Book 4 Chapter 46: Securing Loyalty

++The first thing any magician does after pioneering some new, earth-shaking feat of magic is to start figuring out exactly how to make everyone else pay them for it.++

- A common saying among the magicians of the early 19th century, though its precise point of origin remains unknown, it is believed to have been in use for at least a hundred years before that point. Similar jokes have been recorded across various magician cultures dating back millennia.

I had worried at first that lecturing in the Vornholt Institute would eat into my valuable time, but Bogern pleasantly surprised me by advising that I give no more than one session per week. In his words, making them rare and infrequent would only leave the students to crave them more.

He had quite the advertiser’s head on his shoulders, I noted. Then again, given how much of modern magic was based around the pure politics of acquiring funding for all the experiments one wanted to do, that was hardly surprising.

And I was certainly not complaining.

For six months I settled into my new routine, turning twenty just a month or so after my first lesson and putting each day into the endless effort of furthering my own growth.

I was gaining an average of sixteen or so vis each day now. It was a tiny fraction of my total power output, and so in total terms my magic was improving relatively slowly. Still, I added thousands more onto my maximum output and by the sixth month could sustain over thirty eight thousand while pushing myself.

It was, I decided, acceptable progress, but not especially notable. What was notable was the advancements I made on the front of physical power.

I had known that warriors grew more explosively and quickly than magicians, but feeling it for myself was still an endless shock.

But that was all expected. It was all barely even progress, just power that I knew already was waiting for me to take, and needed only to be grabbed when the time came. I would not be threatening the Gods with only my inborn talent and a trick of Vessel transfer, however prodigious that was.

No, the truly significant changes were in my ongoing experimentations with divine magic.

It was rather funny. Ten years ago a Demigod specimen had been my greatest priority. Now, after having one to do with as I pleased for roughly half a decade, I realised that it was not nearly enough.

Divine magic, like ordinary mana, came in blends and flavours, with distinctive patterns and idiosyncrasies unique to each individual. I had learned a great deal about it from my captive Demigod, but there were limits to the knowledge I could glean from only a single prisoner.

Unfortunately, securing more specimens with innate divine magic of the level I required was far easier said than done. Sakhent’s cult was more than able to provide me with a few stray Godtouched, but of course that did little to help me. I had already vivisected them by the thousand in my old life, and if the discoveries made with Nu’chista meant that a few more repetitions took my knowledge further now, it was all still short of anything even resembling a breakthrough.

What I needed, really, was Demigods. One more would make a difference and let me continue advancing, narrowing my conclusions from the countless millions of possibilities I was formulating currently to a relatively few, and entirely testable, hundred or so. It would still take time and effort, as did everything worth accomplishing, but that time would not be measured in additional millennia.

No, if I waited that long then I had no way of accounting for what would come over the world while I did my work.

Unfortunately, Demigods are difficult to capture. Nu’chista had fallen into my hands thanks to having isolated himself in Orapathaqi, having stupidly incapacitated his fellow Demigod Aryqatan and having made the mistake of fighting Lord Dread at the height of his powers. In most cases, the Demigods of Garamon were far more cautious than that.

It was not unknown for them to travel alone of course, such was their power that few forces in all the world could truly threaten them—they would need to search quite hard to find anything in nature that could so much as singe their eyebrows. My magic was a lot more potent than a mere magma chamber or meteor impact, but it was also far more detectable. If I called on it to fight a Demigod, I would find myself swarmed by all the others within a hundred miles.

And if I failed to force my captured Demigod into the isolation chamber I made to cut them off from the Gods’ influence, they may still simply be killed from afar before I could study them.

Laying out each limit, the prospects seemed close to impossible, and certainly I could never have managed it ten thousand years ago. Even with my new advancement in trapping the Demigods, I was not sure if anything but blind luck would have let me capture another.

Except that I had recently encountered the ancient lich known as Shuo Meg, and her unique mastery over mana-isolating magic had piqued my interests. Unlike my Demigod cage, which was limited in scale to a scant few dozen feet across, hers had been applied to a sprawling temple, and I had seen no evidence that the spell matrix was in any way strained by that magnitude.

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That was with Shuo Meg’s efforts. With the genius and prescience of Lord Dread added into the mix…well, whoever said a whole country could not have its magical signature isolated from the rest of the world?

Shuo Meg had yet to agree to join me, but I was not too worried about that happening eventually. The problem, once more, was on what exactly ‘eventually’ meant. One drawback to immortality was that my kind had a tendency to ponder for decades what a human might only for days.

