Chapter 14-397: The Wall (1/2)

The dragon’s hoard itself wasn’t nearly as valuable as the carcass of the dragon itself, at least from a goldweight standpoint. What was more precious was the lore the dragon had taken upon itself to ‘safeguard’, taking records, tablets, carvings, scrolls, and the like from various places across the world, and reserving them for itself and its kin.

I didn’t know the world well enough to return them to their true owners, although I was pretty sure I could spend magic to do so. As it was, much of the precious metal was only roughly worked, and the craftsmanship on the gems was definitely below par, too.

The archeologists were all tumbling over themselves to be the first to examine everything, but there was no way they could visit personally, so I would have to move everything out of here via Item or Tapestry, which was going to take me several trips at the least.

In the meantime, they were going to have to make do with examining and categorizing everything in my Visual File for nuggets of new stuff, one of my thoughtstreams that was totally detail-oriented jumping right into that job.

With the dragon dead, this cloud island was also going to start drifting, and the Aura of his presence would fade, meaning other things would be arriving to investigate and take over the lair that it represented, more than likely.

I also did not know how long it would be before his peers realized he was dead, likely via Messages that found no home or received no answer. They would then doubtless either Scry this place or come personally to investigate, so I didn’t actually have a lot of time.

His human Dragonbound would naturally know that their Patron was dead, and they were now receiving their power from the distant and disinterested draconic Ancestors behind him... very distant, indeed, with the Shroud up between them, relieving them immediately of the subconscious influence of the dragons.

I was going to be busy for a day or three. I had actually replaced the dragon’s Wards underneath its nose, making sure that it couldn’t flee by various magical means, so they’d endure long enough for me to empty this place.

If something decided to investigate that I didn’t want here, well, that was a matter of thirty seconds to get here and either chase it off, or appreciate the free Karma delivered my way...

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It was one of the greatest, grandest, and bloodiest of achievements in human history.

In size, grandeur, and purpose, as well as the deaths involved in its construction, it had no true equal. Likewise, the time required to erect it all had crossed generations, consuming the lives of the people under the weight of stone and the power of muscle and sinew.

It was the Great Wall of China, and it was the longest and deadliest of Shroudzones native to the planet.

Emperor Qin Shi Huang had used building up the Great Wall as an excuse to get rid of anyone and everyone who crossed him and his totalitarian regime. Poets, nobles, commoners, magistrates, or bureaucrats, it didn’t matter. They were carted off to the Great Wall, made to labor in impossible conditions, and when they died they were buried without markers beneath the Wall itself.

No battle in human history had ever generated so many resentful dead, and as the Wall extended over mountains, plains, and hills, their silent hatred had flowed with it.

When the Shroud came, that hatred was unleashed.

Over the centuries since it was built, re-built, extended, joined, and then torn down in places by the opportunistic, parts of the Great Wall had found their way into many houses, roads, buildings, construction projects, and other places. After all, the Great Wall was in the way of expansion, and was largely a useless construction. Modern warfare could almost completely ignore it, while the handy pre-cut stone blocks were still useful in other places.

Ever pragmatic, the local Chinese had soon taken to stealing its stones to build things other than a great eyesore on the landscape, and over generations whole sections of the Great Wall had been retasked for other purposes.

Every single stone removed was a place the undead could manifest from, and since they tended to be places that people lived close to, the results were as might be expected.

Millions of Chinese had been slaughtered on the day of the Fall to the ancient dead who had died building the Wall, fighting atop it, or assaulting it. The next day, more Chinese died to at the claws of those who had perished the day before.

Those undead furiously dug out each and every stone of the Wall, regardless of where they were buried or what they were used in. Dams were breached, roads torn apart, bunkers ripped open, buildings toppled, plazas dug up, tombs broken, and the lands excavated haphazardly. The undead dug out the stones of the Wall, and they brought every single stone back to it, building it back up with literally magical speed as every stone found its old place, and new bones and blood joined that which had mortared the stones in ancient times.

The dead enslaved to the Wall exceeded a hundred million. They could move back and forth along the Wall itself with almost magical speed, meaning that any section of the Wall could effectively be reinforced by the dead from the whole length of it.

Fighting on any part of the Wall was equivalent to fighting all parts of the Wall.

What was worse, and had even scared the most confident of Cultivators away, was the Greyfield.