Chapter 39 - Return to normal.
It has already been a week since my return. I found the Sword of Destiny on Beno's person. He obviously did not know what it was and used it... as a toothpick, since it looked like a very small sword with an intricate design. I wanted to give it to Arianna right away, but it melted in my hand, turned into light, and shot between my brows. I am worried about it, but I will focus on getting her sister back first. It might lessen the blow? Sigh.. better not lie...
The refugees now all have their respective homes built, and I have "tamed" Katriel. Well, this is the term closest to what I do; it works on animals, so I think it is the right word. It sound better than enslaving...
She is forty-two years old. I did not think... She looks younger than that, and now with the power inside her, she looks like she is twenty again. Her lash marks did not disappear completely, but they did become fainter...
She does resemble Tenka a bit, 5'6" and blonde, but they are not related. She is a noble lady, after all. They did not leave her and her three baby boys out in the wild. She has golden hair, blue eyes, and black eyelashes, unlike Tenka, who has blonde eyelashes, too. Her skin is a healthy white. Her hands and feet look delicate, like they never lifted anything heavy. She was already like an hourglass thanks to her captor, but now, she is firm and gorgeous. Her high C-cup breasts seem to defy the laws of gravity to hold in the air like they do.
I could not resist making her a very skimpy set of armor. With her past, it fits... Tenka is more the assassin style, and Salaba is like a cute barbarian with fur garbs. So I made Katriel the gladiator style, hehe. She wears small leather underwear under a see-through mail skirt. The top is a small mail tank top with just enough leather underneath to prevent chafing on her perfect breasts. It leaves just enough for the imagination. She also wears a battle helm; she is the first to use one in the village.
Everything is in the signature dark red from Echatium. The helm is simple and sleek, except for a hole to pass her hair through in the back with a clip, and the holes for the eyes joining in a line down to the mouth. The helm cannot fall off, and it looks good. The blonde ponytail waving in the wind and her blue eyes visible in the curved, inverted L-shaped openings.
I teach her how to fight and advanced knowledge myself. Of course, I do not leave out Tenka and Salaba for this, but I separate the training styles of the three.
For Tenka and Sal, it is the opposite of what they are naturally good at, hehe.
Tenka is lifting weights without any power to help her, on top of all the training weights on her limbs and waist. Only when she is done do I use my overflowing vitality on her body, and I make sure she is very much unable to hold on at all through cruel means, like putting fire under her so she can't let go, beating her with a light staff, or force-feeding her all the food she requires for her last growth spurt, which is currently happening. She could reach 5'4" at best if she keeps the regimen, but... at the end of the day, she gets a deep massage with VIT and PU infusion. Her body changes fast to adapt to her growing soul. These changes are not visible from the outside.
This also brings me to the eighteen remaining souls residing in my soul palace, specifically within the temple Khonsu claimed inside my brain, or rather, my pituitary gland. I use these souls as fuel to the tree pit, slowly dissolving them in the process. I do not gain, or lose Karma by doing this. Even if this is a torture of the soul, they seem to be paying for their mistakes before getting to hell, so it is not so bad. Besides, hell is problematic currently. Sending these souls there would actually make them worse, not better. Now, Elnora gain some yin energy and I can benefit from them too, but not currently.
Sal is training her mental power. She needs Imagination, Knowledge, and mental energy to successfully create a Mindscape. It also requires a powerful soul... For example, imagining a complete room requires you to establish all the laws of physics, like the air composition and gravity. Even a simple smell requires you to put your mind into it, so to make a whole world, you need a lot of imagination and knowledge. That means she needs to learn Math, Physics, and Chemistry...
Katriel is perfect for her beginning. Her age is set, but her soul got a significant bump in power. She knew that I would give her powers, so she eagerly took them. From an un-awakened, normal human, she managed to come straight into my Mindscape by sheer will and trust. She immediately kneeled and submitted her heart and soul. There are chains bonding her to me, and I also granted her the same potential seed, I would say. It is the Golden Ratio that I added to my Mindscape. This is what created the monsters and other stuff out of my control, too.
I do not know how she can trust me that much, but that makes me want to take it all! I respect her decision and bind our souls as tight as she can endure without exploding. With that, I can hear her thoughts. She can also feel my presence and feelings, but Amy is the one reading her, so she cannot read me like I do her. My power creeps into her body and makes it into an extension of myself, as if she is one of my own limbs. Once she wakes up, this will be a whole new world to her.
