Chapter 23

Unsurprisingly, the humans that screamed the longest were equivalent to what Angie had been before I fixed her. I did to them the same thing I'd done to Angie, altering their assorted will circuits into true circuits. Even without the alteration they would have been in pain far longer, but with the alteration everyone else had stood up and was staring at them in fear before they'd even started to solidify themselves again.

Now I had a decision to make. I had already established solid beachheads in Celius and Agatha, but if I could maintain a city I wouldn't need to worry about hiding my tracks. It may be suspicious if anyone noticed the population dropping from almost half a million down to several tens of thousands, but nobody would come here. I'd still need to kill the reinforcing armies, though.

I absently gave the humans the nutritional circuit I'd used on Angie to make them less annoying later. As I did, I explored their bodies, searching even the smallest natural circuit. The commoner population had none. Not a single one. How was that possible? Every other creature I'd come across so far had at least some circuitry built into their bodies that matured as they did. Many had circuits written into their clothing or other equipment, but none within their bodies.

The soldiers had some, but they were all horribly lacking. The circuits were so bad that it made them appear far stronger than they were. I had thought Adrian CMXXVIII would be greater than a third composite, but she was merely equal to one. She simply leaked far more mana than they did. There was even some of the wasteful script in the circuits. Not nearly as much as the "spells" humans liked, but any was a waste. I immediately started fixing the military arm of Adrian. I was fixing all the random implements I found as well, though that was harder as I actually had to shift the structure of the objects themselves instead of writing them in bodies that could adjust to the circuitry.

An interesting issue made itself known when I started trying to fix Adrian CMXXVIII. I would shift the circuit's shape, and it would immediately snap back to how it had been before after a tiny ripple of mana surged through her. That hadn't happened before. I followed the traces of mana into her skull to discover it was strange. Her skull had been replaced with another object. It was magnificent, the circuitry so complex and interwoven that it took me a significant amount of time to decipher it.

Her skull was the exact template I'd suspected existed in Agatha and Celius. It altered the flow of will within her to form all of the circuits in exactly the same pattern and would abandon her corpse when she died to allow the next Adrian to immediately become powerful enough to control a city. It also made her skull harder, but that was probably incidentally beneficial rather than purposefully so. It was still human circuitry, but this put anything but the lock on the wizard library to shame.

Still, it was using her entire skull. That was space I could use for a better construction than humans were capable of producing. It also was stopping me from using Adrian CMXXVIII to her fullest potential. It took so long that I was done with the whole population and the literate were starting to stir, but I finally broke the circuit and smoothed out the metal that was her skull to allow for my own circuitry. With all the circuitry contained within Adrian CMXXVIII and her skull, I had learned more than enough to invent a few templates of my own. Contained within the skull was also the principle of dimorphic will alterations, allowing me to understand why runes and circuits were different between sexes and how to predict the alterations. That was exceedingly helpful, and sped up my circuit writing among the human population exponentially.

My first mana-core true circuit was dropped into the earth when I started, but I'd used up most of the human bodies building more mana-core true circuits by the time I finished. I wanted a little left over, as I still needed to make a brain nexus. I'd finished my char nexus, though. There were eighteen mana-core true circuits guarding it, making it the most defended nexus of all until I finished with the human ones.

The hounds had given in faster than expected, or rather one had. It submitted, I fixed it, and once it was a hell hound the rest submitted to it. They were the most difficult to make worshippers, but once my hair construct lifted it off the ground and caused it pain, it whined constantly. That was enough to form the rune. Once it had advanced into a hell hound, it could form the rune itself, which made the rest so much easier.

With that done I decided to gather all of my forces into Adrian. I would destroy the reinforcements and decide what to do after that.

While I waited for the reinforcements, I finished writing circuitry into all of my humans, making them vastly more dangerous than they had been before my assault. Despite the population having gone down by more than ninety percent, Adrian had never been more powerful.

As I worked, I spread my will across the entirety of the city. I'd gained so much will from the battle it made me feel pathetic. I had so much will I could explore the entire city and enough attention to actually understand all of it thanks to my multiple true circuits. The increasing processing power also allowed me to finally crack the code of the wizard library circuit.

The scale of information available within the Adrian library in comparison to the wizard library was shocking. I had thought the wizards wouldn't care about anything but magic, but I couldn't be more wrong. The Cannibal Conclave had their fingers in everything, and that was reflected in their library. Unlike the city management, the Cannibal Conclave had to record everything to know if they were in danger. Cannibals were the most hated breed of intelligent life, after all. Even the other two races of humans refused to call cannibals humans. Unfortunately for their world view, cannibals were the most successful race of humans. The Cannibal Conclave had recorded it as the goliaths were driven into smaller and smaller tribes until they had to beg their way into ursa tribes to survive. The Cannibal Conclave had watched as the spawn were driven into a similar but less efficient parody of the cannibal societal structure. They watched both as the cities they built near either civilization were burned to the ground. The goliaths at least had the strength of character to kill off the cannibal breeding stock, but the spawn hadn't. In response, old varieties of cannibal stock had conquered the entire world, forcing their "saviors" into becoming so similar to those they hated most.

They hadn't been able to watch either race for a long time, a very long time. The Conclave was young when their last city capable of strong enough divination to see other human civilizations was destroyed. That didn't stop those that crowed at how the world as they experienced it was impossible for the other humans to survive as they had been and how it was only the cannibal civilization that survived and prospered.

Unlike the consensus of the Conclave, I believed the other human breeds had survived. One form of proof was necromancers. All cannibal cities had problems with necromancer revolts, many had fallen to them, but there were many reports of necromancers popping out of nowhere. They could fall through the cracks, but they easily be those fleeing from other human civilizations as well. Another form of evidence was a couple of reports from cities before they fell that felt suspiciously similar to the reaction I would expect would have heralded my invasion had I not destroyed the tower first that were then pinned on monsters by the following investigation.

I put wider observations aside as I found the food supply of Adrian. Below the third largest structure in the city was a massive underground space. It was filled with a different breed of goblins. A superior breed of food, but I wasn't sure if it was a superior breed altogether. Their submission was absolutely superior to the goblins. I barely had to ask before they started working in earnest to worship me.

They circuitry was certainly more refined than regular goblins. Their circuits were even showing hints of losing their rigid circular shape. Their guts only had the single mana-to-nutrients circuit, but what they replaced it with was utterly useless for me. The males had a gut full of useless muscle, good food but irrelevant to the functioning of the creature. The females had vastly expanded wombs, making each brood much larger per class. They did have one circuit that was interesting to me, though. They infused their fat with mana instead of crystallizing their brains. This would make it easier to build a fat nexus as well as increase my means of storing mana. I hadn't even considered a liquid medium for mana. It was amazing, though. The potential…what could I do with liquid mana? How could I alter my creatures to utilize it?

I put off further invention as I was still digesting the knowledge from the Conclave's library and I had another problem. Male food goblins had muscle capable of having exponentially more power, especially in their later classes. The females, on the other hand, had muscle that was so feeble it was pathetic. Female goblins were my main army, as the males could be equally proficient in combat but also served as breeding resources. Now that there was significant dimorphism, that threw a wrench into my plans. Male food goblins were much more suited to be fighters while females were much more suited to be resources for reproduction.