My one saving grace was the presence of Aadan Farah.

He was not nearly as knowledgeable in necromancy or biomancy as me, nor any of my fellow ancients, but he was a magical genius, and the fact that I could work with him and not need to worry about how he might use each nugget of information I let slip left the whole affair going impossibly smoothly.

Besides, he was a hundred and four year old man, and I found his youthful enthusiasm refreshing. It reminded me of earlier days on my own part, when magic was still new and the world seemed infinite in its possibilities.

If anything, I had been even more naive than he was now. Farah, at the very least, was well aware of his own place upon the cosmic chain of power. I had learned that lesson only through a good deal of pain after encountering the Gods.

We coaxed the flesh into different shapes and forms, splitting our focus between working on the arcane elements of cultivating new bodies—a known technique that I merely tried to improve and make more efficient—and pioneering entirely new methods of using it with divine magic.

Unfortunately, he enjoyed no more success in this latter category than I did. Or, to be more specific, I enjoyed little more success than any other genius might have. Divine magic was difficult for a thousand reasons, but in my case, easily the most significant, the first among them was that I could not actually see it.

Only now had I found out how others felt when they practiced the arcane. Floundering in the dark, blinded morons attempting to balance equations made from reactants they could not even perceive. For a while I was baffled that any magical progress was ever made without my presence.

On divine magic, I would truly get nowhere at all without the best selection of specimens. And that was just another reason added onto the others that I needed to cooperate with Zameka. One way or another.

On the production of bodies, I enjoyed a great deal more success. Before the second month was up I had created one for Exyria Voret and Sethira, and Qaigor received his before either of them. By this point my creation process had been cut fully in half, and I was shaving a few more hours off it with each new form I made.

Voret was the first to come for hers, not counting Qaigor, whom I invited over for a visit just to make the transfer in his sleep. I had to keep the smile off my face as I met with Exyria and imagined my younger brother’s reaction to finding himself suddenly capable of wielding magic as well as magical strength.

Sitting in my office alone, with no distractions from one another save the sterile luxury around us, I knew Exyria must have seen the emotion on my face. Apparently she decided better than to inquire about it.

“My body, is it ready?” she asked as soon as the door was shut and the muting spells interlocked.

“Yes,” I told her, and said nothing more. I waited. I wanted to see what she would add before moving onto the topic of transferring her soul—if she would add anything at all, that was.

But she was clever, experienced, and had been given about half a year to do nothing but consider how she might make use of this advantage. Of course she had concerns about the pragmatism of it.

“I would like you to start granting my family bodies of their own,” she said. “For both of our sakes.”

“Explain your reasoning,” I instructed her, though I knew already.

“The Voret family is big, and though many of them are…idiots, many more are genuinely cunning. Perceptive and politically savvy—always seeking weaknesses in their superiors to exploit so they might take their place. If I suddenly gain the powers of a warrior and start to stave off old age, it will not go unnoticed forever. For the Vorets to survive this without being torn apart from the bottom up, we need to spread the power further through their ranks.”

All correct, and all as I had planned, but I knew the notion would settle more confidently in her mind if I let her suggest it first.

“You have specific candidates in mind?” I asked her.

“Yes. First among them is my son, Aravon.” I had predicted as much, of course.

“And?”

She rattled off a few more names, all known to me, and I probed her with questions about her particular reasoning. In this field, she was far more knowledgeable than myself. It was, after all, her own family.

“Very well,” I agreed at last. “You have asked for a dozen more bodies, that will take me time.”

“How much time?” she asked, with just a touch of desperation evident in her voice.

“More than half a year, being pessimistic. Half a year or less, being optimistic.” I saw her deflate, realising she would need to hide the change to her from the rest of the Vorets for six long months, or more.

But she had been motivated by the fear of death, and of course had agreed anyway.

Four more months passed, and proved that my estimates were actually rather on the long end. I was averaging a new body every few weeks, and each meant another of the Voret family’s senior membership was absorbed into my growing cabal of immortals.

And these immortals were not liches. Their bodies still aged, just more slowly. If they wanted to live forever themselves, they had two options; learn to replicate the techniques I was using to make their bodies…or remain in my favour.

Six months was not a great amount of time, but I had gotten a great amount done in it. And to think I still had a few more weeks before my damned wedding ceremony ate up more of my time.