Time within the crystal locker grew blurry. Rhys swapped between growing his strength via being deluged with qi and impurities while it was on, and slowly sabotaging-slash-taking-over the entire death portal. The testing continued, partially because of his slow sabotage, and partially because Yulin was even more thorough and cautious than Rhys had imagined. Forget not waiting long enough; Yulin was more likely to wait too long. This final boss was fully locked into a centuries-span lifestyle, and Rhys appreciated it.
The too-long boss was a rare but beautiful phenomenon, and if nothing else, he could definitely relate. If he was a final boss, he’d probably spend all his time doubting his ultimate plan and shoring it up over and over again until he got overcome by the sheer passage of time and/or the hero’s power-up cycle. Hell, it’d almost happened with his hostile takeover of his home region and take-down of Virgil. He’d always been the first to get annoyed by the not-long-enough bosses and, indeed, the rarer too-long boss, but when he was the boss, he had to admit: timing was hard. Especially when he had a near eternity ahead of him, a trait Yulin and he shared.
Right now, though, timing wasn’t his major concern. He had a death portal to corrupt, and nothing but time to work on it.
The death portal was not only shockingly resistant to corruption, but also well-attended. More than once, he’d painstakingly corrupted a part of it over years, only for the people keeping the portal up and running to swap out that part and replace it with a shining new un-corrupted piece, wasting all his impurities and effort.
As for it being hard to corrupt, well, it was composed of high-tier parts with not only almost no to no corruption or impurities, but also a natural resistance to impurities. Many pieces were even enchanted to resist impurities.
The crystal gym locker (which he’d learned, over the years, from the bits and pieces of conversation he’d overheard, was called a crystal coffin or a coffin filter) was one of the few pieces not enchanted to resist impurities, because, as part of the filter system, that would be silly. It was getting shot full of impurities every day. Rather than fight a losing battle, they simply gave up and let it get (relatively) easily corrupted. That worked in Rhys’s favor, who was free to use it as a base for grinding tiers and building his power yet higher, but it didn’t really help him with his ultimate goal of taking over the death portal.
But he had time. He kept an eye on the main portal, but Yulin was really taking it slow. He was in absolutely no rush to unleash his destined army upon the lands, or whatever. It made sense; guy had eternity. And it was great for Rhys, who had a whole death portal to take over, on top of making steady gains toward Tier 7 after settling his breakthrough to Tier 6 from his first bout as the death portal’s main filter. He didn’t think it was possible to actually reach Tier 7 from here. The pains were strong, but he could already sense them falling off. But he could get pretty well up into Tier 6, and he wasn’t turning up his nose at any gains, however incremental.
He needed to beat Yulin eventually, after all. Probably not straight out of the coffee filter or whatever they called this crystal box, but eventually. He had goals, like killing Ryota’s grandpa and the almost equally important goal of keeping Yulin (Ryota’s grandpa) from massacring this region.
Time continued to pass. He corrupted the pieces more subtly, keeping them functional, but only barely. Essentially, he made them just squeaky enough that they didn’t work quite right, but not squeaky enough that the mages working on the portal felt the need to replace them. They degraded into the perfect state of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Neither broken, nor in perfect working order, just imperfect enough to raise eyebrows and cause problems, but not broken enough to make the boss stop work and force everyone the change the pieces out. After all the chaos he’d caused earlier in making everyone find new pieces when his over-corrupted pieces broke, the workers were happy to allow a little bit of squeakiness. As long as the (as they now perceived) delicate and touchy portal didn’t break down entirely, it was in good enough shape to keep working.
And so Rhys continued to corrupt it. One piece at a time, slowly taking over the entire portal until there was hardly a piece in the whole device that he hadn’t corrupted. Every piece, even the most protected and enchanted pieces, had some amount of impurities in them now. The impurities in his trash black hole wound down as he infected each piece, but unlike the star, the black hole wouldn’t give up enough mass for it to wink out. Whenever he got too low, he simply had to wait for the qi to impurify him back up enough for him to keep pushing further into the portal. It wasn’t hard work so much as repetitive and slow work, but that was fine. Right now, he was in the gears of the war machine, quite literally. He didn’t have to worry about Yulin kicking off the attack while he was busy, because he presently had his hand on the neck of Yulin’s master plan. Yulin started to kick things off, and Rhys immediately clenched his hand and killed it. He recognized that it wouldn’t work permanently. Yulin would eventually figure out the failure point (him) and remove it (kill him). But it hadn’t not worked yet, so he still had his plan.
Still, he couldn’t stay in his hole forever. He had to get stronger than Yulin, and that meant leaving the portal behind. So, once he had the whole portal corrupted, he began looking for an opportunity to bail.
