The Elven kingdom’s few hundred inhabitants watched in awe and reverence as the bloodstone corruption was scorched before their eyes in a great calamity that defied any words that they had to describe it.

  At the end of performing his ‘miracle,’ Balor graced them with a split-second look at his Dragon form, just to make sure his appearance would be written into their history for epochs to come. It was the same way, Petrah, but more intentional this time.

  He wanted to see the leadership that defied all odds to make them dig trenches and construct a layered defense in such a doomed situation. Serpent Balor would’ve chosen assimilation.

  There was no reason to do that anymore. He had gathered enough information through thousands of assimilations to process a perfect synthesis of anything he could imagine. Like a true god, he created himself an avatar made of blood and flesh using an insignificant amount of Soul Matter.

  He was an armored elven soldier at the edge of the trenches where the great mysterious fire-fall cleansed the land of all corruption. Another advantage of being a Dragon was that he no longer needed to be there in person. The soldier avatar that he created could function on its own, giving him an uninterrupted stream of consciousness in real time.

  The soldier named himself Yurash and was taken back to the elven castle by a group of healers who collected all the injured survivors of the blessed miracle. Yurash didn’t speak a word until he had enough information about the society that he was part of. It took several days for him to speak the first word in the Elven language that had the same roots as the Petrahns.

  No one knew Yurash, and in a community of less than three hundred, this was an unavoidable problem. Yurash came up with the fine excuse that he’d always been there since the beginning, lost in the land fighting the ‘red demons.’ He proclaimed to know a lot about the great miracle, having seen it in a prophetic dream.

  This tall tale earned him an audience with the noble family and a personal visit from the Elven king, Nerelin of the mountains. He was a longer-lived elf than most, having taken nearly two hundred and thirty years to reach middle age.

  Balor knew another special bloodline the moment he saw it. This was once a key advantage the dark lords had over the population during the Dark Age. The elf had inherited the genetics to live longer than others.

  It gave Nerelin a direct advantage in knowledge, having survived countless conflicts where his strategic knowledge had been sharpened to a fine blade. The trenches had been his idea, as well as the sophisticated layered defense that took a perfect orchestration of one hundred and fifteen individuals operating at the edge of their abilities.

  The elf looked imposing as well, towering a head above other elves, with high cheekbones and glowing emerald eyes.

  In the next few weeks after the cleansing miracle, Nerelin ordered expeditionary teams to survey the charred lands beyond the trenches for the origin of corruption, while the other half was to find a way to grow crops. The castle had supplies that could only last another month.

  These hard constraints doomed the Elves to perish eventually. Balor waited for a month to receive information about bloodstone corruption from the expedition teams. They had found no trace of it.

  Deciding not to waste this resilient pocket of civilization, Balor performed another miracle that directly involved Nerelin. He blessed the man with the temporary power to cut through the partitioning barrier, guiding his people safely to the other side.

  Yurash remained embedded in this tight-knit community, and Balor continued to receive a lot of information as he moved on to other tasks. In time, Nerelin, the King blessed by God, managed to reestablish a kingdom. His scholars called it Elmar, and they were known as the Elmarians across the world, as the story of their victory against corruption inspired many others.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  Balor finished the second and third strata of the second continent without issue with the same method as before. He scorched them to ashes, ground and all.

  After making sure no trace of bloodstone corruption remained on the second continent, he moved on to the third.

  It didn’t take him long to realize the third continent was the most corrupt one so far across all three strata. The amount of land lost was more than the first two combined, and bloodstone corruption had evolved even further with the sheer variety of affected races and the number of individuals.

  It has decimated half of the surface-dwelling ork population, who were easily corralled by various corrupted figureheads into serving under them. Their subservient nature had led to a much more violent spread of the corruption, burning through thousands. There was no one left in the partitioned zones of the surface.

  It was the first time that there was no collateral damage or unfortunate casualties. Every single ork was corrupted to the core, and thousands were dying each day, creating mindless abominations that were a hundred times more dangerous.

  Balor didn't need to spread himself to scorch them with precise control. He fashioned a more concentrated projector of heat that could turn the ground into lava. He scanned the terrain back and forth with it, taking longer around places where he saw bloodstone corrupted souls underground.

  It was the most thorough, destructive cleansing of the land that he'd ever performed, with no witnesses left to tell the tale. Some of the abominations attempted to survive by gathering more corrupted flesh, but they were eventually turned to ash during a grid sweep of the terrain.

  He took special care to do everything from hundreds of feet away as some abominations exploded, sending shards of bloodstone high into the sky.

  It spelled disaster for his plans for the strata below. This new trend of abominations was exceedingly dangerous, as their explosive power only increased with the amount of flesh.

  With the limited vertical height of the lower strata, he was risking contact with bloodstone at any moment. He needed a different approach to handle the lower strata.

  Balor descended through a stratum hole into the first stratum. The method that he came up with required a precise chain reaction that would decimate everything within the space with a huge delay.

  He tested it on a smaller scale with a small settlement of corrupted individuals. He started by creating spores of soul matter that accumulated and burned with the Ambient source. These spores broke into others upon contact with one another, creating more spores with each collision. A small number of spores could grow into consuming all ambient Source within a given space, growing larger with more heat.

  It was far more destructive and comprehensive than anything Petrahns had ever invented. His spores started at the size of dust particles and grew to the size of boulders. The collapsing threshold was set after a specific amount of heat, and any explosion of a spore could set off all the other spores, creating even more spores.

  Destruction at this scale could peel a large layer off the ground, getting rid of every crevice the corruption could’ve hidden in.

  After blowing up a corrupted village and observing the effects from a safe distance, he reclaimed all the residue soul matter, snuffing out the wave of explosions. Flying over the land, he let out millions of spores and, in the same flight, flew out of the stratum back to the surface.

  The explosions only started a week later, and they grew in a steady crescendo of strata-shaking rumble. At the peak, the surface dwellers retreated to underground shelters, fearing the end of the world.

  Balor waited until the rumble reached its peak over the next week, and he descended to collect all his soul matter.

  It turned out to be a huge success despite the trouble caused in the unaffected regions. There was nothing left, not even a grass blade. It was craters inside craters until the ground resembled a mush of amalgamated soil with shattered glitter of drained bloodstone shards strewn about.

  He did the same to the second and third strata, always retreating to the one above for shelter. It took four weeks total, and the decimation of everything that ever existed in the partition zones. The third stratum was especially worse off because the chained explosions boiled the ocean and shaved entire islands away until water was all that remained.

  In any case, he’d thoroughly cleansed the third continent of any bloodstone corruption that it ever had.

  He headed towards the fourth continent armed with this knowledge about efficient spore-based chain explosions. He found a continent in turmoil, even with the partitioning. Petrah had deployed most of its forces there to fend off against frequent appearances of corruption in the border regions. They kept walling off sections, and it created a crisis where half the partitioned regions still had a lot of unaffected.

  The fourth continent was the worst because it was entirely about collateral damage and casualties. Balor shelved the idea of spores. He needed yet another new solution.