The Power of Ten

Chapter 9-287: Meeting Notes

There are routine things I did in down time.

There were big cheap gems to cut, mold, and turn from crappy rough chunks of crystal into Energized 5000 gp gems, in essence making myself large amounts of money directly from raw materials via Shaping Stone at VII. Heavenbound Hall had literally tons of said materials stored away, courtesy of The Mick and appropriate business dealings.

I Cast an Exemplar Surge and learned a new spell to fatten the libraries of Silver Magic, which now had the most complete such set of spells in the world. The other Temples and magical forces had no idea where it was all coming from, but they kept buying the ones the Temples leaked for incredible amounts of money. Revenue, revenue, vroom vroom! Support the Good work despite yourselves...

I could Teleport to the ex-Firezone warehouses of smelted metal and harvested raw gems, Itemize or Tapestry tons of them, and Teleport Item them directly to Detroit, bypassing all them nasty transportation costs and the security issues that would rise with them.

As I had all the money I needed, I could work on progressing magic items. As I could work on items with requirements of 12 Ranks of Spellcraft, or I could instead start up an Item, send it off for others to Infuse it up, and then spend a day at the far end doing the finishing, potentially making more powerful items without directly working on them myself most of the time.

I made six Wishes a day: three via Bey Azzar, and three copies from him given to Master Fred.

I administered Blessings. Since I could unerringly return to any place along my Lived-Line, my Allegiance and/or associated Priests would gather together suitable people at different locations so my time would not be wasted when I popped in, administered them at six seconds a pop via a kiss on the forehead, and then departed.

I could use Marrowmeld, Stone Shape, and Woodshaping together with Fabricate to get days of work done on materials in mere minutes. My modifiers and Ranks for such tasks were unmatched among mortals on the world, so I could make things at higher QL than just about any artisan alive.

I mostly used them to generate multiple types of healing Wands for Master Fred to charge up, his standard task while we were traveling, or to make raw Implements for other Casters to use and empower. Metalwork I left to others.

I could also administer the Full Tempering treatment of spells for items, consisting of Bond, Reed, Stone, Iron, and Adamant. This famous set of spells was called the Dwarven Pentad.

Bond was a I Valence Rune, and gave an item a +1 to-hit when wielded by the person blood-bonded to it... overridden by a true magical bonus, but also forming the core link used for Naming an item.

Reed, a II Valence Rune, made an item as flexible as rubber without actually affecting its hardness. Since it would stretch and bend radically while still returning to its original form, it made it very hard to break or shatter it with brute force. You could bend a sword with Reed on it right over on itself, and when the force was released, it would recover to its original form without a problem.

Stone was the III Rune, and doubled the hit points of an inanimate item, increasing its durability greatly. Leaving aside its resistance to deliberate sundering, such things simply lasted longer.

Iron was the famous IV Rune that gave an item the base structural strength and hardness of iron, while retaining its own characteristics if they were superior. Glassteel, or laen, came from using this spell to make glass as hard and ductile as iron at 10 (instead of 2), while keeping its own crystalline nature.

Adamant, or Harden, was a V Valence, and straight up boosted an items hardness by +1 for every two Caster Levels. Since I had a crazy Caster level, I could easily boost the hardness of an object to 30+ without too much effort. The ability of such a material to resist damage and stresses to its system were impressive, to say the least, the biggest restriction on the spell being the relatively small amount of material you could work on per spell.

I was running The Map all the time now, of course, and so Markspace had literally the most accurate maps of certain areas in the world now. Naturally my people wanted to map a whole lot more areas and fill in the blank spots. There were people who wanted to get to Nine just so they could Cast Commune with Nature and add that level of detail to The Map... and feel that level of harmony with the Land.

The miners in the Shroudzone would also call me up to very, very quickly work out a vein by Stone Shaping volumes of stone directly, creating a perfect tunnel through the stone following it, and dropping bars of ore or crystals down to be easily carted off. Given the volume of stone I could move and the precision at which I could do it, this resulted in production surges here and there which only took relative minutes of my time to accomplish.

And, you know, I could walk through the stone under Heavenbound Hall and clear out new halls and rooms...

I could also Energize lower-end gemstones or metals, also pure money-making, as I had the Caster Level to make small amounts of adamantine and mithral out of the original tungsten and titanium.

So, needless to say, as long as I had Valences or Pool, there were always things I could be doing, and plenty of things I could be doing even if I went through them all.

The Shroudzones and Cultivators being nice enough to help me recharge was something I was grateful for, of course, but that couldnt help me all the time.

The V+ Valence stuff was the stuff in highest demand, of course, so I literally could not run out of things to do, because I would never have enough of them to do everything that I and everyone else wanted done.

I did what I could do.

I had twelve Ranks in Logistics, which doubled as the Allegiance Management ability, among other things. My base check at that was 49, which could spike another twenty or more after Casting Allegiance-related magic, enabling me to assign duties and coordinate efforts between disparate members and locations with, well, magical speed; let individuals know what they could do to contribute to maximal effect; smooth out flows; get different personalities working together; and sideline those who didnt contribute or caused problems, and then give them the chance to help elsewhere... or simply leave.

I did have full authority to punt people from my Allegiance as I wished, of course, and that meant barring them from Markspace, too, as Sama would also mono-line them... and make damn sure the people knew why, too, and theyd better shape up, or theyd lose the Mark! She had far less patience for slackers than I did, and was, um, more fiery in her personality than I was, totally willing to go after someone in real life who was being a shit.

