening wasn't just about containment and that killing off the demons performing the ritual didn't stop it, Felix sprang into action.

Flying forwards as fast he dared, Felix grabbed the closest collapsed and unconscious demon and removed their head with a flick of his wrist. He didn't bother activating his rings and instead, manually grabbed hold of the demon's soul before it managed to escape. He manually tore the outer layers free then sifted through the remaining experiences as quickly as he could.

He quickly dismissed all the experiences that had nothing to do with the ritual, which was the vast majority of them, and focused in on the ones he was looking for. There was a weird and painful experience that involved the fusing of souls which Felix mostly dismissed followed by a confusing mess of experiences that were weirdly fused into each-other.

The mess was difficult to process but Felix didn't have time to waste trying. Instead, he flew to the next demon in the ring, one who was still awake, but quickly ended them without much trouble. He found a similar set of experiences starting from a soul fusing followed by a confusing mess.

One by one, Felix killed each demon around the circle and processed their experiences, ignoring the messages from The System about his ever increasing bounty. At the moment, he didn't really have a choice. He needed to figure out what was happening. He was better off trying to explain what happened and dealing with the consequences later than getting caught switching to Arthur now.

At about three quarters of the way around the circle, Felix fought with one demon who put up a more admirable resistance but nonetheless, was significantly weaker than any participant should have been. Before they died though, they sputtered out a chuckling prayer, "An offering this size, only salvation awaits for me."

Killing a few more, Felix realized what the common soul fusing experience was all about. Whatever this ritual was, they didn't have enough experienced ritualists in the event to cast it. Instead, they fused ritualists into participants to get them in. The souls fought each-other in what was inevitably a painful existence but they all seemed completely willing for the sake of whatever 'salvation' was for them.

He still though, wasn't really sure what the hell the ritual was. He cursed himself silently for destroying The Mind Devouring Crown so he could kill Erolan and not having come up with a sufficient alternative by now.

There was nothing he could do about it except kill the rest of the ritualist demons though.

Global Quest: Massacre

For surpassing 100 stacks, you have been rewarded with a permanent buff so long as you are within the event:

All creatures will be visible to you on your map at all times along with their stacks.

Current Stack Leaderboard:

Felix: 304

Iravyne: 239

Zeraxes: 117

Once they were all dead, Felix had held out hope that the ritual would stop or fail but it showed no signs of doing so. Instead, the ritual continued to whir into existence, various rings and nodes began spinning and shifting as the ritual began to activate in earnest.

Standing perfectly still, Felix forced his consciousness into his Soul Garden for the time dilation then began recklessly tearing through the mess of experiences he had retrieved. Now that he understood the mess was caused by fusing multiple souls together, it was slightly easier for him to separate them out. In doing so, he managed to get nearly nothing out of the experiences with respect to the mechanics of the ritual and how to stop it.

What he did manage to learn was that these demons were worshippers of Akaroth. Salvation had something to do with saving themselves and the city was an offering to Akaroth which somehow contributed to this salvation. Given he didn't have time to rope Melody into this and get and explanation from her, he instead popped back out into the real world and walked over to the edge of the ritual.

The ritual itself had continued to, and was still, accelerating. As it spun, the sand and viscera that tainted the crimson blood forming the ritual was flung free which slowly purified it. Seeing this, Felix got and idea and began trying to shove sand into the blood forming the ritual to add impurities.

As soon as he did though, the sand was flung back out at him, tearing through his flesh and chunking his health by not an inconsiderable margin.

After that he tried to slow down the ritual with a Force spell but no amount of Force he could create with a spell was enough. Each and every spell he cast on the ritual itself was shredded on the spot. Given that, he didn't dare try and touch the ritual as it began separating but he did fly over and place his hand against the barrier surrounding the city.

Luckily, it didn't immediately sever his hand or anything and just felt mostly solid. It shifted slightly under his hand which was a weird feeling but Felix wasn't overly focused on his sense of touch. Instead, he pushed on his Soul and Matter senses and began feeling out the orb. As far as he could tell, it was exactly what it looked like. The crimson was mostly blood and the gold was formed from the trapped souls trying to escape the ritual.