He had a plan to replace himself as filter. The last-ditch hoops he’d built into the crystal gym locker were stronger now, many times reinforced. They were the most permanent hoops he’d ever built, and they pointed directly into his core. He’d even tested it, temporarily bailing into his void world to see if the hoops would properly feed qi and impurities into him no matter where he was. It worked, though maybe a bit too well. Whenever Yulin tested his machine, the qi overwhelmed him. He’d rebuilt his body a million times and he still couldn’t handle the mass, force, and energy of qi entering his core all at once that Yulin’s machine required. He’d gotten better at it, but it still left him doubled over in pain, like he was having bad heartburn, or a girl suffering some really bad period cramps.
Unfortunately, it didn’t mean he was still gaining a great amount of strength from the qi. He had to let most of it flow through him to avoid being too suspicious. He’d tested it a few times, and if he took more than about one percent of the flow for himself, the workers started really digging into the machine, trying to figure out what was going wrong. One percent was still a sizable amount, just due to the quantity of qi flowing through the portal, so he wasn’t too mad, but it wasn’t anywhere near the total qi they put through the portal regularly.
When it’s time, I’m gonna suck up all this qi for myself. But until it was time to go hot, he was better off sipping his 1% ad infinitum. Over time, a great deal of 1% added up to more than one 100%. All at once, sure, 100% was more, but as long as he pulled 1% 101 times, he came out ahead.
His replacement filter was ready. He could warp out at a moment’s notice. All he needed was a quiet day to himself, when no one was testing, where he could freely warp out without anyone sensing an anomaly with the machine and checking it.
That’d happened the first time he’d warped out to test things. He’d vanished, then warped back in all within a cycle, and he’d barely made it back before the workers aborted the test. They’d even hauled up his filter to make sure he was still locked in like a good boy. He’d pretended to be, and they’d put him back down, but he didn’t want to be chained to warping back at a moment’s notice every time they ran a test. If nothing else, they’d eventually get sick of checking on him and swap him out, and he’d have to figure out some kind of playing-dead situation for when they tried to dispose of him. Better to leave things at status quo, where they were less likely to question him or the entire system. The status quo was the safe space where he could keep his secret corruption-control of the death portal. All praise the status quo!
And what, after all, was trashier than the status quo? The status quo was the enemy of progress, of change and forward motion. The status quo was the “we’ve always done it that way,” the old, shitty software his work had forced everyone to use because it was “what worked” and “I know how to use it.” The status quo was garbage. It was no good, but it persisted due to sheer laziness and organizational momentum. No one liked the status quo; it was just that people were afraid of what might come after the status quo. Things were bad now, but they could always be worse.
Of course, they could always be better, too, but that wasn’t the kind of trashy thinking that locked an organization into the status quo. And Rhys was all about trash.
That night (or quiet period, really; mages didn’t always pay attention to such ephemeral things as the day-night cycle), Rhys extended his aura from within the crystal coffin. He wrapped the entire portal with his aura and focused on the essence of the status quo, drawing on the heart of unchanging indifference. The portal had a low-level aura due to the powerful items used to forge it and the qi constantly flowing through it, but Rhys’s now Tier 6 aura easily overwhelmed it. The portal trembled, then became… grayer. There was nothing visibly different about it, but it somehow became a little less shiny, less exciting. It was no longer the brand new technology, exciting and engaging, but instead the same old technology, the same boring portal that sat here every day.
A moment later, Rhys lifted the coffin, then teleported himself out. The hoops he’d built into the walls of the crystal were deep enough that they basically pierced through the entire crystal, so, with a little bit of silly logic, he could warp himself in one side and out the other side, and thus exit the crystal. He needed to lift the coffin to escape this way, but… well, this was his portal now. He could lift the coffin with no more than a thought.
Dismissing the coffin back into the guts of the portal, he looked around him, taking in the sights. The place looked… pretty much the same as it had when he’d gone in.
Let’s get a lay of the land. Not wanting to risk leaving too many tracks behind, he called the coffin back up, feeling a little dumb for having sent it down, and touched one of his teleport points, simultaneously sending the coffin back under the earth. Almost all his teleport options had gone dead due to the passage of time, but there was still one within range that worked. He popped out on the other side of the city and looked around.
Like the room, not much had changed. It was a city of mages, after all; he could’ve been under for ten minutes or ten thousand years, and he wasn’t sure much would have changed, at least on the surface. For all that, there were some differences. The street was cleaner than it had ever been, and the buildings were more polished, if they had somewhat less… personality.
Hmm. Suspicious. One might even suspect that some kind of tyrant with a powerful backer like Fifteenth took over, overthrew their system of government, and instated himself as long-term king.
I hope Ryota got out. Though I guess there’s no better religious symbol than a martyr. Shrugging to himself, Rhys continued on, heading toward the edge of the capital. The capital was great, but it was time he moved on. He needed to get the lay of the land, and not from within the palm of his enemies.