There were a thousand of them the first time, a day taken off when both White Death Wolf and Leviathan Emperors were busy.

They started when a Portal quietly opened near the Valley of the Ice Phoenix in Antarctica, disgorging a certain someone in the mirror and a bunch of Disks piled up with Flaming Braziers.

I looked down over the hill at the Glacial Wurm with its half-exposed head among the vivic flames, ignoring the world in its joy at breathing in the purest Mana possible, and set about my task.

Ice Shaping was spell by spell instead of constant, like my all-day Stone Shaping, but I had Mana to spare, so putting up some steel-hard, icy columns to put the pre-made Vivic Iceflaming Braziers in didn’t matter at all. I had the Mana back before I moved to the next one.

The one-hundred-and-twenty-foot active radius of the Vivic Eternal Flames meant they were staggered two hundred and forty feet apart for maximum effect. As I wasn’t going to build Obelisks or Pyramids here to really do the job right, this was a nice work-around.

I put them in an arrow-straight arc, ice forming out of the driven snow in this perpetually dry and sub-zero temperature land, placing the brazier with its burning misty fires within, and going on to the next one.

The arc I described as I moved was precise. Ice flowed up out of the ground, seized a brazier, and I continued on, barely stopping.

It was easy, minor work, taking little effort and concentration, and the thick Ice Mana in the air only made it all more comfortable to do so. I had to concentrate not to burst into flames at the extremely pleasant environment.

I had over five miles of them laid out in a perfect arc before the first wave of Awareness passed over me and paused, surveying what I was doing.

They had to be aware of the Vivic Braziers and what they did, so I ignored them and did not stop making pedestals and placing more braziers of vivic flame upon them, twenty-feet off the ground, columns of shaped ice that would last for centuries and more here in this Icy environment, the coldest of its type on the planet.

Ten miles along, the Ancient Blizzard Yeti True Emperor loomed out of the blowing ice and snow like a two-hundred-foot materializing mirage, right in my path. Its white-furred and scaled body had almost no neck, a massively overbuilt upper body, outsized hands ending in icy claws, and pure blue eyes that could suck the heat out of those it was looking at.

Its glowing eyes fell on me with their gift of killing cold, and my Firefrost Seed poofed into fire instantly.

I ignored Him as He stared at me, and my flames grew more intense, while behind me the air swirled into ever more ice and cold, exactly matching the power of His stare.

I made three more Brazier Pillars, towing along my Disks, before coming up and pausing not twenty feet away from the Yeti Emperor’s crouching claws.

“Does the Emperor wish some braziers for His lair?” I asked Him politely.

He stared at me, but all He did was make the fires about me more intense. He huffed once, blinked, and His gaze faded away, the flames instantly snuffing out as it did so, leaving me wrapped once more in intense and revitalizing cold.

“WHY YOU DO THIS?” He asked, crouching down to examine me more closely. The Ceremony of the Frozen Soul made me a creature of Cold, which this environment was bringing to the fore. Despite me using the Fire, all His senses said I was a being of the fellfrost, and I belonged here.

“It is to help The Ice Emperor sleep more easily, Your Imperial Majesty. This one would place them about His lair, but His Awareness extends throughout His personal Demesne, so if the Mana is to be purified, it must be around the edges or it will not be effective.”

He huffed, thinking that over slowly, eyes on the long row of burning Vivic Iceflames rising up behind me. “PURIFIED?” He eventually asked.

I gestured one of the Braziers with TK over and up to in front of His flat nose, His eyes turning upon it. “Inhale, Your Imperial Majesty.”

He slowly did so, white mists swirling and disappearing up His nostrils as He slowly and deeply breathed in, mightier than any bellows, magic taking care of the square/cubed discrepancy as His lambent blue eyes half-closed.

After a few minutes, they opened again, regarding me keenly. “PURE,” He agreed slowly, and then He glanced over at my Disks of them with unmistakable greed.

“How many does His Imperial Majesty need to ring His lair?” I asked calmly, careful emphasis on the words to remind Him that these were meant to ring The Ice Emperor’s Lair... and He needed a lot of them.

Some of the greed died quickly. “TWENTY,” the gargantuan Yeti finally said, His tusks gleaming with expectation.

I turned and glided away from my line of Pillars, pausing a hundred feet away, and there made twenty more pillars.

These, however, were adorned with the face of the Ancient Blizzard Yeti Emperor, a detail He noticed and His eyes gleamed coldly in appreciation for. He looked back, and now also noticed that there was a serpentine head on each and every Pillar I’d made previously. If He’d taken them away, it would have been a direct insult to His High Emperor...

“They are ready, Your Imperial Majesty,” I announced, backing away by gliding in reverse.

He looked over the twenty pillars of Ice harder than steel, and huffed in contentment. A moment later, they were pulled from the ancient snow and floating along after Him as He turned away, and in a matter of seconds His hill-sized body was gone between the wind and icy particles in the air.

