Chapter 6: Unlimited POWAH!
I doubt anything ever woke that evil treant faster than my corkscrew diving slash. Zy'tl Q'ae released a scream so intense from its jagged wooden maw that the shockwave hit me like a bomb, blowing me away from the massive tree as its six root tendrils ripped out of the ground. Zy'tl Q'ae stretched into the air about 350 feet, but his six prehensile roots each stretched a thousand feet in length and snatched up all the nearby trees, tossing them into the cavernous maw as the evil treant munched them down for a quick boost.
Contrary to my expectation, Tryhard was yet to become edgy enough to produce conceptual wounds that never heal, and the deep gash I carved around the side and back of Zy'tl Q'ae closed up from his hasty snack. Though I felt disappointment, I acknowledged the impressive sustainability this massive being brings to the battlefield, and as a tendril so large it made a blue whale seem childlike came around to smack me I activated the Martial Art, Fortress, and turned my blade over to block the attack.
Despite shunting a tremendous amount of force using the precisely timed defensive technique, the raw physics involved smacked me out of the air, though the impact itself left me unharmed. Landing on the ground in front of something that big that wants to kill you is a jarring experience. Zy'tl Q'ae and his six tendrils took up my entire field of vision as he set up angles to lay down the smackage on me. It's awe inspiring, but so am I.
Descent of the War God activated and the approaching tendrils slowed down, the whole world slowed down, and the quickest path to my victory became something so simple as setting my body to autopilot and letting it go.
When the next tendril came down for a titanic slap, I didn't defend, I attacked. Seven slashes of light generated with my single sword swing and bit into the rooty flesh deeply, causing the evil treant to jerk that massive limb back and squeal in agony. As it shrieked I walked forward and made another swing when the next tendril approached, seven more blades of light slicing into it, the grouping marginally tighter than the last.
Every score of steps or so another burst of sword light emerged from me as I repelled attack after attack, each grouping tightening up, and soon an eighth and ninth slash of light joined the others. When all nine slashes of light finally came together into a single attack, one of Zy'tl Q'ae's tendrils didn't reel back in pain, instead it completely severed from the point of counter attack and the tree threw everything it could to stop my advance on its main body, but each counter attack severed more of its attacking limbs and soon enough I arrived at the trunk of the tree, below its jagged maw.
For my next trick I folded four more Martial Arts into my new True Slash of Light: Heavy Blow, Severing Strike, Strong Assault, and Greater Slash Strike. The radiant horizontal attack didn't just bite deeply into the massive tree, but completely bisected it, and with a full power front kick I sent that evil treant toppling to the ground before it even had the capacity to contemplate that one perfect cut.
As Zy'tl Q'ae took the time to figure out that he was already dead, my Jungle Shroud spread out roots from the lining of my cloak stretching and twisting around the severed pieces of the treant, drilling into the ground to grasp the deep roots and snuff out all remaining life in the evil being. As the Jungle Shroud got to work, I used the Xeric and Primal Shrouds to start converting the soil in this forest into black earth so nutrient rich the Amazon Basin's Terra Preta looks measly by comparison. The Devotion cost for expanding my Estate is inversely proportional to the quality of the real estate purchased, as my Estate exists to generate income for me. By increasing the production capacity of the natural landscape, I decrease the Devotion needed to bring it to profitability. Using my Shrouds and my Estate I can create a natural utopia, a paradise for the Devoted.
Once I tagged all the pieces of dying treant for use I did some quick math and sighed. When I ghosted my Familiars I turned them into herds of high quality animals. A very long term sustainability strategy. I should have done the short term strat and made people. A classic trees for the forest mind trap. So, with the fading consciousness of the evil tree providing no resistance I shaped his massive volume into new botanical humanoid forms. Specifically I converted him at a rate of 3 cubic feet per new person to bring into being a new species of plant people. At least new for this world. ArenaNet is free to take me to New World court for the infringement.
I'd considered making babies to maximize efficiency, but like money, productive population now is more valuable than productive population in the future. Near thirst, distant water. Zy'tl Q'ae still provided enough raw biomass to generate 225,000 full adults. Yesterday I had a population of 700. I resisted the urge to break my arm patting myself on the back for picking such a utilitarian build while the Jungle Shroud went to work, producing Sylvari with a wide variety of appearances and since The Company is a porn company, sporting viviparous sexual characteristics rather than boring reproduction like budding, fragmentation, spores, or pollination.
Who can blame the Jungle Shroud for simply defaulting to its basic nature? I certainly can't. I gave it the task to generate hundreds of thousands of unique members of a new species out of a single source of biomass, and from the incredible variety of body types, colorations, textures, and features both male and female, I'd say the Shroud did a fantastic job. The plant people being one hundred percent fuckable is a bonus if my opinion must be known. But why get caught up in the possibility of plant pussy when the real question is: Can they produce Devotion?
An inquiring mind must know.
"Welcome to the world." I greeted my new creation, "Let's get you people to work."
With a flex of the Xeric Shroud I began sucking my newborn man and woman babies into the earth and transporting them to my Estate, the as of yet unnamed hill fortress and its surroundings. I imagine the trauma of that event is quite similar to the natural birthing trauma. Taken from a comfortable and safe environment, squeezed through a dark and tight tunnel, then bam! In the light, it's showtime.