With that done, Amy got some readings on my own soul. Every time I use my power like this, let's call it [Familiar Bond], I lose some of my SPI as a cost. So, this is not possible until someone is a lot more powerful. Only I had a powerful soul to begin with and could afford to use it on very small animals early on. Red is a byproduct of this anomaly; he was too big for the bond but obedient to me, so I was altered too. That is unlike now, where my DNA is a lot more powerful, mostly in potential...
Her body and mind both need work, so she joins both training regimens and excels. It shows that she received an education before all of this. I make her wield a spear and buckler. In time, she will be able to take on both Tenka and Salaba at the same time. I already throw her at them to get beaten up and to resolve the resentment they feel for stealing my attention as the new inner circle chick. I also gained a stigma for loving blondes, chuckle.
Temate and Babaku are the two leaders. Temate is leading the politics and logistics, while Babaku is leading the warriors. Since I bound her soul too, I know she is smart, not just a giant girl. She is not on Izuka and Tenka's level, but half of their intelligence is already good! She is smart enough to command my army, hehehe.
There are currently 415 people in the village. This includes the three prisoners. Three hundred of them can fight, while the rest of them are either too old, too young, or crippled. It is a good number!
It is the same old routine as before; the addition of 150 people did not change much. Awakened people live more carefree and easy lives. The refugees quickly became part of the already existing tribes, mostly the Grass tribe, since they are more "normal." There were no children in the lot.
There were a few older women, but they are mostly people between fifteen and fifty years old. I consider all of them adults. The ones with emotional scars are healing slowly, but we had to make an institute for them to go and get proper treatment. There is no lack of hands to take care of them. Some might not recover, but let us hope they all can.
As for the prisoners, at first, Stephany was treated well. I did not want to feel bad. But, after I got nowhere trying to find what I wanted from Beno and her, I did not care about Karma and all that anymore. So, I fucking ate him, ripped out his soul, and ingested it by force to gain his filthy memories. After all, I am still a chaotic person, but I am also a pragmatic person...
Amy filtered out the boring, uneventful stuff, because he was fifty-seven... In the end, ten years' worth of bad shit was stored in my brain, and my soul got a tiny boost. It is not funny to have your soul grow forcefully. My Karma fell back to zero. His whole life amounted to just two of my actions: saving the girls and cleaning this place. You could argue that he was worth as much as the whole of his subordinates combined. That makes him quite bad...
I learn where I need to go to find the fairy. I should be able to track it... ish... track her down. She was sold to a slave market fourteen years ago. It is going to be tough... I will have to use slaver language.
Besides that, I also found out all about Stephany and her man-hating gimmick. She went to hell before and is now bound to me because of the strange fluid that Beno ingested. Ammit went crazy to eat the thing; she played around with it as if it was a piece of candy, the same as she did with the ambrosia. It is the Poly-Bloodline Tether. Beno was too stupid to understand what the cowled man did. This is chemical art. Real magical alchemy!!! Sigh, I would have kept the hooded man alive if I had known!!!
I might be able to ingest other bloodlines, for example, if I eat Stephany, but I am keeping her as my slave. Besides, Beno did taint me a bit, and I feel my dark thoughts surface more than usual.
I also gained more understanding of the [Air Slash] skill and a new skill called [Slaver's Luck]. This is the last time that I do this! At least, until I find a better way. This asshole was clearly unlucky! Wait, he was unlucky and a loser, but he controlled a whole fortress filled with slaves...
Now, I need to build good Karma. Resolutely deciding to keep Stephany actually made me gain one point. W.t.f... Maybe killing her would not make the world a better place? After all, she would just go to hell and then come back with even more resentment. Now, I will train her as my perfect pet. Cough, hmm, moving on.
I also need her to perform all kinds of readings on human brain waves. Having her soul bound like this is a blessing for research. With Amy at the helm, it is like having an X-ray scanner, an electroencephalogram, a hematology analyzer, a mass spectrometer, and even more machines that do not exist due to the existence of powers!
In short, I can pull up a perfect map of her mental, physical, and soul state in real time. I can tease her system and see her hormones, nerves, synapses, and powers reacting to emotions. Then, I can remotely simulate those emotions. With practice, maybe in the future, I can cast perfect illusions like the fairies do. I could either trap them in hell or make them fall into bliss. Well, it will take a while, and I do not plan on traumatizing her... too much.