Curiously, the souls in the barrier weren't just anima but they were actual souls. As he examined them, Felix felt thousands of souls pass through his senses. Many of them were creatures that had been used to necromantically raise and create flesh golems and demons but a decent proportion of them were noticeably Rakyt.

Blood ritual and the souls are trapped… Most of the blood I saw was from the front line demon hoard so they carted all that in for the ritual but a lot of these souls are Rakyt, at least the undamaged ones… They're the offering then. The city itself-even if the last resort was contained-was definitely obliterated so all that's left in there is sand, blood and souls. They're offering the souls to Akaroth for their own salvation… Grim, what do we know about Akaroth?

We didn't bother with information on any of the gods other than the big three.

Okay, let's fix that after this. In the meantime, it feels like a safe assumption that any god who makes their worshippers do this is bad.

Grim nervously sighed in Felix's mind, Good and bad are relative and there isn't really anything we can do to stop it at this point anyways.

You might be right but… I don't need to stop it.

Flying a short distance away while he prepared the spell he wanted, Felix slammed his body into the sand to stop himself then opened a portal only slightly bigger than his hand. Reaching through, he activated The Soul Devouring Ring and made absolutely certain his harvesting skill was disabled.

Rivaled only by the time he harvested the Grelmite hive, souls gushed into the ring. Everything contained within the orb was rushing towards him and he intended on stealing all of it. His ring could handle the speed but its capacity wasn't nearly enough as the souls themselves were denser and more significant by orders of magnitude than the Grelmites had been.

As his ring filled, Felix began manually shredding and removing the demon souls, not daring to touch the Rakyt souls until he absolutely had to. The demon souls all ended up in his Soul Space where they were completely obliterated into raw anima with no regard for the souls themselves. There were far more demons than Rakyt which helped but he quickly realized it wasn't enough.

Sifting through the demon souls, he wasn't entirely paying attention to them as he didn't really care about anything other than the raw anima. The Rakyt though, as soon as he was forced to handle them, he was as careful as he could be while sorting through nearly a hundred thousand souls a second. The only thing making it remotely possible was having his consciousness entirely in his Soul Garden with its time dilation. Even then, he was pushed beyond his limits for Soul control. In practice what that meant was that all he could do was remove every layer from the core souls and dumped that into his Soul Space.

The core souls themselves, he kept in the ring in the hopes that he could preserve any knowledge they may have once contained. He knew that the souls held significant and personality altering experiences, not knowledge. Especially not logical, mathematical, arcane and emotionally detached knowledge. He held out hope that he could get something out of this though, like the location of the arc they had sent out with the entirety of their knowledge and some survivors.

Harvesting in this way, Felix was giving up a lot of stats but realistically, he didn't think he really had any other choice. Placing the souls in The Kryptos Repository would result in them degrading before he ever got a chance to use them. The necromancer's battery didn't preserve experiences and often drove the contained souls insane. His own Soul Space completely obliterated souls and effectively wiped them clean. All he had was the space in The Soul Ring to work with.

After a minute, it became very clear that Felix wasn't going to be able to hold nearly enough souls in the ring and he had to come up with an alternative. The only thing he could come up with though, was to move them into his own soul. His Soul Space wasn't an option but he did have some souls living within his own soul. The issue was that they all held pieces of his soul within them. He didn't have enough to inject all of them so he decided to try something new.

Up until now, Felix had been reading through and lightly experimenting with the designs in the Soul Structure Compendium from a theoretical standpoint. He hadn't found anything he thought fit perfectly and none of his experiments were so beneficial that he felt he had to implement them. He had however, read through and memorized the entire thing.

He hadn't conducted experiments on everything as some of the structures he didn't see a point in implementing within constructs. He didn't have a choice now though so, he mentally flipped to the corresponding pages.

With the Soul Ring halfway full after just a minute with him manually filtering and processing out the demons and stripping the Rakyt as fast as he could, Felix didn't have much time at all. There was no way he could implement anything fine or precise so his only goal was function. If it worked, he could fix things later.