I took little pleasure in the obvious discomfort of my new creations, but also desired greatly to not get involved in the day to day mundane governance of this new demographic. Once more the utility of my build saved me from the banality of the typical contractor as the Primal Shroud simply generated hundreds of homunculi programmed to process and settle the new Sylvari while the Xeric and Jungle Shrouds went to work on building up the new infrastructure needed for them.
As I traveled home a steady river of devotion flowed to me as the Sylvari made up in numbers what they lacked in skill as they registered as Minions, Mooks, Functionaries, and Cultists with my homunculi. Even lacking the number of trained Cultists to double their Devotion contributions, they still provided me with over 5000 points to play with.
I tamped down the temptation of instant gratification and held back on maxing out my vocational buildings and splurging on Fortress and Palace upgrades. I currently had zero qualified people to take over any of those massive institutions, and as appealing as it would be to have an Angkor Wat size temple complex dedicated to the worship of me, I still had an entire backlog of information to consume before I could make informed choices.
As much as I verbally fellate the Mastermind Heritage, it does have the distinct disadvantage of lacking the same plug and play method of accruing and applying power as the other Heritages. Though it may feel almost like a real time strategy approach to the world, the real potential of the Heritage comes from the perk formerly known as 'Strange Toolbox' now rebranded as the 'Esoteric Toolbox'. It changes the 'idle game' aspect of the Heritage into an Indiana Jones experience, and like a good Indiana Jones experience it begins with discovering something worth finding.
After entering my castle, I did not ascend to my palace, but descended into the subterranean depths of my holdings. I've yet to go full Elden Ring with my underground domain, but the below ground levels of my Estate are more extensive than those above without counting the vast tracts of real estate added by the Artist's Lair perk. Between Strange Toolbox and Monster of the Week, there are a total of seven levels beneath my keep to explore and eventually man.
The disorganized complex contained libraries, reliquaries, armories, laboratories, galleries, archives, treasuries, pantries, and more seemingly at random. The chaos caused my scrotum to tighten and my spine to tingle. There are few things I hate more than chaos. People might have told me my office looked chaotic in life, but they just didn't understand my version of order. This shit is pure unexplored chaos.
So I made a bunch of homunculi to Marco Polo that shit.
It took them fifteen minutes to track down a primer on Wild Magic for me as I sat behind a presidential desk. I settled in with honeyed milk tea and by the time I finished my cup I'd already set off on the path of the Wild Mage. It cost me 5 points for the Added Potential to bypass the bloodline restrictions on the magic system and though I lacked the progressive evolutionary advantages of Wild Magic Job Classes such as Primitive Caster, Soul Talent more than made up for that snag. Though it won't spontaneously develop systems of intuitive mystic power that the host body has no native potential for, mystic talent for any intuitive magic systems native or acquired through Template Stacking or Added potential is set to prodigious.
I feel a deep pity for all the contractors who are so baseline retarded that even with The Company giving them the talent of Magical Mozart they still can't catch up to the efforts of some tween protagonist and his edge boyfriend/rival.
According to the leather scroll detailing an ancient shaman's understanding of Wild Magic, the system was far less restrictive for use in the past, which lends credence to the idea that either the Six Great Gods or the Eight Greed Kings used the World Item Five Elements Overcoming to bring about the rapid ascendance of Tier Magic.
Despite that conspiracy to fundamentally shift the mystic nature of the world, Tier Magic is undoubtedly better for the wider populace as it relies on Mana, and not Souls. Though both have a link to life, the depletion of Soul is instantly deleterious to the health of the caster while Mana depletion is a matter of inconvenience. Even with the Dragon Lord's vastly powerful souls, they can feel the need to draw on the power of external sacrifices to fuel greater workings.
Wild Magic can scale infinitely, though not linearly, and will very quickly drain the caster dry of power and life, limiting the top end users to around Tier 8 on The Company's power scale. A very powerful designation for sure, with the capacity to punch up in suicidal or genocidal potential, only truely limited by the supply of Soul. This is about my burst limit on power as I've jumped up - and thus my Soul capacity is - to Tier 8. While I lack the efficiency multipliers from Job Classes, I make up for it in this one little way… my mystical energies - and thus my Soul - are inexhaustible. No amount of casting will ever lower my total Soul, and any chargeable Wild Magic Spell - which appears to be all of them from the observations of the ancient shaman - are infinitely scalable.
In my hands the only difference between the entry level fireball spell and a supernova is time.
For whatever reason, Inexhaustible doesn't result in an instant Tier 10 classification. It seems like a glitch in the system, but it works in my favor so I won't be writing HR about it any time soon. I guess I've become a Xianxia protagonist. Looking down on me because of my T8 Cultivation? Taste my T10 secret technique!
Unlimited POWAH!
My study session slash fantasy daydreaming came to an end when when my ears picked up the fall of feet and the deep sniffing of a dainty nose before the azure image of beauty that is Tiamama came into the corner of this library I turned into a temporary study. The flush and flooding was unexpected, I'd assumed the whole Dragon Slayer thing might put a damper on our relationship. Silly me. Tiamama is from DxD. Ichiei Ishibumi heard the idea that power is seductive and giggled lewdly at the possibilities.
Tiamat wasn't giggling, she groaned and barely articulated, "Breed me!" over the crashing waves in her fanny.
I looked at my growing pile of scrolls and tomes, the gateway to unlimited POWAH! then looked at the puddle forming under the most gorgeous creature I've ever encountered.
"The things I do for my waifu." I sighed as I put down the scroll.
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