Chapter 14-394: Force is all that Matters (1/2)

I started my hunt on May 14, in the midst of getting the Woodcarver Mastery improved. Doing so required that I head on down to the Hollow World, but given I had Lived-Lines going the whole way now, that was simple enough.

I had taken other trips down there, of course. Some of the castaways and survivors wanted to come back home, and I brought them there, some of them leaving families behind. I wasn’t bringing any bunny-women to the surface to be gawked at and treated as sex toys.

There were people who wanted to come down here for various reasons, and one of those reasons was to hunt and tame dinosaurs... which turned out to be pretty popular, once people knew about it. If they were willing to pay the money, I wasn’t worried about it as long as they didn’t start a slaughter.

Goldweights for the Hall found another way to sneak into our hands! The great white hunters would find out the dinos here were a lot smarter than they thought soon enough...

For those who had remained behind in Waterdown, they ALL up and followed Professor Shellington to the nearby Shroudzone.

It utterly shocked the Corsars, who basically were handed the entire abandoned and highly upgraded town and many of the farms around to do what they wished with. Many of them found it hard to understand how the ‘Downers could give up such a fine living space.

Of course, they hadn’t seen me put up most of that stuff in one day, and the Downers had. I’d said that I’d help them with a settlement when they got where they were going.

Not sure why the Professor chose the Pharaoh to go after first, but whatever. It was just arranging for shelter from the sun and a water supply. I had brought down weapons with sufficient QL to be made magical, and all the men and women, natives and not, older and not, were itching to go.

Giving some of the old survivors a +4 Strength Blessing so they could move around helped tons, too. They all wanted to make Seven and Forsaken, earn back their youth and be badasses, so they were totally down on risking their lives for this.

They were taking care of a Shroud problem down here for us, so I was also totally fine with this as a side project.

It also happened to let me study the Professor’s Dragonpact and its ties to his Grantor, the Amethyst Dragon Umryxigorz... and then go looking for other ties in other places.

Blowing Valence VII’s on Divination spells could look for all sorts of stuff down here, where the Shroud wasn’t getting in the way of everything. Line of sight went for a long, long way here...

Legion and Shvaughn were also perfectly willing to let me look at the Bonds between Pact and Grantor, as were the Angelos and Windgraf Mochtal. While even basic Divination defenses would totally obfuscate this kind of tracking, as long as I had living examples to work from, I could start verifying such connections and whether they existed. Who and where they were was easy to conceal, but I could at least confirm they existed by exploiting Pact Resonance.

Umryxigorz had nine Dragonpacts active, all he could sustain at his age and power. He naturally had Wards up against Divinations, but most of his Dragonbound did not.

Four of those Pacts were among humans, all of whom had once been energetic and outgoing explorers of their people, the other three now having withdrawn into placid leadership and oversight of their communities, with no real drive left.

The other five Pacts were among the Mahars. It didn’t take much to discern that those flying dino-men were also displaying advanced psychic abilities and strange magical powers, such as spitting ‘violet lightning’, and maintaining absolute control over their mammalian and reptilian underlings.

That was enough for me. The dragon had definitely taken a side, totally expected for a Cold Blood dragon, and I was going to do something about it.

---------

His actual lair was in the Twelfth Tier; high enough for him not to be disturbed by 99.9% of anything, but not so presumptuous as to be up in Sixteen or higher, where it would inspire challenges from the things that lived up there. The creatures that lived in the Twelfth Tier had no desire to mess with him whatsoever.

I could have held off going up against a nigh-thousand-year-old dragon, but it was plain that the dragon had already taken sides and removed certain human players from the board simply by being a dragon and influencing them subconsciously.

In addition, he had made Pacts with the Mahar, who were using them actively, and he was probably even teaching them about active psionics, even if such couldn’t be manifested easily here.

I was aware of the Empire of Cold Blood, whose name didn’t refer to being cold-blooded, but for the icy and pragmatic decision-making typical of dragons intent on dominating all. I knew they were always looking for new worlds for their spawn to settle in and eventually take over, and that such an instinct for domination and control couldn’t be stopped, even if they played at being aloof from such things.

Only power constrained power. It cost the dragon nothing and generated interesting things to wile the years away for it to ‘gift’ out those Pacts, which would eventually be freed up by those receiving them dying out in a handful of decades from age, if nothing else.

The Mahar would make suitable draconic minions, given their reptilian nature and natural psychic abilities. When the Empire fully spread here, the Mahar were already used to being dominated by Old Gods. Powerful dragons would be no different, and had the power to fight with those Old Gods... and the numbers to win.

No, the Empire of Cold Blood also had to be eliminated from this world before it opened up. The last thing anyone needed was a mass immigration of dragons hitting the Hollow World once the Shroud lifted, and that meant killing off all the dragons here who would make such a thing happen.

Something else I was going to have to get into motion.