Publicly beating up a student was, somehow, one of the best decisions Freddy had ever made.
From what he overheard, most assumed that he had been taking the high road until now, seeing how much older he was than the average student. For him to have finally run out of patience came as no surprise to anyone.
Thus, the near-constant goading finally came to an end.
Now, the way the bulk of the student body looked at him was a lot closer in line to how they looked at any other high-level elite; a bit more afraid, from a bit further away. And he couldn’t lie—it felt good.
With his emotions finally registering properly, it became undeniable. He had changed. Kind of. He recognized that this… brutality, he supposed, had always been a part of him on some level. But there had been a thing holding it back. A sort of shame. A principle, perhaps. Whatever it had been, it was a lot weaker now. And those feelings of just wanting to beat the shit out of anyone who irked him was much, much stronger.
As far as he was concerned, he could live with that. Relatively speaking, it was one of the best ways his soul recovery could have gone. Besides that tiny detail, once his emotions finally settled, he felt pretty normal. It wouldn’t be correct to say he hadn’t changed at all, but it was no more than was normal given how much his circumstances had shifted.
A few days passed. Just as he was getting back into a routine, he got a notification on his tablet.
“Oh, my schedule was updated…” He opened it to check what had changed. What he saw left him confused for a bit, and once he realized what was happening, he groaned. “Seriously?”
He finally got his schedule for Starhold Expansion Progress. It was tomorrow. All of it. For 12 hours straight, with the exam being scheduled for two days afterwards. “I’m shocked this class even has an exam, to be honest…”
Out of habit, he checked the professor, and as he did, a smile appeared on his face. It was Wisdom. Freddy pumped his fist. Passing was all but guaranteed with Wisdom as the teacher. And while he would miss almost an entire day’s worth of classes, he couldn’t deny that he was excited about discovering what this class was about.
Seeing how the number of attendees surpassed four thousand, this would no doubt be quite interesting.
***
Freddy made his way into the gigantic amphitheater, a massive crowd already present, with a vast number of people talking amongst one another.
Nearly everyone in the higher rows was wearing a suit; either that or some kind of business casual attire. He looked down at his stained gray sweats, wishing he’d picked something less… relaxed.
He’d stick out less closer to the front. With his attire, at least. But given who else was sitting there, he was pretty sure it would be best to keep some distance.
Even from the entrance, he easily spotted Madame’s distinctive hair color, tied into a complex hairdo of tails and buns. She had seemingly used her life affinity to add quite a bit of volume to her hair. Flashy as always, huh?
Given she was sitting there, it came as no surprise that she was surrounded on all sides by eccentric individuals, all wearing distinctive attire and standing out in their own right. He also noted several of the high adjudicators he had met during his trials, including Lissia.
The urge to stare was overwhelming, but he held himself back. The people seated there were Lords at the very least. It was for the best for him to not attract their attention.
Thankfully, the massive crowd of spectators made that quite easy.
He made his way over to an empty seat, and waited. Not long after, Wisdom appeared, the eidolon’s presence suffusing the air with all the good stuff that made studying easy as breathing. I wish every class was hosted by Wisdom. He sighed. If only.
“Greetings, everyone,” the eidolon’s wizened voice sounded through the amphitheater. “Welcome to today’s update on Starhold Expansion Progress.”
It quickly became obvious that this was less of a class, and more of a conference. He was guessing that the “exam” was just a way for many of the goers to certify that they were up to date with all the recent news, likely to legitimize their input as advisors or informers. He wasn’t expecting to see the Lords below taking a test any time soon.
For most of the conference, Freddy was just kind of lost. Wisdom talked about all the different developments, and most of them, he was completely out of the loop on. And the further the conference went, the more he was starting to regret ever learning about this stuff in the first place.
Compared to Repentawa, life in Starhold had felt like a damned vacation. Sure, it was getting attacked by one thing or another all the time, but it was mostly taken care of by the empress and the many powerhouses who had stationed themselves in the city.
That being said, it was hard to say that Starhold had it any better than Repentawa back then. Arguably, Starhold had it a lot worse.
“The number of identified threats above the fifth star in estimated power continues to grow. For the time-being, we are relying on distractions to keep them away from Starhold and the secondary settlements, but so far, we have no real way to permanently address any of them. Thankfully, the monsters in question are extremely territorial, which reduces the odds of sudden migration, but there is always a chance of one of them leaving their territory.
“Should such an event happen, and a monster of such power directs its attention our way, the estimated death toll could reach as high as ninety-nine percent of Starhold settlers.”
Freddy was pretty shaken by that revelation, but nobody in the room even as much as gasped at the news. Have I really been living somewhere this dangerous all this time?
The answer to that was no.
He had actually been living somewhere far more dangerous than even that.
