The scene was not much different from Ael’s memories of the Dead Marches going at one another, a nightmare landscape of Dark Cardinals bashing heads with one another, trying to seize the Dark Hierophant throne that would enable them to claim the world.

As a matter of fact, it wasn’t all that different from the deadworld called Pentara he had assaulted with all the Powered of Terra, the one fronting the Shroud, a shrineworld to the very essence of Undeath, and a link to a horror that crossed endless realities.

There were billions of undead going at it, souls harvested for thousands of years from the human populations. Down here, those souls would not naturally die, they’d just lose their shells and have to form new ones from the debris of others over a period of time. Thus, battles and wars could rage on endlessly... and yet, the consequences were real. If one side could woo/enslave/tame/capture the souls of the other, they could cut into the real power of the undead rulers, potentially resulting in them being captured and subjugated themselves!

Intruding into China’s Realm of the Dead had not been wise, and so now there was a constant border war going on between China’s Underworld and the Lands of the Pharaohs, playing out along the edge of the Netherworld where the nexus to the Conduits they were sitting atop came together.

Undead hungry for battle clawed and ripped at one another to vent the fury and frustration of their tormented existences. Hills of savaged undead squirmed and writhed as they put themselves back together in new configurations, ripping apart and sucking down the newly dead to rebuild themselves.

There were undead Colossi beating one another up, with China’s famous Mountain Zombie King dominating those. Skeletal, zomboid, phantasmal, incorporeal, and Possessing undead were going at it, the Chinese side going more for size and classic variety, the Egyptian side including all sorts of undead Beasts, especially Snakes and Scorpions and their variants, all headed up by undead Medusas, Sphinxes, Sand Colossi, and the like.

The spellcasters of both sides were throwing spells at one another or the twisting, writhing darkness of the hordes below in showy displays of power that really did almost nothing, the battles seesawing back and forth across this space as the dead ripped at one another in glee, giving and receiving the pain that was their only constant in existence.

I could have turned this entire situation upside down. I could have annihilated the forces at war here entirely with vivus, ending their torment and sending them back along the cycle of life. I could have brought all sides down Burning in unwhite fire, ending their threat to the mortal world forever, and yes, it would have been a Good thing.

I could feel at least four Presences lightly watching anything and everything, delighting in the displays of prowess and ineptitude, the futility of the fighting which would change so very, very little for whoever won, if anyone won at all, and the way the battle was slowly taking on the status of merely a game to demonstrate skill and proficiency, perhaps even worthiness to advance for a rare few.

It was occupying a significant portion of the attention of the Realm Lords, as it was probably the only thing interesting happening in the entirety of their Netherworld.

Masked by Astral Ward at XXI, I simply headed down a conduit path which was disgorging endless streams of Undead and Shades who had reformed themselves and were coming back to the fight. I was also covered by Invisibility to Undead at XXI, which extended to Fiends and beings of this Netherworld in particular.

Shades and Undead spectral and material flowed past me, not seeing or acknowledging my existence as I moved in the other direction. Something was attempting to muck with my passage of time here, but Adaptation XX took care of that, and soon enough I was out of the roiling, oily Conduit with its flow of undead souls and out into the Netherworld beyond.

The Awareness of the Realm Lords swirled around me and past me, but did not register me. I looked about at the ghastly lighting coming down on a world that looked like a shadow of some distant mortal realm, all the plants like extended shadows with macabre angles and hues to them, the ground looking both oily and festering at the same time, trod under the uncaring bones and rotting meat of millions of undead arriving here in a constant stream.

The amount of Dark Mana here was overwhelming, corrupting and consuming the base Elemental Mana and infecting it with the energies of death, decay, dissolution, destruction, darkness, and doom. The Manafield felt heavy and hostile, especially since my Sublime Chord was quiet here, and it did not want to move at my will... not that it had a choice. Necromancy was not something I loved, but it was something I could use, and I had Control Darkness Ranks up the kazoo for a reason, as if I knew all this was coming.

The Manafield felt my +112 Control Darkness modifier and perked right up as it smiled greasily at one of its own.

Well, I did not want to remain here, but it was on my Lived-Line, even if it was interdimensionally. I could now come back here at any time via Plane Shifting or Gating.

I turned and headed away from the Awarenesses I could feel effortlessly maintaining perception of the area around me, picked up speed, and zipped away.

I wasn’t alone down here, either. The communication ability of Marks extended across dimensions, so there were a lot of interested people looking out my eyes as I wove through the incoming flights of Shades, Phantoms, Spectres, Ghosts, Wraiths, and other flying undead, rising in altitude while defying the cold and life-sucking aspect of the Netherworld that increased rapidly as I did so. I saw Nightwings and other extraordinarily dangerous undead lazily winging their way through these upper reaches.

None of them could see me, and once I was out of the traffic, I made for some speed.

The combination of Linejumps, Void Magic, and my own Chaos/Air-assisted speed meant I was truly moving. Reynard’s explorations of the Beast Realm had shown me exactly how big a plane dominated by a Realm Lord could be, so I had no hesitation in going for distance. Even at speed, nothing could sense me or feel me flit by, little more than an illusion or passing wisp of magic to even the most developed senses.

