Balor loomed above Petrah with full invisibility. Personally infiltrating at the ground level wasn’t as easy as before with the amount of soul matter that he now controlled. Dispersing a cloud this large could significantly affect the magics in the area with the rapid rise in concentration. He could embed created beings in Petrahn society, but it was going to waste more time than he wanted.

  He targeted the Petrahn royal palace where Resil was. He created another temporary realm encapsulating the whole space, bringing it into a world where he could assume whatever shape that he wanted.

  A swirling gray void isolated Resil’s section of the tower in a separate world.

  “Resil, we must talk,” he said, his voice penetrating the physical and mental senses of everyone involved. Leaving his soul matter in the Dragon form, he recreated himself in his bipedal form for Resil to comprehend more easily.

  The Emperor peered out of his window, eyes wide and mouth hanging open. “I-It is you again!” he exclaimed weakly. The bloodstone fiasco in the four continents seemed to have taken its toll on him, and he looked older than he was.

  Balor dashed in through the window into his chambers.

  “What is that out there! with eyes and wings! a beast?!” he asked, clutching his chest. “Where did you find it?!”

  He thinks that's my mouth or something.

  “That is me, God of Veilthorn,” he said, standing before the old emperor. “Thanks to our collective efforts, I managed to become more powerful. I’ve come here to inform you that all bloodstone corruption in the four continents has been dealt with.”

  “I’ve been hearing rumors, first from Rakkar, Arlan. Then, unconfirmed reports from Euren, and now Serila has Wrenthians more powerful than us!”

  “We arrived at the topic I wanted to discuss. Those wrenthians are a temporary measure. Their elevated Source that they now have access to will stabilize soon. They make great corruption cleaners.”

  Resil looked at him expectantly. “That is power that we Petrahns can also use, God of Veilthorn. Would you bless us as well?”

  Ever the resourceful.

  “I need a better mechanism for distributing power with the Source. The elevation of power will not happen again unless circumstances call for it. I shouldn’t have to explain to you how destabilizing that would be for the population.”

  “I understand. You are worried about corruption,” Resil said, his voice trembling.

  “I’m worried about it being more enticing than the magics that I gifted you. It will resurface time and again, seeking ways to spread, as you keep using it.”

  “For the portals that you said—”

  “It is done. You have all you need on the moon. You can launch vessels far more easily from there, can you not?”

  Resil looked at him as if the idea hadn’t occurred to him before. Having assimilated with inventors, Balor knew this thought wasn’t out of reach for them. In fact, he was sure he could find a hundred others with the same idea.

  “We can be rid of bloodstone altogether,” Resil said slowly.

  “For this one use case, yes. It will present itself to others. I need you to counter it at every step. Across all facets. Culture, religion, knowledge. It should be woven into the morality of your population, across time.”

  “What is bloodstone?” Resil asked a question that he’d never asked before.

  “I don’t want you to see it,” Balor said. He remembered how hopeless hominids were upon the first knowledge of the Seedmaker. It overrode his authority over them and forced civilization into stagnation. Petrah had soared so high because he delayed it.

  “What will you do, then? This better mechanism for power, what did you mean by that, God of Veilthorn?”

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  “I saw the advantage of letting the Wrenths become demigods. I would extend that to everyone equally, granted they are worthy of their own merit,” Balor said. “Source power belongs to those who seek it. Right now, there is no way for you to be anything more than mortals. I can change that.”

  “A way to become more than mortals?!”

  “Yes, and you, the Emperor of Veilthorn, will represent all mortals, as I design this system,” Balor said, swiping his hand. The empty void shifted with shapes, stone pillars rising and falling around them outside the window. Resil stared at them wide-eyed.

  “From here on out, this will be our only mode of communication. I can invoke this realm, as can you,” Balor said, forming a small ball of soul matter into the shape of a gem. He handed it to Resil, who took it with trembling hands.