I returned to my task, unperturbed. As word of the Braziers spread, I expected to be bothered by Emperors who wanted some for themselves, and possibly even Rulers.

A lair free of all traces of Dark Mana was something all Emperors should have, should they not?...

------

“Fourteen of the bastards?” snorted Sama, shaking her head. “Well, it’s not going to take a short amount of time for you to ring the old bastard.”

“On the flip side, I now have personally met fourteen different powerful members of the Court of Ice, and they have acknowledged me in one fashion or another.”

“And you can track them if needed.”

“And I can track them if needed,” I agreed with a nod. Not that we had any invasion plans down there. Still, I’d had a Commune up down there, and there was no doubt whatsoever that the place was a cornucopia of fantastically valuable magical plants, minerals, and animals thriving in the incredibly intense Manafield made by The Ice Emperor.

Sama sat back, yawning in a manner that displayed all her canines to be admired before snapping her jaw shut with an audible clack. I’d watched her bite through an iron bar, so that wasn’t for show. “Welp, the number of littoral fights has dropped like a rock. The big thing now is the Water mages all getting tired managing the turbulent wave action, and people clamoring for Saltstone breakwalls to help ease the load.”

And who had the highest number of Saltseed Earth mages in the world? Certainly nobody we knew, or their construction corps...

“Giving everyone time to work on their Earth-shaping?” I asked archly, knowing just how much everyone had been working on that recently.

We’d only managed to add a few more levels to the Pyramid. Briggs and Sama were using their Sculptor Rods to do so, Legendary Crafter enabling them to get the things Powered up quickly, but they simply didn’t have the multi-layered modifiers that I did to pull it off, nor were they The Lord of Pyramids.

Still, they had a lot more non-combat time now, which they filled with making Blocks for the Pyramids. Both of them found it incredibly relaxing and rewarding, like massive puzzles that had to be carved to perfection, stacking and connecting into a greater whole.

Most of our Earth mages were involved in construction right now, making beach defenses and restoring infrastructure while they didn’t have to fight, gladly taking breaks from the insistent grind.

However, that also meant they weren’t earning Karma and taking Class Levels for lots of skill points, more Feats, and Masteries. When you want a full Twenty Ranks in Sculpting to make Pyramids, that’s not a cheap prospect, and getting the Skill Ranks via training took a damn long time.

Still, a hundred pounds of gold a day was Burning away on the Broom Closet Pyramid’s Altar, Investing it with ever more Mana every day, courtesy of Flowing Silver High Emperor. We were up to an eight-mile radius, and there were Beasts all over the place constantly putting down new Tiles to reinforce the boundaries of the Closet.

“How goes the Ascendence?” Sama inquired, as that was something nobody else on the planet could actually track. “I’ve been hearing about the dreams of souls finally reaching salvation.”

“I have eighty Celestials on soul recovery, a hundred thousand Mana bound to the Task.” Doubled Summons let me bring in two Summons instead of one, and then I just tied off the Mana on those Stars to support their existences as the Archons and Angels went about their instinctive tasks of shepherding the Good souls in Limbo into the various parts of Heaven.

A hundred thousand Mana seemed like a lot, but since I wasn’t going to blast anything with that much Mana, it really didn’t make much of a difference at this point. Yeah, it was the total Mana of two Elements of a normal Archmage, but that didn’t matter to me.

The Celestials were sweeping through Limbo constantly, rescuing Good souls new and old from a miserable state of barely-existing, amusingly enough even spiriting away a lot of Good souls who’d been followers of the Church of Light and had died recently. Nirvana had poached off a lot of Good souls who’d been followers of the Church, reducing them to drones in their realm to serve eternally as the undesired Virtue was slowly driven out of them, but there was nothing we could do about that at this point.

It would take an actual god to set things right on that end, and even then, they probably couldn’t be restored, only swept clean and removed from Nirvana’s control. Stealing Aligned souls was a big no-no, but under the auspices of religious devotion could be done... especially if there were no Aligned agencies around to contest the move.

It was one of the big ways to start a War in the afterlife. Despite their claims that everyone was going to Hell, even the Netherworld wasn’t grabbing everyone who had died, as Limbo was proof. Sure, they’d grab anyone with a Dark Element, as using it was basically a contract with the Netherworld they were collecting on, but just normal Good souls they left to rot in Limbo... although doubtless they were filching some every so often, just because they could.

That was going to come back to haunt them, but hey, free souls, how could an Evil being turn that down? Especially if they didn’t believe/didn’t know of/ignored the fact that there might be beings far more powerful than them out there...

“You’ve still got to support all of them?” Sama asked narrowly. “I thought we were hoping for evolution...”

“There’s been fourteen cases of Evolution both up and sideways. I replaced them when it happened.”