The further away I was from those Awarenesses, the greater and greater the amount of data they had to process. At the same time, they would have to expend more energy to affect things out here, so it was natural that the edges of the realm would hold the stuff they cared the least about or had discarded. Their main area of interest out here would be the actual boundary of their realms, which they would be focused on as trying to detect anything from outside trying to get in and invade them, instead of vice versa.

Even then, there were probably minor invasions of things from the Aether, be they lost mortals or inhabitants thereof, that they mostly ignored unless they got up to something interesting.

What I was intending to do was find an area with a lot of stuff, make a Pyramid there out of their own damned Realm, and extend a Veiling to the entire area, so nobody outside could sense what was going to happen there.

I was going to use that Mana to either feed the Broom Closet’s existence, or speed along my own development, dependent upon me bringing together the final elements and design of the spells and internal formations and understandings I would need to do what I was doing.

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I didn’t know how far I’d come, due to the irregularity of what had to be a composite Realm down here, and some resulting planar and spatial instabilities.

That was fine. I was far enough away that the Awareness of the Realm Lords wasn’t sweeping past me with any real sensitivity, basically looking past and checking on the integrity of the Realm Border with automatic placidity, not really paying attention to the random seething hordes crawling over the landscape, mindless undead being broken down by the Plane and with almost nothing to offer the Realm Lords in terms of emotional strength, pain, or similar things... even if some of them were the size of small hills.

Perfect for me.

Step One: Make an Obelisk. It didn’t have to be very big, just large enough to conceal an area from any Undead in the vicinity while I made my Pyramid.

Step Two: Make the Pyramid. It didn’t have to be that large, so I stuck with a ten-stepper, twenty-foot blocks of stone that I dropped out of a Portal I opened to a waiting pit of Mudrock on the Mortal Plane, pouring it into an excavated pit. A simple Dispel, and I had waiting real granite instead of necroically-charged false matter to build from.

I formed the Pyramid right around the Obelisk, absorbing it as I built the thing up from one square to ten by ten, geometric perfection and elemental superconductivity with material absoluteness finding all sorts of things to assail the much-less-stable pet Realm of these Netherlords and whatever its natural laws were.

Step Three: The Pyramid’s influence extended out for ten miles once completed, taking me about six hours to get it rising two hundred feet above the landscape, repelled by and repelling the squirming landscape underneath it that didn’t want to touch such Elemental absoluteness... especially when it was so shot through with Holy energies.

Step Four: Make it Rain.

The air here didn’t want to be purified and the Dark Mana infusing it destroyed, but I had a Pyramid right there happily absorbing all the random vivus around, either making it available for me in raw Mana or pumping it out and away to a particularly harmonic configuration in the Broom Closet Pyramid, effectively sucking out the power of this Realm and sending it back to the Mortal Plane it had been taken from originally.

That was fine by me. Setting the first patches of the place on vivic fire was enough to free up the remnants of the corrupted Elemental Mana and allow me to start doing things with it... and setting up a great rolling thunderstorm extending out from the Pyramid was part of that.

The Pyramid made sure that nothing outside the Warded area paid attention to this area or saw anything happening here. The Obelisk made sure none of them saw the Pyramid, and so the storm billowed out with only curious glances at it, the undead below and around unable to tell just what was waiting inside the inky black clouds, and doubtless considering it just another part of the hellish plane’s torments upon them.

That torment ended rather quickly when the skies opened up, and Holy Water came down.

Necroic flesh went up like oil-treated tinder as a Storm of Vengeance like nothing the Netherworld had ever seen poured down absolution and an ending upon the soil made from flesh and bones below.

Soon enough the entire landscape was blazing with vivic flames as the ground and everything upon it Burned with slow, hungry mistfires, and falling rain in a wall of whiteness ate through undead bodies and spirits alike.

Some of the biggest undead tried blindly to get away, but the Storm was also embedded with a whole lot of Call Lightnings operating at Sage Levels, and they Thundered down with the sound of gentle bells pealing out and calling out for an ending to their suffering. The mightiest undead were hammered to the ground as their flesh exploded and ran away into mist, and soon enough there was no motion at all inside the bounds of the Pyramid’s Ward, the few intruders from outside lurching away from the killing rain if it touched them, and unable to react much beyond that.

A solid stream of vivus was being drawn into the Pyramid from all directions like a whirlpool, drawing all of it away from the seared ground, leaving no revealing whiteness behind.

When it was done, and an empty black landscape of depleted ebon sand and almost no moving hills and gullies was all that was left, I bid the Pyramid start moving as the Storm was allowed to fade away. Slowly, helped by the fact the affronted ground was pushing us away, we headed off for another hunting area.

Millions of Soul Crystals were filling up the interior of the Pyramid, being rapidly combined and condensed down by the intense vivic fire. The low-end ones were being combined to form Ruler-Class Jewels for me, and the higher ones being combined to form Realm-Class Star Diamonds, if that was even possible.

The most powerful undead hereabouts had been fallen Rulers, ancient and decrepit, but holding onto their physical power and still more than the mindless things here could really kill. It was fine... I was patient, and they had the numbers. I wasn’t even draining a drop in the bucket yet.

Let’s see how long it took them to notice anything was going on. Behind me, random undead were already stumbling into the cleared zone, which was empty of the malevolent forces always sucking at them and draining them. In only a couple days, they’d have spread by osmosis into the cleared area, and there’d be no visible evidence of anything having happened there at all...