Now I know a lot more about this world. Or should I say, Beno knew more about the underworld than the regular surface world. Still, I at least know the geography, the value of money, reading and writing in two languages, the social classes, and the jobs available in this world.
The people are divided into layers, starting with war prisoners, slaves, commoners, lords, low nobles, nobles, high nobles, Rulers, and Gods. All those categories have sub-categories, like godling, ancient god, or scum slave versus house and personal slave.
War prisoners are tormented, while slaves have physical integrity but no freedom. Commoners make up seventy percent of the population. Lords are in charge of others, either by power or craft; sometimes they carry a bit of noble blood, which would give them low noble status. Low nobles are usually within the branch families; they are respected, but if they do not have a strong background, they are treated the same as commoners. Nobles are godling descendants in reputable families. High nobles are the twenty percent of more powerful nobles who generally manage more lands. Rulers are the top five percent of this category. Finally, Gods have to fulfill many criteria, like immortality, fame, strength, beauty, and so on.
This is the human rule, but I know for a fact that other races have different ways to scale power and nobility.
The gods are recognized for only one or more of the laws and characteristics they embody, like the War-song God, the God of Prophecy and Luck, or even the God of Luck and Drinking. There is also a God of Wine and a God of Pleasures, which often overlap. You could actually meet them, if you are lucky!
Oh! And most of them are androgynous, as in, they appear in both genders. Though, they usually have a preferred form.
There is a lot of unexplored territory for humans, even close to here, not to mention the whole world. But humans have a tendency to play war games. Things are still in a feudal state, even after millions of years of civilization. Maybe it is the magic, the other races, or the gods, but I cannot help but be a bit disappointed in us. Still, this is a good opportunity for me!
Right now, our village is only a small dot in the thick forest. Far in the east, there are cities that cover thousands of kilometers. Beno heard that somewhere in the world stand many great places like the Bastion of Humanity (where Beno would never go, since he is the opposite of that), the Great Academies, the Temples (which act as hospitals), the mercantile and entertainment guilds, and so on.
I expected to find something like an Adventurer's Guild, but no! The lords are in charge of the local markets and information, so the money flows up the ladder. The merchants deal with the lords, and the lords deal with the commoners. The nobility controls everything and competes with each other. You do not see many international organizations, except for the ones related to the gods.
There are many currencies. The most common are gold coins, of course, but the value is not as high as it was on Earth. I would say a gold coin would be worth about ten dollars.
Under gold are silver and bronze. Over gold, there is Platinum Tael, Adamantium Tael, and Crownium Tael. Stephany's collar is made from Crownium to tank her powers without breaking. Then there is Ezetium Tael (Flying tools level), Sazium Tael (Noble magic jewelry level), and Arsenium Tael (Noble weapon level). Sam's claws contain three kilograms of Arsenium. Echatium weighs one hundred times more than this for the same power condensing, which can be both good and bad. Above those are Betanium Tael (Gods' jewels material) and Alfanium Tael (Gods' weapons material).
There is more to it, like crystals, but this is as far as Beno's knowledge goes, except for the dark knowledge, like slave values and other dark trading tokens.
So, now I can do the same thing that he did with Steph, but on an even better level. There is a cost, however. As long as she remains alive, I will slowly integrate the "good" pieces of her bloodline and powers, which are unknown even to herself. With me as her master, she can grow stronger, too. I forced her into my Mindscape and made her surrender to me. It was easy to tell when she was not sincere, so she did not resist much, knowing exactly what I can do to her. Now, she is bound to me, body and soul. She is bound even closer than anybody else in this village.
She is absolutely crazy. Even when I punish her, she derives pleasure out of it, though she would conspire internally while it happens. I broke her even more; she is in love with me because of the way I treat her, but she also hates me because of it. That was the best that I could do. At least now, she looks alive. She knows she belongs to me, so she might as well roll with it.
Still, this potion is miraculous. I can sense any betrayal thoughts from anywhere. She just cannot betray me, not at all. If she even tried, her brain would simulate the "torture" I can put her through. She would faint before ever completing the deed. That is thanks to Amy's extensive knowledge.
She is like a vicious spider. If you startle her, she will bite, no matter who you are. So, to make sure she stays out of trouble, she is serving me personally. She has to stay around me at all times, wearing a skimpy outfit that I specially made for her.
