78. The Temple Summoning Begins

The Temple Summoning Begins

The temple was built from interlocking shapes and images symbolizing Mavis magic, Mavis history, and the written forms of specific spells, again using sympathetic principles to connect with the summoning ritual.

Magic was guided by intention, and language was intention encoded into arbitrary symbols by the shared agreements and beliefs of hundreds of Mavis generations. Therefore, language could guide magic.

The conversion ratio was extremely poor. One had to carve those symbols hundreds of times across material tens of thousands of times greater than one’s own mass to achieve even a fraction of what a mediocre mage could accomplish.

But the Mavis people were themselves mages, and to them, physical resources were a problem solved by a few spells.

In the end, once a world’s magic level was sufficient, such a temple could absorb magic and automatically channel it into a spell, requiring only about an hour of effort from the Dark Masons.

Earth had finally reached the necessary magical awakening, and the three Dark Masons in Archon Mort’s forces had been working for far longer than an hour.

Under Mort’s own gaze, sparks of red and black power slowly gathered into a roughly humanoid outline, and the process of condensation began.

More and more power was added to the framework provided by the temple, a template designed to contain and shape the intended result of the magic.

At first, the shape was only a handful of flickering sparks. Then it became a featureless translucent outline, then a ghostly red-and-black figure.

More distinctive traits emerged, from the shape of the face to the contours of a solid body, then increasingly realistic clothing and equipment.

Soon, a figure identical to the three Dark Masons had formed. The only sign of its illusory nature was the slight transparency in its limbs.

After confirming that the first summoning had succeeded, Mort touched a black adamantine brooch given to him by the necromancers of Mavis and released a stored soul from within it.

An invisible being, unseen by most, drifted toward the construct.

Mort himself had studied necromancy for a time, though not enough to become a true necromancer. He could see the souls of the dead and communicate with them through rituals or sign language, but he could not speak to them directly or force them to do anything.

Useful as those abilities were, they were often harmful to his work, because unwilling souls made poor servants.

This particular soul was very willing. It drifted to the construct on its own and settled inside.

Dark Masons, in their youth, were as reckless as any other mage. Although their magic was slower to cast, they were just as prone to accidents and lapses in judgment.

The souls of the dead were collected by necromancers and offered a fair bargain: military service in exchange for reincarnation.

Once the soul was absorbed into the construct, all the gathered magic scattered back into the world for later use, and the new body stabilized into reality.

Its eyes became deep pools of darkness under the guidance of the soul’s power, and its solid, muscular body was optimized for its new state.

The service owed by the soul was inscribed onto the soul itself. The same spell would pull it back into the sphere when it died again, or send it back to Mavis if the sphere was destroyed.

Souls that served long enough would receive custom bodies matching their requests at the end of their contracts, and those who performed exceptionally would receive additional material wealth.

In Mort’s view, it was an excellent system. Souls that eventually rose into the nobility of Mavis might have spent decades or centuries serving in the army, among the casters, or in the labor classes.

They were not pampered fools like the nobles of other nations, and even the lowest street thug could, with enough effort and time, expect a good position.

The newly formed Dark Mason stepped out of the temple, then took control of the magic surging within him and summoned a wall of iron.

He then dispelled the wall, built a magic circle for summoning an imp, summoned one, and then dismissed both the circle and the imp.

He continued in this way for a full five minutes, ending by casting the spell to summon a lightning tower.

Mort watched that process with particular care. He judged the manifesting effect good enough and ordered the new Dark Mason to dismiss the tower before it finished forming.

All tests confirmed that the temple had indeed successfully materialized a Dark Mason. The archon connected it to the soul-storage system and set it to automatic production.

With another builder-mage added to his command structure, Archon Mort proceeded to the next temple.

Now that it was possible to materialize new Dark Masons, Mort’s operations in this new world were no longer stretched so painfully thin.

At last, he had enough builders to establish a proper base, rather than the barely functional outpost he had been working from until now. He could create defensive structures capable of withstanding more than a small group of nonmagical machines. He might even be able to build a proper city shield against the locals’ nuclear missiles, or in case some genius discovered strategic curses earlier than expected.

His first priority?

Finding a good, defensible location for his new base.

For this, he borrowed from the local resistance: build underground.

In Mavis, where hundreds of generations and careful use of geomancy had produced bedrock of ironstone, adamantine, and other magical materials, such a suggestion would be impractical. The very stability that protected a nation from enemy sabotage would work against them. Tunnels could be dug and dungeons slowly expanded, but constructing underground required hundreds of times more magic and labor, much like excavating ordinary earth with picks and human muscle.

On Earth, however, even common steel tools and gunpowder could cut into the ground with ease, as proven by the locals’ underground rail systems and fossil-fuel extraction.

So, with twenty times more Dark Masons than before, and more materializing every hour, he called up a map of the city and surrounding region in his mind and directed everyone toward a new project.

To become a Dark Mason, an initiate had to demonstrate some basic free-form geomantic ability and master nine spell forms: Vanishing, Repair, Iron Wall, Summoning Circle, Binding Cage, Tomb, Lightning Tower, Temple, and Dark Portal.

Only nine spells often seemed like an absurdly short list to mages from other nations, where even apprentices knew dozens, but that impression was deceptive.

Those spell forms could be adjusted according to the number of available Dark Masons and the ambient magic level. So Mort began designing a version suited to his current plan in his mind…

And then a new development caught his attention.