Faralethal wasn’t the first time earthlings had come into contact with “another world”. From what he understood, the sheer immensity of the interspace was still filled with countless unknowns, but it was generally common knowledge that the interspace eventually took to planets pretty similar to New Earth.
There were countless unreliable sightings of all sorts of aliens by people who had delved too far into the interspace, but two other races were confirmed to exist without doubt. And they were close, relatively speaking, to Earth. They also seem to have undergone a Rift at the exact same time as New Earth, causing some to speculate that the three planets—and their respective civilisations—were being intentionally pitted against one another by whatever entity managed the interspace.
Freddy, of course, knew a thing or two on the topic, courtesy of the literal manifestation of Insanity itself, and he couldn’t deny the very real possibility that this conflict was, in fact, intentional.
And from what was being discovered… humanity was already losing.
The other two races in question were the Khorks and the Chippergnats.
The Khorks were a race of pig-men with overall greater physical capabilities and somewhat lesser intelligence, and the Chippergnats were those things Freddy met when he first found the passage to Faralethal.
The two races had a few rather notable advantages compared to humanity.
The Khorks were less technologically advanced, but they had a warrior culture that put their average fighter well above the average human. They also had a significantly more egalitarian society, and a distributionist mindset. They put the best primes they could find together and then randomly gave them away to their children when they reached a certain age.
While the overall population of Khorks was a bit lesser than humanity’s, they were basically all ascended.
And they were generally not considered to be the big problem.
The big problem were those fuckin’ googoo gaga bastards.
The Chippergnats were primitive barbarians. They were a lot dumber and weaker than either humans or Khorks, but that barely held them back. They lived in small nomadic tribes, treating all outsiders—Chippergnat or otherwise—with extreme, violent prejudice.
They were sexless, and reproduced by laying eggs. And they reproduced fast.
No matter how dumb they were on average, as enlightened, they naturally had their standouts, and those were no lesser than the powerhouses of Khorks or humanity. Given that their default lifestyle was violently looking for revenge against anyone and anything that even slightly inconvenienced them, they produced standout fighters at a staggering rate.
Humanity was struggling to make a foothold in Faralethal, but they were slowly getting there. The American Empire wasn’t the only country that has found a passage leading to it, and China, India, The Europa Alliance, Yugoslavia, Brazil, and even The Southern-African Union were already producing cities and smaller settlements all over the planet. And that was only those the empire was aware of.
The Khorks, due to their lacking technological capabilities, were far behind, basically having zero presence here.
The Chippergnats, however, were spreading like the plague. The dangers of Faralethal were nothing new to them. In fact, from what the captives the empire got their hands on claimed, it was considered somewhat safer than their home planet, which was completely insane.
If these creatures ever stopped infighting and united, humanity was just screwed. That was all but unavoidable.
As the conference continued, the news only got more disturbing. For starters, with the 200th anniversary of the Rift, something had obviously changed with the way new passages appeared. They were getting bigger, appearing more frequently, and took to increasingly more dangerous realms. More and more first-step passages to Faralethal were appearing all across New Earth, and second-step entries and onwards were no longer even considered an exceptional find.
With this, it was all but guaranteed that life on New Earth was going to get a lot more dangerous for the average person. Ironically enough, if the current trend continued, Faralethal would become safer to live on than New Earth.
And then, Wisdom brought up something that made Freddy’s skin crawl.
An image of a square-pupiled sand drake appeared on the screen, the creature’s mouth foaming as it charged towards whoever took the picture. “There have been numerous confirmed sightings of ethervirus infections in the Saharan Desolates, leading many to believe that the individual who goes by ‘Kaefalge’ had located a passage to the African continent, and was thus no longer wandering the Frozen Wastes.”
That got a reaction from some of the people in the room.
“Recently,” Wisdom continued, “a significant breakthrough in researching the ether virus phenomenon has been achieved.” The image swapped to a young woman with eyes closed in meditation. “This is Shirley Onelle. She is a two-star youth and the daughter of Overlord Onelle. Recently, she acquired a unique construct that granted her a unique dream affinity—the nightmare affinity.
“It was Overlord Onelle who contacted the imperial informants upon noticing a striking similarity between the functions of the unique affinity and the supposed ether virus. According to the young woman’s testimony, the nightmare affinity is built around converting objects into so-called ‘nether-seeing eyes’. These eyes—effectively, wisps of the nightmare affinity—traverse the netherecho, seeing living targets to ‘possess’, in a manner.
“This possession takes part in the outermost shell of the soul, where it is incapable of doing any concrete harm. But what it can do is allow the nether-seeing eyes to affect the infected victim’s subconscious. There, the nether-seeing eye can alter the emotional state of the target in a manner resembling a highly complex curse. Primarily, the effect manifests during sleep, in the form of a nightmare.