  Balor dissolved his bipedal shape, returning to his Dragon form that loomed out of Resil’s window. He watched as the Emperor peered out of it, holding onto the gem.

  “You should get used to the true form of your God, Resil.”

  Balor hovered in the upper atmosphere above Petrah after his discussion with Resil. He created a few individuals at his leisure, taking time to target the facets of the population that he needed. These were supposed to work in the background, feeding him streams of information about Petrah itself. The global empire was only going to be as robust as its heart.

  Having set everything in order in Veilthorn in the coming days, Balor took the time to visit his own experiment in the forest realm. He had seen examples of civilizational sparks, and he fully intended to influence his race from the beginning.

  He arrived there phasing through the barrier, and he didn’t use invisibility this time. He made his presence clear to every man and beast in sight by flying all over the sky, his gigantic shadow sweeping across the land as he gathered every bit of information possible from the ground.

  The forest had changed in his long absence. The settlement there used to be scattered villages, but now they have grown into kingdoms, proto-kingdoms, and territories. The population that he selected for bloodline refinement had continued their efforts, and they had become the dominating force across the forest.

  War and conflict in the forest were a whole different thing from the rest of Veilthorn. The conditions here were smothering, and it required individuals to go to extraordinary lengths to survive, even the travel itself. He had isolated this runaway forest for a reason, and it was proving itself to be faster than any attempt to colonize it. Peripheral settlements of all kingdoms were in disarray, locked in regular conflict with endless threats from creatures and forest overgrowth itself.

  He saw entire villages overtaken with vines and trees, presumably not even a year after they were abandoned. Ironically, the plant species of this forest had been his single most resilient creation yet. If he hadn’t isolated it, Veilthorn would’ve been a planet-sized forest within a few millennia.

  Looming above the mountain range that protected the largest kingdom, Balor made sure to let the population revere his presence. He created several individuals to infiltrate them, and wrote himself into their existing religion through social influence.

  The Kingdom was called Aziris, and it was home to about fifty thousand individuals. There were a few notable bloodlines. One had the simple, yet terrifyingly efficient power of synthesizing the ambient Source faster than anyone else. They were called the ‘Azurian,’ the de facto rulers of the kingdom by birthright.

  This population had always relied on the ambient Source, but this bloodline brought them halfway closer to Petrahns without ever touching Sky Stone.

  Naturally, Balor wanted to see what wonders they would be capable of if they had Sky Stone. He blew up one mountain at night, replacing it with glowing blue crystallized soul matter by the morning.

  The second most notable bloodline, called ‘The Domra’, had a form-enhancement technique that allowed them to steel their skin with a bony overgrowth. They were frontliners in all conflicts, feared by the population as well as their adversaries. Their actual use as explorers had been underexplored. Balor made sure to influence them directly into setting out into the world with their unparalleled resilience, and return with more knowledge about the forest.

  The third and fourth belonged to a smaller family who had Aetheric healing powers of the likes Balor hadn’t seen in the wider world of Veilthorn. The Source that they cultivated accumulated in the form of a star on their foreheads, and their women were especially good at healing anything from cuts to bone fractures by manipulating the Source. They were called ‘Stars’ in the local language, or the Star family.

  Their real power that Balor saw was their ability to manipulate minute fluctuations of the Source like no one else. He influenced them in that direction, starting with the current generation of three young girls.

  The fourth bloodline was also part of them, although kept isolated in a tower on a nearby mountain. It was two individuals who were the opposite of Stars, the antithesis of life. They could kill at a touch or a focused glance. The two individuals were a father-daughter duo who had been isolated there ever since their powers manifested.

  They were tales that the population used to scare children with, the ‘Deathbringers’ who ate the light from the sun and stored it in their hearts of darkness.

  Aziris were maintaining them in an amicable arrangement with the Star family, using them as executioners.

  Their powers sounded rather suspicious, and Balor wanted to see them with his own eyes.