The village has now added one more subject that I was eager to learn myself: Socials, as in civilized social relations. It is funny. I sit in the class with a bunch of young people and learn the same things that they do...
The new additions to our population, for the most part, possess extensive knowledge regarding social matters from many different places in this world. One by one, they come forward and share what they can. We note it all down and store the information securely in the library. I realize that we are already more advanced than the royalty of this world, even in a small village like ours. This is because I put a strong emphasis on choosing the right person to manage these things. Temate follows my instructions well, acting as the village urban planner and sociologist.
We have independent markets and work guilds. They do not have that elsewhere, as they provide for and rely entirely on the lord's estate. The lord is responsible for caring for the citizens' growth.
Even in the big city, the establishments you would see are mostly family-owned businesses: taverns, restaurants, temples, storehouses, and banks. Yes, banks! These are the greatest establishments that even the nobles trust. The bank's only purpose is to keep treasures safe, as some items are simply too valuable to leave lying around in a house. There are all kinds of banks. Most are owned by families in order to remain competitive. One particular bank managed to spread across the entire world: The God's Treasury. Yes! As in, The One God. Rumors say that it is owned by his son and that he is still active today.
(This god! I wish I could meet he... Meet him, but I am just an ant to him right now...)
Moving on from my thoughts, I realize that I need to go see Arianna and get my answers. In the end, I never found out why the sword went into my body... I thought it would be somewhere in my Mindscape, but even Amy cannot feel it anywhere.
This time, I bring Tenka, Sal, Kat, Red, Mily, Izuka, and Steph along. I want them to witness this world's breathtaking sights and not be stuck in their small views.
There are not many dangers, but this party makes me excited for some reason. I cannot help but set up a party menu in my third eye, my game HUD... There is always a bunch of visual information in my periphery. I can just think, and the windows move to the center of my sight. I can make them translucent or whatever else I need. I can create a target helper for any ranged weapons. It is all the holographic stuff that I can think of. I am the party's Jack-of-all-trades and leader.
Tenka is an assassin.
Salaba and Mily are damage dealers.
Kat is a tank.
Izuka is a mounted ranger.
Red is my proud mount. He said he will never let me find another mount, no matter how powerful or humanlike he becomes! Heh, it is fine by me. He is very intimidating in his wolf form, able to become huge!
As for Stephany, well... Except for holding feathers and a whip when my other girls are tired, I do not know what to make of her. I will not force her to fight, so she just spectates...
I am actually eager to go kick some powerful creature's butt!
(When we come out of there, we will go on an adventure. I have everything we need stored in my stomach!)
I remember the way easily with my now near-perfect memory. The ride is very thrilling. We all have our mounts and companion animals with us. Except for Mily and Steph, that is. They ride in front and back of me, receiving jealous glares from Tenka and Izuka, hehehe.
Izuka is on the Whitemare, Sal is on a strong mountain goat, and Tenka is light enough to ride Taki, who became a huge grey wolf with all the power they shared. Kat tamed a mountain goat for her own mount.
It only takes us a few hours of traveling, the ground trembling under the paws and hooves of our speeding party. I do not stop at the tree entrance, but dive straight into the cave along with our rides.
We get a strange feeling running full speed through a tube. The gravity change is also more flagrant at our speed. The mounts have to adjust to the new feeling, but they happily make their way with renewed vigor, even playing about a bit.
Once I see the light at the end of the tunnel, I pull out my flute, order the riders to slow down, and start to play. I had time to practice, so I pull the best songs from my memories.
It does not take long for our fey friends to come greet us and dance around like a constellation of multicolored balls. I will not lie, I heard too many songs in my last life from all epochs and styles. I make use of it for their enjoyment. We reach the castle gates too fast for them, as I can hear the fairies' disappointed whispers. I promise to play again for them later; I do not mind. Especially since the girls look at me like I am a god, or perhaps a freak...
Before going into the castle, I make a cage for Stephany.
"Sorry, Steph, but I prefer not bringing people from hell in there. Maybe if I can trust you one day. Let's say in a hundred years... Red, please stay with the mounts and make sure they stay safe."
I throw a look at Steph from the corner of my eye.
Red replies, "Sure, Sam. You just have to share whatever word you need to later."
He just shrugs like it is not his business and goes to banter with Taki. Of course, they have long begun a "mateship" with each other, making him easy to convince.
"Well, let's go, girls!"