Thankfully, the kind of people we attracted werent that way among the Blessed or the Marked. They were basically Bannersworn people who wanted to get in on a good thing and work towards a bigger cause without endangering themselves or exerting themselves too much, i.e., those with Neutral learnings.

Plenty of people were willing to help work towards a Good cause. Sacrifice for one? That number narrowed quite a bit...

Still, there I was at the top of the Allegiance, radiating Nobility at 16 to 18, depending on who you were (20 if you were Sylunar). I was wrapped in Faith and Duty at 12, stupefying levels of both to a normal person, and possessing mental Stats at the OMGissheevenmortal Level, which nicely distracted people from Sama and Briggs quietly forming a grim and hard foundation trifecta underneath me now, a Null not budging and a Source empowering everything I was trying to get done.

It wasnt that I didnt have much time; it was that I didnt know how much time I had. There was a lot of stuff that had to get done, and I couldnt control the other sides...

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I had a lot of up-to-date information on Shroudzones. Since I couldnt interface with computers directly without bleeding out my eyes, generally people just read the things for me, and I read their Visual Files in Markspace, adding a human element and nicely skipping my problems with tech. By now I generally had at least two people working on cyber-stuff for me all the time. If they talked about the size of the mental spreadsheets I was running, I heard nothing as they darted all over the place getting information, talking to people, buying this, selling that, sending this here and requesting that there.

I was casually at the center of a great deal of support manpower, planning moves and things that would be needed, and parsing them out into many, many details that had to be done and assigned.

My cybereye people ended up rapidly developing some spiritual disciplines regarding Focus and Meditation after dealing with having my psyche so close all the time. After all, there were few better role models for developing mental ability around... and Sama and Briggs tended to focus on the more violent aspects of such things.

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Shroudzone shrinkage was now under slow and steady way across most of Europe, with the governments there coordinating efforts to focus on a few of the more key Zones, building up competency and numbers with sometimes uneven focus.

Certainly there were plenty of Powered who just wanted to go in and harvest everything they could as fast as they could, keeping all that sweet Karma for themselves. I read reports of several such people ending up violently dead through various accidents, and I wasnt there to Raise them from the dead, so dead they stayed and were vivisized.

Excessively greedy behavior tapered off thereafter. People who wanted to act like wankers could do it if they focused on smaller Shroudzones... but they also had precious little backup if things went wrong, and those smaller Shroudzones tended to be much more responsive to external stimuli...

I couldnt harm the fools, only issue opinions and approvals of the tactics here and there, warnings that unilateral growth was not happening here and measures should be taken... and making damn sure Heavenbound Halls forces were leading the way in improving in this manner.

The Mick had seen this problem coming, which was one of the reasons hed taken so many Tomb Clan members to China... and was organizing more for me to shuffle over tomorrow, especially after those who hadnt died stupidly were making the kind of progress they had scarcely dreamed they could.

After all, you didnt need Vivus to start killing Cultivators; you could just be mean, nasty, and have a hemo-fixated profit motive.

I confirmed to The Mick that I would be making another supply run tomorrow, the ammunition, armaments, basic armor, and raw materials for Sama and Briggs would be included in the Tapestry and Itemized stuff Id be bringing in.

Many of the Tomb Clansmen were less than savory individuals, but even they were shaken when they learned of some of the things Id done in China, let alone hearing about the slaughter Id undertaken in India. They respected strength and ruthlessness; I had plenty of both, and The Mick was my chosen representative.

The Micks personal Allegiance was growing, crossing Clan lines, and the Fuilcroi Elders would doubtless not be too happy to learn that. While he didnt have huge support among the Blooded, his status among the lower Clans was growing by the day and with every Cultivator he butchered and drained. His eye was on the bottom line and coldly profiting from good deeds, a mindset they could get behind easily.

Shvaughn/Windwise couldnt directly profit so much from her activities recruiting Warlocks and forming a personal Allegiance, as her Markspace presence was unequivocally the single Darkest Soul in all of our Markspace, and that would not change no matter what face she was using. Finding out your inspirational Amazon Warlock teacher was a people-eating Hellbound who would happily chomp you down for stepping out of line was not the way to build an inspired network of Warlocks.

Because of that, many of the Warlocks she was helping swear Pacts were targets for Marks, Blessings, and Bannersworn, often in their own sectioned-off area of the Markspace where they could talk with one another, resolve conflicts between Patrons, get tips from one another, and generally through their actions help their Patrons work together more closely, too. Shvaughn tended to be exposed to very few of them, and the ones she revealed herself to were generally the most ruthless of her recruits, who didnt care what methods were used as long as their enemies died.

That said, that hardly meant that she didnt know how to manage and rule, and so the Allegiance she had was part of the overall effort. She was totally ruthless in enforcing conduct and cooperation. We were all perfectly happy to knock off people using asshat behavior on the battlefield, and we wiped away people pulling shenanigans who thought they could get away with something, be it looting Cultivators of goldweight that belonged to others, not coming to the aid of others because they wouldnt get any loot, or the like.

It helped that there was a pool of goldweight items rewarding those exhibiting cooperation and camaraderie, suggested by Shvaughn herself. That their boss was giving up goldweight to ensure that some of her more opportunistic underlings acted like good little team players wasnt lost on them, and so if they took that goldweight, they were very, VERY enthusiastic team players, indeed...

Shvaughn and The Mick had shares in the Firezone profits, so that money was nothing, but nobody was telling them that.