“This nightmare acts, in part, as a negotiation between the caster and the target. Should the target agree to whatever deal the caster is offering, they can receive the object the nether-seeing eye was converted into. In the case of Shirley Onelle, this has been successfully utilized to subdue a low-ranking beast in exchange for a large piece of meat.
“The deals in question, once agreed to, become inviolable and permanent. This ‘ether virus’ we’re dealing with appears to originate from the same affinity, but applied at far greater scale. Whoever is behind these offers is clearly at a level of power that far surpasses the limit of the fifth star. There are limitations to this affinity, but even within the observed limits, a sufficiently powerful caster can cause immense devastation.
“The most immediate concerns with the being behind this blight are their motivations. It is entirely unclear what this being is after, but it is safe to assume that it involves, on some level, domination over as much territory, and as many individuals as humanly possible. It is currently presumed that the being in question does not have any direct way to locate New Earth or any other location they have influence over.
“Should that ever change, the genocide or total enslavement of mankind is all but guaranteed.”
It was important to note who was sharing this information. It was Wisdom. Not only was it a sentient ether construct, meaning it wouldn’t lie, but it was… Wisdom. An eidolon whose entire being revolved around disseminating and gathering information. It would never, not in a billion years, confidently make a claim it didn’t believe. Never.
So for such a being to say something like that… The silence left in the wake of those words was utterly deafening.
Not that Wisdom cared.
It bulldozed forward, utterly unconcerned with the reactions of the people present. Not that the following topic was any more cheerful.
A recent piece of research finally proved something many had been concerned with for the longest time—the Starhold Arena was extremely dangerous if used recklessly. There were many new cases of combatants developing utterly horrible habits inside the arena, including taking reckless injuries and even using spirit abilities willy-nilly.
Inside the arena, neither of these mattered in the slightest.
But when such combatants entered a real fight, and then used a dangerous spirit ability out of habit, it was no longer so harmless. There were many concerns over terrorist activity as well. The arena was the perfect place for wannabe suicide slaughterers to practice making the most out of trading their life for power. Incidents where such people went postal were on the rise, and it was starting to become a serious social problem.
Wisdom talked about some settlements Freddy wasn’t familiar with, including one that got annihilated recently.
Then, finally, something that at least kind of resembled good news.
“Throughout its recent history, the empire has employed numerous inflation-proofing measures to ensure economic stability. This has stemmed hyperinflation for the most part, but rapid inflation continues to be a persistent issue at the highest levels.”
Freddy almost laughed out loud at that statement. Persistent issue, indeed. When transactions started happening in billions of dollars, something was going horribly wrong.
“The empire has thus acquired the patent to Pricetech industries’ most recent product.” A projection showed a ring, one that looked just like the one Freddy was wearing on his finger.
The dollar was still a valid currency, one that would be no doubt used among mortals for many, many years to come. But for the higher echelons, an era of a new kind of currency had arrived, one backed by itself.
Wisdom briefly discussed the properties of the ether coin, and its many possible uses. It was many times more valuable than gold by volume, and it always would be. Given that it was backed by itself, it was a lot more resistant to fluctuating value.
When they were first discovered, just one was worth nearly a million dollars. Naturally, with the supply going so far up, their value had taken a dip, all the way down to two-hundred thousand. Given their immense value for crafting of all kinds, they were projected to go up in value with time as the demand went up.
Technically, the ether coin as Freddy knew it wasn’t the smallest denomination of the new currency. The coins could be split into smaller coins through some new machine Pricetech invented, but only up to a maximum of 12 smaller pieces. Those pieces would be named aurels, with the large ether coin being worth a dozen.
Conversely, 124 large ether coins could be fused into a big cube, one that almost exactly matched the standard size of prime vestige containers.
Clearly, this big cube was aiming to permanently replace prime vestiges as the best form of long-term wealth storage.
The implications of that weren’t lost on the people present, and even Wisdom pointed it out.
“Going forward, the empire will be taking a soft stance against using prime vestiges as a storage of value. No new imperial laws will be implemented, but the empire is planning to set aside a large budget for trading aurels for prime vestiges, to speed up adoption. The aforementioned primes are going to be put towards creating as many new archhumans as humanly possible.”
Half the people in the room leaped to their feet at that. “This is tyranny!” someone declared. “Distributionist policy is the death of society!”
“This is insanity!”
“We have to reconsider…”
“The implications of this are—”
Mood rapidly souring, Freddy shook his head at the sudden outrage. But a part of him felt incredibly giddy.
Not everyone would be able to trade their prime stashes for aurels on time. And once the empire started giving them out to mortals as they seem to be planning to—although Freddy doubted that deal would come without caveats—so many people would lose an immense amount of money as the value of their primes took a plunge.
It took a lot of willpower not to burst into laughter. Eat shit, you fucking ghouls.