The first thing he did was off load as much of the filtering as he could on his mental constructs. With the smidgen of his will that he had freed, Felix began constructing a wall that was as dense as he could fashion. It wasn't just a solid sheet though, it had structure both physically and experientially. Physically, he crafted a lattice of sorts only because he absolutely had to.

He had already tried creating a simple layer within his Soul Space to avoid the obliteration issue but it wasn't enough. He didn't have enough time for a complex lattice though so all he managed was an isometric grid of triangles that protruded in the third dimension to give it some added structure. The repetitive and easily digestible pattern made it much easier to create quickly which was just an added bonus.

All references within the compendium described complex weaves of intent and convictions but Felix didn't have time for that, all he had time for was one thing, his own conviction. What he could do, was remove the affinization it had towards him so instead of giving in to his soul, it would actively fight back against it. In reality it had no way to attack so he wasn't worried about it fighting back. What it would do-he hoped-was keep the contents from being obliterated by his soul, protect them in a sense.

Having the two fight each-other wasn't ideal but it was all he had time for.

It luckily didn't take long for the lattice to be complete as he didn't really need much of it. His own soul wasn't very big after all.

Wrapping the lattice around, Felix fused the edges together to form a tube then pulled one end through his outer soul layers towards the core. Within his soul, he began pulling and shaping the tube into a circle, connecting the two ends together making his core soul look almost like a planet with a ring around it.

Returning his consciousness to the ring, Felix desperately tossed demon souls and began funneling every soul within the ring, and entering the ring, into his soul. He had to be careful about how he transported the souls themselves but he had thought of a rather crude solution. Using some extra lattice tubing, he ran it through his soul, down his arm and into the ring itself. Once again, there was no time for caution so Felix simply ignored the pain as he recklessly ripped an open wound into his own soul.

As soon as it was connected, the souls slammed their way into the pipe causing such a massive build up of pressure, the tube itself began stretching to accommodate. Felix pushed against the tube with whatever focus he could spare while simultaneously filtering out the demon souls and crudely removing the outer layers of the Rakyt souls.

A few minutes passed like this until Felix began to feel ill. The feeling was nothing physical though as he wasn't sure if it was possible for him to be physically sick. Instead, he felt a deep seated sense of wrongness emanating from his soul. He ignored the feeling though and pushed onwards. There would be time to fix things later.

Another few minutes passed and Felix wasn't sure he would be done by the time the ritual completed. He had no way to know how many souls were left, just that they definitely hadn't slowed at all. The new ring around his core soul luckily showed no signs of filling up.

As the souls poured into the ring, they were naturally compressed just from the sheer pressure his own soul put on its surroundings. He wasn't confident yet that that didn't damage the souls but there was nothing he could do about it at the moment so he didn't worry about it. Worst case, he might be able to read some of the experiences that remained if they were too significantly damaged to otherwise use.

The influx of souls finally began slowing after 8 minutes but only slightly. Felix was confident at that point though that he could contain all the souls but still wasn't sure if the ritual would complete before he stole them all.

The ritual itself had raised the city over 50 meters into the air and kept it contained within a crimson blood orb the entire time. The orb had begun filtering out corruption in the form of anything that wasn't blood, mana or anima which mostly meant sand. As it did so, the crimson grew more vibrant and less murky while the gold within the orb began to gradually disappear as Felix removed it from within.

After a grand total of just over 11 minutes, the souls finally ceased and Felix deactivated his ring as he collapsed to the ground. He just couldn't stand any longer, not with how hard he was fighting with his own soul to not remove what it saw as corruption. That resulted in his feeling ill which had mounted to Felix feeling more sick than he ever remembered being. It was so bad that it affected everything, his mind ached, his joints tensed, his vessels constricted, his skin tightened and his muscles burned.

He did manage to turn himself over though to watch as the-now entirely crimson-orb that contained essentially just blood at this point, rose up the final few meters into the air before shrinking down to the size of a basketball and vanishing in a pillar of crimson light.

There was no response to the offering of the ritual which was slightly disappointing for Felix. He had been hoping for a frustrated scream or something equivalent though, realistically knew it wouldn't happen.