“Silence!” a booming voice shook the entire room. Everyone shut their mouths and slowly sat back down.
Down in the front row, a lean man stood to his feet, slowly turning around. Freddy vaguely recognized the man as the Rainbow Overlord. His hair was a patchwork of locks in every color of the rainbow and more, and his eyes shimmered with shifting light.
“You fools are so absorbed with yourselves that you would rather burn the whole world down than take a single loss!” he proclaimed. “Have you been paying no attention whatsoever!? The threats looming on the horizon are severe! We need every archhuman we can possibly recruit towards the fight, else even the filthy Khorks will exterminate us!”
“And you think this will be the best way forward?” another voice sounded from further down, with a crimson-haired man wearing a military uniform slowly getting up to his feet. “Let us be honest for a moment, since nobody here is stupid anyway.” The man grinned. “This is a move straight out of Kaiya’s playbook. Her favorites will get their aurel trades first, while those she dislikes rot away on the waiting list, watching the value of their accumulated wealth plummet.”
“Overlord League…” The Rainbow Overlord narrowed his eyes. “I would watch what I’m saying if I were you.”
The other Overlord barked out a laugh. “Calm your tits, ponyface. I am not at all against Kaiya’s strategy, but trying to paint it as some kind of egalitarian move for the betterment of mankind is simply ridiculous. This is just another political purge, like many others that had come before it. The winners will get their primes bought out, and then probably also distributed within their own territory, just to make extra sure everyone else is screwed in the long run.”
“Are you trying to insinuate the empress is going to target you with this policy?”
Overlord League burst into laughter at that. “Target me? How, exactly? The prime market has been a bubble for a hundred years at this point. There are many times more primes than there are people who can take them. Unlike many others present, I haven’t been an idiot with my funds. Resources are to be used, not hoarded. If any of you limpbacks cared a whit about those you supposedly lord over, you would have given them strength a long time ago.”
The other Overlord snorted at that. “Given them strength? As you have, with forceful drafts and those torture camps you dare call military academies? Please. You and I both know you will lose your head to an angry prodigy one day.”
“Good!” League shouted. “And when I do, I hope they hang it on a wall, to always remember who gave them the power to cut it off!”
“You have disturbed my class long enough,” Wisdom declared.
The bickering crowds went silent in an instant, everyone getting seated and making themselves as small as humanly possible in the blink of an eye. A chill went down Freddy’s spine at the sudden spike in the eidolon’s aura. Given the reactions of the people present, Freddy feared what exactly the eidolon would do to anyone who dared speak up. Even the Overlords had shut their mouths without a word of protest.
Wisdom continued the conference as if nothing had happened, simply turning to the projection yet again and moving on to the next topic.
The conference went on for another four hours, with a whole set of lesser topics getting covered. There was a lot more happening in Faralethal than Freddy knew. Ethertech was making progress by leaps and bounds, with only some small prototypes touching the market, but a whole collection of revolutionary inventions was waiting for approval and adoption.
It was a humbling experience. Starhold was the focal point of human progress, a front line in every meaning of the word. And yet, it was so fragile. Countless threats, from mundane economic ones, to horrors beyond comprehension lurked on the horizon, with many more likely still waiting to be discovered, the easy way, or the hard way.
For what it was worth, as much as he hated to admit it, he felt he could finally understand why things were the way they were in the empire. Be it Silver Heart, Empress Kaiya, Lady Narcisse, or even the former Kraven patriarch, he felt he understood their perspectives just a touch better now.
Even those at the pinnacle of humanity were little more than ants in the greater scheme of things.
It was hardly a wonder they were all a little crazy. Or a lot.
The conference ended, and Freddy found himself in one of those moods yet again. Where the world around him seemingly expanded. On his walk home, he came across a cleanup crew mopping up the remains of dead Starhold residents, likely a product of another rampage.
He didn’t sleep a wink that night. And probably, he wouldn’t sleep a wink tomorrow, either.
He attended his classes as usual the next day. And then, in the middle of studying a particularly runesetting passage in the library, he finally lost it. Tearing up the book in a fit of rage, he threw what remained on the floor and stomped on it. “I can’t do this shit no more, man. Fuck…” He collapsed into the chair, his breath coming heavy, an anxiety suffusing his entire being. “I need to be faster.”
Faster at what, he wondered…
Reaching the third star? Acquiring knowledge? Healing his soul?
Or getting to a level of power where he could shake off his resurging anxiety about the future?
No matter what, he could no longer handle just sitting and pulling his hair out in frustration.
Suddenly, he remembered a conversation he had overheard the other day, during one of the Blood Alchemy classes. “What did they call it…?” He had overheard a student saying how he was running out of some kind of brew; supposedly, it was something that could help out with studying speed.
Nodding to himself, he lurched to his feet. “Alchemy department, it is.”