With the orb gone and the ritual complete, Felix was left in the middle of the desert, next to a massive crater with his name firmly at the top of the bounty list. He didn't worry about it for the time being and was happy to try and beat his own record with his persona in the future. For the time being though, his soul was as close to in tatters as it had ever been.

He could barely move which made it all the more important that he got himself somewhere safe, like his dorm. Rolling over, Felix pulled the event marble out of his Soul Space and was about to press it into the ground when he saw movement over a dune to his right. It was further from the crater than he was so he was pretty sure it was another participant. Given his current state, he moved as fast as he could.

In his current state though, he wasn't fast enough as the source of the movement vanished and reappeared standing above him. Felix turned towards the shadowy silhouette with a handful of spells prepared but let them dissipate as soon as he recognized the face.

"Felix. You live."

Felix coughed out a chuckle, "Isn't that my line? I was supposed to live and you were supposed to die."

"Yet, I in better shape. I no points pay you but, what happened?"

"Demons sacrificed the city to their god."

Arysha's face contorted in a combination of sadness and disgust, "We…" She sighed then tapped at something before continuing with much less stinted speech, "We were so confident in our preparations, so sure we could handle the rest of the multiverse. Now my people are dead."

Felix resisted the urge to gag and vomit bile, "You had that cache, didn't you? With your knowledge and some people?"

She shook her head lightly, "They didn't make it out. I just… didn't want to tell anyone I…"

Felix didn't question her decision and instead changed the subject, "How did you survive?"

"I didn't intend to I… My survival instincts kicked in and I used a spell… relocate… I made it out. It shouldn't have been possible but… you held the Arcane Torrent's Eye stable long enough that even our anchors were drained…"

He nodded as much as he could which amounted to his chin shifting by just over a centimeter, "Why'd you turn on the translation?"

She scoffed, "What's the point… Words are sacred because they represent our history, our legacy and they…" She sighed, "My people are dead. There is no legacy. Upholding customs now is… foolish."

Felix coughed and felt his throat tear itself apart, "Well… About that… Your people aren't completely gone. Yet…"

Arysha looked towards him and leaned in, "What- Explain."

"The demons and the Eye we released killed and disintegrated their bodies respectively. The whole god thing was about offering souls… I think. I kind of… stole them though."

"The souls?"

Felix gasped for air, "Yeah."

"I… How?"

He waved her off with a slight wiggling of his fingers, "Long story."

"How many?"

Felix laughed, "I can't count that high. Not even now. All of the ones in the city… trapped in the ritual."

"All of them? Where are they? What will happen to them?"

"Inside of me for now. I was planning on putting them in my head. Long story but there's a city up there."

Arysha had far less questions than Felix was expecting, "And they can live… in this city? In your head?"

"Pretty sure. I have to… heal myself first but… Should be possible."

Looking at him very seriously, she leaned in until her snout was just a few inches from his and he could feel her cool breath through the desert heat, "Take me too."

"Hold on. They won't remember… everything. I've never done this before but I have no way to… encode your memories, with their brains gone, there's no hope."

She shook her head, "But their souls remain."

"Yeah, they'll retain significant events and experiences. Life changing, personality defining things."

She nodded, "That is more than enough. Take my soul as well, let me be with my people."

"You would die."

"I was already ready to die this day… Felix, you know very little about our language and our people… do you know I had two daughters?"

"I… didn't."

"I already told you, today I die. When I told you that it was because I didn't want to live without them. They died in the city. Now you tell me there's a way I can."

"Right bu-"

"If they live, in any way. I will be with them." Standing faster than Felix could realistically react in his current state, Arysha made a quick gesture with her hands to cast a spell that caused her head to literally explode.

Holy fuck WHAT! DAMNIT, We could have saved your memories.

Despite the shock of what had happened, Felix activated his Soul Ring and made certain there was room for her soul. Given how she had gone about killing herself, Felix held out no hope he could somehow reanimate and steal her memories. He grumbled about how idiotic and emotionally blinded that was for the few seconds it took him to open a portal and roll through into his vault. He quickly dropped off the Imitation Cores with Zero then dropped through one more portal back to his dorm. Once there, he let his consciousness fall inwards towards the mess that was his soul. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .